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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read The Remnants: jesus christ what the fuck

Soonmot: Dec 19, 2002; Entrapta fucking loves robots; Grimey Drawer

Okay gang, we've knocked out Animorphs (all bangers, even the starfish one) and Everworld (B tier start, S tier middle, D tier ending), now it's time for us to finish what our pal Epicurius started way back in 2020 and read The Remnants!

Here's the summary as per wikipedia:

quote:

Remnants is a series of science fiction books co-authored by Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant, writing together under the name K. A. Applegate, and published between July 2001 and September 2003. It is the story of what happens to the survivors of a desperate mission to save a handful of human beings after an asteroid collides with the Earth. Eighty people are placed aboard a converted space shuttle using untested "quack" hibernation technology and fired blindly into space hours before all life on Earth is obliterated by a large asteroid called The Rock. They are then picked up by a large, sentient space craft of monumental proportions known as 'Mother' which is inhabited by various races. 'Mother' can manipulate the physical environment within the craft's limits and often does so. Only a few people placed in stasis actually were alive and capable of being reanimated when they reached 'Mother'.

So maybe mash together Voyager and Farscape, I'd say Battlestar, but this predates the reimagining and I don't remember the original well enough to recall what it was about, aside from the cylons looking way more awesome than just pretend humans, idk, i never finished the reboot. Who knows how this will go!

Maybe you do! Did you read this as a youth? Do you have fond memories of it? What are we getting ourselves in for?

Also: Let's get a better thread title! Post your thoughts on this series and your idea for a title, we'll begin this tomorrow.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 00:24

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 09:22

Coca Koala: Nov 28, 2005; ongoing nowhere; College Slice

I know absolutely nothing about this series but the summary sounds bizarre so I'm here for it.

# ? Jan 10, 2024 00:55

Soonmot: Dec 19, 2002; Entrapta fucking loves robots; Grimey Drawer

Coca Koala posted:

sounds bizarre so I'm here for it.

we got our first contender for thread title!

# ? Jan 10, 2024 01:47

poop chute: Nov 16, 2023; by Athanatos

I remember these books taught me who Bosch was and made me consider the question "what if a girl was a hive mind of alien worms???"

# ? Jan 10, 2024 02:32

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

Never heard of Remnants. Having read the whole Everworld thread, I need to know... does Remnants have an ending? And does it have a good ending?

# ? Jan 10, 2024 03:53

QuickbreathFinisher: Sep 28, 2008; by reading this post you have agreed to form a gay socialist micronation.
`

Remnants: it's giving Mother...

I'm so sorry

# ? Jan 10, 2024 04:09

Remalle: Feb 12, 2020

I was barely even aware of this series' existence and certainly never read it before. The ending of Everworld sucked so let's see if that was because all the quality transferred over to this series.

poop chute posted:

I remember these books taught me who Bosch was and made me consider the question "what if a girl was a hive mind of alien worms???"

No thread is safe from Gog-posting...

# ? Jan 10, 2024 19:04

Soonmot: Dec 19, 2002; Entrapta fucking loves robots; Grimey Drawer

quote:

THE MAYFLOWER PROJECT

REMNANTS #1

Prologue

Hannibal�s Carthaginian army had trapped the Romans under Varro in a place called Canae. Before the day was done the Romans would lose seventy-thousand men. Hannibal would lose less than six thousand. It was to become the very model of total destruction, total victory.

Annihilation.

It was the year 216 B.C.

On that same day, in that same year, a comet that had for millions of years traveled a long, cold, looping orbit around the sun slammed into a massive asteroid in orbit between Mars and Jupiter. The impact was so powerful it reduced the comet to dust. It knocked several smaller pieces from the asteroid and nudged them, along with the asteroid itself, from orbit.

The asteroid began a slow spiral that would eventually bring it to a fiery death in the sun. Then, in the same year that Abraham Lincoln freed American slaves, the asteroid had a close encounter with Mars. It missed the planet by several hundred thousand miles but the gravity of Mars swung the asteroid into a faster, steeper descent.

The asteroid would never reach the sun. It had another stop to make.

quote:

DAYS TO IMPACT: 5

CHAPTER 1

�BANG.�

Jobs was fourteen years old, and if this were the year 2010 and not 2011, and if this were not the state of California but, say, the state of Indiana or New York, he would not be driving a car. Alone. All alone.

The technology had come in 2009 with the Ford Libertad!, but laws were slow to change, slower than technology, and so far only Texas, Montana, and in this last year, California, had changed the laws to allow people as young as twelve to be alone in control, more or less, of an actual car.

Jobs�s parents had bought the 2011 model Libertad! with two things in mind: the hideous commute from their home in Carmel northeast to Silicon Valley and Palo Alto, and their quiet, restless, gifted son. The car was yellow. It produced 325 horsepower, which wasn�t bad, though Jobs felt sure he could improve on that given time � the engine was computer-controlled, of course, and Jobs hadn�t met a program he couldn�t improve.

Still, it was his 325 horses. Three-hundred-twenty-five horses and all his on a Saturday midmorning with the fog lifting off the Monterey peninsula and Highway One not too choked with tourists yet.

�Car: Turn on,� Jobs said. The car read his fingerprints from the steering wheel and the engine started. It didn�t make very much noise � it was a hybrid and since the batteries were fully charged, it was running on electric motors at the moment.

�My pleasure, sir,� the car said in a noncommittal feminine voice, and added, �Operation will be in safe mode only.� The car did not sound apologetic. The car sounded, if anything, just a bit doubtful. A hint of uptalk. Jobs could fix that: This was just the default voice. Five other preloaded voices were available: young male, young female, authoritative male, gender nonspecific, and the computer-simulated voice of beloved (and long-dead) actor James Dean � a tie-in to Ford�s ad campaign.

Jobs said, �Car: Destination: South on Highway One, most direct route.�

There was no uptalk in his voice, no caution or question. Jobs could talk to machines. People not so much, but machines, yes. The car opened the garage door, backed down the driveway, bumped out into the street, stopped, turned, and proceeded at the speed limit. Jobs held his breath. It wasn�t that he doubted the technology, no, he�d read about it, understood it, the sensors were all well-tested, the Global Positioning System was backed up
with a fail-safe, the program had run millions of simulations before Ford ever put it into a car. No, he trusted the technology. It was his own emotions he mistrusted. That sense of getting away with something, of being unaccountably free, that�s what made him hold his breath because surely, surely somehow it wasn�t going to last.

And yet, the 325 horses stopped at the stop sign, and proceeded when safe, and took a left, and read the green light, and turned onto the highway, sped up and shifted gears and slipped neatly between a classic nineties-era Beetle and a semi pulling a Wal-Mart trailer. Past a new golf course with sprinklers going, and all at once the Pacific Ocean was revealed. Buttery sunshine, robin�s-egg skies, puffy clouds, a sailboat leaning far over, a warm, dry
breeze coming in the open window, what was not to like? What was less than perfect in all this?

Jobs sat watching the scenery and watching the wheel turn, left, right, passing the Wal-Mart truck. He wanted to drive. He wanted to hold the wheel. That�s what was wrong. He wanted his feet on the pedals and his hands on the wheel. Could he bypass the security protocol?

�No,� he told himself firmly. �No.�

It would be wrong, and worse still, it would be the end of him driving till he was seventeen and could get a license.
�Plus, you don�t know how to drive,� he reminded himself.

Jobs was thin, even bony, average height, with blond hair that looked as if it had been largely ignored, which it had been. There was something puppyish about his body: hands and feet too big, legs too long, as if he had been put together in a hurry from components that didn�t always match up.

He had too-prominent brown eyes that wore a distracted expression, as if they were usually turned inward and only occasionally startled into observing the outside world. His mouth�s default expression was one of tentative near-smile. Like he was planning on smiling but kept forgetting to.

His birth name was Sebastian Andreeson. He�d kept that name until he was seven and read a biography of Steven Jobs. From that point on, he was Jobs.

�Car: Sound system on.�

The stereo came on and defaulted to one of his dad�s files: Green Day? Nirvana? One of those eternally unhappy bands from the nineties. Jobs couldn�t keep track of them. At least it wasn�t his mom�s hip-hop.

�Car: Stereo: Search for opera. Neo, not classic.�

A few second�s delay and the full, rich sound of a tenor singing a popular aria from Molly Folly. It was one of those tunes you couldn�t get away from: hooky, singable, but lyrically prosaic, to Jobs�s ear at least. He was on the point of trying for something different when he recalled: Didn�t Cordelia love Molly Folly? Yes, he remembered, she did. He remembered that.

And the kiss.

The dance. The gym, decorated with streamers and balloons and flatscreens showing slo-mo montages of soaring flight videos. (The theme of the dance was All Can Soar!) He hadn�t come to the dance with Cordelia. He�d wanted to, he�d thought about it, planned it, written several convincing speeches to be delivered to her in a very casual yet totally rehearsed kind of way.

But he hadn�t asked her; she�d gone with her boyfriend. Jobs had been under the impression that she�d broken up with Hondo, but no, they were back together at the dance. So Jobs had gone alone. Even his best friend, Mo�Steel, had a date. He had to be there, no choice, since he was the designated techie running the lights and flatscreens.
On his way to the boys� room he�d come across Cordelia crying in a gloomy hallway off the gym. He asked why she was crying. She told him. For the next straight hour.

Jobs was a good listener. He listened, without judging or interrupting or trying to exploit the situation to his advantage. (Hondo had done her wrong.) He listened and sympathized and offered a shoulder to cry on, despite the increasingly urgent need to pee. And then, in a strange, tender moment, Cordelia kissed him. Not a brotherly, �thanks for listening� kiss on the cheek, but the real thing. Then, with a rueful smile, she walked away and Jobs ran for the boys� room.

He remembered every detail. He just wasn�t sure what the details meant. Had he blown his big chance? Had she been all but begging him to become her boyfriend? Had he been just too noble for his own good? Or had he exaggerated the whole thing all out of proportion?

The car swept down the coastal highway, holding at about forty miles an hour, open road ahead now, but twisting and turning. It occurred to Jobs that he should just dial Cordelia up and stun and astound her with the fact that he, he alone, was in the car. No parents. He was the only (or at least one of the very few) ninth graders currently in possession of 325 horsepower.

He could call her up. He could swing by wherever she was and give her a ride. She might respond by saying, �Ever since that night, that lovely, perfect kiss, I�ve been fascinated by you, Jobs. I know you�re like some uber-nerd, but I also sense that deep down inside you hide the soul of a poet. Now, please kiss me again.�

Yep. That�s what would happen.

The music stopped and Jobs realized he hadn�t turned on the content filter. A news broadcast began and before he had a chance to instruct the car to go back to music, he heard something that froze the words unformed in his throat.

�. . . denied the report and said that �no credible evidence has yet been presented that Earth is directly imperiled.��
And with that the broadcast turned to the next story, which involved stock prices.

�Car: Stereo: Previous story, give me the full file, on screen.�

The Libertad! might not have been exactly perfect for a guy who wanted his hands on the wheel and his foot on the pedal, but it was perfect for someone who wanted to read. The story appeared on screen, a compilation of news reports from The New York Times and CNN and WebboScreed.

The original story had come from WebboScreed. The story said that NASA had discovered an approaching asteroid roughly seventy-six miles long on an intercept course with Earth. As he was reading the story a bug popped up to announce an update. This was a CNN story, a more credible source than WebboScreed.

�Car: Stereo: Play the bugged story. Video.�

The screen showed a CNN anchor doing an intro to a piece reported with some skepticism by a field reporter standing out in a marsh near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The reporter quoted sources as saying that one of the last of the aging shuttles was being outfitted to carry a sort of Noah�s Ark of selected humans into space so that at least some humans would survive the impact of the rumored asteroid.

CNN went to some lengths to pooh-pooh its own story. There were endless reminders that this was totally unconfirmed, and in fact was being vigorously denied by NASA and the White House. The reporter concluded by suggesting that he, personally, thought the story was baloney.

Jobs cleared the screen.

