Every time I tell this story—and, by the Angel I have told it so many times… no matter how many times I tell it, there are… difficult parts, where even I have to struggle to keep all the memories together. Rose Monroe, for example, the math teacher with the dog, back near the beginning of the tale; her story always gets to me. It’s strange: the tragedies the fungus left in its wake are so vast, it boggles the mind; it’s a crime that screams out to Paradise, demanding justice, and yet, something as small and heartbreaking as the fate of Rose and Buddy stands out from the rest, and towers over them—tall poppies, except for misery, rather than promise.
I suppose my continued struggles with stories like Rose and Buddy’s speak to the constancy of the human soul. Even after all this time, I am who I am. My psychology keeps on treading down the same old paths, more less. This part of myself can only do so much, even if the rest of me is so much more than that. That’s why the alternate points-of-view I’ve woven into this tale affect me so much. Whenever I reach into my vault of souls and pull out a perspective other than my own… I feel them, as if they and I were one and the same. It’s the same power of connection that lets me bring peace and consolation to my spirit patients—empathy at its most radical.
But this isn’t about me as I am now, it’s about me as I was, back then. That is what you wanted to know, after all.
Alright, fine. Yes, I am stalling, but for good reason. We’re about to start what, for me, is the most challenging part of the story. Sometimes, I think I shouldn’t have put it right after Ani’s scenes—that only makes it harder for me to get through it—but, I’ve told this story enough times to know that that’s the way it needs to be. To be clear—obviously—at the time all these events were happening, the events that I personally struggled with the most came in the fourth part, but, at least there, in the end, I came away with the power to do something meaningful and change things for the better, just like I’d promised Andalon I would.
I just wish I could have said the same thing about this event, the one I’m about to share.
No matter how much anyone tells me otherwise, I can’t shake the conviction that I failed my wife and my kids, and that that failure fell squarely on my shoulders, and mine alone. I have seen Time itself die away and be born anew, yet still, my guilt hounds me, as does the pain. It persists in their memories, and in the knowledge—both theirs, and mine—that I wasn’t there for them when I should have been. I failed as father, there, and a husband, and as a man.
This part of the story takes place back at the house on Angeltoe Street. By some miracle I probably didn’t deserve, Pel, Jules, Rayph were alive, and not just alive, but alive and well—or, as close to “well” as people could be in a situation like this.
Then again, being alive isn’t quite the same thing as living.
The kids sat cross-legged on the beige shag carpeting in the middle of our rotunda living room. They were wearing weekend clothes—socks, and plaid samue—playing together on the GameStation.
Our quasi-benevolent corporate overlords over at DAISHU gifted the Trenton people with many blessings. Samue [Sah-moo-eh] were one of them. The unisex, side-tied, two-piece loungewear was Munine culture’s answer to the time-honored Trenton tradition of lounging around in our nightclothes. The loose seams allowed for ventilated comfort in hot weather, or pandemics.
Jules and Rayph had gotten my “gamer gene”; their mother, meanwhile, preferred arcade games, particularly of the kind you could play on a PortaCon (Tetris, Puzzle & Dinosaurs, etc.). So, for my wife’s sake, I’d gotten the family a copy of Orimon Carnivale 33, because the arcade-style games of that multiplayer delight were one of the few GameStation titles that Pel could enjoy.
It’s a common refrain that, “if it exists, it has Orimon in it somewhere”, and, amusingly enough, my own story is no exception to this rule.
Orimon is the OG manga franchise. Orimon is a red tanuki-shaped robot with the soul of a real tanuki, who wants nothing more than to become as real of a tanuki as he feels he is, and to that end, he’s enlisted the help of Shigeya, an ordinary Munine middle school boy. The manga is about their misadventures, and has been around for nearly a century and half. Though he’s not that popular in the East, back in Mu and the West, he’s “they put him on the sides of aerostats” famous—the mascot character to end all mascot characters.
As for Orimon Carnivale, Monimega’s multiplayer party game series had been around since Letty was a kid, back in the 64-bit era. Orimon Carnivale 33 was considered the second best third-epoch OC game—the best in recent memory having been OC 31—but I hadn’t been able to sell Pel on the idea of motion controls, so I got OC 33 instead.
It also helped make family game night much less of a chore.
I’d once tried to get them to play my childhood copy of Quest for the Emerald Chalice, a self-contained tabletop RPG board game. It… did not go well.
It was hard for them to have much fun, however, what with the end of the world and all.
It was afternoon, though—save for the shaft of Sunlight streaming down from the Eye in the middle of the ceiling—you wouldn’t know it. All the curtains were drawn shut, leaving the house in a cool, pale darkness. As the fluctuations in and interruptions to the power supply had gotten worse and worse, Pel had made the decision to haul the portable generator out from the storage room in the basement and hook it up to the system, to supplement the power line’s inconstant supply. This also took the strain off the solar panels we had on the roof, letting charge accumulate in the reserve capacitor. Along with the portable generator, that reserve would come in handy once the city’s utility network finally gave up the ghost.
As for my wife, Pel sat at the dining room table, with her and the kids’ PortaCons on the tabletop. Unable to rest or stay calm—either physically or mentally—she’d been spending her time scouring what remained of the internet, fighting the temptation of getting into her samue. She didn’t want to accept that this was the end, because that would mean acknowledging that the last sliver of control she thought she had really was just an illusion. Instead, wanting to maintain at least some semblance of order, Pel was in her day clothes: blue skirt, yellow blouse, and those plain, dark brown shoes with a heel so slight, you needed a level to measure it. But, even in her dress, she was lying to herself. Yes, she was wearing her day clothes, but she didn’t do anything else to keep up with appearances, perhaps for fear of breaking the spell. She wasn’t wearing her jewelry, and her make-up might as well have already been in the trash. Finery like that had gone the way of the horse-drawn carriage. They were relics of a bygone age.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
The whole world was shutting down.
