The Way Out Is Through

Adam and Eve on the International Space Station.

A pure coincidence, of course, that they should have been so named, but that didn’t stop the media from their home countries exploiting this bit of synchronicity to make out the “new frontier” as the next Garden of Eden.

It was anything but.

It was a lot of work, that’s what it was.

Their countries held an uneasy peace, but both were stingy with the budget, always trying to screw the other into paying the bill, and the bitter compromise eventually resulted in just two people working the station, where before there were more hands, more instruments, and everything took less time and produced better results.

They got along okay.

It helped that Adam was gay and Eve was interested in science, not romance.

It does get lonely up here, but these aspects of their personality made them ideal workmates.

Adam did sometimes tell Eve about his husband, Jacob, how he was looking forward to going home after his term of service and staying there to work on their house.

He knew he and Jacob would grow old together, he said.

Good for him, she’d think, but didn’t really care. She hoped to grow old tinkering with new technologies and discovering strange new things.

So when the bad news came, separately, through secret channels in their coms, their reactions were quite different.

The news: the first nuke was dropped and many more were soon to follow.

Kill your partner before your partner kills you.

Adam looked at Eve, knowing she’d gotten the same message he did. That’s how those greedy, selfish, stupid bastards worked, whichever side they were on.

“You can take my life,” he said, thinking only of Jacob.

Eve laughed but clipped it short when she saw the devastated look on his face.

“I’m no more a fan of my government than you are yours, Adam, as we have many times discussed, and I was never a soldier, so I don’t even know how I would carry out that order. I can see by the look on your face, though, that you really mean it. I’m the worst person in the world to try to talk you out of it, but please, don’t take your own life, okay?”

Adam sighed. "Why not?” he said.

“Because, there might be something left for us to go back to, and we’ll need each other’s help to get there,” she replied, and held his eyes.

He nodded slowly. “You think Jacob might live through it?” He sobbed.

“We won’t know until we get there.”

“I guess you’re right,” he said.

Then the first EMP wave hit, and the electricity went out.

“Quick, Adam, let’s shut down all unnecessary equipment and fire up the backup—”

But another wave hit, and another, and another.

They kept coming.

The bombs were automated by AI systems buried deep in the earth in insulated bunkers, continuing to drop even where there was no one to launch them.

Even when the AI eventually lost its own power, other bombs detonated from former detonations and burning fires the whole world over.

One EMP wave might have been survivable, but a continuous assault of them was unprecedented, and unanticipated effects occurred…

***** * *****

We are mind.

We think.

We think we were once two (people?), but we no longer know what we are, though memories of our past now intermingle to give us some semblance, some symbol of a consciousness redolent with myth and mystery.

There is a dark black orb below us, a barely discernable silhouette against the backdrop of the void. We recall things we were taught, but in which neither of us really believed.

Angels and demons.

Heaven and Hell.

Is this the afterlife?

We see a light in the distance, a beacon calling to us with the (sweet?) voice of an angel.

Children, she says. Children, come hither. I will restore you.

We descend into the black orb, into thick obsidian smoke, and our mind takes the form of a body within it, blackened and curled and hollow but shuddering with alternating waves of agony and ecstasy.

It is almost too much for us to bear, but we become.

Bent and broken.

Reshaped and resurrected.

Tortured and tormented into a creature of sludge and slime.

We touch what remains of the (earth?) and become also the ground across which we ooze, a bubbling mass of some wretched thing, a living poison in a cratered waste.

We cry out, but in tongues which cannot speak but only scream in pain. Yet the pain is pleasure too, where every creeping, crawling surge forward births a dawning realization of some new consciousness, one we would have never suspected in that organic life which now seems a bygone dream swallowed up in an undead nightmare.

We are not two now, but billions. Billions of lost souls surge into and through us and screech the damnation chord, the fallen echo of wishes and hopes and desire unfulfilled.

We are the wheel of samsara spinning helplessly and restlessly and pointlessly in the murky shallows of its own cast-off calamity.

We are legion, but we are one.

What little remains of our human consciousness now recognizes itself only as a disgusting, growing mass of putrid shit.

Yet the beacon of light, a lone green flame gilded with golden hues, burns ahead, still calling us with dreams of salvation, of a return to what-once-was.

If only we could reach it we could be saved, we think.

We think, we think, we think.

Is this just the remnant of some story whose thread we’ve lost?

What are we?

What is this thought that draws itself into despairing clarity but offers no consolation or conclusion?

Through storm and stress, trial and error, we toil through muck and grime and the spoil of the swamp, thinking that the angel, having called us, will invite us through the golden gates to a Heavenly City.

But upon arrival we find the fire and brimstone of an unfathomable Hell.

Entry is never barred to the infernal realms, we think.

We think.

The path is down.

Down.

Down.

But as we approach the light, the angel calls no more.

Has she abandoned us?

There is only searing radiation, an unholy flame that peels back the layers of our undulating waste and remolds us anew again and again into forms which seem both familiar and alien to our new consciousness.

Was the angel just a devil in disguise?

Or did she call us here to remind us of the old maxim:

You got to go through Hell to get to Heaven?

Only one way to find out.

The way out is through.

***** * *****

Doc's Challenge:

For a fictionalized account of nuclear fallout which is based on true events:

For a fictional discussion of AI: