Heir of G.O'D. Revelations Page 2

  “Quite. Ladies and gentlemen, G@n@le0 our runner-up. Go collect your gifts, my dear.”

  I can’t stifle the snort that escapes my nose. I worked fracking hard for four hours for my podium finish, and he calls them gifts! Does he think he’s giving Remembrance Day gifts to some needy kid in an orphanage? I swallow the faint memories of my childhood orphanage before Hamilton rescued me. The obnoxious smells of poo (and worse), the piercing screams of pain and the incessant sobs of sadness.

  I refuse to let those painful memories, or the frackhats get to me. Instead, I go through the motions by shaking avatar hands, avoiding the collected gaggle of robed COGOD competitors who all lingered for the prize ceremony, and pose for Sim-shots. Duties over, I scoop the prize byte-balls from each sponsor, scurry between the Sol-Corp guards to the teleport and get the frack out of Dodge.

  New York, Central Park in Manhattan to be specific, forms into view as I appear on my personal teleport on the roof of my apartment building. French doors over to the right of the roof-garden lead inside to the main stairs down to the living room. Alone, I no longer need to fight to keep my emotions shielded. I’m shaking from the relief of escaping, exhaustion from the event and the overwhelming satisfaction of winning. At least now I can investigate my prizes in peace. I’m tempted to do a post-Arena happy dance as I swipe the byte-balls from my inventory.

  “38,000 $uns. That’s what your last shot got me. Pure genius!” Denver says. His hand touches my arm realworld, making me jump. The glowing byte-balls spinning in Sol distracted me, and I didn’t hear him walk across the container. The reclaimed TV screwed to the wall allows Denver to watch the broadcasts while he’s spotting for me, but nobody can enter, or see inside my in-Sim apartment besides me. It galls him when he can’t see what I’m doing, but with Denver living in the container next door and never out of mine, I need somewhere private. “We need to go.”

  “I’m not leaving; I‘ve got frack to do.”

  I ignore Denver and instead spin the in-Sim circle of byte-balls around until the salvage prize floats above my palm. Each year, they make special byte-balls for the Remembrance Festival Events and Arenas, be it fighting, driving, sports, martial arts, chess, quizzes, whatever. This year’s trophies are miniature globes, complete with swirling clouds. Mine are all silver, and the shimmering surfaces are mesmerising. The developers positioned the lock over the landmass that used to be the almighty United States of America, a vast region now reduced to nothing more than an ash- and snow-covered wilderness where the NARaS Salvage Corporation operates. The globe splits apart revealing a silver voucher inside that flickers like a flag in a breeze, its iridescent surface reflecting my avatar’s face.

  50% off, I think to myself, looking at my reward, 10% higher than the prize for third. I pull up the NARaS store and check their stock, exhaling with relief when I discover the listing is still open. Realworld stuff sells fast, and salvaged products that people can’t make any more sell even quicker (especially items like my fridge, which cost a fortune). By adding my hard-won savings to the voucher, I can now afford the base and three cameras, instead of the two if I’d only managed third place. Of the hundred cameras listed this morning, only six are left. I don’t risk waiting and swipe to buy them without pause, spending my voucher and a large chunk of my saved $uns. Easy come, easy go. It will be worth it; the cameras will change my life.

  “Frack it! Ana, come on!”

  “I told you. I’m staying.” Without warning, Denver rips the visor from my head and the bright lights of the Sim evaporate like a puddle in the desert. Blackness envelopes me, surrounds me, drowns me. “Frack it, Denver!”

  Denver ignores my protests and unclips the carabiner between my shoulder blades before he unlocks my haptic suit from the rig and lowers me to the floor. The moment my haptic-booted feet touch the omnidirectional treadmill I kick out blindly, missing him. I sense his fingers on my breastbone as he disconnects the feed, turning off feedback from my haptic suit.

  “Put me back!” I yell. “Denver!”

  I’m lifted again, hefted over his shoulder and carried towards the door. I rain a constant stream of thumps on his back, but what can I do? He’s well over one-eighty-five centimetres tall, strong, broad-shouldered and wearing haptic armour. By comparison, I’m at least fifteen centimetres shorter, skinny, and worst of all without the visor I feel naked, vulnerable.

