Chapter One - The End

"Everything is wrong."

The words silently glowed in the center of the screen. Exhausted, confused, and dripping with sweat, their author slumped back in his chair and stared at them blankly.

"Everything is wrong." He read back his summation a hundred times over, almost chuckling once when he realized that even the words themselves were wrong. The cold screen flickered impassively, casting a reflection against the window, awaiting more words to be selected, entered, edited. Outside, a light rain fell, streaking the window and distorting its reflection. Rainwater seeped in through the cracks around the window, forming small, damp puddles along the sill. From the roof above, water collected, flowing lazily into drains. One of the drain pipes ran down the wall adjacent the impassive monitor, filling the room with a trickling sound from the shadows.

"Everything is wrong," the sole source of illumination in the room flickered almost impatiently in the darkness. The more he read the line, the more hostile the words became. Impassive only moments ago, the flickering and impatience of the flashing cursor spat out anger, then disgust. The machine's owner and operator, one Christopher Tucker bowed his head, holding his hands over his ears and squeezing his eyes as tightly shut as he could, desperately trying to blot out the words- his own words- now mocking him from his screen. He screamed, desperate to blot out the high pitched whine of the display, but to no avail. His wall pulsed slightly, flecks of paint chipping off in response to his neighbor's pounding from the other side in an effort to communicate displeasure with the screaming and a desire that it should stop.

Regaining his composure for a moment, he breathed in and out deeply, his nostrils filled with the odor of mildew and damp wood from a long rainy season. A bead of sweat rolled slowly off his forehead, down the bridge of his nose, waiting an eternity before dripping off and splashing on the wooden floor, marring the surface with a dark, wet irregularity, reflecting back a bit of the light provided by the monitor above.

Unable to contain himself or maintain his fleeting composure, Christopher (or "Christo" as his friends called him) cried out again, this time punctuating his wounded animal shriek with a closed fist to the side of the display. The image flickered off-center for a moment, but quickly regained its impassive, unfazed appearance. He struck the casing again and again, trying to kill the vile words- his own words- but only succeeded in drawing more hammering from his neighbor.

Shaking, he stood slowly and staggered over to his window. For a while he stared at his reflection, illuminated by his monitor and distorted by the streaks of rain and the fog from his breath. He gazed through his reflection into the darkness beyond, a darkness that seemed to cling to every rooftop and ooze down every wall like a thick, black oil. His distorted mind struggled to arrange the random water droplets and streaks into patterns. The patterns swirled, and he began to see a familiar face floating in the blackness. The face, old and stern, announced, "they will be here soon, you know." It hovered silently as if waiting for a response or reaction. Grey hair framed the face from above with a perfectly trimmed mustache and thin goatee below.

"Of course I know! It doesn't take a floating face to tell me that!" Christo shouted at the translucent figure, partially aware that it couldn't possibly exist. "Besides, you've been recycled by now. Recycled people can't float outside my window."

The face frowned, but refused to leave. He thought back to the last time he'd seen the face, mere hours ago, only that time it was part of a head that was attached to a real body. It was the chief minister of his employer, Alfred Chambers, who, under ordinary circumstances, would never be seen with such a low-grade employee as Christo... but in this case, the appointment hadn't exactly been arranged in the traditional fashion. He had stormed into the office complex, tailgated his way into an elevator to the executive suites, and without stopping barged past Chambers' secretary into his office.

Christo, burning with adrenaline and red from exertion thrust his palms down onto the wooden desk, leaned forward and bellowed, "I know what you're doing! I know what's going on down there!" Chambers, taken aback by this sudden assault on his sterile, private office rolled back a few feet in his chair and helplessly shouted to his secretary, "Judith! Call security! Now!" An old radio sitting on the chair adjacent his desk softly played insipid easy listening music- not the kind of music a person with any taste would listen to, but the kind which merely provided something to dampen an otherwise deafening silence.

The sweaty, red-faced man continued, "Ohhhh, yes! Call for security and perhaps we can take a trip to the lower levels, eh, mister Chambers? You see, I know what's going on down there now. Oh, you think I couldn't possibly know, but I know!"

"I haven't got the foggiest idea what you're talking about! It's... it's just a parking area! You're mad!" The empty music played on, taking no notice of the confrontation.

"A parking area? A parking area? Don't insult..."

