1.
“Too bad you're too clumsy to do this,” she said, reaching up and gripping the rain-slicked granite, “it would be a real shame if I didn't have to do absolutely everything we needed.”
“Shut up,” the smoke-eyed man said from below, “I'm the one who built this thing, you're just my Igor.”
“How? How did you build this thing. Your original didn't have any particular engineering skills, you know.”
“Well...I'm just as I was made, and you know that. You aren't exactly like your original, either.”
She didn't respond, pulling herself up onto the slate roof as best as she could. The drizzle made the surface precarious, but she was sure-footed. Scrambling up to the spire, she took hold of the metal rod, and reached into her backpack, removing a metal tube and two mounts. Clipping the tube in place, she screwed it tight, and let out thirty or so feet of wire from the spool attached to the bottom.
Gingerly, she edged down to the edge of the tower, and lowered herself toward the open window.
The Wade-Simulacrum inside reached out, grabbing her around the waist, and pulling her inside.
“Perfect,” he said, before taking the spool and unwinding it completely, pooling the lightweight cable on the ground. He sat down with a soldering iron, and set about splicing that cable into another one.
“Soon,” he said.
“What?”
He looked up at her with his eyes made from arafel-smoke.
“We'll be ready soon. We'll be able to unmake ourselves, and not have to deal with this world any longer. It'll be glorious.”
2.
"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"
Wade slept, the walls shaking from the rolling thunder. He had a sheet pulled over him and a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
Wade slept, and dreamed.
He could see in his sleep-addled mind's eye, he could see the house his family had lived in as long as he could recall. He could see the furniture being pulled out and put on the street corner. His mother and father watching, as their home was hollowed out and reduced to a house.
He thought of Mari, remembering his first day in Valley City. He saw a crowd of black-clad hashshishin creeping behind him, eyes narrowed, knives bared. She had come out of nowhere, brandishing a baseball bat.
His dreams turned to Algernon, replaying his conversations with the older man, though the words were indistinct. For a moment, his leg was broken, then it was whole. He was pacing and square-shouldered and sharp-eyed. Then he collapsed in on himself, broken again, but with no sign of harm upon him.
Then Theia. He saw her standing by Cincinnatus's hospital bed, the click-hiss-click of the respirator and the beep-silence-beep of the EKC providing all the soundtrack the scene had. Wade looked down at the man he'd as good as killed, and would have shrugged. Other forces had been acting through him, and through the other man. They'd been caught up in the fallout of some kind of supernatural disaster.
A blink, and he was on Theia's couch, stretched out as best as he could. A long, dark silence enveloped him, and he relaxed, feeling his muscles melt into the couch, and his bones creak and rattle into a resting position.
With a start, he fell, dropping down gracelessly in front of Victor, who loomed over him like a giant. His eyes bleached out into squares of white behind the ever present horn-rimmed glasses.
An intake of breath, and Victor spoke:
“We're doomed. And I'm damned.”
3.
Early morning. Wide eyes. Sweat on his back, running down the channel of his spine. Wade rolled over, and pushed himself up before he grabbed onto his pants and pulled them on.
Opening the door to his closet, he went down into the bar. The chairs were up on the tables, and the earliest traces of morning-sun-through-raging-storm-light filtered in through the windows. He sighed, and tried to crack his neck. Failing, he padded barefoot through the bar, the black concrete of the floor sending long lines of chill up his legs. He swept his head back and forth twice, looking for something, but not knowing what.
He squeezed his eyes shut, and padded blindly for a moment, swinging around behind the bar. He ran his hand along the varnished bar, and curled one finger, catching his nail in an imperfection in the wood.
He breathed deeply through his nose before puffing his cheeks out and exhaling.
Wade lowered his head, and looked left and right.
Something caught his eye.