  -04-

  The walk along the metal footpath lasts under a minute as we pass Denver’s container to get to Hamilton’s neighbouring units. Regardless of how short the trip is, I am outside. Outside where the stink of the world assaults my nostrils; where unwashed beggars slump in the street, abandoned like heaps of soiled laundry, and Mexhead addicts lay crumpled and half-starved waiting for the relief of death. Outside where Sol-Corp guards patrol in groups, and the military might appear at any moment to press-gang the unwary into serving. Outside where any snert might notice me and try to cash me in to Sol-Corp for the reward.

  The sudden movement, shock and fear are too much, and I vomit down Denver’s back.

  “Frack it, Ana!” I ignore him because he deserves it. He knows I hate outside, yet he still insists on forcing me to visit Hamilton. “Once a year, Remembrance Day, that’s all Dad asks.”

  A number-pad bleeps as Denver punches the buttons and the door swishes open.

  “There you are. Come in, Son. Hell, you smell bad.”

  “I need a shower.” Denver stomps across Hamilton’s container and dumps me on a seat. Hamilton is a manager or leader, or something in a business, and is wealthy enough to afford a home built from multiple shipping containers; with holes cut in the side, and the ends welded together to create a much larger unit. He’s so rich, he has one container reserved exclusively for Sol access. In contrast, my little home still matches the layout of G.O’D.’s original patented container conversion design, part of O’Drae’s Haven blueprint after the Devastation. Keeping the layout allows me to move about with no trouble, because everything is always in its place. Here, away from my home, everything is wrong. I stay seated despite needing the bathroom.

  “Drink, Ana?”

  “No, thanks.” I curl my legs up and wrap my arms around my knees. I should be nicer to Hamilton, but I’m still shaken from being forced outside. Hamilton strides across the room, his muffled footsteps echoing off the walls. I guess I’m sitting in the main living area, with chairs and the kitchen at the far end.

  “Great show today. Second. And what a final shot! One for the annals. Blind into a building; you’d make an excellent sniper.” I don’t smile at the irony of his statement.

  The tantalising aroma of coffee tickles my nostrils a second before Hamilton places a tin cup in my hand. Anger forgotten, I relish the heat seeping through the thin, dented metal, warming my fingers through my haptic glove. Hamilton guides my other hand to the side, to a surface of some sort next to my seat. I hear a soft scraping sound as something hard rolls away from my fingertips. The spherical lump is bumpy to the touch. I turn and place the cup, careful not to spill a precious drop, and take the ball in my hand. I can’t decide from touch what the nobbled object might be. “What is it?”

  “Take a bite,” Hamilton instructs. His voice is rich with an accent from a country that no longer exists, a deep drawl from Texas in the south part of what used to be America. I roll the ball between my fingers and thumb, then pop it into my mouth. As I bite down, sticky goo oozes out from the cereal prison and coats my tongue. I’ve not tasted anything like it before, it’s neither sweet nor salty, yet has a buttery tang and something else...

  “A nut?”

  “Excellent!” Hamilton’s voice is grating because I recognise this tone; he’s humouring me (I’m blind, not stupid)! “They infused the oats with black walnut oil. Denver found them on Sol-bay and bought them for me for Remembrance Day. He’s a good boy.”

  Once Hamilton starts talking, drawing out his words as if to prevent anyone else interrupting, I find it easier
just to pretend to listen. Granted, some of his stories were once interesting, but I’ve heard them all countless times before. And, despite Hamilton and his wife Rosemary saving me from the orphanage when I was five, I’ve never been close to him. I miss Rosemary as much as Denver does, although he gets angry when I say it, but her hugs were legendary, and I know she loved us both. Hamilton though talks about Denver, his only real child, all the fracking time and kinda makes me feel like the hired help. I sound ungrateful, and I don’t mean to, but everything I own I earned for myself in the Arenas.

