Chapter VI and VII
Rare Earths / Nuclear Winter
VI - Rare Earths
“We just have to pick a spot, and go, and kill as many people as we can. Then when we’re out of ammo, we grab the nearest few survivors and haul ‘em back with us,” I said.
“I’m not doing any of that,” Izumi tried to sound more apprehensive than she was able.
“Well then you’re just hesitating now. You bring us here, and now you want out? Where are we supposed to go?”
The reality unfolding in front of us was much too large and frightening to swim toward. We might as well have been bugs or fish being swept into some unfathomable net. That’s how the Board gives you a job; they hand you a dossier full of instructions whose contents cannot even be disclosed to you legally, until an appropriately binding clause is signed, and by then you’re pretty much tied, but the thing people don’t realize is that it goes way deeper than that, and you’ve actually been tied right from the moment you were born, and even before that, because the Board either employed your parents or their parents or both, and has been researching you much longer than they are willing to admit.
The Board was invented in a moment in human history that will occur very, very soon, its purpose for now is auxiliary to this conversation. You already know who the Board are. They’re my employers. Just know that they recruited me before the word got out. Now we’re their little golden retrievers.
Somehow though, the assignment me and Izumi’d been delegated, the unnecessary formality of this secretive commute through the city… the watchful, merciless perception of the Board weighing both of our fears down by some sense of duty, but mostly with resignation. We weren’t killing by choice; we were just doing our jobs. Anyone knows what a good job looks like after all. When you work for the Board; It’s not too different than being in the army. What a good job looks like in the most decisive moments of all time, is killing more people than anybody else can in the shortest possible time..
.
“You’re just wasting time then.“ I tell Izumi. “Get in the car, now.” I look at her with special disdain that until this moment I’d always kept in check, contempt that, yes, I admit, I had been kind of saving for a moment like this, when I needed her to just listen.
“I’ve never even seen anyone die.” She protested.
“Innocent people are dying as we speak.”
“How is..”
“Stop,” I said.
“The people we’re killing are innocent too. What about them?”
“They’re history,” I breathed.
The Uber drops us off near Granville station. It’s exceptionally late; we deliberately chose the quietest hour. A few girls in high heels click down the walkways past shuttered storefronts past junkies with exposed wounds, shabby sleeping bags, all who glance momentarily at us. I’m probably imagining they can feel the stones in our hearts. But maybe not. I always underestimate the intuition of human beings, how inherent it really is.
“Okay, so when we get to the building I’ll keep a lookout while-”
“Stop talking,” she says without turning.
Her complete lack of expression hurts more any scowl could. She hated me right then, seemed to barely recognize me in this moment. And above all she really wished I was wrong. But I wasn’t. This shouldn’t be happening, but it is. Our last chance to back out was ages ago; every second we waste here in limbo means more death, more suffering, a toll that we are hesitant to even guess, at a rough estimate… we both figured an incredibly high number, and left it at that. No point in standing and arguing about particulars, about how wrong what she and I were about to do really felt.
Izumi and I walked into the hospital. I’d never associated a hospital with luxury, but this was one of the nicest buildings I’d ever set foot in. It looks more like an embassy or a hotel; lobby, reception, steps echoing against the lavish expanses of a completely vacant first floor. We scan for cameras and finding none, proceed.
White tiles. The sheer size of the expanses created therein I had only seen so far in dreams. The city is a freak of nature; this downtown display of opulent, stupendous, barely fathomable wealth horrifies me. Our soft-soled trainers make absolutely no noise but still echo smoothly against each other. I could almost feel my consciousness itself echoing through the vacuum of this lobby, outside whose doors homeless people endlessly drift past, freezing and starving and O.D.ing, scratching their nails and crowbars at the flat cold walls, an enterprise some of them undertake more routinely than others. Much too futile for the hotel’s wealthy occupants to take notice of, even so late at night. The walls are that thick, so as to be sociopathic.
The only thing of them that penetrates the fortress is their smell, which however, still does not breach the lobby, and only crawls partway up the elevator shafts as slow as slugs, continental drift, still a smell that to any who have known it will understand. Eventually human essence breaches all barriers.
