Prologue

It has been almost seven years since my last entry, my longest break between written thoughts in nearly a century. It is interesting—I once had so much to write at the end of each day and now, with nearly twenty-five hundred of them having slipped by, I am at a loss for where to begin. Perhaps it is easier to write about the nothing of day to day than it is to explain the seven years’ worth of something. And something it has been…the biggest I am sure I have ever witnessed.

For reasons unknown to me, I feel compelled to write it all down here, to explain the grave events that have transpired—both to me and to everyone in the world—over this rocky time. Strangely, I have never written for the sake of relating information, for imparting or leaving behind any record or wisdom. I do not write to remind myself later of what I did on a particular day. I have no need for such reminder, nor do I often long for such recollection. All this time, over all these thousands of pages, I have always written just to write.

I suppose one might ask why I do not just write fiction. Perhaps compose a series of epic novels. I certainly have the time. Well, much as I enjoy reading fiction, I have no propensity for creating it. I have seen so many strange and unbelievable truths in my time that perhaps there is nothing left up to the imagination. The closest thing I have ever created to a fictional character is whomever these journals are addressed to. No one will ever read them, even myself, so it is a practice in wishful thinking just to compose them.

And yet…

I digress. Much as I enjoy fiction, I also enjoy history. At least, history that is told accurately, of which there is very little. I suppose in another, starkly different life I might have been a historian. I guess this is a chance to flex that muscle a bit…to recount the bitter events of the past eighty-four months.

From all the information I have gathered after the fact (of which sources were notably thin and varied widely in reliability) it all began with a young and rather well-liked Alabama senator’s one month sabbatical to London, accompanied by a small entourage of very powerful corporate giants, all of whom (the senator included) belonged to the same devout Southern Baptist church. At some point during this—it is unclear when or under what circumstances—the prestigious group mingled with a small gathering of very influential British men and women, some connected with Parliament and all rumored to have dealings with the Freemasons.

So it was that, through some odd confluence born out of fanatical belief and no small amount of drunken discourse, that the Clearthinkers were created.

It was from the top of that unlikely hill that the snowball was tossed, no doubt with great ease by the heavily influential hands of all those involved, from both world-leading nations.

Within three months, the exponentially growing and constantly mutating faith had swelled to approximately ten million followers. While this number in and of itself paled in comparison to most major world religions, the actions of the sect itself were quickly gaining speculative and even critical attention. Most specifically, the Clearthinkers was not a group for “Sunday Christians”. With indoctrination came life alteration as surrounding and complete as the utter silence towards outsiders that went with as well. People gave up their homes, lives, worldly possessions, and even families to join this congregation and, as though they had stepped behind some infinitely opaque curtain, were never seen or heard from again.

It was because of this all-encompassing shroud that every member of the faith seemed so fully willing to sacrifice everything for that I was only able to gather very limited information about the inner workings of their belief structure, and even this was significantly after everything came crashing down.

It is certain that their primary belief surrounded a necessary pilgrimage to a promised land that, for no calculable reason from my findings, existed on an expanse of land in Australia, found in the Simpson Desert, just north of Lake Eyre. It was there they believed would be the epicenter of a great cleansing that would be unleashed upon the world.

Usage of the verb “to cleanse” in regards to anything living has never, in all my years, failed to nauseate me.

All religions mutate and change form over time. The Clearthinkers, seeming to be a particularly advanced and vicious strain of the manmade plague of organized religion, did so far faster than any I have ever known. It was only a matter of months before they moved from passively awaiting their prophesized end of days to deciding to take a more proactive approach to the matter. They came to believe that the great cleansing would not come from the hand of their higher power, but rather from the virtue of that hand working through them. It was then, through the efforts of a small group of brilliant but radicalized Clearthinker geneticists, that P17L4, affectionately dubbed the Progenitor Virus, was created.

On the morning of October 18th, only seven months after that fateful multinational melding of minds in London, and in the steadily rising glow of dawn hours, every single private, public, and commercial airport and marina on the massive continent of Australia was rendered useless by a series of massive, synchronized explosions. The attack was strategic and unforeseeable and the nation, crippled and cut off from the rest of the world, had not the time to glance around and truly see what had happened—let alone gather itself in its own defense—before the slaughter began.

Less than an hour after the initial explosion, car and transit bombs began rocking every city in the country that boasted greater than twenty thousand residents. These secondary, smaller explosions were the true bringers of destruction, however. Each one carried on the winds of its own might lethal airborne doses of the Progenitor Virus.