He took several deep, shaky breaths. Dangerous to automatically believe anything the media said. Unless it was confirmed, backed up, proven. Or unless your mother had been weeping secretly for the last two weeks, giving you and your brother strange, faraway looks filled with muted horror and sadness. And unless that mother was Professor Jennifer Andreeson, head of astrophysics at Stanford. Asteroid. Seventy-six miles long. The asteroid that had eradicated the dinosaurs was what? Jobs searched his memory. Ten miles long? It would be like shooting a bullet into a soft-boiled egg.

�Bang,� Jobs said to the car.

He didn�t know what to do or think. He could call his parents. He could call his little brother, Edward. He could call Cordelia and try to exploit the fact that the world was coming to an end. Or he could call his best friend, Mo�Steel, who would be absolutely no help at all.

�Link: Call Mo.�

And we're off!

Okay, so number 1. We got some names in this book. Wow. Number 2, Jobs has a Something Awful account. Number 3, we're getting right into thing, hell yeah! Also lol at working autodriving cars in 2011

quote:

CHAPTER 2

�YOU DON�T WANT TO BE IN A BODY CAST WHEN IT HAPPENS.�

Mo�Steel had barely slept the night before. He�d barely spoken to anyone, which was unusual. He�d barely formed a coherent thought, which was not at all unusual. He was as excited as it was possible for him to be, and he was capable of becoming very excited.

He was not scared. Not what you�d call really scared. He was totally glandular, definitely hugely adrenalized, but not scared. His friend Jobs had once tried to convince him that fear was the real motivation behind Mo�Steel�s obsessive need for the newest, wildest, most idiotic, most dangerous thrill. But that was Jobs for you: He thought way too much. He wouldn�t say anything for a week, then, when he finally did say something besides, �You gonna eat those fries?� what he said would be something disturbing.

Mo�Steel was hooked onto a semi-enclosed chairlift that moved about five times faster than the usual ski lift. But then this wasn�t a ski lift. This wasn�t skiing. No snow in sight at this altitude, though there was a nice snowcap higher up. The lift was just a sort of hook, really, a bare little seat and a steel ring to hold him in place and a plastic bubble to trap oxygen and a bit of warmth.

His feet hung free. Fifty-foot-tall trees reached up practically to brush the wheels of Mo�Steel�s skates as he skimmed along above them. The birds were all down there, flitting white and gray and russet shapes. He was above the birds.

He twisted in the lift to look back at distant Denver, smoggy and sprawled out at the foot of the mountains. He pitied those people down there. Pitied them because all they were doing was grinding along, stuck on slow, while he was on the edge of the ultimate. He turned away from the city and peered down through the trees again. Here and there he saw sections of The Pipe. The Six Flags over Colorado Skateboggan was the official name, which was just pitiful. They should have known everyone would be calling it The Pipe. Capital T, capital P.

The Pipe was an eight-foot-diameter tube, all blast-glass, Teflon, and neon inside, dull brown-painted aluminum outside. It ran from near the top of Mount Cisco Systems all the way to the bottom: an eleven-thousand-foot drop. But not just a drop, oh no. The Pipe split into four intertwining, interlocking branches, zooming back and forth down the mountain�s face, so that the eleven-thousand-twenty-foot vertical actually ended up being closer to twenty
thousand linear feet.

Twenty thousand feet: three-point-eight miles, give or take. Maximum recorded speed? Seventy-eight miles per hour, compadre. Fast as a car on the interstate, only with no car.

The peak, the launching point, was not far now. Mo�Steel was getting giddy and he wondered for a moment if the oxygen system was working right. Not much air way up here. Not much air but plenty of wind. The little car rocked back and forth, not a bad ride all by itself. What if the cable broke? That could be woolly. Hard-core woolly.

He began to loosen himself up as well as he could. Shoulder roll, leg stretch, oh man, it was going to be supreme.

The voice of the chairlift informed him that he had one minute to blastoff and reminded him to check his equipment.

He slapped the helmet down on his head, made sure it was seated properly. He spun the little wheels set in the edge of his gloves. He kicked his skates together, testing the feel of them. Knee pads, on. Elbow pads, on. Mo�Steel was not a big jock. He was never going to play professional basketball or football � he was too small for either. Not small small, just normal size, and normal size was death in pro sports.

He had broad shoulders and somewhat bowed legs and a concave belly. His face was defined by a wide, smiling mouth and eyes set too far apart for classic good looks. There was a reptilian quality to him, but a nice reptile: a happy lizard with quick movements and sudden grins and long brown hair that bounced every time he yelled. Which was fairly often since Mo�Steel�s normal mode of conversation was a goofy, wild-eyed yell.

He was over the snow now, the almost year-round snow. The wind whipped up seriously, whistling over the mountain�s peak, and pushed freezing tendrils through the chairlift�s heat- glow. They said the inside of The Pipe was warm. And plenty of air, too. That was good because he didn�t want to do this all numb and wheezing. The point was to feel.

The chair cleared a rock ledge and there it was, all at once: The Sink. There could be no other name for it, although the Six Flags people insisted on calling it the American Express Launch Point.

It was The Sink. Capital T, capital S.

It was sixty feet across, a rounded out, perfectly smooth dimple in the top of the mountain, carved into living rock. In the bottom of The Sink was a drain. That drain was the opening of The Pipe. The chair rose, circled, jerked on its cable as it dropped lower.

Time to take the test.

�Lock and load,� Mo�Steel said.

He opened the safety belt and dropped the three feet to the gently sloped upper sink. He could still chicken out if he wanted. He could skate out of The Sink and wait to catch the next downward chair.

Yeah. Right.

Mo�Steel had never bunnied out. He had broken five major bones � four of them so badly that they�d been replaced with either composites or regrown-bone-over-titanium. His left humerus, right clavicle, right tibia, and fibula were artificial.

He was proud of the damage. He�d traded his birth name of Romeo Gonzalez for the name Mo�Steel � either for Man Of Steel or More Steel, he couldn�t quite recall which � right after the spectacularly gross (and painful) tibia-fibula break.

Breaking body parts was acceptable. Going all bunny rabbit was not.

Mo�Steel changed his angle of attack and dropped down, turned, caught a cool centrifugal, then cut down and all at once, no time for second thoughts now, he was in The Pipe. The Pipe took it easy for the first three-hundred feet. Time to catch your breath, psych up, get ready. There were neon bands placed every fifty feet. The color of the neon changed depending on the slope. Here they glowed green. Later they would change to yellow. When you saw red bands flash by you were dropping nearly vertical.

And then, there were the big purple streamers that would warn you of approaching intersections, and the white strobes to let you know you were coming onto an airborne.

A lot to remember when your brain was screaming.

�Green, green, green,� as Mo�Steel got used to The Pipe, got used to the diameter, the unmarred smoothness. He slalomed a little, riding up and down the sides. How fast would he have to be going before he could pull a three-sixty?

Then, all at once it was bye-bye, stomach, and he was blazing down through a blur of yellow.

�Aaaaahhhh! Aaaaahhhh!� he yelled, an expression of purest joy. �Aaaaahhhhh!�

His link rang in his ear.

What? He�d blocked his link, he had definitely blocked his link, and now he was crouched low, beating the air resistance, building speed, and the phone was still deedly-deedling in his ear.

Faster, faster, so fast he could go airborne with a fart. Red lights ahead!

�Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!�

So fast now the wind was vibrating his cheeks, stretching his lips into an oblong �O.� Going red! The red neon was a blur. A smear of blood-light all around him. The link rang again. Distracting, to say the least, when the slightest wrong move would result in his sliding ignominiously down the entire remaining length of The Pipe. Oh, the
humiliation!

Deedly-deedly.

�Argh! Link: Answer already!� he shouted in frustration. Purple streamer. Left or right? Left or right? He tried to remember the simulation he�d had to run through three times and master before he could be allowed to ride The Pipe.

Left. No, right!

A voice in his ear. �Mo, what�s up?�

�Jobs? Aaaaaahhhhhh! Yeah! Yeah!�

�Mo, what are you doing?�

Left, left, left! A sudden, jerking, yellow-neon-three-gee-turn, then a sickening drop into all-red territory and man, he�d only thought he was going fast before. He was falling like a rock, gravity, Mother G had him, falling faster and faster, skates barely touching the tunnel.

�I�m riding The Pipe!� Mo�Steel yelled.

�What? Now?�

He pushed off ever so slightly, did a forward flip, and landed on his glove-wheels. Now he was rocketing along backward while standing (more or less) on his hands. It was perhaps the most deeply satisfying moment of his life.

�Strobes!� Mo�Steel screamed giddily.

�Hey, this is kind of important, Mo.�

Ahead there was a perfect circle of sunlight. Somersault. Upright and he was there before he could take a breath. There and all at once out of the pipe and flying through the air, shouting in glee, yelling, scared, wild, totally adrenal.
The gap was thirty feet. Thirty feet of open, pipeless air. A flash of green and brown and a weirdly long, dream-slow view of blue sky.

The opening of the next segment of pipe was flared wide to allow for windage. Mo�Steel pulled his legs up, raised his toes, spread his arms out like wings and hit the flared lip perfectly.

�Jobs, you have got to do this! Aaaaahhhh! Aaaaahhhh!�

�Mo, listen to me, man: no more broken bones. Take it slow. Something is happening. Something big. You don�t want to be in a body cast when it happens.�

�Aaaaahhhhh! No, no, no yellow, no yellow, give me the red! Give me the red! Gimme RED! What�s happening, Jobs? What big thing?�

�Mo, there�s an asteroid going to hit Earth. I don�t want to ruin your day, but it kind of looks like the world is going to end.�

�Oh, that. Yeah, I knew that. My dad told me. Why do you think he paid for this trip? Is that it?�

A long pause. A peevish, dissatisfied silence. Then, �Yeah, Mo, that�s it.�

�Cool. Aaaaahhhhh! Later.�

So it looks like we'll be getting multiple POVs a book. I like Mo.

# ? Jan 11, 2024 04:59

Coca Koala: Nov 28, 2005; ongoing nowhere; College Slice

I think the weirdest part of this setting so far isn�t that they had self-driving cars in 2009, but that the first self-driving car was shipped by Ford, of all companies. I guess it�s being set ten years in the future and 2001 was still a few years before detroit really started making GBS threads the bed?

# ? Jan 11, 2024 20:53

Soonmot: Dec 19, 2002; Entrapta fucking loves robots; Grimey Drawer

quote:

DAYS TO IMPACT: 4

CHAPTER 3

�IT WOULDN�T BE LIKE KILLING IN A NORMAL WAY.�

�Can�t they blow it up?�

�No.�

D-Caf thought about that for a moment. He trusted Mark, respected him. But at the same time he had always thought his brother lacked imagination. Mark was brilliant, no one argued with that, but he was not an imaginative person.

D-Caf said, �In this old movie I saw on TV, I forget the name, something about an asteroid, anyway, they blew it up. Most of it, anyway.�

�It�s too big, Hamster. If they were lucky maybe they�d knock a chunk off of it.�

D-Caf bit his lip, then bit his thumbnail. �Don�t call me Hamster. My name is D-Caf, everyone calls me that. You can call me Harlin if you can�t handle D-Caf. Not Hamster.�

�Whatever.� Mark returned his gaze to the monitor, gazing intently, working, worrying an idea, tapping fitfully at the keys, occasionally muttering a simple spoken command. D-Caf watched with what minimal patience he could summon. His brother had just announced the end of the world, and he seemed almost uninterested, distracted by the streaming number series on the monitor.

�Aren�t they at least going to try?� D-Caf pressed. �I mean, in this old movie they landed on the comet, I mean I think maybe it was a comet, and they were drilling holes down into it and putting nuclear bombs and ��

�Let it go, Hamster. Just let it go, all right?� Mark yelled. He slammed his hands down together on the desktop, sending a souvenir pencil holder from Ocean City crashing to the floor. He leaned over and picked it up, put the pencils back in, and returned the cup to its place.