The sole person aware of this peculiar odor of mould, garbage and piss was the receptionist and this is why hotel receptionists tend to be some of the most miserable people on Earth. The ultra wealthy, who have all sequestered themselves away from the awful smells that describe human impoverishment, can not face the smells without partly going insane for the it awakens in their consciousness a cocktail of brain chemicals; rage, helplessness, injustice, the impediments of mind that people who resent the poor equate to rats and bugs. I remembered my roommate at my old job cleaning carpets claiming that he despised homeless people. I was driving a company van back to drop off him back at his house, because the loser didn’t even have his own car and he was almost 40. I was convinced that the carpet cleaning chemicals rotted his brain because in other ways he was uniquely pure and wholesome almost like a little boy, and even that was weird, so I altogether hated him. “They disgust me,” I remember him saying.
I scarcely felt so valid of my hatred for him as when I heard that he had some sort of mental breakdown several years after I quit the job, and assaulted his, and my former boss, who also happens to be a good family-friend.
I checked my watch just before we broke in - 4:13 AM. A man and woman walking a dog saw us, but barely took notice. Others wrapped in blankets and just happy not to be bothered or shooed away, also took note that we were breaking in but made no attempt to stop us. For a fact I know that no receptionist was scheduled to be here for hours. Forcing open the key compartment is easy when you can make all the noise you want. Each and every single building with an elevator on earth specifically keeps its access keys at the ground level. The distinctly circular keyhole pops out of the metal compartment like nothing when wedged open with a screwdriver and a hammer. You could swear we’ve done this before. I’m starting to wonder why new skills feel like they just come now. It never used to be like that.
Both of our keys are meant to be scanned in the elevator, gaining access to floors that general occupants aren’t allowed in. They weren’t normal looking bolt-lock keys, nor cards, but tiny black scanners sometimes called FOBs - they look almost like the device I’d shown Arie in the bar yesterday; they emit a strong blue light right above their centres. One for the basement and one for the highest floor in the building. All of this had been detailed, almost down to the exact minute; rehearsed; perfected: which lock box to target; exactly the time that this building would be empty; even which desktop monitors controlled the CCTV. A password would have been provided, but wasn’t necessary; this receptionist apparently left his or her monitor unlocked, and it was as easy as clicking a few buttons; the camera controls were already open right when the screen lit up. We saw nobody, just exactly like we’d been told.
Beyond this all we were instructed to take separate elevators, two separate keys for two different jobs part of the same assignment. I’ve never killed anyone before. Was the only thought flashing in and out of my mind.
“What about when you designed After?” I said.
Izumi turned. “What?”
“Didn’t you know? Didn’t you know that people would die?”
Thinking about it, she couldn’t deny the slight foreboding of death.
“But still, building a computer is much different than killing someone,” Izumi whispered.
“Do you think Oppenheimer felt like he was killing someone when he built the atomic bomb?”
“After isn’t a bomb. She’s not even a weapon.”
“Still, didn’t then Angels tell you? They must have tried to stop you for a reason. Didn’t After kill them?”
Izumi’s mouth hung open, void of an exact response...“writing that code definitely didn’t feel like killing anybody. I have no idea what that feels like,” she said. “I’ve never even cut a worm in half, or so much as chucked a rock at a bird.”
This sentiment loomed and pulsed in me and, I’m sure, in Izumi. I knew it was After speaking. And so the news has almost broken but the wave has still not crashed; it’s that high up. It’s blocking out the sun. We cannot even perceive its immensity. Maybe it‘s already on its way down, or maybe it will just keep growing and growing, and eventually swallow the entire sky. Whoever conjured this wave has clearly done so to punish all of humanity, maybe even all of life as we know it. Maybe it’s all supposed to change into something else. As if whatever gets crushed by the wave was never supposed to be here in the first place.
It didn’t matter which key either of us chose, as long as we were separated. I’d hoped this moment just before parting would somehow take on some sort of ethereal quality, that it would feel longer or more significant, you know, more.. momentous. But no such luck I guess. Neither of us offered each other anything but silence. We had been separated for quite some time longer before, but not even close to as suddenly.
Gad! Somehow no line of work is simple enough, even if you land the same job as your girl, you still have to end up on completely different sides of the world. Nobody tells you this when you’re young, but that’s the way it is if you want to know the truth.
I’d told her about these exact keys before, strange devices that weigh absolutely nothing, whose blue light shines so vividly it goes right through even thick pants pockets. Neither of us knew which key we had; they looked completely identical. Once we scanned them into the elevator, the blue light signals which floor it’s taking us to: Basement or penthouse - bottom or top- no way of knowing which. This moment lacked any levity. We didn’t hold each other, but stood close enough that some part of our arms hands or sleeves made occasional contact. I can tell we’re both panicking, trying to find our breath, waiting for the wave to finally crash. But it’s too late. We just smiled at each other and shrugged, wondering when or whether we’d ever see each other again.
It is at this exact moment I squint my eyes. To my upper left, a camera has adjusted just slightly. A barely perceptible red light blinks on. You can tell it’s designed to be surreptitious, but I have eyes for these things. It might as well have winked at us.
I really wanted to take the camera out, but as I reached for my holster my training kicked in.
“任何没人吩咐你做的事，都不要做。甚至连想都不要想，因为那样你是在浪费时间思考永远不会做的事情。”“Anything you are not told to do, don’t do. Don’t even think about doing it, because in such a case you are wasting time thinking about something that will never be done.”
“Ha,” I had said, smiling too much, I could tell, for your liking.
The duration of your stare put me back into stasis. My rights being stripped away by every word.
“You’re being paid to follow very complex and expansive instructions. However the volume and difficulty of your task should not minimize your sense of responsibility, in fact it should increase it. If you do your assigned tasks correctly, we will succeed in our work. And we will champion you. If you fail, we fail. Your time is therefore worth immense money when on an assignment. We aren’t just watching you, H. We’re measuring you. And we can forgive a mistake, we can forgive an accident, momentary lapses happen, of reason, of perception even, and we account for those, with plenty of grace. We will not ever be mistaken about explicit disobedience, though. the countless lives this project will save upon completion makes it worth the amount of death it is taking to build. Everything has requirements. Your existence no exception to this rule: every breath you take not only implies death but is a concrete result of it. True peace is an illusion, only one half of the coin. Proceed with caution that it might be you ending up dead next.
I disagreed inherently with that; and sensing the discomfort of the sensation of disagreement in me, I allowed After a moment to type another response.
…
Don’t be mistaken; you’re not necessarily in danger; Many people however will die in front of your eyes but they are far away and abstract, and their cries reach you but only as unrecognized distortions; anything and everything changes though, H, and often at the drop of a hat. Just assume that when you are caught off guard, it simply means that you are ready. You always knew there would come a day that you yourself would be tasked with death’s administration. So I’d advise you not to screw around and then feign ignorance. It will be met with immediate consequences. Even as a joke - that’ll be it, H, that’ll be it. Guessing and joking is in no way, shape or form what you are being paid to do. So never guess. Never second-guess. Only follow instructions.”
In the elevator, I realize my key takes me to the basement floor. Guess I got the easy job between us; I send her my best luck, wherever that is. Will she kill all those people when push comes to shove? If so, how? Is she going to be given instructions or does she have to figure it out herself?
🌺FOR YOU FLOWERS 🌺 ©️2025
V - Nuclear Winter
The interviewer comes in, a large slithering humanoid snake whose slimy tail bends and trails far behind the confines of his slick silver suit; he changes form and colour as he approaches me, into a more and more agreeable shape whose suit actually fits all of him now. Fucking animorphs in this shit. A solid foot taller, and a full head of gelled, pampered hair, the Disintegration’s change sincerely stuns me. Now he is a stately, debonair looking man, pretty as a goddamn picture, an Oscar hopeful, a fucking soliloquy. Behind him, I scan for the slug trail which I swore sparkled vivid and blue as bioluminescence… the scent of sea is already gone and now the Disintegration sees how the sight of him affected me, how my entire face is wrinkling into lines of pure disgust despite myself.
“Issssomething the mmmatter?”