And right in the middle of it all, converging upon a piece of land in the Simpson Desert, just north of Lake Eyre, were some fifty thousand Clearthinkers, each and every one wearing protective anti-virus suits. I can only imagine that it looked like and endless army of identical, faceless marauders—all with the same blighted future in mind.

Over the course of the coming week, those who were not quickly killed by Progenitor—through natural immunity or lack of exposure—were systematically hunted and gunned down by roaming death squads armed with automatic weapons. This information was easily gathered, as by this point the Clearthinkers had obviously revealed themselves, and there was no point in hiding their actions any longer. From hour that Progenitor was released upon Australia and for the seven days that followed, the Clearthinkers ran a constant stream of carefully videotaped documentation of the carnage to a website being broadcasted by satellite, the link to which was emailed to every major news outlet in the world. They wanted the nonbelievers to look on and tremble, and they wanted their followers to raise their hands in victory.

It was then, on the eighth day, that one faceless Clearthinker among the horde of faceless Clearthinkers, indistinguishable in his pale blue body suit and black shiny facemask, addressed the world through a broadcast that was, by that point, impossible to avoid no matter where you were. It was then that this indiscernible wraith stated that bombs containing massive levels of Progenitor had been placed with perfect, calculated accuracy at every point on the Earth that would be required to create global exposure with the push of a button. He held up the button (which I thought would be red, but turned out to be green) to show to the world, and the collective cry was so great that I do not imagine it escaped anyone’s ears. He said that the world had twenty-four hours to say goodbye, and pray for its salvation. Once the virus was released, even they would unmask, and all would be judged, and only the righteous would survive.

All information that follows this point may be questionable, especially since a great percentage of it was gained through one man. He held a position with the group in the United States government that was directly involved in the events that followed that ominous broadcast and, while he had not been important enough to be privy to this information when events were transpiring, concepts such as “National Security” and “Top Secrecy” became little more than trivial words after the fact. His name was Eugene, and I trust his word on these matters. A dying man who has lost everything carries with him little reason to lie.

Within an hour of the speech that left the world feeling stunned and helpless, one of the largest single gatherings of national leaders in history took place (much of it through televised conference, no doubt). It was through the course of the gathering that it was decided that, although it would be impossible to scour the earth for the bombs in a twenty-four hour period, they could attack the known source of the bombs’ trigger in hopes that it might delay detonation long enough for separate nations to search. Through satellite imagery narrowed down by frantic text-messages and hacked-connection emails from frightened Australian refugees hiding scattered throughout the nation, combined multinational military forces were able to discern that the majority of Clearthinkers in Australia were in the aforementioned spot in the Simpson Desert.

It was, predictably, the United States who offered both a tactical approach and the means by which to carry it out. Only full thermonuclear assault would guarantee both complete destruction of the Clearthinkers as well as sanitization of the now fully virus-infected continent. There was no doubt a deafening uproar of protest, rallying against the notion for reasons ranging from the guaranteed killing of any remaining Australian survivors, the massive irradiated wasteland that would be left behind, and right down to the very practical notion that even a carefully synchronized assault could not reasonably blanket the entire massive country with enough bombs needed to do the job right without alerting the Clearthinkers of what was coming.

The US Department of Defense and its military weapons development group—the sector that Eugene worked for—were the ones who took the floor from there. They had been developing for a number of years a bomb that should, theoretically, hold approximately twelve times the destructive force of a one hundred kiloton nuclear warhead, but with less than one percent of the nuclear fallout. It had yet to be officially tested in its full scale, but it was decided, through utter desperation, that its first official christening would be in an act of war.

True to Oppenheimer style, hindsight is always much, much clearer.

The following is a direct account from Eugene of what happened next:

“A few hours before dawn on October 25th, we had a stealth fighter cruise out over Australia, just creepin’ along black as night up there, thinkin’ itself so sly.” Eugene chuckled ruefully and pulled a cigarette out of the pack that sat on the table between us. We were sitting on the porch of a random house along with all the other random houses. Just one Eugene had decided to take up residence in. He lit his cigarette and continued.

“So it gets about to the center of the ol’ down under, and it goes ahead and drops that bomb, still thinkin’ it’s about to get away with murder.” Eugene was an interesting contradiction. He spoke with the sometimes ineloquent and colloquial manner of a native Georgian, which made his intelligence seem questionable, despite his three PhDs in engineering, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. Not that those things mean anything anymore.

