The Apocalypse Script (49 page)

“
But it is clearly no accident,
right? I mean, the internet doesn’t just go down - some nation
state must be behind this. Would the U.S. have a reason or the
ability to do this? For example, if there was a war?”

“
It’s hard to believe that it
could, really, but if it could, war is only one of many reasons
they might do that. Reports of border incursions around the world,
of approaching meteors, of spacecraft-”

“
Vance, we can’t validate any of
that and we don’t want viewers to assume-”

“
We can’t
validate
shit
, Sue. Sorry, but we’ve got nothing. The wires are
down.”

At that point, the camera on
“Vance” went dark and his microphone was cut off. “Sue” was visibly
upset as someone seemed to be escorting the young man from the set,
even as another reporter ranted about illegal state militias
mobilizing.

“
The internet will not be coming
back up,” said Disparthian. “Not for a few centuries. Now the
paranoia will begin to set in.”

“
How long before the television
broadcasts stop?”

“
Twenty or thirty minutes. It is
important that the broadcasters not be given an opportunity to
discount any of the misinformation spread on the internet before it
went down. The misinformation varies according the demographics of
the websites’ viewers. It is catered to maximize its believability.
Conservative websites that were hijacked blamed the coming
collapse, in some form, on minorities, anarchists, communists, and
so forth. Liberal websites were tweaked to blame gun-wielding
vigilantes, survivalists, the U.S. military, the
industrial-military complex, and so on.

“
Sites that
catered to conspiracy theorists were fed misinformation about
aliens and comets and meteors and solar flares. Environmentalists’
websites were fed stories about ‘runaway global warming’ and the
rapid melting of ice sheets and coastal flooding. And so forth.
Whatever scenario the audience feared most and
wanted
to believe has
been delivered to them.

“
Social media outlets were, prior
to the outage moments ago, barraged with desperate pleas from
people supposedly caught in nuclear blasts, or being rounded up and
put into containment camps, or fleeing government entities sent to
kill those who had come in contact with someone who had died from
Cage’s disease. These messages were pre-generated by the Nisirtu
and are now imprinted upon the minds of hundreds of millions of
people, who will spread the lies to millions of others, by word of
mouth. Now that the seeds of discord and anarchy are planted, they
must be allowed to grow, so all news sources will be taken down
before they can disavow any of the claims.”

“
All of them?” asked
Ben.

“
All of them.”

The intermission ended, Lilian
again stood front and center. An elderly man with Einstein hair sat
behind her, a violin - not hers - at the ready. The queen waited
patiently for everyone to retake their seats before saying, “I am
minus an orchestra but William here has been kind enough to offer
his services. I assure you, he plays splendidly.”

The audience applauded and the man named William
stood and nodded humbly before returning to his seat.

Lilian said, “This is a short
piece from
La damnation de
Faust
. She nodded at the violinist behind
her who began to play. She sang:

Autrefois un roi de Thulé,

Qui jusqu’au tombeau fut fidèle,

Reçut, à la mort de sa belle,

Une coupe d’or ciselé.

Comme elle ne le quittait guère,

Dans les festins les plus joyeux,

Toujours une larme légère

A sa vue humectait ses yeux.

Fiela sat in wheelchair at the
back of the room, and IV bag dangling next to her. She loved
Lilian’s voice but understood not a word of French, and so had
begged her sister in advance for a translation of anything she
might sing that was not in English or Agati. Lilian had generously
provided a translation, written in her own hand, before the
performance began. Fiela tried to follow it as her sister
sang:

Once there was a king of Thule

Who was faithful until death,

Received, on his fair one’s death,

A carved cup of gold.

As it never left him,

In the happiest festivals

Always a light tear

Moistened his eyes.

At 8:12 PM, the television
stations started blinking out. It was like watching dominoes fall.
First one, then two, then four, then eight screens went black
mid-broadcast. When they were all gone, Ben had the radios turned
on.

Local broadcasters were in a
panic. They were repeating what they had read on the internet or
had seen on television before those two bastions of information had
expired. The radio announcers urged listeners to remain calm but to
take cover in the event that any of the myriad reports regarding
war, an incoming meteor, rogue militias, or anything else were
true, while also encouraging them to take their radios with
them.

Many were astonished that the
Emergency Broadcast System had not been activated, though a few
pointed out that the people in charge of the system, whoever they
were, might be unable to activate it, or the antennas might have
been destroyed. Law enforcement personnel and local government
leaders appeared at the radio stations to plea for calm and to
ensure listeners that everything that could be done was being done,
without specifying what the problem actually was, since clearly
they didn’t know. There were discussions about contacting local HAM
operators.

At 8:43 PM the radio stations went
off the air just seconds before all the radios and televisions went
dead. The lights at Steepleguard flickered, but remained
operational. Ben, knowing what had just happened, stepped out onto
the balcony and looked up at the sky, but he didn’t see anything
unusual. He was surprised. He thought that an EMP blast would light
up the sky, especially at night. Maybe the nearest blast had
occurred too far away. Still, he knew that the lights were blinking
off around the world. The grid was dying and the engines of earth
were grinding to a halt.

Electricity was again an untethered force of
nature.

The evening’s performance was
nearly concluded. Lilian now stood in middle of the ballroom
surrounded by the children, Nisirtu and Ardoon, ages six to eleven.
As their smiling parents watched from the perimeter, she said, “Are
you ready to show your parents what we have practiced?”

“
Yes!” said several of the
children, while others look away bashfully and just
nodded.

“
Good. Now, form a circle and hold
hands. That’s right…like that, yes. Very good!”