“Um,” I cleared my throat, quickly adding, “well, I just noticed that the time on your clock doesn’t match that of my phone,”
“Oh?”
I took the millisecond that he glanced back at his wall, to make sure that my FOB was still secure in my pocket; the hue of its glow was exactly the same blue as the bioluminescent slug trail that had just been there. Completely, I try to feign composure. It meant something, I could not say what.
Just breathe. Not through your mouth - that will dry it up and you won’t be able to speak. Pay attention to what he says, no matter how vile. He’s testing your wits, and to win him over you might have to whip up some sort of snake-charming verbal acrobatics at any given moment. This disgusting overzealous shapeshifting man really did look like he liked to be complimented - he was complimenting himself for minutes at a time, that’s what he didn’t realize his little stories were - self indulgence; but I knew he would eventually want to hear me parrot his own opinion back to him, and who likes being buttered up by someone whose lips smack together out of dryness?
Nobody, that’s who. I need a sip of water but there was nothing nearby.
He looks pitiful and concerned for me. I tell him, no worries, with my glance. His deep eyes know I’m leaving something unsaid, even though I had barely had time to say a word. The moment seems to stretch out forever. My genuine awe and horror about the whole situation seems to appeal to the thing and its grin inches wider yet.
It seems to have stopped transforming, its current form seems fixed for now. The smile is the only thing that remains static throughout this entire metamorphosis, and now it spans his entire face. His evil eyes burrow further into me, having never broken contact, as he turns in his swivel chair, allowing his computer a smug moment to fire up. Pivoting a nearby projector on its stool, he brings an image into focus for me, a video feed whose contents take only a moment to become apparent.
“You probably have a caught on that you already have the job.” His smile grows once again.
I take a deep breath and reply;
“What do you suppose, uh, tipped me off?”
The video feed, it turns out, is that of a hamster wheel. At first it appears that nothing is inside. It is dark. The wheel isn’t turning. The feed’s resolution is characteristic of low-light, resembling that of a baby monitor with a surprisingly high quality lens. Mr. Slug, though, continues conducting the interview, yammering on about this and that, the company’s structure and history, the obligations of the D.O.B, the makeup of my team and the day-to-day, and he knows that I’m not listening, but then again he seems much more invested in whatever this footage is now showing me.
Within what had just seemed like just empty space, an horrifying image emerges, and now I realize there actually is a rodent in the wheel, but it’s not taking up the amount of space a conventional, healthy rodent would; the creature occupies the entire wheel’s volume as if it had been forcibly stuffed inside. You can barely tell where its face is. The image brightens just slightly, revealing a frenzying festering writhing rat that looks as if it’s been force fed immense quantities of some sort of experimental growth steroid. The swell of its massive hideous body clogs up the hamster wheel so much that its tiny limbs all extraneously poke through the wire frame at varying angles, snuffing any chance of it actually turning over or getting out without outside intervention. Whatever the horrifying growths that currently incapacitate this poor rat are, they only cover one side of it, weighing it down topsy-turvy. The opposite side of the rat is replete with body sores, desiccated and grotesque. Like a cancerous growth in and of itself, the rat pulsates and torments my stomach with nausea. And as the orchestrator of whatever abomination is unfolding in front of us produces a blowtorch, brandishing it with satisfaction so obvious you can feel it even though only the man’s black-sleeved hands are visible on the screen. I begin crying, determining in that moment that this evil slug man in front of me needs to die; he personally looks like he is having the time of his life. The rat on the screen cowers in an attempt back away from the hands of its off-screen tormentor. The two maniacal hands bring the end of a long metallic filament into view with a sense of flourish so clear and deliberate as to be theatrical. The unseen tormentor is apparently showing off a beloved death instrument of theirs, eager to demonstrate what it is capable of. Just as the blowtorch fires up and proceeds toward the rat, I reach over the desk and turn the nightmarish feed off myself, even though by doing so I know that I am breaking every known law of job-interview etiquette in existence, in all likelihood completely fumbling this entire interview.
“Look, can you tell me where Izumi is?”
“Hmmm,” the slug man oozes with satisfaction.