�Look,� Mark said, �it�s too big, it�s too fast, it�s too close. It�s about four days away. If you dug a hole right to the center of it and piled every bomb on Earth in there all you�d do is crack it in half and both halves would hit Earth. Or maybe you�d melt some of it, and then we�d get hit by two great big rocks plus a few million cubic yards of molten rock and maybe some nickel and iron. You got the picture? Last big rock that hit Earth drilled a hole about a mile
deep and left a crater almost a mile across. You know how big that rock was? One-hundred-fifty feet. Not miles, feet. So guess what? The Rock is coming, the Rock is going to hit, and it�s going to be like swinging a sledgehammer into a watermelon.�

Mark spun back to his monitor, mad at himself for blowing up at his little brother, mad at D-Caf for making him blow up. He was more than just a big brother. He was all D-Caf had for family. Their parents had died ten years earlier when Mark was fifteen and Harlin was five. Under most circumstances the brothers would have been sent to foster homes. But Mark Melman was a resourceful kid. A prodigy in the arcane world of data flow mechanics. He was
already employed by a major e-tailer while still in school, and he was able to use his income and his skill to evade the Maryland child protective services and keep his brother with him.

Once he turned eighteen he sought and was granted legal custody. By then Mark Melman was employed by Oono Systems Inc., which, among other things, held major contracts with NASA. He had raised his little brother, doing a good job, mostly. But there had always been stresses and resentments. Mark hadn�t had much of a childhood himself and the weight of parenting had made him short-tempered, impatient.

And D-Caf was honest enough about himself to know that he had never been an easy kid to handle. He was a daydreamer, a spacer, a person for whom ordinary life seemed dark and dull and slightly threatening. He spent his days reading, playing by himself, wandering away on long walks by the bay, watching the sailboats, forgetting homework, times, dates, duties. He would gladly have spent from sunrise to long after sunset with his face buried in a book, living a vicarious life.

When he was around people, in school, at church, at the summer camp his brother forced him to attend each year, he switched personalities entirely, becoming hyper, chatty, nervous, like someone on his tenth cup of coffee. (Hence the name D-Caf.) He made bad jokes. Too many bad jokes. People made him tense, and tension made him jumpy. The presence of other people had a sort of toxic effect on D-Caf, like they were a drug that altered his sense of himself, turning him into someone that he himself could not stand.

He was getting that way now, he could feel it, reacting to Mark�s tersely delivered, shattering news. His leg was bouncing. He was rocking back and forth. �They can�t just sit around, though. I mean, they�re trying something, right? I mean, all the technology we have, all the scientists and all.�

Mark snorted derisively. �Yeah. They�re trying something all right. They�re calling it Mayflower. That�s fairly pathetic. Mayflower? They had two weeks� notice. What do you think they�re going to do in two weeks, build themselves a brand-new ship? They�re hauling some tired old shuttle out of mothballs, tacking on every half-tested bit of quack technology they can find � I mean, solar sail , hibernation, anything lying around in somebody�s lab. They�re gonna tack it all onto this shuttle, load it up with people, and shoot them off into space.�

�And they�re going to blow up the asteroid?�

�No, Hamster, they�re going to go floating off through space like some lost lifeboat. That�s the big plan. That�s it. That�s all they�ve got.�

Mark�s voice dripped contempt. But then contempt was Mark�s default tone. �Eighty, ninety people, whoever they can round up on no notice. For about ten seconds the NASA brass considered assembling some neat cross-section of humanity, geniuses of every type, every race and whatnot, then they realized, oops! They had no time for all that. NASA started handing out tickets to the people they needed, the people they owed favors to, the people who might screw up the plan if they weren�t taken care of. And they�re going to send those poor fools floating off through space, more or less aimed at a star they think might have a livable planet, which they might reach in a century or two, by which point they�ll be freeze-dried, radioactive, as full of holes as Swiss cheese, and oh, by the way, dead.�

D-Caf and his brother were like a before and after picture. The younger brother was fighting a weight problem, the older, Mark, looked like a guy who might not have exactly won that battle but had at least avoided losing it. D-Caf had dark hair, dark eyes, teeth that would need correcting. He was already as tall as Mark and on his way to being taller. But he concealed this advantage by his habit of walking a little stooped forward. He had been tested in the usual ways and was, in fact, a bit more intelligent than Mark. But this was another advantage D-Caf could never exploit. Mark was his parent and his brother, and their relationship depended on an assumption of superiority for
Mark. D-Caf had no interest in challenging the one real relationship he had.

D-Caf considered Mark�s statement, the way he delivered it, the sense of things being left unsaid. He was practically vibrating, forehead frowning and releasing, frowning and releasing, trying to resist the cascade of tension-agitation.
�Can we go?� D-Caf asked. �Can we go on the shuttle?�

�Didn�t you hear what I just told you?�

�Yeah. But you kind of look on the negative side of stuff, Mark.�

To D-Caf�s surprise, his brother barked out a genuine laugh. �Yeah, I do, huh? But, Ham � but brother, this isn�t about positive or negative. The Rock hits, that�s it. I wasn�t going to tell you. I was just going to make it all good for you: movies every night, all the junk food you want, whatever you wanted because what does it matter anymore, right? But even if you are annoying sometimes, you�re a very smart kid, and I�ve never lied to you yet.�

D-Caf looked hard at his brother�s face. There was something more, something he wasn�t telling. D-Caf had the gift of knowing people�s emotions, understanding. Empathy. He felt some hesitation, some indecision from his brother.
He waited, and stared, and said nothing, and at last Mark sighed and hung his head. �We can�t go on the Mayflower because we�re not a regular, stable family. That�s what they�re looking for. They�re rounding up NASA people and NASA contractors, and yeah, maybe that�s me, but only intact families. Anyway, the whole Mayflower Project is a stupid waste of time. But I guess there�s a small but measurable chance it will succeed, and no chance with anything else.� He sucked in a deep breath and looked hard at his brother. �So, look, if you want to, we�re going.�

�How?�

Mark leaned forward. He twined his fingers, twisting them almost painfully. �Everyone�s doomed, brother. Everyone�s death warrant is signed, sealed, and waiting to be delivered. So killing . . . I mean, it wouldn�t be like killing in a normal way. And I still have Dad�s old gun.�

D-Caf blinked. He knew his brother didn�t believe his own words, but he also knew he was very serious.

�The crew of the shuttle, just two guys, they have to deploy these experimental solar sails after they�re in orbit, well into the flight. There�s a space that connects the flight deck to the pod, the Mayflower capsule, whatever you want to call it. They have two hibernation berths there for the crew, just above the rest of the berths. They�ll come back there after they deploy the sails and carry out their final burn. That�s where we�ll be, Hamster. That�ll be our place. We�ll be waiting.�

three chapters in and we're already justifying murder, hell yeah!!!

quote:

CHAPTER 4

�YOU UP FOR SOMETHING STUPID AND DANGEROUS?�

A weird day had passed since Jobs had guessed the truth from the much-dismissed news story. A day when he had gone to school, done his homework, followed his usual routine. His parents had said nothing. But for the last twenty-four hours the air in their home had been electric with unspoken fears. Conversation was stilted. His mother�s eyes were rimmed with red. His father withdrew into a shell of silence, reading the paper for too long without turning a page, staring at nothing, squeezing his wife�s hand too often.

But the next day, things changed. The atmosphere was just as charged, but Jobs guessed that whatever consideration had imposed the delay, the time had come at last. Jobs�s parents were waiting for him when he got home from school. They asked him to stay home. That night, after a family dinner, after Edward had been freed to go play in the family room, they made it official: It was real.

�It will be devastating. I mean, you can do the math, son,� his mother said.

�There�s this escape plan. They call it Mayflower. It�s an old shuttle loaded up with new technology. Hibernation,� his dad added helpfully.

�I�ve read about the hibernation technology,� Jobs said. �They tested it on baboons. Sixty-two percent of the baboons survived. That means thirty-eight percent died. And that was a short-term test: twelve hours in hibernation.�

�That�s just what�s been declassified,� his mother reassured him.

But his dad gave him one of the secret looks they sometimes shared. Jobs and his father had an agreement, a sort of truce that papered over the fundamental differences between them: They didn�t lie to each other. Jobs nodded slowly: message received. His mom was trying to soften reality.

It was a lot to absorb. One thing to deduce, based on sketchy, not-entirely-serious news reports that the world was coming to an end. A whole different thing to have your parents lay it out.

His father said, �The thing is, kid, they�ll come for us sometime in the next day or so. In the meantime, we�re being watched. All communications in and out of the house are being monitored. Same with the cars, with your link. You can�t talk to anyone about this.�

�I called Mo yesterday after that news story ran. He was in Colorado. He already knew.�

�And you got the call to go through?� His mother frowned. �Idiots! On an open link and they didn�t block it? You encrypted at least?�

Jobs nodded. �Of course, Mom. Mo and I have our own cryp.�

�Thank God for that at least. This can�t get out. The shuttle only carries so many people, you know, and almost all the spots are spoken for. There would be panic.�

�The story was on CNN,� Jobs said.

His father waved a dismissive hand. �That�s a deliberate leak. They set it up so they can knock it down. Makes the newsies cautious about reporting anything else on it till they�re dead sure.� He winced. �Bad choice of words.�

Jobs went to his room. He contacted Mo�Steel on his link. The call did not go through. Dead air. He e-mailed. E-mail returned, unreceived. Weird. He sat there, staring at the glowing screen of his main monitor. How could he punch
through? He could tack an e-mail onto a virus, piggyback it onto a simple request for a movie. He had a virus he�d used before, a benign, harmless, nearly invisible virus created only as a test. He called it up, bundled it into a standard request to view a movie. What movie? He thought for a moment. Lord of the Rings, Part III.

He punched in the request.

Request denied: virus detected.

And then, an instant message from Watcher 27@DSA. The IM said, �Nice try, kid.�

Jobs didn�t answer. He pulled his hands away from the keyboard. DSA: Data Security Agency. He was being actively monitored by the DSA. Jobs had often considered a career that would begin with a couple of years at DSA.
He couldn�t reach Mo�Steel. That was clear. Of course, he wasn�t really interested in reaching Mo. Mo was already in the know, Mo could take care of himself.

Cordelia was a different matter.

What would I even say? Jobs wondered. You barely know me, but the world is ending and maybe I could get you on some doomed shuttle to nowhere? A silly, romantic gesture, he knew. Grandiose. Melodramatic. Ludicrous. But the need to do it, to try, to make the grand, silly, romantic gesture, those feelings were real. He couldn�t just do nothing. He couldn�t just write off the human race, so long, Earth, so long, Homo sapiens. So long to the kiss.

He noted with some surprise that he felt like throwing up. He was sweating. His hands were shaking. It disturbed him being this disturbed. He tried to take deep breaths, tried to calm himself down, impossible to do any good
thinking when you were this upset. Deep breath. Deep breath.

�Calm down?!� he demanded, outraged at himself. �Calm down? Everyone is going to die, calm down?!�

Sudden thought: Had they bugged his room? Were they watching him even now, watching, listening, and getting readouts on his pulse and respiration and brain waves? He shot a look around his room. Pointless, of course: The sensors the FBI had access to were too small to be detected without the right equipment. Yes, of course they were watching, of course.

How to play it out? They�d seen him try to contact Mo. Seen him from both sides of the keyboard. Still, their resources must be limited. He got up and went to the bathroom. He turned on the shower, hot and hotter. He cranked on the air-conditioning and closed the fan vent. Steam.

Lots of steam, that was the trick. Wet heat would confuse the sensors, the steam would cloud the tiny lens. He let the steam build up, and, very self-consciously, took off his clothes. He was going to take a shower. A perfectly normal thing to do. When the steam was dense enough he slipped back into his clammy clothing, opened the
bathroom window, slid out, hung by his fingers, sucked it up, and dropped the eight feet to the ground.

He rolled, stood up, looked around the dark backyard. In a crouch he ran for the back fence. A jump, a grab, a painful roll across the top. �Ouch. Ow. How does Mo do this kind of stuff?�

He was in the Ludmillas� yard. They didn�t own a dog, fortunately. He ran across their yard, cut left, and climbed their shorter fence, landing in the alleyway. It was just a block to Mo�Steel�s house. Mo would probably be in the backyard: His family had a pool, and it was a warm night.

Jobs ran full speed. They�d know he was gone by now.

He reached the fence around Mo�Steel�s backyard and saw his friend fly through the air, soar above the fence into view, then fall with a huge splash. He jumped, used the fence to do a pull-up, stuck his head over, and saw Mo�Steel spitting water. He was trying to drag a stainless steel mountain bike up out of the shallow end. Mo had
rigged a ramp to drop from the backyard swing set, onto the diving board. He was convinced that he could get his bike to jump the pool lengthwise, if only he could build a high-enough ramp.