Most people had come to terms with the certitude of demise. The internet was now one grand goodbye. It was a wake for the whole world, and everyone was invited.
Everyone was a guest of honor.
People shared memories of their lives. Through written text, or videos they uploaded to the Cloud, they told their stories. Here and there, you could find small groups of people on social media dedicated to keeping abreast of the situation as best they could, recording their observations for anyone who might want to use them.
Don’t sleep in close quarters with others. If you’re infected, and someone else goes feral, you’ll get pulled into it, too.
Stay away from the cities.
Try not to think about how, at least in the beginning, the zombies are completely aware of what is happening to them.
Don’t drink fluids that weren’t in sealed containers.
And so on, and so forth.
The internet was also divided on whether or not the Norms were still themselves. For every person who passionately insisted that they were, there was someone who said the Norms were taken over by demons, possibly from the earliest stage of their transformation, and that you could tell when the demons had taken over by the colors of their eyes. But, in spite of the controversy, there was one point on which there was unanimous agreement: being near a Norm was certain death, for they carried the plague, spreading it with their every breath.
Funnily enough, the end of the world turned out to be a real boon for freedom of speech. Content censors were only human, after all, and they died just like the rest of us, except when the censors died, they took their censorship with them, leaving the remaining members of the human community free to express themselves to the fullest.
Paying for digital content was a thing of the past. You could read what you wanted, play what you wanted, and share what you wanted, and nobody cared one way or the other. Property rights—intellectual or otherwise—meant squat when everybody was dead.
On her own console, off to the side, Pel had put on old episodes of John Henrichy Tonight while she continued doing her research. Understandably, Mr. Henrichy himself was no longer broadcasting. Pel imagined he’d be spending his final hours with his loved ones.
“When was the last time you stopped yourself from saying something you believed to be true for fear of being punished or criticized for saying it? If you live in Trenton, it probably hasn’t been long.”
Though she wasn’t about to admit it to Jules, Pel had started watching online videos of re-runs partly as a way of spiting me. She found herself wondering if our marriage vows covered zombie apocalypses. My wife was understandably angry at my leave of absence, and she couldn’t help but feel that our recent (and not-so-recent) struggles were at least part of the reason why I was one of the unlucky few who was, as far as she understood it, being transformed into a vessel for an archdemon.
“Thanks to mass immigration, Trenton has experienced greater demographic change in the last century than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime. We can’t see it anymore, but our elders know. Suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that. We are told these changes are entirely good, that we must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly Daxonian, Lassedile, and Trenton-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language.”
Glancing back over her shoulder at Jules and Rayph—they were playing a party game together—Pel lowered the volume on her console. She didn’t want to give Jules a reason to be upset. However much Jules and I might have feuded, our political stances were the same.
So far, the family was safe, but Pel knew only a fool would assume that things would stay that way forever. At any moment, everything could fall apart. That’s why she was so frantically busy, coming up with contingency plans and writing them up in the consoles.
Suddenly, all the lights went out, as did the TV console mounted on the living room’s flagstone wall. The screens of the three consoles on the dining room table glowed like they were windows to another world.
Rayph was the first to scream; he yelped in surprise. Jules merely cursed: “Damn it!”
Pel got up from her chair and turned to face the kids. “It’s alright, just… give it a moment.” She looked at the wall sconces expectantly.
There was a soft hum.
A couple seconds later, the algorithm that managed the house’s power supply shifted the house’s juice-sources, tapping into the solar panels’ capacitors to supplement the power coming from the portable generator thrumming in the kitchen.
The lights flickered on a moment later, as did the TV console, and all the other plugged-in appliances.
The GameStation, meanwhile, just woke up from the sleep mode it had placed itself in, thanks to its internal battery, designed to handle situations exactly like this (minus the apocalypse part).
Rayph turned to his sister. “Best two out of three?”
Jules set her controller down on the shag carpeting. “The power just went out, Rayph,” she said. “We have back-up, because Mom is smart, but,” she lowered her gaze, and her voice, “not everyone else will.” She turned to the big bay window.
The curtains were drawn, as they had been all day long.
“Things must be getting really bad out there,” she added, in a whisper. “It’s not so easy to just goof off, you know? Not for me, anyway.”
Jules had been pretty adamant in her belief that the plague and the zombies and the transformations had to have some kind of rational explanation. Though Pel understood why our daughter felt this way, it didn’t make the situation any less frustrating. That was the trouble with legends and prophecies: they didn’t care about your opinions. Prophesying was not democratic. If an event was destined to come true, it was going to come true, and there was nothing you could do to stop it.
Pel was certain the Angel was watching over her and her children. That was the only explanation she could find for how she and Jules had managed to escape unharmed from the Norm at the supermarket. But, no matter her faith, Pel couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t as safe as she seemed to be. The Norm had seen her, and it had seen Jules, too, that petrified her. She worried it made her and the kids a target.
“Mom…” Jules said. “Mom…?”
Jules’ words snapped Pel out of her thoughtful daze.
Pel could hear the windows rattling in their panes. The noise set her heart racing.
“What is it?” she said.
Turning to look, Pel saw Jules standing over by the big bay window, pulling one of the thick curtains aside to peer outside. Rayph, meanwhile, stood near the cone of Sunlight streaming in through the Ceiling Eye in the middle of the living room, with the GameStation’s two wireless controllers at his feet, staring warily at his sister.
Jules turned to her mother. “You have to see this…” She stepped out of the way to give her mother room to look