“An’ sure enough, everyone seems ready to pop the champagne…but just before the big explosion happens—you know the one—there comes all these little ones from every which way. An’ then it hits all of us, all at once. We just bought the farm.”

I nodded gravely in response to his story, particularly the part about the big explosion. I was in Erdenet, Mongolia at the moment it happened, roughly six thousand miles from its origin, and I still heard the rumble, and saw the unnatural glow on the horizon. I, along with six billion other people on the planet, knew the face of the world was about to change.

“More shocking than the virus spreadin’ like mad, I reckon, is what happened to Australia. I’ve probably spent more of my life in school than I have sleepin’, young man, and I still can’t figure it to this day. That bomb, after its shockwave had wiped out New Zealand, The Philippines, and even all of Indonesia, well it just sent that chunk of Australia floating off on its own, didn’t it? Most of it was black and burned and dead, sure, but that one chunk just drifted off there like it didn’t have a care in the world…just cruised along like continental drift on fast forward, those seas swirled up like they were, until it decided to sit and stay like a good dog right there in the North Atlantic, just making itself right at home. What is it they call that place?” He snuffed out his cigarette and lit another, then offered me one. I had never smoked before, never thought much to try it, but I took one. I decided right then to pick it up as a habit. Just another thing to pass the time.

“Ayenee.” I answered after lighting mine and taking my first drag.

And made itself at home it had. It took that chunk of land two years to drift up to were it sits now, but it finally just stopped and set up shop, just as Eugene had rather interestingly stated. No sooner had it, too, than it seemed to spring to life. The piece of earth, nearly the size of Alaska, which rightfully should have been barren, began to grow vegetation at a rate no one had ever heard of. It was as though the soil had been enriched with something magical…and many people believe just that. It was quickly heralded as a new Eden, the Spiritus Terra. Large groups of people quickly began to migrate there.

Eugene is dead now, has been for going on four years. Although he was one of the roughly one hundred million people in the world (his estimate) who had survived Progenitor, his rather run-of-the-mill lung cancer had quickly overtaken him without adequate medical treatment. In his final days he confided in me his hopes that Progenitor’s debilitating effect on the survivors’ ability to reproduce would allow this world and its humans to finally come to a peaceful equilibrium.

But I, having watched this world and its generally unfortunate inhabitants for far longer than Eugene, have my reservations. This secular holocaust and its cataclysmic reshaping of the face of the world aside, something is changing; something new is slithering on the outskirts of this reality. The humans are rebuilding, recreating their world in an interesting collaboration of medieval construction and salvaged modern technology. But what they don’t realize is that they and the world around them are changing in ways they may not even be able to imagine.

In my unnaturally long life I have encountered less than twenty like myself and, although vicious, each one held the sensible reservation required to survive the centuries. In the past year, I have come across five…and every single one was young, ravenous, and, worst of all, completely unwary of the humans.

Moreover, the humans themselves are beginning to change. Not all of them, but enough to catch my eye. I stepped out of my inn two nights ago just in time to witness a fight between two men across the road. It began with an argument, which then became physical. The first man shoved the second, and the second responded by knocking the first through the picture window of a nearby building…without ever laying a finger on him.

I think my time here on the outskirts of the now mostly-deserted Moscow is about up. Winter will be coming soon and this place will grow too cold for even my tastes. I finished digging up my shipping crate last week, so I think I will see about having it transported.

I’ve decided to move to Ayenee. The stories I hear of the changing world and its wondrous new sights all seem to originate there, so perhaps I should see it for myself. I feel an odd apprehension at the prospect, but I suppose I never could resist new horizons, dark though they may all be.

I do not know what was awoken when the humans split this world open, but whatever it is seems to have taken root in Ayenee and is now curling up vines around their ankles without them even noticing. I have heard a number of them refer to all that they have survived as “The Last War”, but there can be no such thing. With one man’s mouth left to tell the story, and another’s ear to hear it, there will always be war on the end of their fingertips. It is simply in their nature. This change, this apocalypse, is only the beginning of something even more ominous just beyond that dark horizon. I believe it is just the head of the pale horse coming over the hill. They haven’t even seen the rider yet.

But I’ll be there to see it all, whether it takes a decade or a millennium. I’ll be there to witness them to their last. Because while their sins stretch out endlessly before their feet, mine are still piled insurmountably upon my shoulders. I can never atone for mine…I can only spend an eternity watching theirs.

That is my penance.