�Mo!�

�T�sup, Duck?�

�You up for something stupid and dangerous?�

Mo�Steel grinned like a four-year-old offered a lollipop. �Who, me?�

# ? Jan 12, 2024 16:04

WrightOfWay: Jul 24, 2010

This series has incredible names.

# ? Jan 12, 2024 17:49

Soonmot: Dec 19, 2002; Entrapta fucking loves robots; Grimey Drawer

WrightOfWay posted:

This series has incredible names.

YEAH I can't wait for D-CAF and Mo'Steel to hang out!

# ? Jan 12, 2024 17:52

Remalle: Feb 12, 2020

Is this series mostly written by Grant? Animorphs and Everworld definitely had the same voice but this feels wildly different so far.

# ? Jan 12, 2024 18:27

Jim the Nickel: Mar 2, 2006; friendship is magic
in a pony paradise
don't you judge me

God Remnants scared the poo poo out of me as a kid, in a way that I didn't feel again till years later when I read Annihilation. So much so that I never finished it, so I'm looking forward to finishing it here.

# ? Jan 12, 2024 19:14

Soonmot: Dec 19, 2002; Entrapta fucking loves robots; Grimey Drawer

/\/\/\That's awesome, please post about the stuff the freaked you out when it comes up!

Remalle posted:

Is this series mostly written by Grant? Animorphs and Everworld definitely had the same voice but this feels wildly different so far.

I could see that. I think Epi mentioned as much waaaaay back in the animorphs thread when we were discussing what series to do next.

quote:

CHAPTER 5

�WELL, YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DINOSAURS, RIGHT?�

In his dream Billy Weir flew across a great emptiness. An emptiness so vast, so hollow, so ringingly empty, so utterly without form or characteristic, there seemed no possibility of an ending. It was emptiness, blankness, a hole not in the ground but in the fabric of time and space itself.

He flew, immobile. He flew and his body was changed, somehow.

At times as he flew through the void he recalled the orphanage in Chernokozovo, Chechnya. He tasted the mold on the bread. He smelled the urine reek from the latrine, the reek that permeated the whole room. The cold, always cold, paint peeling from damp stone walls.

Other times he was in his room, in the house in Austin, Texas, the shockingly large, impossibly clean, opulent house where they fed him barbecue and corn and green salad. Billy Weir. Not a taken name, a given name. He had been born Ruslan. That was his first name. No one ever told him his last name; it wouldn�t have been safe: His father was a guerrilla fighter and the Russians were not above using him to hurt his father. When the Weirs adopted him at age three he became William Weir III. At school, Billy Weird.

His dream drifted to school. He was teased but not harshly. Liked but not much. Accepted without enthusiasm. He wasn�t even weird, except for the dreams, and no one knew about them. No one knew that in his dreams he remembered everything, everything, things he couldn�t possibly remember: being a newborn baby, being three months old, and the murder of his mother by scared-drunk Russian troops. Things no one remembered but Billy.

And then there were the dreams, just as real, but that seemed to be about events that had not yet unfolded. Those dreams, those places all lay across that great, horrible void. He saw a world of brilliant copper-colored ocean and pale pink skies and a ragged group hoisting sails on tall masts to catch the wind. A wild kid was hanging from the ropes yelling.

He saw mountains like knife edges. He saw great, buoyant beasts as big as blimps that bounded across a landscape of waving yellow grass.

He saw other creatures, creatures without faces, without arms or legs. Was he, himself, one of them?

But all that was far, far away. And what he saw most was the Rock. He dreamed of it, spinning, silent, no rush of air, no swoosh, no sense of its enormous speed. Just a monstrous rock, as big as a whole mountain chain, hills and pockmark craters and strange, fanciful extrusions.

He saw the Rock. He saw that his father, his adopted father, knew it was coming. The Rock would chase Billy Weir away to yet another home, another country. The Rock would make him an orphan again. There was no resisting the dreams. When the dreams came they spoke the truth as it had been, as it would be.

He woke. He�d fallen asleep on the couch watching football. It was only about nine o�clock. Sadness washed over him. Sadness had always been with him. Always from the start, from birth in a hollowed-out stone house, roof blasted away. He had come into the world without a cry, they thought he was dead, they almost hoped he was dead because what life could he ever have?

His mother, his true mother, had cried as she nursed him for the first time. And many, many times more as she carried him from place to place, always harried by the distant and not-so-distant sounds of artillery, the sharp crack of rifle fire.

He woke and the sadness was all over him, all through him, the dream still fresh in his mind. His father and mother were coming. They were in the kitchen doorway. �Son, did you wake up?�

His mom and dad, Jessica and Big Bill Weir, as he was known, all went into the kitchen. Big Bill was just home late from work: a suit, a tie, polished alligator cowboy boots. His mom was in her robe.

�Sorry to make you miss the game, son,� Big Bill said. �But we got the okay, so, anyway, I had to talk to you.�

�It�s fine,� Billy said.

His dad looked at him, lips pursed, thoughtful, perplexed. Billy knew his dad had always done his best to treat Billy like a natural son. But despite those best efforts there seemed to be immutable differences between them. They didn�t fight. They didn�t argue. Billy was a good kid, respectful, proper, rarely headstrong. And, he knew, that was part of the problem, because Big Bill was known as a Holy Terror, a wild man of the high-technology world. He had loved it when Business Week called him a maverick.

Billy was not a maverick. Not a Texas-style maverick, anyway. He was small, for one thing. He had pale skin that never seemed to tan. He had deep, deep black eyes and unruly black hair. He was a good-looking kid in his own way, but he wasn�t Big Bill. And yet, Billy knew, his dad admired him. When he was twelve Billy had been in a very
one-sided fight: An older kid, twice Billy�s size, had beat him up in retaliation for Big Bill�s firing his father. The older kid had broken his nose, kicked him so severely he peed blood for a day. Billy refused to take off from school. He refused to be driven to school to avoid walking by the bully�s house. And when the bully�s father brought his son over to make a contrite and frightened apology, Billy just listened, said nothing, showed neither fear nor resentment.

Big Bill didn�t say much at the time. But the next day, for the first time, he brought Billy to work, to the company he owned. �Figure it�s time for you to start finding out what our family does for a living. Meet some of our people, see our company.�

The �our� was subtly underlined.

Now Big Bill was watching his son closely as he delivered the news. �Son, I have something to tell you. In the morning some men are coming. FBI agents, to tell it true. They�re going to pack us up and take us away.�

�Why?�

�Something terrible is about to happen. You know how you used to like to play with dinosaurs when you were little? You could name them all, I think. Brachiosaurus, all those. Well, you know what happened to the dinosaurs, right?�

�Yes, sir.�

�A couple weeks ago they found a big old asteroid and it�s coming this way. And there�s no way to stop it. So, well, we�re going to try hard not to be here when it hits. There�s a mission. They�re going to use the solar sails we�ve been developing, what do you think of that, eh? Of course, I have to tell it true: It�s all one heck of a long shot.�

�It will work,� Billy said.

Big Bill smiled. To his wife he said, �The kid can take it.�

Billy did not return the smile. He could feel himself rising up, floating, hanging now very, very near the edge of the endless void. So close now, that nothingness. Normal time, this whole world already seemed shriveled and insignificant beside so much emptiness.

�Can we bring anything with us?�

His mother spoke for the first time. �Not very much, sweetheart. One or two small things, maybe, they said. It�s all . . .� She looked around at the gleaming kitchen. There were tears in her eyes.

�I�ll go pack,� Billy said.

And we have another kid. No girl character yet, will that be Cordelia?

quote:

CHAPTER 6

�IT�S JUST NOT HERO TIME.�

�How are you going to get them to let Cordelia come along?� Mo�Steel asked.

�Blackmail,� Jobs said.

�Cool.�

They were trotting along the alley, Jobs dressed in still-damp clothes, Mo in a bathing suit, barefoot.

�I�m going to threaten to go straight to the media,� Jobs panted.

�When we get to Cordelia�s house I�ll use her link to creep my mom�s computer at work. They won�t be monitoring Cordelia�s link. I�ll creep my mom�s files � I know her codes. I�ll upload them into half a dozen time-release files spread all over the Web. If they don�t give me what I want, my mom�s files on the Rock will be everywhere in a hurry.�

Mo�Steel nodded. As usual, Jobs had a plan. Jobs always had a plan. But discussions of computers tended to cause Mo�Steel�s mind to wander, and after ascertaining that Jobs had some kind of plan, he lost interest in the details.

He did not lose interest in what was happening around him. Specifically the two dark sedans that roared down the street, crossing the alleyway. There was a screech of brakes and the whirring sound of a car thrown into reverse.

�Are we being chased?� Mo�Steel asked.

�Yeah. Maybe.�

�Woolly. Come on, Duck. Follow me.�

Mo�Steel leaped onto a trash bin, balanced precariously, stepped onto the top rail of a high fence, balanced there for a split second and jumped onto the sloped roof of a garage. Jobs did his best to follow. Fortunately Mo�Steel had a pretty good idea of his friend�s physical coordination and he had a strong hand ready to grab Jobs�s flailing arm and pull him up.

A sedan came down the alley. Someone inside was shining a powerful flashlight into dark corners. The light swept just beneath Jobs�s dangling legs. On the garage roof Jobs gasped, �Thanks, Mo. I would have made it, you know.�

�Sure you would, Duck. No question,� Mo�Steel answered. �Come on.�

�Let�s get down.�

�Down? Why would we get down? Look: There�s a tree.�

He led the way across the garage roof, into the low-drooping branches of an ancient elm. They threaded through the branches, up, down, squeeze. Across the fence to drop into the next yard.

Then it was across the yard, climb the rose trellis to the roof of the house, over to the far side, out onto that attached garage, a jump onto an RV parked in the driveway, and a heart-stopping leap that took them over a picket fence.
Jobs landed and plowed forward. Mo�Steel grabbed his arm and yanked him back.

�Careful of the roses, compadre. Thorns and all. Besides, the old lady who lives here is nice.�

A quick look left and right and they bolted across the street. Then through a gate and smack into a very large dog.

�Rrrrr.�

�Mo!�

�He�s on a chain!�

�It�s a long chain!�

With a guttural roar the dog charged.

�Jump him!� Mo�Steel yelled and leaped straight up as the dog passed beneath him. The animal hit Jobs head-on, bowling-balled him down and stood snarling on his chest.

�Aaahhh!� Jobs yelled.

Mo�Steel grabbed the chain, yanked the animal off Jobs, dragged the chain fast, and looped it around a cast-iron lawn chair.

�Come on, Duck, what are you waiting for?�

Jobs jumped up, cursing under his breath, and ran past the frantic, air-snapping beast. Two more fences, one more roof, and a lung-crushing trip over a swing set and they were in Cordelia�s backyard.

�Yesterday I do The Pipe. Now I�m Spider-Man,� Mo�Steel exulted. �It�s been a sweet couple of days.�

Jobs gritted his teeth and narrowed his eyes. �Yeah, it�s been a party, Mo. You are deeply disturbed.�

Mo�Steel nodded in agreement. He was aware that he was different. He liked the difference. They stood gazing up at Cordelia�s window. No light showed.

�How do you know that�s her room?� Mo�Steel asked.

�I know where her room is.�

�You been up there?� Mo�Steel shot Jobs an incredulous look. Then he laughed. �Just in your head, right? L-o-o-o-ve. Makes a boy go crazy.�

�How do I get up there?� Jobs wondered aloud.

Mo�Steel frowned. �Go around to the front door and knock. You can�t be climbing in some girl�s window.�

�What? Hey, those guys could be waiting for me around front.�

�Yeah, and your babe could be changing clothes or picking her nose or whatever, Duck. You have to treat fems with respect, you can�t just be sticking your head in her window. Who raised you? Monkeys?�

�Mo, it�s kind of an emergency. Now, how do I get up there?�

Mo�Steel looked around. He spied a picnic table. �Come on.�

They manhandled the heavy table into place and leaned it up against the siding. Then Mo�Steel piled a wooden chair atop the upturned table.

