Pavel Kravchenko - Project Antichrist

I looked to Iris for support. Somehow she managed to shrug with just her face. I held my own shrug in check, afraid I would not be able to stop shaking for about a year had I allowed it.

“But the prophecy is fiction!” I shouted, apparently not entirely in control after all. “How is it nearsighted to think there shouldn’t be a real Antichrist when you, yourself, have written the fake prophecy about him? More importantly, how is it not insane to expect one to exist?”

He peered at me over intertwined fingers with something near annoyance on his face. “Frankly, I’m not sure what you’re going on about, Luke. So the prophecy is fiction, what of it? Are you saying that by creating a character in a book of fiction the author somehow erases that character from pages of reality? That we should eliminate the possibility of ever meeting Oliver Twist or Raskolnikov simply because Dickens and Dostoyevsky have written about them?”

“N-no?” I began to lose thread of the conversation. And to sweat.

“Come now,” Stan said. “What exactly are we arguing about here? All of you saw what happened on that roof. All of you wondered, if not knew. And now that I’m telling you what it was, what you are, you’re scared, even though you know it’s the truth. But you shouldn’t be frightened. ‘Real’ Antichrist is not bound by the fake prophecy. In fact, I’m only using the name in the sense that you’re someone who stands up to them, to the way the world is set, which is, ironically, closer to the meaning of their prophecy than what you would become had I not interfered.”

“Only that? All I have to do is stand up to a bunch of gods and about seven billion of their followers? Boy, do I feel stupid for being afraid earlier.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. You’ve been doing the very thing ever since that doctor called you in the middle of the night. Quite successfully, I might add.”

“Successfully enough to get myself killed, if you’re to be believed.”

“There’s cute and there’s stupid. Neither becomes you.”

“Fine, I’m alive. I came back. So what? I nearly got Paul and Brome killed; I rescued Iris but left Dr. Young behind. It was too close, and that for only a partial success of a small rescue mission back when they didn’t know I could toss Seekers across roofs. We managed to survive, and I’m very happy about that, but I don’t really know what it is you expect me to do now.”

“Never mind what I expect,” he said. “But you forgot a small detail in your summary of your adventures. Your show.”

A display slid out of the middle of his desk and spun around, offering Iris and me a view of a website. It was a hastily put-together page, black font on white background, filled with images, video clips and questions, but at that moment all I could see was the header in large letters: SEEKING LUKE WHALES, in which the letters of my name changed every five seconds or so to spell out ANTI CHRIST. Under the header the hit counter kept rolling. I began to count the digits.

“One hundred thirty million hits,” Satan said. “In just under three days.”

From that first draft notice my life had been ruled by conspiracies, by desire to survive, by momentum. Run, hide, fight, but mostly run. Now the chase was over. The wheel I’d been running inside halted. They brought me out and told me that I was not like other rats in the lab. For the first time, they put me on the table and asked me what I wanted to do next.

One hundred and thirty million may not be an immediately impressive number to someone whose show had often boasted that many viewers in a single night, but converted into unique hits on a homemade website that went live some six hours after the end of my five-minute-long hijacking of the airwaves, against the backdrop of the sudden stillness, sudden absence of the momentum that had propelled me forward up to that point, that number affected me more than anything else I had learned within that pyramidal library.

But I had to learn at least one more thing. The first thing.

“Why do they want us to end the world?”

Satan, who had walked off to stand by the window while I’d scrolled through the forum topics on the website, turned around, nodded.

“Actually, ‘restarting’ the world would be a more accurate term.”

“I don’t understand.”

“This would be the sixth time the world ends. Since we’ve been around, in any event.”

“That’s insane.”

“Yes, it is. Which is why I chose to no longer be a part of it. Well… that and my refusal to accept the solution as final.”

“Solution to what?”

“When a human dies, a certain amount of energy is released. A miniscule one per human, but when seven billion die at the same time, the energy burst is substantial enough to harvest. We’ve been doing just that over the last few hundred thousand earth years. Breed a species, start a civilization, then, when the time comes, let it develop to extinction, making sure the species do not have the chance to ‘overdevelop,’ replenish the tanks and start over.”

“You’re collecting souls,” said Iris.

“No, we can’t do that. The energy released is related to what you call ‘soul,’ but capturing souls themselves is beyond our technology.”

“But why do it at all? Why capture souls, energy, whatever? You’d think with all your gadgetry you’d be able to use solar batteries or something to power you flying saucers.”

“Our flying saucers are doing just fine, Luke. The energy we harvest this way is used to ‘power’ us. It’s the only known way to replenish our life-force.”

“So without it you…”

“Would die. Yes. The gods are mortal. We live a very long time by your standards, but eventually we would die, and we cannot reproduce any longer. And as for why we don’t do it ourselves, well — and be discreet about this, please — there’re only twenty-three of us left, not counting the Seekers. We are strong, but at this stage if all humans work together against us, there may be losses we cannot afford.”

“This is lunacy,” I said some time later, finding myself on my feet in the middle of the room.

“I understand that it’s difficult to digest it all coming at you at once—”

“Explain to me how did this beekeeping operation of yours begin? You just sail randomly around the universe, find this tiny blue planet in the middle of nowhere, find primates among a trillion animals populating it, and say to yourselves, ‘Hmm, maybe these monkeys have souls, maybe there’s energy released when they die, maybe we should see if we can eat it?’ Talk about anticipation. I don’t care how advanced you are. It makes no sense.”

He smiled. “Oh, I see what’s troubling you. Well, it makes sense. Because we originated from you.”

I stared at him, at Iris, at the desk, at the million questions on the monitor with an open mouth. My eyes found the painting on the wall, but even that did not help. There was no longer anything dreamlike about the room. It, they, everything around me was solid, stationery, three-dimensional, reasonable, provable and proven empirically, simple.

“Jesus Christ!” I said in exasperation. Satan shot me an amused glance, but continued.

“Our ancestors moved from this planet a long time ago, and when the immortality and the reproductive ability were lost we knew exactly where to return. The source.”

“You lost immortality?” Iris asked. “So you’re saying…”

“Yes! Ironically, unlike us, humans are truly immortal. As far as we can tell, anyway. So you see, it’s easy to defend what they’re doing. Death is painful, but humans don’t really die, and human death is essential for our survival.”