  “My father,” Hamilton continues, oblivious to my wandering thoughts, “Denver’s grandpa, owned a farm. I remember growing up running through the orchards, collecting walnuts. They were the size of golf-balls, you know?” I nod, picturing an in-Sim golf ball and imagining it as a hard, lumpy fruit. “Mother would bake walnuts into everything, stuff the turkey with them, put them in cakes and pies...”

  Hamilton’s voice trails off, as it always does when he slips into his own memories. He’s not the touchy-feely type, but you can tell when he’s picturing things before the Devastation because his voice softens. Reminiscing is about the only thing that mellows him. I guess today being Remembrance Day, his memories are so much more vivid.

  “Dad. It’s time, Sir.”

  Denver approaches my chair and lifts me, again. I don’t struggle, because it’s pointless. Where would I go? We pass through a doorway and into a room full of the familiar smells of omnidirectional treadmill rubber, harness grease and the metallic twang of overheating electrics from aged televisions screens. It’s been a while since I was in Hamilton’s dedicated Sol container, configured solely with rigs and numerous spotter screens.

  Denver clicks me into a rig, connects the suit and places my visor in my hand. I don’t need any prompting to pull the straps over my head, careful to keep my long, braided hair out of the way of the rigging. A click of a small button, and Sol blazes to life filling my vision. Like that, I go from pure darkness to the splendour of my New York apartment. I devote a small prayer of thanks in my mind to Gary O’Drae, the creator of Sol and the man who changed my life. I do this every time I log in (even though G.O’D. is long dead now).

  I want to check my messages and examine my other byte-balls to see what other marvels I won, but Hamilton’s expecting me to join them on his private Sol-copter. The whole replay that I’m about to be subjected to is depressing beyond understanding, but I promised (and the last time I refused, when I was eight, I couldn’t sit for days afterwards).

  A floating and spinning miniature of Hamilton’s vehicle hovers in front of my avatar. I reach out with my realworld haptic-gloved hand, and my avatar matches my movement in-Sim. The moment my finger connects with the craft I’m transported to its deck, where it floats high above the State of Wyoming, western USA. Direct teleports like this are expensive; even normal ports have a fee thanks to Sol-Corp, but Hamilton can afford it.

  An overlay map, an enhanced version of augmented reality, shows the craft’s location, a few miles north of the town of Boulder, and west of Boulder Lake. A moment later Denver spawns next to me, his grey eyes emotionless and his chiselled chin speckled with stubble. Denver’s coal-black hair is cropped as always, and his expression stoic. Like me, he wears combats, although he prefers black to my greens. In contrast, Hamilton’s avatar, with its bushy sideburns and grey furry slugs for eyebrows, resembles a portly Dickensian shopkeeper - despite his avatar’s crisp military uniform. I realise I’m twisting my in-Sim locket in my fingers and let it drop inside my top. It’s a habit I can’t stop, and it must look weird realworld since the locket only exists in-Sim.

  The replay springs into life, making me jump in surprise. O’Drae’s disembodied tones resound in 3arth’s atmosphere, reminding me of old Charlton Heston movies depicting God with a loud voice booming from the heavens above Earth. In one of the few breaks from the pure realism on 3arth—a perfect replica of the pre-Devastation Planet Earth—the Remembrance Replay is both spectacular and horrific in both its scale and detail. A meticulous reproduction of what G.O’D. and other scientists believe occurred both leading up to, and on, that fateful day. Nobody knows for certain, because no one can travel close enough to that part of the world to validate The Ordinance Histories. I take a seat at the front of the copter and rest my feet on the dash. There’s no wind in Sol, apart from inside some of the Arenas, so with the lack of windshield I can hear every word, syllable and breath as though the man who made the Sim sits beside me:

  June 17th, 2022.

  Here, due south of Yellowstone National Park, in Sublette County, Wyoming, everything seems tranquil. The region nestles at the northern tip of the Greater Green River Basin, within the Hilliard-Baxter-Mancos shale field.

  Despite constant campaigning and opposition from movements such as Americans Against Fracking in the United States and Frack Off in the UK, energy corporations have performed continuous Hydraulic Fracturing, known colloquially as fracking, here for several years. The Corps continued even after scientists exposed the increase in both water contamination and subterranean seismic activity.

