“I know. We’ve got to be ready for what comes next.”
“The good thing about the Bleed—the only good thing as far as I can see—is that it’s predictable. It likes to put on a gruesome show and try to intimidate us, but when it comes down to it, it’s only ever going to try and kill. Far as I can see, our options are now down to one.”
“We need to get ourselves and everyone else left alive away from here and somewhere safe.”
“Your planet’s dead, Jen. We have to let it go. Shit got ugly fast and we’ve got to deal with it.”
“I agree. We have to leave.”
15
SURFERS PARADISE, AUSTRALIA
Whether they had responsibility for less than four million souls or more than twenty million, it was all academic. The same problems remained: what the hell were they going to do with so many bodies? Where could they take them, and could the clockwork room even do it?
Jenny and Maddie worked hard to unlock the final secrets of the god-tech, combining their skills and abilities, riffing off each other to fill the individual gaps in their collective knowledge of the machine. Maddie knew the nuts and bolts (and cogs and levers) of how the thing worked and what it was capable of, but it was Jenny, the half-god, who truly had control. Individually, both struggled with the scale of the crisis and their responsibilities. Together, though, they had to believe they could do it.
Whether it was a hive-mind or collective, or if there was some central control somewhere, the Bleed appeared to sense the impact it was having on the remainder of the human race trapped in their bubble, and it fed off their fear. “It knows how to get to us,” Jenny said, watching the malevolent entity’s actions on the portals presented by the clockwork room. “It knows that the more it drives us apart, the easier it is to exploit the gaps and take us down.”
Outside, the Bleed was constantly mutating. Its shape, form and consistency was changing all the time…evolving. Tendrils and arms grew from out of nowhere and battered the outside of the orb, engorged and elongated fingers bursting from bloody stumps, trying to dig into the energy field, trying to rip and tear and smash and crush…anything to breach the human race’s last layer of defense.
“We saw what happened to Indonesia,” Maddie said, watching the displays with mounting concern. “The barrier is stronger now, but it’s only going to take a single break and that’ll be it.”
“I know. I get that. Once it finds a way in, it’ll flood this place in seconds.” Jenny looked at the invisible wall protecting the last humans. They were all held captive here. All of the people who’d survived so far would be drowned in blood. That was if they hadn’t already torn each other apart. Outside the clockwork room, the streets ran red with violence and fear. “If we don’t move fast,” she said, “there won’t be anyone left alive to take with us.”
“It’s always the same,” Maddie said. “When word got out that the moon was going to be colonized, there was a rush to escape like you wouldn’t believe. Folks trying to buy their way onto transports, figuring that net wealth somehow made them suitable candidates for re-starting the human race. Others were killing to survive.”
“Shit always floats,” Jenny sighed.
“Actually, only shit consisting mostly of fat, but, yeah, you can say that again.”
“It sickens me that people can be so entitled and so fucking selfish. Every last person out there, their lives are worth just as much as the people next to them. They’re here because they’re lucky, not because they have some god given right.”
“No pun intended.”
“I’m serious. It’s not for us to decide who lives or who dies. We just have to do the best for everyone left.”
“I know. I get that. Thing is, right now I think saving any of them will be a miracle. There’s a potential problem, and I don’t know if you’ve picked up on it yet.”
Jenny just looked at her. “Why am I not surprised? There’s always a potential problem. What is it now?”
Maddie showed her an image on the display. “The dome goes sixty miles down as well as up, but we don’t want to move anything other than the people on the surface. More to the point, we can’t. The room won’t be able to cope. We can’t risk trying to move all that ground and all these buildings, we can only move the people.”
“So how do we separate them from everything else without letting in the Bleed?”
“Exactly. That’s the problem. One drop of that thing gets inside this dome, the tiniest bit of contamination, and we’re all toast.”
“There must be a way.”
“If there is, I’m struggling to figure it out. I can’t see a way of getting this orb and those people to safety without compromising the forcefield.”
“Can we create a second orb inside the first? A bubble within a bubble?”
Maddie shook her head. “No. I already thought of that. It won’t work. We can’t risk diverting energy away from keeping the Bleed out. Any reduction in the strength of the forcefield to set up another one will leave us vulnerable.”
“Great.”
“On the other hand, if we leave it too long, the dipshits out there will kill themselves. There won’t be anyone left to save.”
“I wish this really was the Rapture,” Jenny mused. “We could do with finding a way of getting people to float up to heaven, or wherever it is they think they’re going to end up.”
“I guess it is, in a way. No floating, though.”
“There’s no way we can get people off the ground and scoop them up?”
Maddie shook her head. “I don’t think so, not without diverting energy from our shield. And the people who are inside would be screwed. They’d just float up to the