When they were in position, the queen said, “Okay,
let’s start.”

The children, began to move in a circle around
Lilian, “the Fair Lady,” and sang.

London Bridge is falling down,

Falling down, falling down,

London Bridge is falling down,

My fair lady.

Lilian, pretending to be
astonished the bridge might fall, sang with them, suggesting in
consecutive verses that the bridge be rebuilt with wood and clay,
bricks and mortar, iron and steel, and silver and gold.

The wise children, however, warned her that wood and
clay would wash away, bricks and mortar would not stay, iron and
steel would bend and bow, and silver and gold would be stolen
away.

At last, Lilian, a finger in the air, suggested a
man could keep watch over the bridge, only to be advised by the
children that the man watching the bridge might fall asleep.

She addressed this concern, singing:

Give him a pipe to smoke all night,

Smoke all night, smoke all night,

Give him a pipe to smoke all night!

To which the children yelled, “My fair lady!” before
falling to the floor in a laughing fit. The ballroom erupted in
applause.

In Los Angeles, the night became as day.

The next evening, the tears and
wails of despair behind him, Ben sat in the tablet repository alone
and meditated on all that had happened in the past week and
wondering what lay ahead.

He pondered Ridley’s statement
that a force of some kind was being born on the other side of the
world that would take possession of any lands that the Fifth
Kingdom did not claim and that it would fight for the lands the
kingdom had. What kind of power, he wondered? A military power?
What of the
other
Nisirtu kingdoms? Surely they would not be powerless to stop
such an advance.

Where exactly had Ridley gone?
Lilian had said that the scribe had told her he was a player in a
script written by another, but that begged the question,
what script?
Who was the
author and how did Ridley know about it? Wasn’t it a truism that
the actors in Nisirtu scripts didn’t know they were
actors?

Ben wondered if he was still an
actor in such a script. This question bothered him because it
raised the unnerving question of whether the decisions he was
making were really his alone. If the decisions he had made up to
this point and would make in the future were based on a set of
values and beliefs instilled in him by a life-long script, was he
really is own man? Did he really have free will if everything he
did was the result of some hidden power’s manipulation?

The photo album in his lap made such questions even
more pressing.

That’s what it had been, the thing
on the oak table next to Ridley - the large leather book that Ben
had seen just before the scribe had released the Empyrean. It was a
photo album filled with photographs of Ben when he was a boy. His
mother and father were in many of the photographs but Ridley was
in
all
of them,
usually smiling like it was Christmas morning and looking directly
at the camera.

The scribe had not been young even
then, but he was less stooped, had more hair and his skin was
tauter. He wore flannel shirts or sweater vests and sometimes caps
with football team logos on them, appearing every bit the quirky
uncle every family seemed to have at least one of. There was
nothing that would make the scribe’s appearance in the photos
remarkable, at least not to anyone but Ben, who observed that not
once, in any of the photos, did his parents look at Ridley. It was
as if the man were a ghost making cameo shots in family photos for
his own amusement.

Ben had surmised that his parents
really hadn’t seen the scribe. Now that the block had been removed,
he remembered many of Ridley’s visits and how his parents had
seemed so remote when the man was present, often disappearing into
their bedroom and not coming out until Ridley had told them he was
leaving. It would have been easy enough for the scribe to convince
them that he wasn’t even there, if he spoke the right word to
them.

The researcher remembered sitting
in his family’s kitchen with Ridley studying the Tiwanaku tablets
and how after several months he had achieved the “epiphany event” -
the instance in which the entirety of the Empyrean Glossa
registered in his young mind. He remembered Ridley’s joy and how
the two of them had talked long into the night about a million
unimportant things, speaking rapidly. He remembered the ice cream
sandwich that had been his reward.

He also remembered how a somber
Ridley had convinced him to accept the words that would imprison
the Empyrean Glossa in Ben’s mind for the next two decades and
which would remove any memory the boy had of the scribe.

One of many mysteries the
photographs did not resolve was how Ridley had happened upon Ben in
the first place. How had Ridley
known
that young Ben Mitchell would
have the capacity to learn Empyrean? How had he found him? When had
the script that controlled Ben’s life begun?

A more troubling question:
What had those scripts required?
Had they, for example, required his parents to
die prematurely, or for him to enter the Marines, or for his convoy
to be bombed? Had his hasty removal from Afghanistan been
scripted?

It was not a mystery, at least,
why Ridley had left the photo album for him. The scribe wanted to
assure the new king that his memories were genuine. It would be
easy for a man with Ridley’s abilities, or now Ben’s, to create in
another person’s mind an entirely fictional past. The photographs
were Ridley’s way of telling Ben that the memories that were
resurfacing were genuine.

Unfortunately, the things that Ben
had forgotten, the kinds of events that anyone might forget,
remained forgotten. Empyrean did not grant its users perfect
recall, and Ben had, in fact, forgotten many of the events captured
in photographs contained in the album.

An event captured in one photograph, in particular,
troubled him.

Deeply.

He pulled it from the album and
inspected it yet again. It was a four by six inch glossy color
photograph taken at an amusement park or perhaps a county fair.
Kids were everywhere in the photograph and most were in costume so
the photograph was presumably taken on or around
Halloween.

In the background of the
photograph was a miniature castle, gray and menacing, generously
decorated with plastic bats and sheeted ghosts. A set of decrepit
double doors were on either side of the castle, in front of which
were faux-drawbridges in the down position. A rail with red
passenger cars on it spanned the distance between the two
drawbridges.