The Fractured Earth (6 page)

"That's good," I said. "Now … turn around and drive down until we can get on the other side of the highway. I don't want to pass them on this side." I was half afraid of passing them on either side. Maybe they'd create some sort of caltrops or a barrier.

The driver turned around and started speeding up down the highway. "Keep it slow, about twenty miles per hour. We don't want to run into another wreck or a car speeding this way." She slowed down, and I finally breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you." I put the safety on the gun, pulled the eight-round magazine from my pocket and loaded it with the rounds my dad had on him, then switched it out with the seven rounder. Only then did I take off my backpack. I put the survival rifle in it and put on the back holster and the waist pack. Putting the gun in the back holster, I covered it with my shirt. Unless you knew to look, you wouldn't know it was there.

I leaned back and closed my eyes, glad to be safe for the moment, in a working vehicle, heading home—or at least trying to. I could feel tears on my cheeks.

"Goodbye, Dad," I whispered.

—————

"Turns out there really are aliens, and they have a wicked sense of humor. Unfortunately for us, it's the football-to-the-groin, mountain-biking-off-the-rooftop sort of humor. Misery, lawlessness, and terror on a global scale, that's what sells the alien equivalent of prime time satellite television across the galaxy.

And unbeknownst to us, we all got signed on as extras to the apocalypse."

Commander Jack Streel

Star Point Induction Speech, 21 AA

Interlude—Boreling Empire—Plannel 6

Grodge the Merciful yawned and kicked at the doglard snoring at his feet. It sounded like the creature was trying desperately to hawk up something nasty and spit it on his nice clean floor.

"Wake up, you worthless thing," he snarled. "Go outside and chase those bridlings out of the yard. They're crapping all over the tables." The doglard snorted once and looked at Grodge, then slowly got up on its four paws and did as it was told. The door opened automatically, rolling upward just enough for the doglard to go underneath. Just as the doglard appeared at the door, the bridlings squawked and flew away.

Grodge the Merciful longed for a new title. His came from being in charge of the "Aliens of Interest" channels, with stories of heroism and evil. He got a decent number of viewers—often the bleeding-hearts who didn't like the whole framework of entertainment, but hey, they watched it, didn't they? Those commercials for Bubbly-Chew drinks worked for someone.

He thought of the next five cycles and hoped he'd get to work in the Massive Carnage Plannel; maybe Grodge the Destructive would be his title. In the meantime, oh well, back to the small time.

"Hrumpf," muttered Grodge, as he turned back to his monitors. The first phase was going well. The humans believed they'd been subjected to an electromagnetic pulse, and were scrambling to figure out exactly what had happened. Channels one through eight played back the first hour of the pulse up to the current time, focusing on crashing aircraft, speeding vehicles going out of control, and hospital patients on life support machines thrashing and expiring.

"Grodge, bring up channel eighty-three," came a voice through his workstation. Grodge checked the speaker and answered his supervisor quickly.

"Yes sir," he said enthusiastically. "Moron," he said under his breath.

"What was that, Grodge?”

"I said ‘it isn't boring,’ sir. Just thinking of my great job, sir!"

Grodge switched one of his systems to channel eighty-three. A split view—half from an underwater view of a subsurface vessel, while inside it looked like a walk-through view of a bunch of humans in distress, maybe choking or running out of air. They were panicking and running around like bridlings in a firestorm.

"Oh great catch, sir, this is hilarious! Look at them struggle to turn those wheels! I take it they've been fused?"

"Oh yes," said the supervisor. "At least half of the subsurface vehicles were slated for a watery grave. The others were allowed to surface and slowly starve to death."

"Brilliant, I think it should go on one hundred right now, and I'll start its loop at zero on channel one right away."

"You let me worry about channel one hundred, Grodge, but yes, loop it on one and move the aircraft stuff to channel two. Drop off whatever has the least violence or blood, but I want to keep the attack disease stuff going around the clock. Ratings show viewers are loving the human on human violence."

"No," he muttered under his breath, “they like the mass carnage, you yellow grongight."

"What was that, Grodge?"

"I said 'Yes sir, you're right!' I'll take off ... let's see ... all of those intersection crashes—most of the humans are surviving those anyway. Too bad their seat restraints weren't electronic like the crash bags. It would have been far better if their corpses had been flying out of their cars."

"Great observation, Grodge. Perhaps next time we could find a way to counteract that without being too obvious. Keep up the good work."

"Thank you, sir!" Grodge said, honestly for once. Praise from Pactain the Virulent was rare indeed.

Grodge set about his tasks, setting the time event back to zero hour. It actually wasn't very interesting until about forty-five seconds later, when the subsurface vessel commander started shouting obscenities, so he set the start for that point. Anyone tuning in to channel one would catch the start and could watch through to the current time. Grodge then removed the intersections loop and bumped everything up a channel. Viewers loved putting their sets on a particular lower channel and letting it switch with whatever the Plannel decided.

Once he had the channels aligned, he began the task of making it all more interesting by cutting out any boring shots of humans doing nothing, humans crying—they seemed to a lot of that, pitiful creatures—humans comforting other humans—way too much of that, too—and anything that wasn't boring or titillating. He located the most dramatic, bloody, terrifying scenes, and cut a commercial in between the start and finish. He had to change the sequence of a few of them, since there was this one part where a human fell down a ladder and cracked his skull wide open, followed almost immediately by some sort of pipe exploding nearby. He added other various things between them. Most viewers had little choice but to watch the short commercials, because switching the channel would restart the loop, and fast-forward was only available at a premium charge. Most people owned a multi-set and could watch up to four channels at once on it, but the system was smart enough to jump the sequences around so that all four would play one large commercial all at once. 