  The ground beneath us shakes, the movement almost imperceptible at first from this height. Wildlife scatters across the land, while ancient trees and other taller objects topple to the ground. Our copter, along with the thousands of other craft gathered to form the Remembrance Armada, dips in a stomach-churning plummet towards the surface. The fleet ranges from small private pods like ours, to vast public barges and floating cruise liners.

  A rent opens in the soil, and we plunge miles beneath the surface until we reach the magma chambers beneath Wyoming. I slump, numb and silent, yet unable to look away as all around the ground bucks and tears and new fissures open, allowing magma and toxic gas to surge in and fill the voids.

  The first of three deep-crust earthquakes strikes – this one registering a magnitude of 7.6 on the Richter Scale. Dampened by the depth of the quake, and occurring in a remote and lesser-monitored region of Wyoming, the first tremors passed with little attention or concern. But this earthquake began a chain reaction which the best minds of our time could have neither predicted nor prevented.

  The Government deemed the incident a Matter of National Security. But they forced the press to under-report the scale of what occurred, and so the public remained unaware of the potential danger.

  A series of images flash by, like an old time-lapse video. Rushing through sequential pictures of the scene and showing the changes between the first earthquake and mid-2024. Even as I watch, the level of magma rises at an alarmingly swift pace.

  August 30th, 2024.

  A second, more devastating earthquake, of magnitude 8.2, rocks the region. The flow of magma into the reservoir increases to the equivalent of over a hundred Niagara Falls. Sensors recorded the aftershocks as far west as Los Angeles and as far north as Canada. The US Government demanded a temporary halt to all fracking activity and launched an internal investigation into the cause of the earthquakes.

  But, like the Titanic–doomed from the moment it struck the iceberg hours before it sank–the integrity of the Yellowstone Caldera was already beyond the point of no return. No actions now, could prevent the chain reaction that would follow.

  Despite the temporary halt to fracking, magma continued to build at a catastrophic rate. But a larger problem was developing, one which remained undetected until the third quake. High bottom-hole pressures peppered the environmentally sensitive region which had been further destabilised by drilling. This second and more powerful quake compounded these pressures and caused a new and undetected weakness fracture in the earth’s crust, in the largest of the sulphur gas fields.

  The time-lapse recommences as lava continues to pour into the fissure and threatens to submerge the armada. Pockets of air form around the viewing craft until the whole fleet is sitting inside a protective sphere. Although Sol does not reproduce heat, sitting inside a bubble with walls made of fire makes me sweat as if
the magma is real.

  Most years, I leave at this point. Even though the replay is in-Sim and not realworld, I shake with claustrophobia. Denver gives my avatar’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

  I try to distract myself by picturing the chain reaction inside my suit as the Sol interface sends signals through the rig. The suit reacts by forcing the Magnetorheological fluid encased in the thousands of miniscule pockets embedded in the suit to harden and replicate Denver’s touch. My attempt at distraction fails as the screams, cries and shouts of distant unseen avatars viewing the replay cut through the silence. I clench my jaw in determination to stay.

  February 14th, 2025. Happy Valentines!

  A third, more powerful quake, known as The Valentine’s Heartbreak, reached magnitude 9.4.

  At least five aftershocks, each topping 8.5, ripped through the Mid-West and Western Seaboard over the next six days. Analysis of the recordings at the time, suggested that the second aftershock tore open a new fracture above the largest sulphur gas deposit, causing the tunnels to fill with both toxic gas and magma.

  The bubble, along with all the ships cocooned inside, pushes north before bursting out into the largest magma reservoir beneath the Yellowstone Caldera. Molten rock pours in through fissures and tunnels too large to comprehend, the reservoir filling up like an oversized bath.

  Before the Devastation, the Yellowstone Caldera last erupted approximately 630,000 years ago. For decades, geologists and volcanologists monitored every nuance of seismic activity. From records of the volume of magma and gas in the reservoirs, they predicted that we had centuries at least before any build-up would be sufficient for the caldera to erupt.