Genesis: An Oral History of the Apocalypse

[geekyteacher]

Part IV: Aftermath 

“After the failure at San Francisco, the human race faced an unprecedented catastrophe that nearly drove the species to extinction. There were nearly 8 billion people on the planet on G-Day. By our best estimates, there were 400 million in 2025. Imagine the worst parts of a natural and manmade disaster put together. There was a complete halt to all social services, widespread destruction, starvation, violence, death, despair, suicide, flooding and more in every corner of the world. Most governments collapsed right away when it became clear they couldn’t save us from the clanker threat. Some held on for a few more months, trying to regroup people in ‘safe zones’ and ‘rebuild society’ with some crumb left of the semblance of power they once had. But those that ‘survived’ longer only did so until clankers reached the capital and they had no ability to do anything. No one was going to listen to the government when killer robot android things were banging on their door.



“The problem was that clankers couldn’t be stopped that easily. You might deter one or two with a sheer drop or a small body of water, but that wouldn’t stop a whole swarm of them. I saw clankers scrambling over each other to get to their target, no matter the obstacles in the way – and with big enough swarms that’d eventually build a bridge of clankers that others could crawl and walk over. You’d think their determination would make them easier to deal with – they were so single-minded and only focused on swarming as their strategy – but it just made them seem implacable at the time, and that caused everyone to lose their shit because we thought that they were just unbeatable. Of course, once we figured them out, we got a bit better at dealing with them. They were less unbeatable and more just unbelievably resilient bastards. But during those early years – some call them the Aftermath and others call them the wilderness years – humans were having to relearn very basic things, like how to live on their own in a world without electricity, cars, or technology and how to make a fire, hunt or grow food, so that made clankers deadlier than the worst prehistoric predator that our ancestors lived in fear of in the darkness. It was only by coincidence that Adam and the clankers didn’t wipe us all out – that and what we discovered later, but we didn’t know that then. Due to the chaos that was happening, there aren’t a ton of records of the wilderness years. Only diaries and the memories of those few of us who lived through it. I worry that as time goes on, the memory of these years will get emptier and emptier, so we’d better record them while we can. That’s the purpose of this project.”



- Munsar Nagi on the creation of the Genesis Logs



Sorry for the long delay. I hope everyone enjoys this next part of the story

[texican]

Thanks GT for the chapter.

Texican....

[geekyteacher]

EDF Video Log                                          Kevin Baker; Atlanta, GA                                          4 Years After G-Day 

“You never think about how little it takes for society to collapse. After San Francisco, everything just shut down. Anything electronic went down after that mass clanker EMP, that is of course except for the clankers themselves. They kept functioning even as planes fell out of the sky, cars shut down, and computers got fried. We still don’t really have regular access to any of those today, and now, 3 years later, only a very select few do. It just makes no sense that clankers didn’t shut off each other when those EMPs did it to everything else. I’m not privy to all the research that’s been done on the subject, so I can only speculate. Maybe it’s something with nanite poisoning or how they altered the human body and turned it to metal. Maybe when the body shifts into a clanker it still maintains its organs and bones and all that instead of being fueled by electricity. All I know is what was left of the government tried to set up shop in the CDC Lab because even as everything was going to shit, they still had security and an emergency power supply that kept everything in there going even as everything outside shut off. I don’t think they expected it to end the way it did at the time, but in retrospect it seems obvious that it couldn’t end well.