Those types of commercials made the Plannel a lot of credits, so Grodge took his job very seriously when it came to the timing of various scenes. The better he was able to closely match their lengths, the easier is was for a Megammercial to appear.

His workstation was huge, given that he was responsible for the very important bottom looping channels as well as the bleeding-hearts. Each one of the loopers was displayed on its own opaque holographic display unit across the top of the workstation. Under that was another row of displays. The leftmost held the commercial sequence list, the right had two views: one was the average viewer's four screen choices and their positions, and the other the top four overall channels by viewership. The center held his work displays where he made the changes, waving his arms and fingers and occasionally using a keyboard or stylus to make edits.

Grodge the Merciful could not make direct channel substitutions, but he could make recommendations, and there was some automation that could bump his ratings. Each approval or autobump increased his ranking among all the channel editors. He was the First Rank of his channel group, with three other Borelings taking shifts throughout the day and night cycles. He got to pick the cycles that everyone worked—his only real perk, choosing the afternoon and evening of Earth. He might switch it up later, depending on how the mayhem progressed, but guessed that this would be the best time. He'd been through three other Scary Mayhem Planet Reality Apocalypse Show seasons in his seven cycles of working for the Plannel Entertainment Corporation. Each season was a little different, depending on the most deep-seated fears of the largest technical societies on the target planet.

The first planet had been a very peaceful one. It had a single continent, like most planets, very mild weather, and a unified society that mostly worked in gardens and fish farms. But they were terrified of the huge storms that brewed occasionally under just the right conditions. The western coast of the continent was sure to get a few small storms every year, and one big one every twenty or so years.

The Corporation pounded them on both coasts with four storms in a row, keeping them strong across the entire continent, even turning them around and hitting the same cities again and again. They even made one of the storms a salt-rain storm!

"Hilarious," Grodge said out loud, thinking about the time a wind-driven plank had speared three people into a wall. Their society quickly collapsed when their gardens no longer grew and their food stores were exhausted. The Corporation also spoiled their fish farms, gradually making the fish taste terrible. Watching them trying to feed a starving child the horrid food had been a popular pick. Grodge's group ran a loop on channel one for almost an entire cycle that was nothing but children gagging, throwing up and dying by the hundreds.

"I sure hope we get something like that again this year," said Grodge.

The second planet almost bankrupted the Corporation. Some high-level idiot didn't disable their planet-buster atomic weapons. When they blocked their sunlight and destroyed all their light-making technology—they were terrified of the dark, living in a double sun system—one continent launched nuclear weapons at the second, who retaliated in kind. The loops of people dying from radiation poisoning was good for a little while, but the Corporation barely recouped their investment since the whole Apocalypse only took three months. The executive who messed up took three months to die, and the Corporation managed to make a decent profit from the sale of that torture to Plannel 19, which handles all of that sort of entertainment.

This new planet, Earth, that they were featuring had great potential. They had a bunch of nuclear weapons, but nothing like those planet busters. And not only a half dozen continents, but hundreds of different languages and cultures. There were very specific fears that could be induced, and even planet-wide fears where it was easy to strike.

They are afraid of everything,
thought Grodge. Religious fears, global diseases, wars, comets and asteroids, even a supremely silly thing called "zombies.”

"We could make this last for years and years, bringing out a new terror just as they start to get back on their feet," he said out loud to his doglard that had just returned inside. "Hilarious!"

Speaking of zombies, Grodge caught sight of one of them killing some random human on a scroll rolling along the bottom right corner of his workstation. He jumped it back a couple of hours and saw that it wasn't being featured by anyone, so he put it on alternate channel seventeen—the one channel his group could directly change—and entered it in the request queue for his eight primary channels.

If his change to alternate seventeen started appearing on the top four in the rightmost monitor, Grodge could instantly move up a whole rank.

He watched the scene unfold with a smile and crossed his fingers, tapping his double-thumbs together with a clack.

---   ---   ---   ---   ---

"That's my son, and I'm going to kill you." said the larger human. He turned back to what appeared to be his son, dying on the road. The man who'd shot him ended up getting into a truck with some other people. There was a female driving the truck backward.

Grodge entered commands to follow the truck and the man and woman with the dead son, then marked the shooter and the driver as clean, and the others in the truck as dirty. He marked the two left alive on the road clean as well, hoping it would play out well and the evil man would get his chance at revenge.

He also re-enabled one car down the road, just long enough for it to stop and pick up the woman and the father.

"My son is hurt, can we get a ride to the hospital?" the man asked the driver—a young Asian man with an impeccable three-piece suit.

"Sure, yes, put him in the back seat there. Let me help. Oh my ... is that blood? What happ—" He never finished. The man clubbed him over the head with the tire iron.

"Let's at least put him off the road," said the father. "And see if we can find something to cover him."

"This guy's expensive jacket will do fine," said the fat woman. She took the tire iron from the man's hand and bashed the guy in the head again, finishing him. She dropped it and then removed his jacket. The two pulled him to the side and covered his upper body. "We'll be back for him if we can," she said.

"Yes," he agreed. "But first we need to get to a hospital."

Grodge chuckled with glee.
Yes, do it!
he thought. He was getting really good at setting this stuff up!

He tapped a key to queue up a commercial for Fruity Sweet Stim Sticks, then turned back to watch the progress of the two killers and their race to intercept the truck at the hospital.