He walked to the end of the bar, where it bent and met the wall. Reaching into the crook, he took hold of a handle wrapped in electrical tape. He pulled out Mari's baseball bat, and looked at it: in addition to the utilitarian wrapping of tape, there was a spiral design down the length, a sinuous, serpentine design that served no practical function, but suggested a great deal.
There was a knock on the door.
Going over to it, Wade spoke:
“Who is it?”
A moment of silence.
“Wade, open up,” Theia said from the other side of the door, “I've finished my paper, and now I'm here to help.”
He opened the door, and she pushed past him.
“Algernon sent me an e-mail talking about what you all found, and I've been doing some thinking, some extra research, and I think I have a few things worked out.”
She turned and looked at him, then blinked.
“It's really early, isn't it? Why aren't you wearing a shirt? Wouldn't the health department frown on that?”
4.
Wade put the coffee on, and Theia fished her phone out of her backpack.
She pressed eight on her phone, and it began to dial Algernon.
“Hello?” he asked.
“Since when do you sleep at home?” she asked.
“Since last night. You know how early it is?”
“I've been up since yesterday morning. Took some mini-thins last night. Anyway, I finished my paper and I figured a few things out.”
Wade closed the coffee maker, and turned it on.
“I'll be down in a bit. I just need to get some coffee.”
“Wade's making some. It smells great.”
“Well...I'll be down there, soon.”
Wade pulled an ash tray from behind the bar, and looked around.
“I think I left my cigarettes in my room,” he said.
“You still haven't put a shirt on, either.”
“Yeah, well, it's early.”
He went upstairs and finished dressing, though he remained barefoot, and grabbed his cigarettes and phone. When he came back downstairs, Theia was leafing through a legal pad covered in chicken-scratch designs and handwriting like that of a Parkinson's patient.
“It's weird, really. You said that this Victor guy uses Electricity to do what he does, right?”
“Yeah. He shot me with a lightning bolt.”
“A what?”
“Well, more like ball-lightning. He had a ball-lightning gun.”
“And you survived?”
Wade nodded, “he had it changed around, made it suck something out of me.”
She blinked twice, without speaking, then sighed.
“Wade. You know that, sometimes, you say things that are absolutely insane?”
Wade nodded.
“That was one of those times.”
“Doesn't make it any less true.”
“I suppose there is a precedent for this sort of thing with you. How do you get into messes like this? How do you survive?”
He shrugged.
“Maybe I'm some kind of lucky,” he said, “the kind that keeps getting me into and then out of horrible situations.”
5.
“You know that thing you saw in the warehouse? The strange thing plugged into the wall?” Theia asked.
“Yes,” Algernon said, before sipping his coffee. He coughed for a moment, and pulled out his pack of cigarettes, “Jesus, Wade...what did you do to this coffee?”
“Three tablespoons of coffee per cup of water. It works.”
“So,” Theia said, ignoring the non-sequitur, “I was going to go home and sleep on this, and I saw something like what you described in the hall of my apartment building. I figured that it would be a good idea not to ignore it, so I grabbed the mini-thins I mentioned and went back to the library. There was one there.”
“What?”
“They're everywhere,” Theia said, rifling through her notes, “but the library one was on the third floor, and it appears to have been recently installed.”
“So, if they're installing them as they go along, that means that they hit up the library most recently,” Algernon noted.
“Anything else?” Wade asked.
“Well, you all failed to mention the sound.”
“Sound?” he asked.
“It's making this sort of whistling sound.”
“The one we saw wasn't doing that, yesterday.”
One of the heads on the bar was dripping amber-colored beer, drop, drop, drop. In the ensuing silence, the sound of that merged with the noise of the rain outside.
“We need to go check this out,” Algernon said.
“Yeah,” Wade agreed.
“Come on,” Theia said, “I'll drive.”
“Nope,” Algernon replied, “you're jacked up on legal speed. You shouldn't have driven here in the first place. I'm driving. Come on.”
6.