“Think about it, even after the bulk of the people who fled or died lowered the population of the city by half, there were still 200,000 some odd desperate people in the city. Imagine for a second that you’ve been living a life of destitution for months without enough to eat, no clean water, no medicine, and not feeling like you have a whole lot to lose even with clankers at your doorstep. I wasn’t surprised to hear how many people left the ‘safety’ of their shelters to storm the CDC building despite the threat. I remember when I stepped out of the lab and heard the noise first, so I looked out and saw what looked like a peaceful protest at first – there were chants to let them in and not too much violence, at least at first. Until some idiot thought he saw a rage head and raised the alarm. Then suddenly everyone was in a panic. A brick flew through one of the building’s windows. People started banging on the door, yelling and screaming. That wouldn’t have been too bad, but then one of the walls of the building had a hole blown in it. To this day, no one is sure if it was a person or a blaster who did it, but that caused things to get real ugly. We had armed guards in the building, but they weren’t as a way to stop protestors, despite what some people say and the rumors that they spread to make it look like the government was some evil organization trying to stop people from being saved. The real reason we had them was because the CDC has samples of just about every known disease and there were lots of people who might want to get their hands on those, even as the world was collapsing. Hell, the world collapsing might’ve made some people want them even more. But now we had to send them out to deal with a group of desperate people who thought we could offer them sanctuary. Now the thing was, at first, the guards only used rubber bullets. After all, we didn’t want to kill any of the crowd. They were, so far as we could tell, just desperate people. A few went down to the rubber bullets, but then someone in the crowd returned fire using live ammunition – we realized that when one of the guards went down with a bad wound right on his face. It actually blew off his cheek, if you’re looking for the gory details.



“At that time, the guards switched over to live ammunition themselves and began firing into the crowd. Many people in the crowd screamed and tried to disperse, but the noise attracted a swarm of clankers. So some people – probably idiots who thought Atlanta would be the next Phoenix – were still firing at the guards, while all the rest were running for their lives trying to avoid clankers and crossfire, and the guards were trying to stop the clankers while avoiding gunshots from the idiot PILF wannabes. At that point, if things weren’t already shit, they went completely to shit pretty damn quick. The wannabe PILF idiots weren’t firing at the clankers because their focus was too trained on the guards who were ‘oppressing their freedom’ and that divided the focus of the guards, which meant that by the time the clankers had taken out all of the shooters in the crowd, there weren’t enough guards left standing to take the bastards out and that meant that they were able to swarm into the building. And that meant we had to evacuate the building fast. Now I was in charge of security, so I was responsible for the evacuation. The first and most important order of business was to try and protect the samples in the building. There was an emergency cage that could be brought down over the door to the lab. I put that down and all the shielding that was available. I hoped that would be enough to hold the clankers back for long enough for us to all get out of the building. It’d be another story down on the streets, but at least they were wider, so it was more possible to dodge a clanker there than it was in the crowded hallway of a building.



“Just as I was starting to shepherd scientists out of the building another explosion rocked the place to its foundation. It nearly knocked me off my feet, and some of the scientists weren’t so lucky. A lot of them fell and the vials they were holding broke, which risked letting the diseases in the vial escape and infect the people unlucky enough to fall face-first into the sample. Not to mention the broken glass. I tried to help up those I could, but then there was a loud banging on the cage door – the clankers had made their way up to us and were trying to bust their way in to get to us. To my abject horror, I even saw a grinder – barely able to fit in the hallway but not letting that stop it, moving toward us as well.



“About that time, I said f*** trying to get the vials out with us. One more explosion and the building was going down. Or that grinder was going to bust its way in and rip us all to shreds. I started yelling for everyone to put down their vials and run for it! Some scientists started to object, but one look at the grinder lumbering down the hall seemed to convince them. After a few minutes, everyone was out of the building and on the fire escape except for my second-in-command, Gus. He wasn’t moving, acting like he was rooted to the spot that he was in.



I yelled at him, “‘Come on man! We gotta get out of here!’



The response, ‘I can’t do that. If we let those clankers get their hands on those vials, who knows what could happen.’



‘Smash them on the ground then! Come on, we have less than five minutes before they bust their way in at this rate!’

‘You go. Make sure everyone gets out safely. I’m gonna make sure that no one can get these.’



‘What are you saying?’ I asked him.



He pulled a grenade off his belt and put his finger through the loop of the pin and tensed like he was going to pull it,



‘I should be able to buy you some time. Tell my wife and kids that I love them.’



‘Gus, you have to come with us. That way you can tell them yourself!’



‘Get out of here, Kevin.’ He said and began to pull the pin.