�Climb on up: easy as a ladder.�

Jobs began the ascent. Not as easy as a ladder, Jobs thought, but not impossible, either. But now he had some time to consider the next step: actually confronting Cordelia. What on Earth was he going to say? Hi, it�s me, Jobs, I wanted to stop by and let you know the world is coming to an end but I think I can use blackmail to get you a berth on a probably doomed shuttle to nowhere?

He looked down at Mo�Steel. Too late to back out now. Not after all they�d gone through. Besides, maybe, maybe she�d believe him, and maybe she�d go along with his plan.

�I�m an idiot,� Jobs muttered as he stood up to his full height and stretched to slide the window upward. A breeze carried delicate white curtains out, along with the scent of perfume: Bulgari Pink. He�d made it his business to find out.

�Cordelia,� he whispered. �Don�t be afraid. It�s . . . it�s Jobs.�

He pulled himself up as well as he could. No answer. He sensed the emptiness of the room. He climbed in, feeling that he was very definitely doing something wrong. But he had to do it anyway.

It was a girl�s room, definitely a girl�s room. There were stuffed animals, that was a dead giveaway. But she wasn�t a Jane at least. No frills, no retro-Vic tea set or gold-framed pic of Jane Austen, the patron saint of the Jane clique, or the Skirts as they were sometimes called.

He�d worried about that, early on, what with her name being Cordelia. No way a Jane and a Techie ever got together. But it had turned out Cordelia was her given name, so blame her parents. Anyway, this room was a girl�s room, but a cool girl. She had a pair of screens doing slow-dissolves of pix. Pix she must have taken herself, of places Jobs recognized, hangouts, parts of the school, people he knew. Also landscapes, sunsets (kind of a clich� choice, he thought), and seascapes.

He stood watching the dissolves, turning his gaze from screen to screen as each new pic came into focus. And he was starting to see something more there than just so many giga-pixels. She had an eye. Nothing posed or forced or overly cute. But there was affection in some shots, and distaste in others. The emotion bled through into the shot somehow.

�It�s an emotional progression,� he said, surprised at both the fact and at his ability to see it. The shots were arranged without seeming regard to subject category, but rather according to the mood expressed by the photographer�s choices. The screens were moving from affection, to indifference, to active distaste or even contempt, to lust.

�What does that say?� he wondered aloud. �Contempt leads to lust? That can�t be right.�

But now the alternating shots were progressing to humor, to admiration, to a shot of him.

�Huh?� Jobs said, blinking fast and reaching unconsciously for some sort of freeze-frame. But then the shot of him was gone.

�That was off a pinhole camera,� he muttered. The shot had come from a concealed camera, and he had a sinking feeling he knew when and where the shot had been taken. He�d had a look in his eyes: scared, hungry, hopeful, and scared some more. He walked over to her computer and tapped at the keyboard. It asked for a code word. It
took him twenty seconds to break the security and another twenty to run a word search for his own name. He popped a blank disc � he hoped it was blank, anyway � into the drive and copied the files.

This was highly immoral. But then, so was using a pinhole camera. Her wrong had necessitated his wrong. That wasn�t a morally defensible position, but hey, this was love and wasn�t all fair in love and war? There was a noise from the hallway. Footsteps. Heavy ones. Jobs stifled a desperate yelp and dove for the window. He was halfway out, with his legs kicking to find a support when the light in the room snapped on.

�Who are you and what are you doing here?�

A man. Almost certainly Cordelia�s father. With a stun gun. Not deadly but very painful.

�Um . . .�

�I would answer if I were you,� the man said.

�My name is Jobs. I�m a friend of Cordelia�s. From school. I was . . . See, she asked me to drop by and study with her.�

A click. The man lowered his weapon. �I see. And she asked you to come in through the back window?�

Of course. In this position it looked like he�d been caught crawling in. That was something, at least. Cordelia�s father didn�t know he�d already been inside.

�I wasn�t totally clear on where exactly she wanted me to come in.�

�Uh-huh. Well, that makes perfect sense, son. Yes, I can see why you�d be confused: door, window, hard to keep them straight. Anyway, Cordy�s not here. She�s up in San Francisco for a couple days for her cousin�s wedding.�

�Ah.�

�You can go now. And put the lawn furniture back where it belongs, hear me?�

Jobs climbed down. Mo�Steel was standing between two men in dark business suits.

�FBI,� one of the men announced unnecessarily.

�Hi.�

�We�ll drive you boys home now.�

�Okay.�

The agent, a gray-haired man named Boxer, shook his head sadly. He patted Jobs�s shoulder and said, �That�s okay, son: You tried. Everyone wants to be a hero. It just ain�t that kind of situation, that�s all. It�s just not hero time.�

Okay well lol, I ask a question and it's immediately answered. But there's no way this series doesn't have a �fem� in it. Oh god, this slang is sure is something.

I do find these characters a bit endearing. I'm already invested in Jobs and D-Caf, I like seeing what Mo'Steel is gonna pull off. Psychic russian kid has potential.

What are folks impressions so far?

# ? Jan 13, 2024 05:52

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

Well, the voice is definitely different to the other two series.
The distant future of 2011 is an odd setting. The other series always made a point of being very grounded in the here-and-now, and I wonder if this series will suffer a bit without that grounding. That said, aside from The Pipe and self-driving cars for schoolkids, we haven't seen anything too egregiously weird yet.
So far, the worse the character's name, the more sympathetic the character is. Russian Trauma Kid makes for dull reading, while Mo'Steel's (ugh) chapter was fun.
Finally: I absolutely love stories about the days before the end of the world. (I almost feel like it will be a disappointment when the story leaves the doomed earth behind.) Something about that idea is so compelling. What would you do with your last week on earth? On that note- anyone read On The Beach? There's a classic end-of-the-world novel, perhaps one of the first.

# ? Jan 14, 2024 07:11

Coca Koala: Nov 28, 2005; ongoing nowhere; College Slice

Yeah the setup seems interesting but I'm also still grappling with the psychic damage of the setting being "the distant future of over ten years ago"

# ? Jan 14, 2024 19:20

WrightOfWay: Jul 24, 2010

This book was published in 2001 so it takes place in the distant future of 10 years from then which makes some of the tech even more wild.

# ? Jan 14, 2024 20:58

Aston: Nov 19, 2007; Okay
Okay
Okay
Okay
Okay

I dropped out of Applegrant's work some time during Everworld so I've never read any of these, the first few chapters are promising!

# ? Jan 14, 2024 21:42

someone awful.: Sep 7, 2007

i'm enjoying the prose style a lot so far, but yeah the voice definitely does feel quite different from Animorphs and Everworld! extremely lmao at this kid naming himself after steve jobs, it feels exactly like something a 7 year old would do

# ? Jan 14, 2024 21:55

Soonmot: Dec 19, 2002; Entrapta fucking loves robots; Grimey Drawer

quote:

DAYS TO IMPACT: 3

CHAPTER 7

�NO ONE MAY SURVIVE.�

2Face prepared to leave the house in the same way she had every morning for the last couple of months. She dressed, made sure everything necessary was in her pouch, checked the battery charge on her link. And then she stood in front of the mirror and looked at her face, looked at it long and hard.

No deception, that was the point. No fooling herself.

She turned to the right, showing her left face: the smooth, olive skin, the unsettling juxtaposition of pale gray eye color beneath distinctly Asian eyelid. The strong chin, the too-pert nose.

Then she turned the other way, revealing the burned, melted flesh. The eyelid drooped at the outside corner, making it seem the eye was eternally crying. Her cheek was like some aerial shot of a desert: pale ridges like sand dunes. Human caramel.

The nose was untouched, but beneath her long black hair the right ear was nearly gone, a nub. The hearing on that side was an echo chamber, hollow. Her straight black hair was an illusion in part, grown longer on the top so she could conceal the ear and the fact that her hairline on that side began two inches higher than it once did. But that was the only trick she allowed. She would not wear shades to hide the damaged eye. She would not wear a scarf to conceal the melted wax skin that extended down her neck as far as her collarbone.

This is what she looked like, at least till the next surgery. She had been beautiful all her life, naturally so, blessed by the fortuitous arrangement of the four letters along her DNA helix. And then, the fire. And the hideous results. And the change in how people reacted to her.

It was fascinating. It was a lesson that no book taught. It was a spy-cam straight into the human soul. Everyone flinched when they saw her, that was to be expected, that was inevitable. How could they not? The human mind was prepared to see certain things and not others. So it wasn�t the shocked looks that fascinated 2Face, rather it was what came next: the pity, the avoidance, the anger, the poor attempts to conceal disgust, the dishonesty, the
bending over backward to pretend it wasn�t there, and the outright ridicule and anger.

The anger was most interesting. People were outraged that she would dare to show them something ugly. It was a social sin. Her existence forced people to confront the uncertainty of life. And of course the irony disturbed people most of all: the pretty girl turned ugly. Like they would have understood if she�d been ugly to begin with. But a beauty turned hideous?

What kind of rotten trick was that?

Her birth name was Essence Hwang. Before the fire she�d been called either SE for Essie, or WaterBaby, depending on whether it was a family member or someone from school. But once the bandages were unwrapped she knew she had to either hide from the truth or get right up in its face. She changed her name to 2Face. People thought it was rude, like she was forcing them to look.

Maybe so, maybe it was rude. But she had learned a lot, most of it not encouraging. She almost welcomed the whole thing, except for the hideous pain she�d endured earlier.

Almost.

She was stabilized, her health had been rebuilt, her scarred lungs were fully functional again. She was ready to start the series of reconstructive surgeries in exactly twenty-two days. A year from now the doctors said she�d have her old face back, all of it, all of the eye- catching loveliness.

She�d wondered if she should refuse the surgery. That old face felt like a mask now. Maybe she should go through life as 2Face, proud, defiant, a living reproach to superficiality.

�No,� she told the mirror sadly. �You�re not that brave.�

She headed downstairs intending to go running. She ran four miles a day. She hated it, but it was part of staying strong for the trauma of the operations. Part of strengthening her lungs. She would have preferred to swim, she�d been on the swim team back in the before, but chlorine burned her still-too-tender scar tissue in places. She wore a running shark suit, skintight black from neck to ankles. She twisted her pouch around to the rear position, then pinned her link in place; the earpiece had a tendency to slip off. Heavy-use athletic links usually rested on two ears and she only had the one.

She paused at the top of the stairs and stretched, using the stairs themselves to lengthen leg muscles. Then down the stairs at a quick trot, a nod to her dad in the kitchen, and past him toward the front door.

�Essie!� he called.

She paused, trotting in place to warm up and to demonstrate her impatience to be gone. �What?�

Her father walked over to her and clumsily put his arms around her, hugging her tight. Her dad was old-country Chinese, though he�d been a U.S. citizen for fifteen years; not a hugger, definitely not a hugger.

2Face pulled off her link and gently pushed her father back. �What�s the matter, Daddy? Is it Mom? Is something the matter with Mom?�

�No, no, your mom is fine. She�s on her way home. She ran out to get a few things. Listen, something is happening. Something very bad is happening.�

He was agitated. Overwhelmed even. All 2Face could think was that it was her mother. What else would make her dad this upset? The fire. He�d learned about the fire. He knew. No, that was impossible. She couldn�t start getting jumpy now.

�Daddy, tell me the truth: Has something happened to Mommy?�

He shook his head and drew her with him into the living room. It was the most formal room in the house: spare to the point of austerity. Three big flatscreens showed art that changed with the time of day. The furniture was low-slung, elongated, modern. Uncomfortable.

2Face sat perched beside her father, turned toward him. She consciously sat this way so her undamaged side was facing him. She didn�t mind provoking strangers, but her pain had been felt too deeply by her father.

�I have the biggest story of my life,� he said. �The biggest story of anyone�s life.�

�A story?� This was about some story? Her father was a producer for ABC news here in Miami. He worked closely with the network�s investigative reporter, Carl Ramirez. �You�re scaring me half to death over some work thing?�

She said it in a teasing tone, but her father�s scared, serious expression didn�t flicker. Just then the door opened. 2Face�s mother, Dawn Schulz-Hwang, came rushing in carrying two bags from the drugstore. Her mother said, �I got the toothbrushes. Q-Tips. Deodorant. Travel-pack sizes, except for your migraine pills, Shy.�

She was agitated. 2Face�s worry deepened. Why was her mother running out to buy travel- size toothpaste at this hour of the morning?