“Why show me that.”
“The structure of the-”
“No, why show me a tortured rat. What - are you some sort of sadist? Is that it?”
“Look, nobody cares about rats.”
“I do-” I laugh out of pure shock.
“You-”
He basically screeches with laughter and after collecting himself insists I need to tell Dream Orchestrator about that one, as if it’s the finest joke. The Dream Orchestrator turns out to be the guy in the video, at least the guy whose hands were in the video.
“I just want a job! I just want to support my family, I just want an appropriately nuclear outcome! A domestic lifestyle. Fuck that guy who was torturing the rat, seriously - fuck him!”
“Ooo! You know, I’ll give you a pass this time - H. But you really oughtn’t say things like that about your future boss!
And so continues the hail of screeching mania. He laughs harder than I’ve ever seen anybody laugh at anything. Maybe I need to see my friends more. But this man seems on one hand, truly evil, and yet, somehow, genuinely excited for me to work for him.
He had wanted me to turn the projector off just now. He grins, sighing once more out of fatigue, reaching back down to flick the picture back on. However instead of grotesque rat torture, the feed now consists of what clearly looks like an active war zone. The last video had been silent, but this one startles even the slug man with sharp immediate, gut-wrenching explosive sounds. Dilapidated buildings and bouts of heavy artillery, the omnipresence of falling sand coloured rubble which renders the camera’s visibility to almost nothing, twisted rebar hanging out the faces of blown out edifices, buildings sprawled out, gutted like cadavers, lay prone and disemboweled. Carpets, floors, drywall, structural columns and waterlines, exposed crazy electric wires whip around like rabid animals. Rubble falls from the sky still hot with impact. The compounding sounds of explosives create an oddly soft crackle on the evil slug man’s old TV speaker. Soon the camera seems to find what it had been looking for; a troop of soldiers in tactical gear progressively mowing down each alley with gunfire, advancing bullet-first, no longer bothering to risk visual sweeps. They’d lost too many. Their target is outpacing them and leaving a river of death in its wake.
“She is doing exceptionally well,” His grin widens, but suddenly flips back to the rat channel.
“…”
“But she is doing even better,”
Although the channel had only been off briefly, the rat’s state of affairs completely different. It’s dead. Well, its death was mercifully quick, apparently not too quick though - the two hands in front of the screen are jittering with joy.
The slug man’s ensuing laugh is cartoonish; he is heaving with genuine pleasure, glancing here and there, back at me, trained against my eyes, relishing my reaction with deep satisfaction, waiting for me to crack right open, poised to interpret my every thought; Like the war zone channel his booming laughter is oddly soft. Even pleasant.
Even pleasant? Wait, what?
I realize at that very moment that I am dreaming. What’s just happened in the last while are tricks of my own mind, trying to nudge me towards some truth it has decided have been eluding me. In a breath I understand that even though whatever I notice before and around me is not real, if I have the guts to look close, I will notice an indication that my mind has been waiting for me to notice.
So the sound of burning fades and the embers of the rat crackle flicker and fade into ash, the video abruptly clips back to feed of the waiting room I had been in only just prior to this; A stock of nervous people fidget and fiddle, having waited for the better part of a day, and starting to bother the hell out of each other begin silently wishing ill upon those who get called ahead of them.
Wait no, they’re all me. All of them!
I keep forgetting this is my dream; those people are in my head. They only exist because I dreamed them. So where am I now, then?
My interviewer shrugs maniacally, “Oh, mmmm.. maybe it’s the air, slick. Maybe it’s intuition. But I have good feelings about you. I am inclined to advance to the next stage; I believe that you wish to take a position?”
“Why would I be here otherwise?”
“You wouldn’t believe the myriad reasons people visit the Board.”
“Visiting is different than interviewing,” I correct him.
His grin reaches its zenith. Now I can comfortably refer to it as immaculate. Everything this very thin grin tells me is awful. I know that soon I will be fighting my way through those double doors to demand back the humanity this job will cost me. For now though I have to play ball; I am entirely too desperate not to. If I lose Izumi now, how will I ever find my way back to the real world? What will I tell my boss? I’ve already seen more than I even imagined was possible, and it barely feels like it’s even begun. I don’t even think I’ll be able to do my old job anymore, whatever it is.
