Heir of G.O'D. Revelations Read online

  December 26th, 2025. The Devastation.

  Frackers, and their cavalier activities, reduced the original scientific estimates that it would take centuries to flood the magma reservoir, to a matter of months. Fracking and the resulting earthquakes caused irreparable damage to the Earth’s crust and affected the fragile seismic stability of the whole region.

  On December 26th, 2025, Frackers changed the earth. Forever.

  Gas flooded into the chambers, creating a pressure that the six miles of bedrock above, could not contain. The caldera exploded up and out in a Megaquake which tore Northwest America asunder, casting billions of tonnes of toxic gas, ash and dust into the atmosphere and raining fiery hell upon the Earth.

  On cue, the rock roof above our craft explodes up and out, and the released pressure vomits us out into a lightning-filled cloud. Darkness shrouds everything, a stark contrast to the burning red inside the bubble. A relentless barrage of lightning bolts cut through the swirling grey ash, giving everything a flashing ghostly pallor. Our copter swirls up and away from the crater, twisting like a cork in a whirlpool before it escapes to the west several miles above the ground, which is now a roiling mass of lava flowing across the devastated land.

  The volcanic cloud reaches as high as I can see, exploding out in all directions. Seas of dust, I guess pyroclastic flows, sweep ahead of the lava, obliterating everything in their path. Behind that, an invisible layer of CO2 hugs the ground for dozens of miles, strangling everything that needs air to breathe.

  G.O’D. is silent as the scene plays out around us.

  I know, as does everyone, what happened next. People died, ash filled the sky and blocked out the sun, plants died, and the Earth plummeted into a volcanic winter. It’s too depressing, and I can’t cope with being here any longer.

  I port out, unsteady and nauseous.

  Fumbling around the side-table, I find the cup of coffee Hamilton must have brought through for me. The bitter, thick liquid coats my tongue, but it’s better than the image of death still burning in my mind.

  Saturday, December 27th, 2025

  -05-

  Communication from Gary O’Drae, extracted from The Ordinance: Book of the Devastation

  To: Secretary-General, United Nations.

  Cc: President of the United States, Leaders of the G7, Leaders of the World

  On June 17th, 2022 at the northern tip of the Greater Green River Basin, just south of the Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming, fracking at the Hilliard-Baxter-Mancos site caused a deep-crust earthquake, reaching 7.6 on the Richter Scale.

  Despite pressure from Fridays for Future, the growing concern from the Time Is Now campaign, America Against Fracking, Greenpeace and numerous protests the world over, you failed to act.

  Your failure resulted in the second catastrophic earthquake in the region. On August 30th, 2024 Wyoming suffered an earthquake at magnitude 8.2, with aftershocks registered as far west as Los Angeles and San Francisco.

  Your belated decision to finally begin the process to suspend fracking was already too late. I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’, but refer to my blog from October 20201, of which I know you are aware.

  Secretary-General, in your wisdom, you chose not to intervene. Yesterday, on the 26th Day of December, in the year 2025, Yellowstone Caldera erupted.

  The blood of millions who will now die, is on your hands.

  Gary O’Drae,

  Founder of Sol, CEO of Sol-Corp.

  Rebirth Day, 2043

  Remembrance Day - The Year Before Baktun

  The Creator looked up to the dark noon sky, heavy with ash and as dark as twilight. Then, as he gazed upon the withering foliage, he spoke:

  “Man caused this because he did not listen. All this,” said the Creator, sweeping his arm before the soaring panoramic viewing glass, “was caused by Fracking. Frackers did this.”

  The Ordinance: Book of the Evacuation (26:8-9)

  -06-

  After the hectic schedule of Remembrance Festival Week, Rebirth Day feels calm, serene even. When he created Sol, G.O’D. implemented a new calendar system2 that didn’t follow any already in existence. As such, Sol has thirteen months; each of which are twenty-eight days long, divided into four weeks. The first of each month is always a Monday, starting with Einstein 1st (tomorrow), then Berners-Lee, Galileo, Da Vinci and so on. For the extra day in the 365 days-a-year calendar, we have Rebirth Day, when the system essentially cleanses itself and 3arth returns to how it was on January 1st, 2020, O’Drae’s last full, realworld Earth scan. For leap years, once every four years, there’s an Intercalary Day. According to Hamilton, the old Intercalary Day was added to the end of a month called February, but now it’s held immediately before Rebirth Day. There’s one at the end of next year.