He was interrupted by a loud crash from the reception area and turned, expecting to see Hydrolux Industries' finest hired security guards ready to make fantastic blunders with precision and poise, but instead witnessed a multilayer white cake wheeled in on a wooden cart by a man who looked older than wooden carts themselves. Seemingly oblivious to the altercation before him, the old man asked, "where shall I put the cake?"

"GET OUT!" Could nothing ever go right? Christo shouted again, "OUT!!" The old man scowled and said as he left, "you didn't have to shout. Wretched kids these days..." Again turning his attention to Chambers, the stocky enraged man continued, "Don't insult my intelligence! I know what's going on here!"

"Look, I don't know who you are, but it's obvious you're very upset and perhaps a little confused, mister..."

"Tucker. Christopher Tucker." Is he going to try to convince me that I haven't seen anything? Is he going to have me hauled off and put away in some loony bin? Are they going to say I've hallucinated- that I'm crazy? Am I crazy?

"Mister Tucker. The lower levels of this building have always been a parking lot. Nothing more. I'm not sure what you think you've seen, or what you could possibly be talking about, but I'm sure we can reach some satisfactory and logical explanation and get you some help..." One tune ended and another began, just as ignorable as the previous one.

"Help? I'm not the one in this room who needs help. I'm not the one who engineered that disgusting thing!"

"I've honestly no idea what you're talking about." Chambers leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, confident that this tactic would work if he played it out long enough. He only needed to play for a few minutes of time anyway, until security arrived. Where was that blasted security anyway?

"Perhaps this will jog your memory." Christo produced a handheld maser gun and aimed it at the chief minister, placing his thumb on the trigger switch.

"Oh how very predictable, mister Tucker. How very predictable indeed. When your verbal assault fails, you switch to the old tried-and-true standby. But let me tell you, it's not going to work. If I caved in every time someone pointed a gun at me, I'd never have risen through the ranks of this company to chief minister. Do you even know how that toy of yours works?"

"The principle is simple," flatly responded Christo, "microwaves are amplified and focused into a narrow, coherent beam which can then be used to cook holes in the subject."

"Well if you think I'm caving into you just because..." Chambers was cut-off in mid sentence by a beam of microwaves which easily pierced his skull and hard-boiled his brain. His eyes went still; his body jerked, then slumped forward and flopped off the chair, sending it spinning across the room where it collided with the cake, sending it toppling onto the floor. A fine trickle of blood wept from Chambers's nose, staining the carpet. Without saying a word, Christo stowed his weapon and left the room, its former sterility replaced by the stink of burnt flesh, singed hair and lemon.

The images in the darkness twisted and faded and the floating face went along with them, leaving only Christo's own reflection staring back at him. Outside the cold rain fell quietly, oblivious to the torment within. A soft golden glow from below gradually grew brighter; the building's incinerator firing up at ten o'clock sharp. Incinerators, he thought for a moment, are fantastic- cleaning up the mess made by people, tidying things up to make them more palatable, more clean, and more sterile. Aiding and abetting horrible, unknowable atrocities with the same dispassion they had for a child's birthday decorations. Steam began to rise in contrast to the falling rain from above as the bright orange fire cast distorted light and disfigured shadows against the walls of the room.

The floor boards creaked with agony as he paced his small apartment, desperately trying to sort through the confusion still building in his mind. A thousand voices screamed a million accusations as his computer reminded him that everything is wrong. What gives you the right? Who are you to kill? Who made you God? How do you know you saw what you saw? Are you sure you're sane? He staggered over to his bed and laid down on his back, staring up at the ceiling past the menagerie of memorabilia tacked to the wall. The face was right: they would be here soon. They'd watch the surveillance video. They'd figure out who he was and they would come.

They'll find me quite insane. Maybe I'll be really lucky and they'll put me on so many drugs that I won't remember what was down there. But it had to be done. Some things are just too terrible...

Getting out of the building had been even easier than getting into it. The maser had been silent, and nobody would have suspected a thing for hours if it hadn't been for that damn cake. Christo had simply walked out of the office, taken the first elevator downstairs, and stepped out of the building, quickly vanishing into the crowd outside. There wasn't sufficient time to complete everything he had set out to accomplish, but perhaps things would take care of themselves now.