The channel on the projector is back amid the war zone, where the sound of shelling is noticeably absent and the dust seems to have mostly settled, revealing our surroundings, barely recognizable from the blind chaos earlier. It is mid day. Barren husks of buildings contain the only the afternoon shadows, all else is subject to the relentless heat and sun, The slug man then clicks an arrow-pad, and the camera of the footage adjusts immediately in tandem, and I realize that the footage I’m looking at is being shot by a drone that the slug man controls. He is showing me how to navigate, how to find Izumi. Why help me, though? Is there a point where I’m too focused and he blindsides me - wait - again, I have forgotten… even the slug man, is me. He is not just something I am envisioning or witnessing or describing. He embodies something deep within me, and I can feel it resonate, in the putrid hate of his eyes I recognize my own self. He stares so hard and still, eyes trained right into my soul. I can even see my own reflection in his eyes, and that is how I know that not only do I see him, but somehow, I know him, I contain him, I am him.
“If it weren’t for all that dust earlier, she’d have a river of blood on her hands.”
I understand why he’s so content now. I’m to take control of this remote, use it to find Izumi, and guide her back, because she’s currently getting sucked into the thrill of killing and whatever else she’s up to.
The slug man seems to have a hard time concealing the pleasure he is extracting from my confusion and, more importantly, my fear. But the former turns entirely into the latter when I notice that strewn all over the streets, all half-buried by dust, dozens and dozens of bodies litter the ground.
“See them, in there? Watch them closely; Look at them, how they writhe like so many maggots in some discarded bin of garbage. .”
I slowly realize that there’s just too much dirt and dust to discern how many people lie in each pile or how many piles there even are. As the camera flies me through the jagged hellscape, I discern countless bodies piled in heaps, some still alive and reaching and writhing with that innocent, puzzled, directionless expression of the dying, the floundering helplessness with which they flail that is reminiscent somehow of infants, pure in awe and with no recognition of the world beyond their hands. Even years later when thinking about this massiven grave, I look down and notice my hands reaching back to them.
Then I recall that even these dying people are me as well.
“Yes, watch them, watch them suffer and flail, and especially notice how the little ones go so quickly that it’s almost sad, and think about how rich you are making me for providing yourself this drone. Most of all, think of how much money you and Izumi are making me every time you go on one of your little expeditions.”
So he makes me take the controls, and instructs me of her general whereabouts, and how, since her assignments been completed, she can step through the gate immediately and be back here, with me, with her next assignment waiting on her desk, as long as we’ve performed adequately.
I navigate the streets for mere minutes before finding her, a span of time which I can tell slug man regards as fast, impressive, capable; his eyes bare down on the screen, aware of nothing else but how efficient my movements, and how sound my judgements in navigation are.
And when I woke up I was back in the normal world. Gloomy regular skies and traffic and fast food, chores piling up between you and your accomplishments, the lukewarm world of dissatisfaction, busy routines, and faithful monotony. My home.
Izumi was cooking breakfast when I woke up.
“I had the weirdest dream,” I mentioned.
“You were gasping and whining about something, and sounded really sound grossed-out,” she smiled.
“It was about you - you’d just killed hundreds, if not thousands of people. I flew a drone and saw their bodies were laying in piles and piles all covered in sand that hid their faces and blood from everyone else’s view. I got interviewed by this evil slug man that I ended slamming into the sharp corner of a desk and then when I was through, my blood felt all hot and I had the eyes and vision of a snake, and I remembered the piles and mounds of bodies baking in the desert, and because I had heat vision now, I could see all the blood now, and it was like a river underneath the ground that I had to follow to find you.”
“Oh, wow,” she said. “That’s a thinker,”
I decided to leave out the part about the rat torture.
“Did you get that job? I’ve been wondering all night.”
“I think so,”
“You think so,”
“Let’s just say I have a good feeling that I’m what they’re looking for.”
🌺FOR YOU FLOWERS 🌺
CHAPTER IV
©️2025