  Today doesn’t feel like a normal Rebirth Day, because Omar and Mika are coming to my container to install the new cameras that arrived late last night by drone. After religiously following every update of the shipment on the NARaS tracking service in Sol, I’ve been unable to stop fiddling with them since they arrived. To think that by the end of today, the little devices sitting in the palm of my hand will be my eyes, almost makes me want to cartwheel with excitement. My stomach gurgles again, a reminder to eat my bowl of puffed grain cereal and camel milk, but I’m not sure I can face it.

  An alarm flashes in the corner of my HUD–or heads-up display–a warning that the freeroll celebration Rebirth Rumble is about to start. My mind is as uncooperative as my tummy, but perhaps competing will provide a welcome distraction until the others arrive. The Rumble feels more like a lottery – anyone can enter for free, and there are no qualifiers. Because millions of people participate each year, there’s no cluster-zone, so competitors are dumped straight into their starting zone.

  The field is split into dozens of identical ten-kilometre diameter domes, each stacked with ten thousand people fighting on barren rocky plains with nowhere to dig-in, and scant few places to hide. Combat is always frenetic, chaotic and relentless and as subtle as a punch on the nose. Whilst I’m waiting for the message-link to go live, I select my permitted three items–my G28, a silver Walther PPK and one of several bags of holding–from my inventory.

  I’ve just taken another victim when the door alarm chimes realworld.

  “Door command: Intercom,” I state, distracted by having to simultaneously avoid being shot in-Sim, and answer the door realworld. “Who is it?”

  “It’s us,” says Mika in his deep, soft voice (ill-fitting for his bear-like frame).

  “Door command: Permit entry.”

  The pocket door glides open with a soft click, like something from Star Trek (one of those vintage sci-fi things Denver’s addicted to), and two people enter the container. Despite the door sliding back in place and locking almost immediately, the smell of outside floods the space making my nose wrinkle. The temporary distraction is all it takes, and even as I take out another player, I stumble into the Arena wall, causing me to Respawn. Respawning isn’t fatal, but it is disorientating and puts me in danger of being wiped out by a lurking Dastarder, as I reappear at one of the six fixed respawn points dotted around the Arena’s centre. I swipe the loot in temper, receiving some sort of helmet, and wait the three seconds before I reappear at a respawn point.

  “Are you still fighting?” Omar asks.

  Before I can answer, a bullet traces through the air and smacks me on the shoulder. “Fracking Dastarder!” The impact translates to my suit and I feel a blow, like a soft punch, at the top of my bicep. Whilst I can still move my arm realworld, my avatar’s limb hangs uselessly by my side. I drop to the ground to avoid the second shot that pierces the air where my head was just a moment before.

  “Dastarder got us both, too.” Mika’s voice is laced with irritation – nobody likes a Dastarder. Camping the Arena respawn spots just isn’t right, especially on a freeroll like today, but they do. Before I can move, another bullet screams towards me and the microsecond before it hits, m
y connection black-screens.

  I rip the visor from my head in frustration, not waiting to see who it was, or what they loot from me. According to the leader board I failed to make the top 100,000 for the fourth year running.

  “Who was it?” asks Omar, his tone gentle and soft compared to Mika’s. Omar is local-born, pure Dubai, unlike the rest of us whose families moved here after the Devastation.

  “I didn’t check.” Someone opens my fridge and a cold tin of water is slid into my hand. I take a sip and place it on top.

  “Is this it?” asks Mika. I listen in anticipation as he rustles through the squeaky polystyrene packaging and carefully places the precious cameras on the kitchen top. “These are in great condition. Almost undamaged. This shouldn’t take long at all.”

