Mark Doten - The Infernal

Tom Pally …A soldier of the Gallant Arms; wife and son dead.

Admiral Poindexter … Admiral Poindexter’s market for eschatological futures opened to a frenzy for Akkad, though not one mention of the valley had been made in any known media for over a century, and it appeared on no maps; so immediate and consuming was the bidding for Akkad, however, that the program had to be shuttered, lest this single word on a ticker drive an already panicked world-body to its own annihilation; and so he was led off in chains and shot, on the charge that he had manipulated the market for his own profit (and he accepted the sentence, since he was shot not in the head but clean in the heart, and his brain uploaded to the New City, before the first peptides began to cool — he had the honor of being the first to make that journey, and died saluting the Flag, and dreaming of Immortality).

This meant giving up the possibility of a correction, but we had to confront the real possibility that the market itself would be the driver of the world’s end, that this future, this single word on a ticker, “Akkad,” simply by virtue of its skyrocketing price, might send an already panicked world-body to its own annihilation. Others were of the opinion that the markets should be left to run, that there would necessarily be a correction, for Capital would not allow us to perish. Money knows only growth, they argued; money will seek out its own end, and short it, and be yet more money: and without us money is nothing, and so we will never die.

Rashid …Drone-strike survivor. Friend of Hakim.

Condoleezza Rice …Photographer. Invalid. Adopted in early childhood by a wealthy family, together with L. Paul Bremer. Torn to ribbons by a big cat.

Roos …Bundler. Friend of Gips.

Donny Rumsfeld …Author of “Iraq Survey.” Friend of Condi Rice and L. Paul Bremer.

The Sheriff … Keep your distance!

Jimmy Wales …Key innovator of the Memex and inventor of the Omnosyne at Dr. Vannevar’s Institute for Youth Advances. Later escaped the institute after slaughtering a dozen institute personnel; on capture, he was placed in permanent solitary confinement. As a lasting effect of Dr. Vannevar’s formula, he retains the size and appearance of a youth. Friend of The Wolf, The Leopard, The Lion.

The Wolf, The Leopard, The Lion … I heard warnings, chatter coming in to dog the dark wood in which I found myself; a thousand years burrowing and I surfaced to a life no longer a life I knew; I heard voices borne in on the wind and stumbled North through stunted gashed and bony trees and fell, exhausted, still farther from the true path; and O! the voices moaned, the bloody slavering maws bounding down the mountainside;

THE LEOPARD: O! how we were warned about the unitary executive!;

THE LION: The finest stress positions!;

THE WOLF: The constitution in rags and tar!;

all three beasts crashing through rending me my garments casting me up the steep scrub …

… they tossed me maw to maw words of each one taking up where the last left off

THE LEOPARD: Empty highways littered with the carcasses of sheeple!;

THE LION: Smashed apparatus of the global-industrial killing machine draped with sheeple!;

THE WOLF: The human race at last extinct!;

THE LION: Technology in ruins!;

THE LEOPARD: Language and thought dead!;

NOTHING NOW! — words of all three slashing up to a unanimous roar as we sailed past boulders and declivities and they pitched me onto the highest bluff; the monsters looked on me their eyes spun hideous then snapped shut, all six eyes, all at once, and the heads pitched back and ROARED —NOTHING NOW they ROARED! — NOTHING BUT THE LAST FEW MOONBATS ON THIS POLAR WASTE BARKING!!!

The beasts! The beasts! Heat and push of the breath so hot and crashing; I leapt from the precipice; I was wrapped in wind, wrapped in splintered ice and gouts of flame;

and a NEW VOICE cried: THROUGH ME THE WOEFUL CITY THROUGH ME ETERNAL WOE THROUGH ME AMONG THE LOST;

now more and more voices, I heard them in the burn;

the voices that fell near me through the burn, me a falling boy; me a falling youth or man; and I saw the New City at last …; a multitude of voices …; I …; I … I …; countless souls …; countless stories …; what burns; I …; I …; I stood in a burn of fire and ice; falling in the burn;

me I stood, firm foot always the lower.

Mark Zuckerberg …Entrepreneur. Amateur fencer and archaeologist; searching for Cones of Power. Friend of Nathan Myhrvold.

DISCOVERY OF THE AKKAD BOY

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A reeling shadow drew them to the child. To the boy. First sighted [38.61] hours ago, naked and in convulsion, atop a twisting geological formation known as AL-MADKHANAH (THE CHIMNEY), by those who once walked in its shadow, until new TECHNOLOGIES—telegraphy, lightbulbs, DIODES, and X-rays, brought first by happenstance, then strategy — revealed the Akkad Valley’s strange properties (for it snuffed them all); and in the ensuing struggle to control an area dense with COSMIC NOISE, a space that existed in abrogation of NATURAL LAW, which is to say, pointing to laws higher or beyond, we expelled them that had lived here from time out of mind and made the valley our own. (And later, in the era of THE CLOUD,the broad, flat crown of the Chimney was the first point on Earth’s surface into which a finger of the WET-GRIDreached down from the mesosphere and buried itself; and while eleven more UMBILICAL SINGULARIESwould follow, spinning slowly across the globe in years-long arcs, broken at odd intervals by discontinuous leaps, drawn by the music of unknown Attractors, here in the valley, until now, there has been only a gentle sway in an otherwise stationary thread, and from underground a deep and nourishing overlay of pulses …)