The roads were strangely empty, and banks of greasy black fog were blowing through the city, roiling and frothing as if some vague meteorological instinct told them that something was happening, as if they had woken up and were champing at the bit to enact whatever will drove them onward.
The rain fell, swelling the river unseasonably fat. Crossing the bridge, they could see the roofs of temporary shacks cracking and collapsing underneath the rushing water.
University Hill stuck up in front of them, looming into the sky, a silhouette of a slope-shouldered giant. The library stood at the top.
They pulled into the parking lot, and stood in the pouring rain.
Wade rested Theia's bat on his shoulder, and looked up at the sky.
“We should probably check the one in the library, first,” Theia said.
The other two nodded, and they ran up the hill. The library loomed before them, a massive brick building with a slate roof.
Entering, the three of them walked past the reading students, some looked up and studied the intruders, trying to understand their purpose or intent.
The third floor was empty, and the strange machine whistled as they approached.
“I think that's a vacuum motor,” Algernon said, “sounds like one, anyway.”
“We should probably unplug it. No telling what it's for,” Wade suggested.
“Yeah, well, it's bolted in,” Algernon pointed out.
“Do we have a knife or anything?” Theia asked.
“I don't really want to cut a plugged-in power cord,” Wade said.
“Neither do I,” Algernon said.
“Well, then shoot it,” Theia said.
Algernon sighed, and looked at it.
“Don't you think that would arouse suspicion?”
“You're worried about what, now?” Theia replied.
“Let's check around and look for other ones, try to figure out what these things are,” Algernon replied.
“Okay, fine. Wade, you wait here,” Theia said.
“Why?”
“You're the most likely to get lost,” she said, “Algernon and I know our way around the campus. We don't need to be looking for you at a time like this.”
Wade frowned, but didn't say anything.
“We'll be back in a half an hour or an hour,” Algernon said.
“Thanks, be real specific,” Wade relied, as the two ran down the stairs and then parted ways.
7.
“They're all over the campus,” Algernon said, panting.
“Yeah,” Theia replied.
“Where's Wade?” Algernon asked.
Theia shrugged, and they looked around.
A door marked “DO NOT ENTER” was propped open at the other end of the hallway.
“Of course,” Algernon sighed.
“Come on,” Theia replied.
8.
Wade walked up the stairs into the janitor's room at the top of the library. There was a dead body in coveralls lying on the floor.
“Welcome,” his duplicate said, holding up a remote control.
“We've been expecting you,” Algernon's duplicate said from behind him, leveling a gun at his back.
“Don't feel bad about what's going to happen. It was completely unavoidable,” Theia's duplicate said, from her seat on the windowsill.
Algernon and Theia burst through the door, examined the situation. Algernon blinked, drew his gun, and pointed it as his duplicate.
The simulacrum turned towards his original, bringing his gun to bear.
Wade turned and struck the smoky-mouthed man on the back of his head with the baseball bat. There was a dull, wet crack, and the Algernon-duplicate slumped, his neck bending at an odd angle.
Wade's duplicate sighed, and pressed the button on the remote.
9.
The tube burst open, and a rocket shot upward, trailing a long, thin wire behind it. The clouds parted, revealing an alien sky above it, a giant sun stared down at the city, filling up a quarter of the sky.
Immediately, the rain began to evaporate, turning into banks of greasy-black mist.
The rocket climbed higher and higher, nearing the sky above.
The wire crackled with blue-white energy, lightning spiraling down along the wire toward the city.
The rocket struck the sky, and black cracks appeared in heaven's vault.
Shards of deep blue rained down on the city, the giant sun fell and struck Palladion, shattering and raining fire on that quarter of the city.
The shards of blue crackled and began to evaporate, turning into more of the greasy-black Arafel.
Transformers all over the city began to crackle and explode, and burnt with blue-white light, spreading through the powerlines all over the city.
In his house high up in Grimsby, Victor watched the destruction spread throughout the city, and listened to the sound of distant screaming.