  I’m too afraid to ask if they’re going to work – even with the NARaS voucher I still dumped most of my ready $uns to get them (Musa, an in-Sim friend of mine, used a phrase once about me putting all my eggs in one basket, but how anyone could afford more than one egg is utterly baffling. Unless you own a warehouse and merchant business like she does, I guess).

  “Will it work?”

  “It should. Where do you want them installed?”

  This is the question I’ve pondered constantly for days, but have so far failed to answer. I know the layout of the container as well as I know each of the scars on my shins, or the ridges on my many times broken nose. I can count the steps from each room, envisage in my mind exactly the position of each item of sparse furniture; I know precisely where everything is stored in the kitchen cupboards and my clothing drawers. Even so, I still can’t decide. “I found Umbra’s blueprint for the first containers. Would one above the door work, in the corner, and the other in the corner of my bed-space, above the bed?”

  Mika clomps from one end of my container to the other, his massive frame making my padded floor creak.

  “It should. What about the third?” asks Mika, returning to the rigs.

  This one I am sure about. “Above the door, on the outside.”

  “That might be harder. People steal frack, you know. Could you open the door?”

  “Door command: Unlock and open.”

  I bury my nose in the tin can, but the faint metallic twang does little to detract from the stench of outside wafting through my container. I listen for Mika to return, and shut the door the moment I hear him fully inside.

  “It should work. How about in-Sol?”

  I’ve thought about that too, I’ve got a private movie room in my apartment. “Can we create an uplink to my cinema?”

  Omar gives my arm a reassuring squeeze, his touch as soft as his voice. I can see why Mika is so smitten with him. He smells of soap and lemons, a welcome contrast to Mika’s oil and grease aroma. “I’ve been thinking. If we make a replica of your container in-Sim, the cameras can capture where you are, and you can watch yourself on them as you move around.”

  I can’t picture in my mind how Omar’s plan will work; in-Sim the Dubai Haven where we live is a bustling shipping port, as it was before the Devastation. But modern Dubai is totally different, it follows the patent of O’Drae’s solar-panel-roofed container city Havens, one of many coastal settlements that started out as temporary refugee camps, and still exist years later. “I can’t. Where can I put it? 3arth is locked, my container doesn’t even exist there.”

  “Didn’t you win yourself an asteroid last week?”

  “I did!” The byte-ball I won from 3arth R3al 3state contained a personal asteroid, nestled within the inner regions of the main asteroid belt. Compared to others around it, ‘2867 Steins’ isn’t that large, but it does have an unusual shape, like a wedge of cheese from the old 20th century board game Trivial Pursuit. Its craters are named after gemstones like diamond and sapphire. Owning fancy asteroid accommodation is a new level of prestige, but for me, it’s the ultimate in useless frivolity. I really don’t need it (well, at least I didn’t think I did), so I listed it on Sol-Bay within a minute of opening the byte-ball.

  I hastily pull on my visor, head to my apartment and check the listing. Luckily, it’s still for sale – the eight submitted ‘best offers’ are too low, less than half retail. With a small sigh of relief, I stop the listing and enter my details via the registration app. Within a few minutes, I own an asteroid, a Sol one, but an asteroid all the same. I allow both Omar and Mika entry, and update the permissions to give them edit rights. Omar calls up the design menus and links into my HUD so I can watch him work. With expert confidence, Omar picks the in-Sim container blueprint from the Sol basic inventory and we start replicating the minor changes that I’ve made to my realworld home (such as adding and positioning my fridge).

  -07-

  It takes Mika a few hours to install the cameras and link them to the base unit, then connect the base unit to the Sol network that runs underground. I realise how useless I am at building things in-Sim, and eventually, much to Omar’s relief I’m sure, leave him in peace to replicate the container within the diamond crater on Steins. Instead, I busy myself clearing out my inbox.

