The world exploded in a rapture of pain. Black circles danced in my vision as my eyesight faded. I screamed. Tightening my grip, I pulled harder, feeling the optic nerves resisting my efforts. Finally, with a wet pop, one and then the other snapped elastically. Blood coursed down my face. Dropping to my knees, I stuffed my eyeballs into my mouth and began chewing. Gagging, crying, I tried to swallow, and with a final effort managed to get them down.
“Don’t worry, Buster,” I choked out between sobs, “someone will be here soon, baby!”
Already the paramedics had been alerted by my health monitoring service. They’d arrive in five minutes, and by tomorrow I would be seeing through new eyes.
A chime signalled an incoming call.
“We are so proud of you,” announced a familiar voice.
My heart filled with a bliss that blotted out the pain. I wanted to cry, and maybe I did—it was hard to tell. With the back of one mechanical hand, I wiped away my bloody tears of joy. “Thank you, Father Michael.”
I felt as light as a feather.
“I have spoken to God this day,” Father Michael continued. “Mankind’s depravity has once again permeated every part of his being, every man’s heart so sin-stained that nothing they touch is not evil. A new Flood is coming to cleanse God’s Earth, but not one of water, this deluge will be one of flesh and blood…”
He wasn’t just speaking to me—he was addressing the whole rapidly growing body of the Church, assembled virtually around the world to observe my ceremony. He took control of my robotic prostheses, and I could feel myself standing.
“Freyja, you are accepted into the Church of Sacrificial Atonement. You will be the knife that cuts the rotting flesh from our God’s Earth. In your own blood I baptize you reborn, from now on to be known as Saint Freyja.”
“Freyja,” he repeated, “archangel of love…”
He paused, holding me high for all to see in my glory.
“… and of death.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Mather is the author of the bestselling novel CyberStorm and the acclaimed Atopia Chronicles science fiction series. CyberStorm was optioned by 20th Century Fox in 2013 for a major film production, and his works have been translated into over a dozen languages worldwide. He started out his career working at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines, and among other things is an award-winning videogame designer. He spends his time between Montreal, Canada and Charlotte, NC.
Paolo Bacigalupi — SHOOTING THE APOCALYPSE
If it were for anyone else, he would have just laughed in their faces and told them they were on their own.
The thought nagged at Timo as he drove his beat-up FlexFusion down the rutted service road that ran parallel to the concrete-lined canal of the Central Arizona Project. For any other journo who came down to Phoenix looking for a story, he wouldn’t even think of doing them a favor.
All those big names looking to swoop in like magpies and grab some meaty exclusive and then fly away just as fast, keeping all their page views and hits to themselves… he wouldn’t do it.
Didn’t matter if they were Google/NY Times, Cherry Xu, Facebook Social Now, Deborah Williams, Kindle Post, or Xinhua.
But Lucy? Well, sure. For Lucy, he’d climb into his sweatbox of a car with all his camera gear and drive his skinny brown ass out to North Phoenix and into the hills on a crap tip. He’d drive this way and that, burning gas trying to find a service road, and then bump his way through dirt and ruts, scraping the belly of the Ford the whole way, and he still wouldn’t complain.
Just goes to show you’re a sucker for a girl who wears her jeans tight.
But it wasn’t just that. Lucy was fine, if you liked a girl with white skin and little tits and wide hips, and sometimes Timo would catch himself fantasizing about what it would be like to get with her. But in the end, that wasn’t why he did favors for Lucy. He did it because she was scrappy and wet and she was in over her head—and too hard-assed and proud to admit it.
Girl had grit; Timo could respect that. Even if she came from up north and was so wet that sometimes he laughed out loud at the things she said. The girl didn’t know much about dry desert life, but she had grit.
So when she muttered over her Dos Equis that all the stories had already been done, Timo, in a moment of beery romantic fervor, had sworn to her that it just wasn’t so. He had the eye. He saw things other people didn’t. He could name twenty stories she could still do and make a name for herself.
But when he’d started listing possibilities, Lucy shot them down as fast as he brought them up.
Coyotes running Texans across the border into California?
Sohu already had a nine part series running.
Californians buying Texas hookers for nothing, like Phoenix was goddamn Tijuana?
Google/NY Times and Fox both had big spreads.
Water restrictions from the Roosevelt Dam closure and the drying up of Phoenix’s swimming pools?
Kindle Post ran that.
The narco murders that kept getting dumped in the empty pools that had become so common that people had started calling them “swimmers”?
AP. Fox. Xinhua. LA Times. The Talisha Brannon Show. Plus the reality narco show Hard Bangin’.
He kept suggesting new angles, new stories, and all Lucy said, over and over was, “It’s been done.” And then she’d rattle off the news organizations, the journos who’d covered the stories, the page hits, the viewerships, and the click-thrus they’d drawn.
“I’m not looking for some dead hooker for the sex and murder crowd,” Lucy said as she drained her beer. “I want something that’ll go big. I want a scoop, you know?”
“And I want a woman to hand me a ice-cold beer when I walk in the door,” Timo grumped. “Don’t mean I’m going to get it.”
But still, he understood her point. He knew how to shoot pictures that would make a vulture sob its beady eyes out, but the news environment that Lucy fought to distinguish herself in was like gladiatorial sport—some winners, a lot of losers, and a whole shit-ton of blood on the ground.
Journo money wasn’t steady money. Wasn’t good money. Sometimes, you got lucky. Hell, he’d got lucky himself when he’d gone over Texas way and shot Hurricane Violet in all her glory. He’d photographed a whole damn fishing boat flying through the air and landing on a Days Inn, and in that one shot he knew he’d hit the big time. Violet razed Galveston and blasted into Houston, and Timo got page views so high that he sometimes imagined that the Cat 6 had actually killed him and sent him straight to Heaven.
He’d kept hitting reload on his PayPal account and watched the cash pouring in. He’d had the big clanking cojones to get into the heart of that clusterfuck, and he’d come out of it with more than a million hits a photo. Got him all excited.
But disaster was easy to cover, and he’d learned the hard way that when the big dogs muscled in, little dogs got muscled out. Which left him back in sad-sack Phoenix, scraping for glamour shots of brains on windshields and trussed-up drug bunnies in the bottoms of swimming pools. It made him sympathetic to Lucy’s plight, if not her perspective.
It’s all been done, Timo thought as he maneuvered his Ford around the burned carcass of an abandoned Tesla. So what if it’s been motherfucking done?