�I'll be okay, hon,� Shy Hwang said. He turned back to his daughter. �We�ve had this story we were trying to get a grip on. We thought it was probably nothing. Rumor. Crazy stuff. But I told Carl I wanted to stay on it, I had a feeling about it. I didn�t think it would be true, and it wasn�t, not exactly. The story was that NASA had developed human hibernation technology and was going to use the technology to pull off a manned mission to Europa. You know, a
moon of Jupiter.�

�Yes, I know the moons of Jupiter,� 2Face said impatiently.

�But that wasn�t it. I reached this source, this guy who owed me a favor. He wouldn�t talk except to give me a name: Mayflower. I used that name in a couple of places and all of a sudden word is coming down from on high to lay off. Then I reached out to the right person. She gave me chapter and verse. Chapter and verse and documentation.�

�About a mission to Europa?� 2Face asked.

�No. That�s a cover story. Mayflower is not about a mission to Europa. Mayflower is about a shuttle they�re rigging up with hibernation berths for eighty people. Actually seventy-eight people plus two crew.�

�Why on Earth would they be doing that?� his daughter asked.

�Because in three days an asteroid twice the size of Long Island is going to impact Earth,� he said. �It will be the dinosaurs all over again. It�s possible that the planet may literally break apart. No one may survive.�

There was a long silence.

�Some other guys got parts of the story a couple days ago, ran with it, but they had no proof, so the story�s dead. Me, I had the proof. But I spiked the story,� Shy Hwang said.

�What? People have a right to know,� 2Face said.

He shook his head. �No. If I had run with the story NASA would be mobbed with people trying to get on that shuttle. I killed the story in exchange for their agreement.�

�What agreement?�

�I buried the story, and we go on that shuttle. Three berths. For the three of us.�

�What? When? How soon?� 2Face asked, and unconsciously touched her marred cheek.

�Soon,� her father said, unable to meet her gaze. �Too soon.�

There was a knock at the front door and 2Face�s mother spilled the drugstore bag.

goddamn these names, but 2face seems really interesting, so perhaps the �worse the name/better the character� idea holds up. We also have our girl character.

quote:

CHAPTER 8

�WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE GOING?�

They didn�t kick the door down; they were more polite than that. But when Special Agent Boxer, with two other FBI agents and two DSA agents in tow arrived at the Andreeson home, they were the Mongol hordes showing up for breakfast unannounced.

�Ma�am, FBI,� Boxer said, and promptly pushed past Jobs�s mother, who was still chewing a toaster strudel and still in her bathrobe. The agents wore dark business suits, not the FBI logo windbreakers that Old Navy had begun to copy and sell for forty-two dollars.

The Data Security Agency agents wore office-casual clothes � that was their look. The FBI agents, two men and one woman, went through the house, polite but relentless, gathering up papers, floppies, nubs, links, and the schoolbooks of Jobs and his brother. The DSA agents plopped themselves down in front of Jennifer Andreeson�s computer and Jobs�s computer. His mom�s computer was networked with the house system�s and all the other
machines except for Jobs�s own, which he had firewalled.

Edward was six, so he didn�t burst out crying, but he did run to his mother and hug her knee, while she went hobbling after the agents saying, �Is this really necessary? Isn�t this awfully early? I assumed you�d be here at a civilized hour. What are you doing? Put that down this instant.�

Jobs was interested to observe that his mother�s �or else!� voice did not work on FBI agents.

Tony Andreeson, Jobs�s dad, was still asleep when an FBI woman hit the lights and announced herself.

�Uh-huh. Could you do it more quietly?� Jobs�s dad grumbled. He was a software aestheticist and had the sort of job where no one expected you to show up early. Or at all.

�Sir, you need to get up and get dressed. You have thirty minutes. Pack a small bag, like carry-on luggage size. No electronics of any type. If you need more we can send for it later.�

�Where exactly are we going?�

�That information is unavailable,� the agent said with a bland smile.

Jobs had already stuffed a few T-shirts into a bag and now he stood watching as the DSA guy searched his computer files and his Web files.

�Pretty good encryption on some of these,� the DSA agent said.

�Thanks. Not good enough, obviously.�

The DSA man tapped away on the keyboard. He frowned. Looked back at Jobs, who kept his face carefully expressionless.

�Very cute: ghost files. I could hack in, but you could save me the time.�

Ghost files were files hidden within regular files. They used the regular file as camouflage. Jobs leaned over and used the calculator for a moment, then typed in a number-letter code.

�Pi to six places divided by yesterday�s date I get,� the agent said. �What were the interposed letters?�

�A girl�s name,� Jobs said, hoping he sounded cool, not pathetic. �Cordelia.�

�Uh. The girl from last night. She�s a babe, huh?�

The ghost file opened. It contained the file he�d stolen from Cordelia�s computer. It was video from a pinhole camera. She�d been wearing a pinhole cam on the night they�d kissed. That was where she�d gotten the scared close-up of him.

But it wasn�t like that, he�d realized, after viewing the data the first time. Cordelia had been hired to do video of the dance for the school�s zine. She�d been wearing a privacy warning button. It had come off during her angry encounter with her now ex-boyfriend. She probably didn�t know that. Anyway, Jobs was prepared to believe she didn�t know. Maybe didn�t even know she was still shooting.

The DSA agent speed-scanned the video for a few seconds, got to the hideous moment when a sped-up Jobs leaned close for the great kiss that now seemed more comic than romantic, then closed the file without comment.

�She . . . Cordelia was . . .� Jobs started to explain.

The DSA agent shook his head. He was young for an agent, maybe fifteen years older than Jobs himself, though mostly bald. �Don�t worry, kid, you got nothing here that�s going to shock me. She pinholed you, you swiped the file. Fair enough, right?�

No, that wasn�t the way it was, Jobs wanted to say. But of course that�s exactly how it was, at least on the surface. The kiss had meant everything to him when it lived only in memory. He should not have had to see it again. He should not have had to share it with a stranger. It should not be electronically stored data.

From the living room came his mother�s cry, �What about the cats? I can�t just leave them.�

�They�ll be taken care of, ma�am.� A lie. Jobs knew it was a lie clear in the other room. Of course his mother did, too, but she broke down crying at that point, and Edward hugged her.

Tony Andreeson said, �For God�s sake, Jen, you don�t even like the cats.�

�Let me put food out for them. Let me at least do that. Oh, Digit�s already so fat, if I leave out all this food . . . the vet will . . .�

Jobs met the DSA agent�s gaze. �You know what all this is about, sir?� Jobs asked.

The agent said, �Officially, no.�

Jobs nodded. He tried to think of something pithy to say, maybe something about the irony of his mother crying over a pair of cats when the whole world was coming to an end. But all he managed was, �It�s kind of disturbing.�

�Yeah,� the DSA guy said. And then he unhooked his link from his belt, tapped the screen, and showed Jobs a picture of three kids, all young, ranging maybe from two to six. The agent seemed about to say something, then lost focus as he gazed at the softly glowing photo.

Jobs considered whether he should reveal the encrypted files he�d programmed to transfer into the DSA agent�s decryption program. They were harmless files, not viruses, created only to prove he could do it, not to cause damage.

No. It would hurt the guy�s feelings. No adult liked being outwitted by a teenager. And the guy had enough on his mind. He would be dead soon. Him, his wife, his three kids, everyone he cared about.

�I better go see if I can help my mom and dad,� Jobs said. There was nothing he could say to this man. Nothing the maybe survivor could possibly say to the surely dead.

�Yeah.� Then the agent shook himself free of the picture and said, �Hey, you have some writing in here, looks like poems. You want a printout to take with you?�

Jobs shook his head. �No. None of it�s any good. Besides . . .� He let the thought hang, unable to find any way to explain the deep sense that the one way, the only way to do this was with a clean break. A bright clear line between a past already suffused with nostalgic golden light, and a terrible, desperate future. �No. Thanks.�

Forty-five minutes after the FBI agents arrived, the Andreeson family was bundled into a dark-colored Suburban with black-out windows accompanied by a dark sedan and a windowless white van. They drove down familiar streets. Jobs looked out the window and knew beyond any doubting that he would never see this home, this street, this place again.

Two blocks away they passed Mo�Steel�s house. A black Suburban, a black sedan, and a white van were parked in the front. Inside Mo�Steel�s house, in his room, some DSA agent would be going through his computer, unable to believe the nearly untouched, pristine emptiness of the thing.

�What do you mean you don�t have any personal files? None? Have you ever even turned this thing on?�

That thought brought a smile to Jobs�s face.

Edward was playing with a pair of action figures, making soft boosh, boosh explosion sounds.

Where would the Rock hit? Would it hit far out in the ocean and send a wave to wash this idyllic place into the sea like a sand castle with the tide coming in? Would the Rock hit far across the planet and break the world apart, sending unimaginably huge wedges spinning off into space? Would this place, his place, still be intact when the sea boiled away, when the atmosphere ghosted away leaving the few still-living creatures to gasp in vacuum?

Maybe the Rock would hit right here, boom, right on top of them. Maybe it would come ripping through the puffy clouds, scattering the fog, a hurricane wind rushing before it. Slam right here into this very place.

He thought of asking his mother. She was in the seat in front of him. She would know, if anyone would. But she was crying softly. Jobs reached to put his hand on her shoulder. And once again, words failed him. He thought too much about what he ought to say, he knew that. He looked too long for the perfect words and ended up saying nothing at all. But what did you say at the end of the world?

# ? Jan 15, 2024 01:45

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

Oh cool, next chapter we get to meet Phresh*Beetz and their crazy friend, YoMaMa

# ? Jan 15, 2024 02:57

Soonmot: Dec 19, 2002; Entrapta fucking loves robots; Grimey Drawer

i don't even know if your joking

# ? Jan 15, 2024 03:26

someone awful.: Sep 7, 2007

the names are so late 90s/early 2000s tween internet that it's physically painful, i love it

# ? Jan 15, 2024 03:29

Jim the Nickel: Mar 2, 2006; friendship is magic
in a pony paradise
don't you judge me

Soonmot posted:

/\/\/\That's awesome, please post about the stuff the freaked you out when it comes up!

You�ll notice when we get there lol. These books go some PLACES.

# ? Jan 15, 2024 16:46

Fritzler: Sep 5, 2007

This is starting pretty crazy. Assuming Cordelia has to come up - she has gotten a lot of screen time. I am also assuming it will turn out like the hibernation chambers don�t work on the adults so it will only be the kids left alive.

# ? Jan 15, 2024 17:53

Aston: Nov 19, 2007; Okay
Okay
Okay
Okay
Okay

quote:

“Pi to six places divided by yesterday’s date I get,” the agent said. “What were the interposed letters?”

I could have sworn I'd never even heard of this series before it came up in the Animorphs thread but for some reason this line is incredibly familiar.

# ? Jan 15, 2024 19:28

Soonmot: Dec 19, 2002; Entrapta fucking loves robots; Grimey Drawer

Second chapter today is a good one

quote:

CHAPTER 9

�YOU HAVE TO ASSUME THOSE TWO KIDS ARE ARMED AND DANGEROUS.�

A private jet took the Andreeson and Gonzalez families, Jobs and Mo�Steel, their respective parents, plus Edward, from the tiny Monterey Airport to a refueling stop in the middle of nowhere west Texas, then on to Cape Canaveral, Florida.

A limousine hauled 2Face and her family from Miami, up the coast past blazing white beaches and sun-roasted tourists.

In San Jose and Austin and Houston and Seattle, in Boston and Washington and New York, the FBI and DSA descended suddenly and swept up their charges and hustled them aboard the unmarked jets borrowed from the Defense Department.

D-Caf and his brother, Mark, had to provide their own transportation, a regular commercial flight out of Baltimore-Washington International airport that landed in Miami. Then they caught a bus northward. They used false identification that Mark had created. They used a credit card number plucked off the Web. It would be hours before the FBI realized that one of the many �Aware Individuals� had disappeared.