  Aside from the usual smorgasbord of reactions from people who watch the Arenas, a mix of fans and gamblers, there’s a flood of Corps videos offering sales and discounts for pretty much everything. I take advantage of the 5% discount off a month’s supply of Probars – high energy cereal snacks with weird, yet edible fillings such as mushroom pulp and squished bugs. After stocking up on essentials, I scan some of the Darknet boards where people exchange hacks for exorbitant $uns, and both stores and individuals trade realworld black-market goods. As inevitable as Sol’s sun rising, I am pulled to one of my guilty pleasures like an iron filing to a magnet, the conspiracy theorists.

  It drives Denver mad when he knows I’ve been on the discussion boards, but I can’t help it. It’s pure escapism, almost all of it is baseless made-up frack, but I find it entertaining. There’s a new theory about Re@lElectrics faking bad weather to keep us confined down below the solar panels (which is ridiculous, because everyone can hear the constant angry squall of wind overhead). Even more ludicrous is the growing theory that people are living outside the Havens, in the wilderness. The idea of Vagrants, as they’ve been called, out in the wastelands surviving acid rain with no sunlight and nothing to eat, is as believable as the theory that we’re all descended from aliens. But it’s not all fiction – like the latest thread covering reports of Sol-Corp’s most recent abduction of yet another blind person.

  Another new thread is fronted by a shadowy cloaked figure, identity unknown, ‘outing’ Umbra as a fracking Church of G.O’D. operation! Umbra, as everyone knows, was set up and funded by O‘Drae himself as a benefactor Corps for the people, supplying each individual with a free visor, gloves, remote pack and Sol access. I feel a spike of anger crawling through my veins, the claim that Umbra is somehow a part of COGOD rankles so much that I shut the site down and resign myself to watching Omar finish the replica container on Steins instead.

  As time meanders towards the afternoon, general noises of partying and merriment drift through the locked door. Whilst Remembrance Day forces us to look back at the dreadful past, Rebirth Day is a celebration, a reminder that we’re still here and Sol, the beating heart of the world, is with us for another year.

  My HUD counts down to Reset, flashing a one hour, a ten minute, then a two-minute warning. Unlike most people, who enjoy with anticipation the eighty-seven minutes, nineteen seconds it takes to cleanse the system and bring it back online, I despise it. What if it doesn’t come back? The deadtime is the starkest reminder of the dark realworld around me, and I hate it for exactly that reason. Denver is usually here by my side, offering a crumb of comfort for my anxiety, but today he’s absent. No doubt he’s hanging out with Nele Mouse again, she’s got him twisted around her avatar since she joined their four-man Arena squad last Hawkin. Full-on-Fracker.

  Omar pours us drinks and we listen as the people outside count down from ten. The moment they shout zero, the
lights of Sol go out. Mika finishes wiring up and we settle back and wait, Omar and I in the rigs, and Mika on the fold-out bench that Denver installed for himself opposite my reclaimed TV spotter screen. Time drags by slower than a tethered-sloth wading through mudflats, and without the HUD I can’t see anything, not even a clock. Omar helps by keeping us topped up with watered down alcohol, extracted from fermented grain and flavoured with dates, and telling me the story of how they met. I’ve heard it a hundred times, but it helps.

  “Musa says you love the new scope on your customised G28?” Omar asks, as he tops up my water tin again.

  I forget that Omar knows Musa (which is dumb because he introduced us). Omar bought his hacked avatar image from her. While most of us stick with an avatar that looks mostly like us, he has a female one. My avatar looks mostly like me, although I straightened her nose and gave her piercing blue eyes (even though I never remove my wraparound Ray-Bans in-Sim). She’s got fewer freckles too, and a cute chin. Unlike me, my avatar also wears a plain silver oval locket that was strangely there the first time I ever logged into Sol. Despite my constant in-Sim fiddling, the locket will neither open nor come off.

  After a lifetime of sitting in the darkness, eating pro-bars and sipping on Omar’s watery liquor, he finally gives us the one-minute countdown to the end of Reset. I fall silent and fix the visor in place. Omar and Mika shuffle together and I hear their voices merge like a musical duet as they join in the countdown to the servers firing back up. I’m itching to get back in-Sim, to finish setting up my container and test the cameras. As the two men share a sloppy celebratory kiss, I switch on the screen and… nothing.