Taking the long way home, Christo eventually wandered into twilight in the old downtown- "Industrial City" they called it, though there hadn't been any true industry here for ages. All that remained were vast warehouses, empty now except for homeless encampments and gangs, and long-neglected factories, their equipment long since rusted and useless. Between buildings, vast seas of oil-stained gravel stretched out, providing ample room for the odd trash fires, human waste, and people who could barely be considered human beings anymore. A brutal, howling wind blew the stench of burning weeds and urine, stinging his bare skin with its damp chill. Somewhere in the shadows one person was couging; another cried hysterically.

He hurried along, holding his arms close to his chest to keep warm, leaning in against the wind and the smoke until he was stopped suddenly in his tracks; an old woman pushed a shopping cart directly in his path, and he nearly tripped and fell over it. Inside the cart a coffee can filled with dry weeds blazed, the heat scorching the plastic cart and charring the edges of the can. The woman, who stood barely taller than the cart screamed as though she were being run through slowly with a dull sword. Her scream turned to laughter as Christo stood and stared, transfixed by the chortling creature in front of him. Her laughter slowly began to fade, then stopped abruptly as she quickly turned and stared him straight in the eye. He met her stare with a combination of curiosity and absolute terror.

"Beyond the stars, below the sea! It's bigger than you! It's bigger than me!" She spoke the words with a twinkle in one eye and murderous rage in the other and again burst out laughing insanely. Still startled, Christo staggered around the cart, holding the edge to steady himself and then darted down the path at full speed as the woman cackled maniacally behind him.

Somehow he'd found his way through his darkening surroundings, though the smoke and the fog and the light rain that had begun. He found his way home to the supermassive apartment building he shared with countless others. Pausing for a moment, he admired the pipes and conduits that ran along the outside wall and wondered why he'd never bothered to notice the intricate growth of moss that grew up the wall to meet a slowly dripping pipe.

Inside he cursed with disgust that the elevator was out of order yet again, a note taped to the doorway that read simply, "amok." It wasn't surprising, however. Annoying, yes, but in this building the elevator was more often broken than functional. It was the stairs then. Ten flights of stairs. In the rain.

A flash across the courtyard caught his eye and he laughed; it was just crazy Doris turning her porch light on and off again. Looking up and down the hall along her apartment he saw the reason why: some kids were play fighting on the sidewalk. Whenever someone outside was doing something of which Crazy Doris disapproved, this was her coping mechanism. Not very effective.

The stairs were slippery from the rain despite being constructed of steel mesh, and his shoes squeaked incessantly as he climbed. Finally he'd reached the place he called home, made his way inside and staggered to his computer with the last of his strength.

And now here he lay, wet from rain and sweat, staring at the ceiling, the room lit by words on a screen and a blazing fire outside. It was then that he reached a decision. If they came and took him, he would probably be found to be insane; nobody could possibly believe what he knew was truth. He would live and die in an institution. He would be recycled, his belongings either sold or recycled themselves. It would be too good for them. They can't possibly deserve it. They were all a part of this hell- a part of everything, and everything is wrong. He decided that he must refuse to allow his own involuntary contribution to the wrongness; at least if he couldn't stop the wrongness, he wouldn't contribute to it.

Sparks rose up outside the window from the incinerator below. Christo gazed out and admired them for a moment, then dashed to his kitchen area, ripping a drawer out of its track. Tools scattered to the floor. He selected a pipe wrench and returned to the window. Columns of pipes ran along the adjacent wall where he went to work, detaching their couplings one by one. The first was a storm drain, which gave way accompanied by a torrent of rust and debris. A small trickle of water flowed from the pipe, carrying flecks of metal and paint along, splashing on the wooden floor. The next was a higher pressure water pipe; its decoupling sent a torrent of icy cold water spraying across the room, drenching the newspaper clippings that had been tacked to the wall. The third, a high pressure steam line, scalded his hand when it came loose and began filling the room with hot sticky moisture. And the last- the one he had been looking for- a gas line. He spun the clamp loose and struck the line with his wrench over and over again, separating the coupling as gas spewed out into the room.

In a frenzy, he then turned to the window once more and satisfied that there were no floating faces this time, hurled the heavy wrench against the glass with all his strength. It shattered easily, shards of glass flying outward as gusts of wind and rain blew inward. He climbed up on the sill, cutting his arm and his hand on the broken glass, blood dripping down and mixing with the puddles of water on the sill. He stood and leaned forward, arms outstretched, and dove through the blackness into the blinding light of the incinerator below.