Special Agent Paul Boxer had followed Jobs�s family to their destination, then been detached to Miami along with half the field agents in the United States. The Miami office would oversee coverage for the Kennedy Space Center. Boxer drew the assignment to locate and question Mark Melman and his brother, D-Caf. Mark Melman was known to be cognizant of the Mayflower Project. Boxer requested that the Baltimore office search the Melman home. They found evidence of the flight to Miami. And worse.

Boxer took the call while eating his third hot, fresh, practically melting Krispy Kreme doughnut. �They�re in the Miami area, that�s definite,� the Baltimore agent reported. �They�re all yours, Paul.�

�Great. What do we know about this guy? Anything that�s not in the file?�

�We canvassed the neighbors. They all say the same: Mark is a nice guy, but a loner. His little brother, who calls himself D-Caf, is kind of a twitchy kid. One other big thing, though: Their father had a weapon.�

�A weapon?�

�A Ruger six-shot .44 magnum. And it�s missing. You have to assume those two kids are armed and dangerous.�

The news did not particularly surprise or bother Agent Boxer. The lunatic fringe had never bought the official denials of the Mayflower Project. The nuts were gathering around Cape Canaveral. Where there were nuts, there were guns; the two went hand-in-hand.

And really, with all the so-called militias, all the doomsday cults, the extremists, and the outright terrorists, some maladjusted computer geek and his twitchy brother didn�t seem like a top-level threat. Boxer had another doughnut. He�d fought a weight problem all his life. Well, if there was one upside to the end of the world it was that now, at least, he could eat all the Krispy Kremes he wanted.

quote:

CHAPTER 10

�TICKTOCK, HERE COMES THE ROCK.�

The chosen few, the eighty men, women, and children who would form the cargo of the Mayflower, were taken to a remote corner of the base, to a shabby, run-down, long-abandoned barracks. It was one of three barracks buildings which, together with a low administrative bungalow, an olive-drab mess tent, and a perilously leaning motor-pool barn formed a sort of compound.

The only thing new in the compound was the chain-link fence topped with razor wire. One of the Eighty had arrived a few hours early. His birth name was Robert Castleman. He called himself Yago.

The President of the United States, Janice Castleman, had refused a berth for herself and her husband. But she had demanded, and been given, a berth for their fifteen-year-old son. And as Yago stood contemplating the noisy squalor of the barracks, the disorder of arriving families, he knew beyond any reasonable doubt that his parents had secured his berth not so much to save his life as to have him out of theirs.

That would hurt, Yago thought, if I cared.

Yago had never been a good politician�s child. Articles had been written about him, contrasting him unfavorably with the sainted Chelsea Clinton, dean of Perfect Presidential Children (who had, of course, gone on to be such a spectacularly, tediously perfect adult), but also mentioning Amy Carter and John-John Kennedy and various others going all the way back to Lincoln�s kids. No one could come up with another presidential kid quite like Yago.

Polls showed that Yago had actually earned his mother a fair number of sympathy votes following the fateful interview in which, at age thirteen, he�d told the NBC news anchor his goal in life was to become �feared.�

Then there had been the time he yelled, �Gun!� at the top of his lungs during a post-summit meeting press conference. The Secret Service had tackled his mother, and the security detail around the president of Azerbaijan had very nearly shot a sound man holding a long microphone that looked just a bit like a rifle.

Yago surveyed a glum assemblage, for the most part, these chosen survivors. They had all packed in a hurry, hustled along by FBI agents. There were too few toothbrushes and not enough toilet paper and everyone was hungry and all the littler kids wanted upper bunks, and all the parents wanted lower bunks, and where was the trash, and good lord why wasn�t it air-conditioned, and why couldn�t they at least have killed the roaches, and how were they supposed to have any privacy at all?

�Killing time till it�s killing time,� Yago muttered and laughed a bit at his bon mot.

Normally he�d have recorded it on his link. But it was an unhooked, unlinked world now. It made him feel deaf and blind. A creepy feeling. There were no really young kids. There was no set cutoff age. But, prepubescent kids were
thought to be at greater risk from hibernation. There were no old people, either. The upper age limit was just over forty. It wasn�t just that NASA wanted everyone to be fit and healthy, they were also looking ahead: to populating some entirely speculative planet.

But in a room filled with scientists and the kids of scientists you couldn�t ignore facts: The Mayflower didn�t represent a real chance, it represented death delayed. Or death unnoticed, unremarked: Death deprived of all the drama and majesty of the shattering, fiery annihilation that was being prepared by that cold-blooded killer Mother Nature.

For his part Yago had no doubts. He had a destiny. His destiny was not to die on a shattered Earth, one of seven-billion bugs cowering under the big cosmic shoe. Nor was it to float through the cold emptiness of space for the remaining life of the universe, pockmarked by micrometeorites and disintegrated into soup by radiation. Yago was going to be something. And there was no point moping over the long odds, or boo-hooing over poor, lost Earth. The point was to figure out how to come out on top. And the time to start preparing was now.

He fixed his gaze on the most promising arrival, the Asian girl, the one with the messed-up face. She would be an easy mark. Like taking candy from a baby. He tried to recall her name from the personnel files he�d wheedled out of a secretary at the White House. What was it . . . Scent? No, that couldn�t be it. Substance . . . Effect . . .

Essence! That was it: Essence Hwang.

Well, it was her lucky day.

Yago knew he was good-looking. After all, he got fan mail from half the girls in the United States, and a lot of girls from other countries, too. They even sent pictures, and some of them weren�t half bad. He was tall and powerfully built. He had his dad�s Caucasian, male-model features and his mother�s African-American skin coloration, but the rest of his �look� was straight out of a petri dish � his parents were rich and indulgent. Yago had had his original kinky hair replaced with straight-growing light brown hair, which he�d dyed different colors over time � it was currently the green of a late-summer elm leaf.

His original brown eyes had been genetically altered to a distinctly golden color with just enough cat DNA to be slightly reflective in the dark. His teeth were unnaturally white and perfectly straight. His skin would never know a pimple. He�d even had his navel relocated and reshaped.

The smirk was all his own.

He was handsome, he was smart, he was smooth: He was way, way out of the freak-girl�s league, obviously. But if he beamed the sunlight of his attention on her she�d be his devoted servant not only now, but later, when they all thawed out. And that was the key: He would need a hard core of sycophants ready to back him up from the very first.

He�d seen the early documents on the Mayflower Project. He�d seen right away what everyone else in their desperate haste had missed: There was no one in charge. No hierarchy. No one in command. How could they be dumb enough not to see that wherever the Mayflower ended up, someone would be giving orders? What did the NASA people think? That they�d form up into Democrats and Republicans and hold an election? In any crisis the strong rose to the top and the weak fulfilled their own paltry destiny as willing servants, unwilling slaves, or victims.
It was a game. A hard, cruel game of survival, and he at least understood that. Let the others mope for poor old Earth. He was starting the game early: right now.

�Kind of a zoo, huh?� Yago said.

Essence Hwang looked at him thoughtfully. Like he looked familiar, but she couldn�t quite place him. �I guess it is,� she said. Adding, �Literally.�

�I�m Yago,� he said and flashed his number-two modest smile � not the full, number-three aw-shucks modesty he saved for meeting with sports stars, but more than the deliberately transparent number-one modesty. He made a sort of deprecating gesture toward the two Secret Service agents, Horvath and Jackson, who watched him from a discreet distance.

�Don�t mind those guys. They come with the job.� He raised his voice. �As a matter of fact, why don�t you guys take five, huh? I don�t think I�m in any danger.�

The girl glanced at the departing agents, obviously clicked into recognition, and said, �Oh. I�m 2Face.� She watched him closely, waiting to gauge his reaction.

He gave her nothing. He�d long ago learned to conceal all but the strongest emotions. �So, what do you think of all this? Kind of amazing, isn�t it?�

2Face considered. �It seems very sad to me.�

The girl looked like she might start crying. Or maybe that was just the creepy way her messed-up eye always looked. He wished she�d turn her head a little, not aim all that scar tissue at him.

Yago nodded. �It�s very sad. The whole Earth getting wiped out and all. Ticktock, here comes the Rock. All those people dying and whatnot. Kind of depressing. So, you here with your folks?�

�Yes. My mom and dad.�

�Me, I�m alone,� Yago said. �You know, my mom�s the president, so she has this idea she has to go down with the ship. Like that�s going to help all the losers who�re getting sledgehammered into the center of Earth. I think she can�t get it out of her head that she�s not exactly running for reelection.�

Yago laughed a winning laugh, expecting 2Face to join in. She didn�t. In fact she gave every sign of wishing she was somewhere else.

�I hope we can be friends,� Yago said. He�d spent his life around politicians, and could, when it was required, mimic the heartfelt tone, the sincere look, even the warm handshake. He could also mimic the subtle threat. �Wherever we end up, a girl like you will need friends.�

�I see. A girl like me. Do you want to be my boyfriend?�

Yago gulped, caught off-guard for once. �Do I . . .� He almost laughed. The idea that the freak was going to be his girlfriend was just amazing. Who did she think she was?

2Face winked with her one good eye and smiled a smile that was unavoidably wry. �Sell it somewhere else,� she said, and started to walk away.

Yago grabbed her shoulder, spun her back to face him. �Hey, freak. You don�t turn your back on me till I say you can go.�

2Face tried to knock his hand away but Yago had a powerful grip. She struck at him, palm outward, trying to push him away. It was a blow, clearly, clearly, in Yago�s mind, it was a blow. She had hit him! All bets were off, all restraint was gone. She�d hit him!

Yago drew back his hand to deliver a slap. Two hands locked around his wrist. Yago glared, processed the necessary data: It was the nerd. The one from California. What was the name? Oh, yeah.

�No,� Jobs said. He shook his head slightly. �No.�

Yago glared at this intruder. He wasn�t very big and he didn�t look very tough. He looked scared. But he didn�t flinch or look away. Yago rotated his hand, broke Jobs�s grip, and using the same hand, shot a short, hard, snapping punch into Jobs�s head.

Jobs fell back. Yago shoved hard and knocked him on his butt.

2Face yelled, �Stop it! Stop it, you jerk!�

Yago moved in to kick Jobs. He would teach the punk a valuable lesson. Once they�re down, make sure they stay down.

Just then, a blur of movement: someone running, bounding from top bunk to top bunk. �Yaaahhh!�

Mo�Steel threw himself at Yago, caught him around the neck, and carried him to the floor. Yago rolled with almost professional skill and was on his feet in a flash. But so were Jobs and Mo�Steel and 2Face. Three against one.

Yago spotted the Secret Service agents across the room drinking coffee from disposable cups. �They attacked me!� he roared. �What are you doing standing there? They attacked me! Get them. Get them!�

The agent named Horvath looked puzzled. He cupped a hand to his ear and pantomimed that he couldn�t hear. Agent Jackson just smiled. Yago swallowed the rage that came boiling up inside him. Swallowed it hard and slowly,
slowly erased the feral, murderous expression from his face.

�We seem to have a misunderstanding,� he said stiffly, then turned and walked away. Under his breath he added, �On my list. That�s three of you, on my list.�

We are on page 35 of 70 And wow, do we have a great villain in Yago. What a loving cock. Intersting that this is 2011 and they have a Black woman in a mixed marriage winning the presidential election in 2008. Also interesting the degree of genetic manipulation humanity has, even if it is probably only for the rich. I'm most interested in hearing how Black folk view the changes he's made to his own body.

# ? Jan 16, 2024 03:08

Coca Koala: Nov 28, 2005; ongoing nowhere; College Slice

Having people arrive on the ship and having an antagonistic presence definitely helps bring some structure to the story in my mind.

Also man, it�s always fun to read these chapters and see the cultural touchpoints from 2001 that are being imagined 10 years in the future. Of course the cop is eating a Krispy Kreme donut, they just went public and their stock is on the rise! Absolutely zero chance they�ll miss earnings and have a C&D issued against them by the SEC!

# ? Jan 16, 2024 18:07

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

Coca Koala posted:

Having people arrive on the ship and having an antagonistic presence definitely helps bring some structure to the story in my mind.

