24: Chloe – The Post-apocalyptic Post-apocalpse Post

Reece came to see me when his first shift was done. He’d been given a tour and a rundown of his duties, none of which he’d be needed for until later phases. When he floated into my chamber, he gave an impressed whistled at the setup.

“Y’know, I got a cubicle in the stacked levels. It’s about as big as a single bed.” He said. “Looks like a capsule hotel designed by a beekeeper, hexagons stacked sixteen levels high with nothing but numbers on ’em. A girl across from me drew a Pokemon on hers, though. Might get her to draw a couple doing sixty-nine on mine.”

“Ew.” I said, not looking up from my screen. “Couldn’t you think of something more tasteful?”

“What? My door number’s sixty-nine. Ain’t you the one who registered this place the WOMB? If you were going for anatomy, you should’ve called it the Fallopian Tube.”

He sniggered and took a sip from a hip flask he’d stashed in his back pocket. Something sloshed inside but refused to flow out. He shook it until several bubbles of dark brown popped out, and he proceeded to suck them from the air.

“I was poking observational humor at Kinsley’s engineers.” I said. “Did you know the two parts of the airlocks are called the COCK and PUSSY? What were they, named by teenagers?”

“They were named by teenagers.” He said, swallowing the last bubble. “Most of the crew are geniuses, kids who’d make it into Mensa. But still kids. They can design a space station, calculate the possibilities of world ending disasters and even build machines to outlast them. And then they’ll name those machines The TITTIES because they’re fifteen.”

“Well if you have them all figured out, help me write for them.” I said. “I’m trying to make sense of all this information but half these entries aren’t even dated. No time stamps, just upload times, and those were when everything was uploaded to this network last week. The only ones that pre-date them are some stupid comics about a wizard with remarkably similar powers to everything we witnessed.”

Reece pushed down on the walls and floated over. “Well what have you got so far?”

I swiveled the screen to face him. “I’ve compiled everything that’s happened so far, into a blog, written up from footage and a preliminary interview with Kinsley. But he’s a busy man, trying to manage all the buildings in the orbital ring, and I can’t get to him for answers.”

“I actually read your first entry.” Reece said. “The Post-apocalyptic, Post-apocalypse Post. You called for Tel Megiddo to be recorded in history as Armageddon.”

“Well, it was called Armageddon Hill for a reason, Reece.”

“Okay, so let’s get it all straight. We had four world ending events in a row, the first of which is now officially Armageddon.”

“In a social context, yes.” I said. “And my readers are calling the last one the Rapture.”

“Because everything flew into the heavens. So which was the apocalypse?”

“I think that’s sort of an umbrella term for anything end of the world like.”

Reece frowned. “But only two have names. Everyone’s just calling the others the Second or Third Events. Not exactly catchy for your readers.”

I steepled my fingers and reclined back, kicking my feet up onto the desk. They floated off. “Well, one of them could officially be the Apocalypse. The umbrella term could be the End of the World. Maybe that should be the title? It’s pretty final sounding. Why don’t you name the remainder?”

Reece fished his canteen out again and flicked a bubble out. It smelled sweet, yet not alcoholic for all it was held in a hip flask. He sat on the wall in silence for a moment, then typed in a new entry.

“Alrighty. That one where all the rocks melted?” he said. I’m calling it Ragnarok.”

“I like. Armageddon. Ragnarok. The Rapture. So the fire one’s the Apocalypse. Well, it burned out the world and that’s what the Apocalypse always looks like in movies.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Reece said. He drifted next to me and held himself seated to the desk corner. “Are you always this analytical? I’m no journalist, but you seem to focus on naming and labeling instead of writing actual stories.”

I didn’t answer him straight away. He’d noticed my obfuscation in less than five minutes. If Reece, could, Kinsley wouldn’t be fooled for a second.

“I’m in over my head, Reece.” I said. Kinsley claims to be all about equality but then he builds an empire like this. He claims he wants me to report truthfully, even about him, to keep him from going power mad, but his reports have been deliberately misfiled in order to throw me off. And he claims he has no interest in building master race, right? On the surface, it seems legit. Everyone comes from around the world. There’s no prejudice based on age, sex race or sexual orientation. And yet pretty much everyone here is an atheist with an IQ and EQ in the top ten percentile. It doesn’t matter how simple the job is, even the janitor has a brain that puts mine to shame. Why not hire a regular janitor? Why train a super genius to be a caretaker?”

Reece smiled. “Why hire a regular janitor when you’ve got an army of super geniuses who can do any job you give them?”

“I thought of that. But look here.”

I tapped an unlabeled file and showed it to Reece.

“They’ve been recruiting the smartest people they could find for almost a century. Places like Shipyard Island, where they built cities and trained orphans? I think those were farms. They’ve been breeding us. Even you. Look.”

Reece opened the folder and read it with an increasingly knotted brow.

Subject: Alexander, Reece Arteum.

“What exactly am I looking for?” he said.

I tapped a certain entry.

Parents: Arteum, Tracy (IDno29081997) & Alexander, Eire (IDno21781520)

He scratched his black hair. “I’m having a dumb blonde moment. Spell it out for me?”

“Your parents were both raised by the Kinsley Foundation.” I said. “You wanted to know why Kinsley recruited you from prison. This is it. They weren’t offering you an opportunity to get back your life. They were offering bait to lure you back into theirs.”