Daniel Suarez - Influx

The gas-masked men around him leveled pistol-like weapons that resembled black plastic toys.

“Whoa, whoa!” Marrano held up his hands, still clutching the phone. “What is this? Wait a second.”

Several Taser darts struck Marrano. The clicking shocks that followed could barely be heard against the larger electric hum of the nearby capacitor bank. Marrano fell and twitched on the ground as they continued to shock him.

He screamed, “Stop! Please stop!”

Johnson held up his hands. “For chrissakes! What do you people want?”

Several Taser darts struck Johnson as well. He went down screaming, disappearing from view as men in power company jumpsuits and gas masks surrounded him, looking down without pity as the investment bankers pleaded for mercy. The shocks continued.

Grady shouted, “What the hell are you doing?” He turned to the blond man. “If you’re so against technology, why are you using it?”

The man intoned for the camera lens while keeping his finger pointed at Grady. “His winnowing fork is in hand to clear the threshing floor. But He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire!”

Several darts hit Grady, too. A teeth-gnashing jolt coursed through him as all his muscles contracted. Before he knew it, he was on the ground. Screaming in pain. Between shocks he pleaded, “Not Bert! Bert’s got a pacemaker!”

Another shock. Then the leader’s face loomed over Grady. He carefully stepped over a Taser wire and came in close. “Your research is an affront to God. Your inquiry into His works an abomination. Humanity must live in humble gratitude. Just as we came into His world.”

Grady craned his neck up, straining to speak. “There are security cameras… covering… this place.”

The man looked up without fear. “Let them see my face so that they know the Lord’s Winnower, Richard Louis Cotton, has claimed you.”

A further shock coursed painfully through Grady’s body. As his consciousness ebbed, he was dimly aware of voices coming in over a nearby radio.

“Commencing evolution two.”

“Copy that, Harvester Nine inbound…”

Grady regained his senses sometime later, only to find himself held in place with ropes. Glancing around, he could see that he was lashed to the tangled piping of the gravity mirror tower by impressively complex knots. Whoever had tied them had literally lashed down his individual fingers. There was no longer any electrical hum from the capacitor banks. The intruders must have powered everything down. Strange that antitech militants would even know how to do that.

Grady then noticed Alcot tied next to him, head slumped to the side. The old man’s face was covered in sweat, eyes closed. Marrano was tied up on Grady’s other side, with the ropes leading off in both directions. The whole team appeared to be lashed to the perimeter of the gravity tower. Grady struggled to squeeze his wrists through the bonds, but his efforts only tightened them.

That familiar voice: “You should pray for redemption.”

Grady noticed several gas-masked men nearby silently attaching wire leads to fifty-five-gallon chemical barrels arrayed across the floor, linked by wires. They looked like enormous batteries. “What are you doing? What are those?”

The man named Cotton walked into view and knelt next to Grady. “Thirty percent ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with gasoline.” On Grady’s uncomprehending stare, he added. “It’s a bomb, Jon Grady—powerful enough to flatten this entire building. To return this infernal machine of yours from whence it came. Along with the people who built it.”

Alcot’s voice answered. “It’s men like you who keep dragging us back to the Dark Ages.” He was awake after all.

Cotton turned to face the old man. “The Dark Ages are what you’re bringing us toward, Doctor Alcot. Advanced technology holds no answers for mankind—only regrets for when we play at being God… and fail. Creating a hell of His earth—the earth that He bequeathed us.”

“And what are you doing if not playing God? Deciding who lives and who dies. Murder is a mortal sin.”

“Not in defense of His creation.” Cotton looked to gas-masked men preparing the explosives. They nodded back, apparently ready.

Cotton turned and smiled as he scraped a wooden match across a pipe fitting. The match lit with a puff of smoke. He held it to the tip of a fuse, which began to sputter and spark. “You will winnow them. The wind will pick them up, and a gale will blow them away. But you will rejoice in the Lord and glory…” He looked to them. “Your judgment is at hand. Your bodies will return to the soil. Whether your souls enter into eternal torment lies with you. Use what time remains to determine your fate.”

Cotton walked toward the large, old-fashioned video camera—which was now set up on a tripod, its red light glaring. Judging by the collection of jerry-rigged radio antennas sticking out it, it was apparently taping their victims’ demise and beaming it off-site. All of the equipment looked old. None of this made sense. It was as though the group were a branch of militant Amish who had settled on the mid-1980s as their permissible technological level.

Cotton shouted to his camera. “The day of the Lord is coming—a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it! For a fire will be kindled by His wrath, one that burns down to the realm of the dead below! This is His judgment against those who violate creation!”

With that, his followers swiftly departed. Cotton gave one last look back at the doorway and made an almost apologetic shrug before exiting.

Grady was momentarily puzzled by Cotton’s parting gesture, but one glance at the sputtering fuse got him struggling against his ropes once more. They only bit tighter into his wrists.

Marrano quietly wept beside him. “Not this. Not this.”

Alcot’s weary voice spoke: “It won’t help, Jon.”

Grady looked up at the fuse and realized just how short it was. Barely a foot or so remaining unless there was more to it than he could see. It was impossible to say how much time they had—so no reason to give up yet. “Bert. Can you get your hands free?”

Alcot shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry you won’t get to enjoy this triumph.”

“We’ll get out of here. Hang on,” Grady shouted. “Can anyone get a hand free?”

Lum’s frightened voice came from the other side. “No. I’m trapped, Jon.”

“Me, too!”

“Christ! Does anyone have a Swiss Army knife or something? How about a phone?”

Johnson’s voice could be heard from the far side. “They took everything…”

The prisoners sat in silence for a few moments, listening to the fuse hiss.

Alcot laughed ruefully. “We really did do it, though. Didn’t we, Jon? We took a peek behind the curtain of the universe.”

“Yes. Yes, we did.” Grady nodded as he scoured his field of view for some means of escape.

“We probably would have won the Nobel Prize. Now someone else will discover this someday…” Alcot looked up at Grady again. “At least we know we were first.”

Grady nodded. The burning fuse neared the top of a barrel. If that was all the fuse there was, it wouldn’t be long. Just seconds left.

“Jon?”

“Yes, Bert?”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Bert.”

The fuse disappeared into the barrel, and a white light enveloped Grady.

He felt nothing more.

Jon Grady became aware thathe was sitting in a stylish, modern office lobby high atop an unfamiliar city skyline. The view out the window was spectacular. Modern skyscrapers stretched along a coastal plain. It was a beautiful day.