Also man, it�s always fun to read these chapters and see the cultural touchpoints from 2001 that are being imagined 10 years in the future. Of course the cop is eating a Krispy Kreme donut, they just went public and their stock is on the rise! Absolutely zero chance they�ll miss earnings and have a C&D issued against them by the SEC!

I've been re-reading Green Mars this week. I love that book but it's showing its age; it hinges on humans establishing a self-sustaining colony on Mars in 2024, and still using faxes in 2050ad.
That said I can imagine a world without social media being a lot less terrible. Maybe that's the inflection point for history.

# ? Jan 17, 2024 00:59

Mazerunner: Apr 22, 2010; Good Hunter, what... what is this post?

Basically every sci-fi story from the 60s/70s/80s envisions the Soviet Union lasting indefinitely

# ? Jan 17, 2024 08:55

Soonmot: Dec 19, 2002; Entrapta fucking loves robots; Grimey Drawer

quote:

CHAPTER 11

�SHE LAKKA YOU BEEZNESS.�

�You want me to go bounce on him some more?� Mo�Steel asked Jobs.

�No. Let it go. It�s all over.� Jobs put a hand on Mo�Steel�s arm and gently drew him away.

2Face said, �Hey. Thanks.�

Jobs shrugged. �No problem.�

�No, I mean, really: Thanks. Is your head okay?�

Jobs touched his injured ear and then looked at his hand. There was a little blood on his fingers. It seemed to puzzle him. �Hmm.�

�You should have someone look at that. You need a Band-Aid,� 2Face said.

�That ear is gonna have to come off,� Mo�Steel offered with a giddy grin. �Get you a nice, new, titanium ear. Change your name to . . . to, um, oh, hey, I know! Change your name to Earanium!�

Jobs and 2Face both looked at him. �Earanium?�

�Hey, it�s the best I could come up with just off the top of my head, all right? You know, you�re not exactly Mr. Quick either,� Mo�Steel grumbled.

�This is my friend Mo,� Jobs said. �Mo�Steel. I�m Jobs. And the ear is fine. Mo�s in favor of as much surgery as possible.�

�2Face.�

They shook hands. The name brought a smile to Jobs�s face. He nodded to himself, absorbing it, smiled again. Jobs looked at her face, interested at almost a scientific level in the effect. Not at all horrified, not at all sickened.

�I was in a fire,� she said.

He nodded. �Yeah. Well, see you later.�

For his part Jobs had already half forgotten the incident. He was remembering the girl instead. His always-distracted expression grew positively dreamy.

�That girl liked your business, Duck.�

�What?�

�Uh-uh, don�t give me �what?�� Mo�Steel said. �You know what I said. She lakka you beeznees. She wants to invest in you.�

Jobs said, �Mo, you know I�m faithful to Cordelia.�

�The girl who isn�t even totally sure who you are?�

Jobs smiled ruefully. Cordelia knew who he was, he was sure of that at least. She�d included his picture in her flatscreen montage. He�d come in right after what, admiration? But what had come next? He couldn�t remember, had been too stunned to pay attention. Where did he fit in Cordelia�s emotional cycle?

No way he could go into that with Mo. Mo was an old-fashioned kid. He�d never understand creeping Cordelia�s computer. Jobs said, �Yeah. That�s right, Mo: Cordelia, the girl who isn�t sure who I am.�

�That�s you, Jobs: All you need is a girlfriend up here.� He tapped his head. �Me, I need a real, live girl. You know, like maybe someone who would recognize me at least.�

�What�s going to happen to her?� Jobs asked, but silently, to himself alone. �What will happen to Cordelia?�

Had to avoid those images. Had to sheer off, stay out of that, or lose his mind. The Rock was coming. Cordelia was just another dinosaur. He shook his head so hard that Mo�Steel looked at him with concern.

�What�s the bruise, compadre?�

�They didn�t leave us any hope, Mo. The Rock. It�s all too sure. Too . . . And we don�t get to fight it, man. All we can do is run away. All we can do is be cowards and save ourselves. It�s just random. If the Rock�s trajectory was one-hundredth of a degree different, it�d miss us. It�s just random, and we don�t even get to fight it. What kind of a story is that?�

Mo�Steel looked perplexed. Then he shrugged. �Maybe we fight later, Duck.�

�It can�t all end this way. It can�t just end in some meaningless . . .� Jobs couldn�t find the word. He hung his head. �Everyone�s just going to die, Mo. What�s the point in that?�

Mo�Steel said, �Everyone always dies, man. Always been that way. And I don�t think it ever did have a point. Did it?�

I really do like the rapport between Mo and Jobs, it looks like 2face is going to slot into that relationship pretty well too.

quote:

DAYS TO IMPACT: 2

CHAPTER 12

�OH, MY GOD, ALL THOSE PEOPLE.�

Cordelia was in San Francisco. Actually standing on the balcony of a monstrously big faux-Victorian mansion atop exclusive Twin Peaks. The balcony looked out over the backyard where the wedding reception of her cousin, Lucy, was under way. But more compelling by far, to her artist�s eye, was the view beyond the backyard. The house had been built on two lots. Two existing houses had been torn down to make room, and to ensure the capture of this very view.

The view included much of San Francisco, down through the skyscrapered downtown and beyond to the sparkling bay, ornamented by the eternally stunning Golden Gate Bridge. As it happened, an aircraft carrier, the new, sleek, low-silhouette USS Reagan, was entering the bay, sliding beneath the bridge in a spectacle that combined the reassuring grace of perfect form with the disturbing grace of might.

Of course Cordelia was supposed to be focusing her link on the reception. She had the latest link, capable of shooting very high-resolution video and transmitting it directly to satellite, so she�d been drafted, or perhaps volunteered, she wasn�t sure which, to act as the videographer. The link allowed far-flung family members to follow the events live from anywhere they happened to be.

Messages were beginning to pile up, superimposed on the viewfinder. Messages like, �Show the ceremony!� And, �We want to see the bride, not the bridge!!!� Cordelia ignored them. The more they nagged, the less she was going to show the silly bride and her dweeb of a groom.

Cordelia�s cousin was from a very wealthy family, money derived from the biotech boom. Cordelia herself came from a more modest background. A more restrained background. Not cheap, not puritanical, just reasonable. Her family did not believe in ostentatious displays of wealth. Her family would not have placed twelve-thousand dollars� worth of Beluga caviar in seventeen-thousand dollars� worth of crystal and then gone about ten steps too far by covering
each mound of caviar with edible gold foil.

Okay, so Lucy�s family had money. Did they have to rub people�s noses in it? And yet, for this view . . . What wouldn�t Cordelia do to be able to look out at this magnificence every day?

Maybe she�d be rich someday. Maybe she�d be a really rich photographer. Uh-huh. There were about, hmm, two rich photographers.

Maybe she�d marry a rich guy. Jobs would probably make a lot of money some day; he was shockingly smart after all. Of course that was jumping the gun a little bit, but that�s what weddings did to you: made you go all mushy and misty and begin fantasizing.

Her dad had called to tell her that he�d caught Jobs trying to crawl in her bedroom window. That was either very romantic or insane or some combination of the two. Romeo or Psycho? He could be nuts, that was a possibility to consider. Jobs was definitely different. He�d spent close to half an hour listening to her, actually listening, without trying to make the conversation about himself. And he�d made no move on her. Just listened. The number of guys Cordelia had met in her entire life who could actually listen intelligently was, well, one.

Unfortunately, setting aside the odd home-invasion, Jobs seemed to have no follow-up. He hadn�t asked her out, despite the fact he was definitely interested. So, she�d have to ask him out. Only, check with people at school first and find out if he was actively crazy.

Her link was ringing. Again.

�Yes?� Cordelia asked in an innocent singsong.

It was her great-aunt Rebecca (formerly great-uncle Robert). �Cordelia, honey, show us the bride and groom or ��

�� Sorry, your audio is breaking up.� She killed the connection. Then she turned the link around to show herself standing before the view and laughing. She was not a classically beautiful girl; her face had too much character for that. Her nose was too big, for one thing. She�d thought of having it fixed, but hey, it was a family trait. Her hair was blond � actual blond, not petri-dish blond, and she wore it long. Her eyes were authentically blue.

She winked at the link, knowing she was really annoying her extended family now. �Okay, okay, I�ll show the bride,� she said.

She started to pan down toward the reception again, intending to focus on the rather gruesome sight of Lucy stuffing her face with crab legs, but something drew her eye. In the sky. It was a small asteroid, a meteorite, no more than eight-hundred feet in diameter, a chip that long ago had spun off the Rock in its collision with the comet.
Just a chip. A pebble.

It ripped through the air, shrieking, a hurricane wind behind it. The pebble slammed into San Francisco Bay just short of hitting Alameda. The explosion was equal to a nuclear weapon. The entire contents of San Francisco Bay, billions upon billions of gallons of water shot skyward, a vast column of superheated steam. Millions of tons of dirt, the floor of the bay, erupted, a volcano.

The immediate shock wave flattened every building in Alameda and Oakland. Skyscrapers were simply knocked over like a kid�s pile of blocks. Frame houses collapsed. Cars were tossed around like leaves in the wind. The water of the bay surged in, sucking the USS Reagan into the bay, a swirling bath toy, then all at once the water blew back. The USS Reagan was picked up and thrown into and through the Golden Gate Bridge. The rust-red bridge wrapped bodily around the flying ship.

The bridge supports ripped from the shores. Cable snapped like bullwhips. The shock wave reached San Francisco itself. The downtown area pancaked. Areas that were landfill simply melted away, quick sand, entire square miles of the city sank down into the water.

A million dead in less than five seconds.

Cordelia said, �Oh, my God, all those people.� It was all she had time to say before the shock wave ripped apart the mansion on Twin Peaks.

The final image broadcast was from a link lying sideways. The lens was speckled with dust. But the image was still clear: Cordelia lay on her side, her face shocked. She looked down and saw the two-by-four that had been driven through her chest. She shuddered and died.

Yeah, I guess there was more for Cordelia. RIP

# ? Jan 18, 2024 02:13

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

Uh

# ? Jan 18, 2024 02:55

bird food bathtub: Aug 9, 2003; College Slice

Well that does at least set the tone for the series. Nope, the love interest does not get to sneak on the rocket. They get a 2x4 through the chest in a nuclear blast.

# ? Jan 18, 2024 02:57

Soonmot: Dec 19, 2002; Entrapta fucking loves robots; Grimey Drawer

Tree Bucket posted:

Uh

Mods, can we get a title change to Let's Read The Remnants: ...Uh...

# ? Jan 18, 2024 03:06

poop chute: Nov 16, 2023; by Athanatos

Soonmot posted:

I really do like the rapport between Mo and Jobs, it looks like 2face is going to slot into that relationship pretty well too.

Yeah, I guess there was more for Cordelia. RIP

This is one of the parts that's stuck with me for twenty years. That hard swerve away from what you think is going to happen into "haha no this all sucks" sets the tone for basically everything else that happens.

# ? Jan 18, 2024 03:55

Jim the Nickel: Mar 2, 2006; friendship is magic
in a pony paradise
don't you judge me

poop chute posted:

This is one of the parts that's stuck with me for twenty years. That hard swerve away from what you think is going to happen into "haha no this all sucks" sets the tone for basically everything else that happens.

Yeah, WTR everybody. Strap the gently caress in.

# ? Jan 18, 2024 17:38

Coca Koala: Nov 28, 2005; ongoing nowhere; College Slice

Man as soon as that chapter started i was like �huh I wonder what convoluted plotline is going to get Cordelia from San Francisco to the ship�?

Anyways,

Tree Bucket posted:

Uh

# ? Jan 18, 2024 18:08

Strategic Tea: Sep 1, 2012

Despite Cordelia commenting on her cousins I have had the impression that every character so far is incredibly rich. Usually techbro working rich but still.

Which sort of makes sense since they're able to get seats on the last hope rocket.

# ? Jan 18, 2024 19:27

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 09:22

Tree Bucket: Apr 1, 2016; R.I.P.idura leucophrys

I'm not sure how the logistics of getting people on an IRL hope rocket would work, let alone deciding who gets a ticket. I feel like it would involve something a little more dramatic than the FBI heading out to the burbs to pick up families who know about the doom comet. Does the wider world know about the Rock yet?

# ? Jan 18, 2024 21:55

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