“At that moment I was extremely conflicted. My friend was going to blow himself up in an attempt to be the great hero who sacrifices everything to save everyone else. I wanted to stop him, but I had to take into account how to save the most lives,



“‘Okay, Gus. We’ll get out. Just hold onto that pin. I’ll tell your family that you died a hero saving us all.’



“I started getting all of the scientists and others onto the fire escape. We were down onto the street and I considered going up to try and get Gus, but then the grenade went off. Gus incinerated all of the clankers, the grinder, and all the diseases in the lab. Some still go out from the ones that fell but imagine what could’ve happened if Adam had gotten them. We could be extinct right now. So if you ask me, no one in the war will ever be as brave a man or as valiant a hero as Gus D. Simpson.”



He wipes tears away from his eye and someone offscreen offers him a tissue, which he takes and blows his nose,



“What happened to Atlanta after that?”



“I got out of there as soon as possible after that. The attack on the CDC Building was what caused the government to collapse for good – no one would come to work after that. Once the government collapsed, that broke whatever was holding the city together and Atlanta descended into the same chaos as the other big cities. Plus, there were always rumors after San Francisco that another city was going to get nuked. So I made my way out and found a group to travel with that was heading to the west.”



“Where to the west were they heading?”



“St. Louis.”


Happy Thanksgiving, everyone

[eyeseetwo]

Very intense story.

I need to clarify, is a clanker a former human who has morphed into a partially metal creature due to the nannies?

[geekyteacher]

Thank you for your kind words.

Yes, that's correct about the clankers.

[geekyteacher]

EDF Video Log                                                    Ben Kramer; St. Louis                                                    4 Years After G-Day 

“I was a lifelong resident of St. Louis before G-Day. I’ll tell you this – as shit started really going down there was no way I was leaving my city, and once we take back St. Louis from those clanker-bastards, I’m gonna rebuild my great city. But I’m sorry, I got off on a tangent there for a second. As I was saying, I was in St. Louis when G-Day hit. I read about New York and Detroit before clankers showed up in St. Louis. We were in a better position than those other cities. I started preparing for the worst, reading everything I could on the internet while it was still up looking for anything and everything on how to survive. Let me tell you, the preppers who’d been preparing for this day all their lives were absolutely creaming their pants over this. There were tons of rumors flying around the internet back in those days of absolute panic. For everything that turned out to be true, there had to be at least three things that were exaggerated or even outright fabricated. As badly as some people wanted them to be, clankers aren’t zombies and they don’t follow the same rules. But sorry, that’s another tangent. The point of this is that when the first clankers showed up, I knew a thing or two about how to deal with them.

With my group, we kept the city under control even as the government fell after San Francisco and Atlanta. I can tell you that it wasn’t easy, especially when it went from half a dozen or so to several dozen and then to hundreds. It was at that time that I started to get worried about getting overwhelmed, but then a mysterious group of people showed up. They said they were wanderers looking for a place to stay. We needed more people, especially ones who could help with agriculture since this was back when we were having to relearn those skills. These people seemed to fit the bill perfectly based on what they told us about where they came from and what they’d been doing since the apocalypse hit.



“We had them stay one night in containment to check for signs of Genesis poisoning, specifically NIR. That was what we thought you needed to do back in those days. That was another place the internet spread a lot of rumors that turned out to be a bunch of made up bullshit since not all clankers started as rage-heads. Either way, after they passed that test we let them join us. At first, everything seemed great. They helped with clanker duty and started showing us better ways to hunt food and plans for growing new crops once Spring came. That was probably the reason so many more people started coming – word got around that St. Louis was one of the few cities not overrun with clankers. Mind you, it wasn’t all sunshine and unicorn farts. We still had to deal with starvation, especially during that first winter. And none of us were prepared for how tough winter would be. With it lasting until May and having that gray snow up to our shins. We lost two or three dozen people, minimum. And that was just from the cold and lack of food, to say nothing about diseases that racked our little society.



“But once Spring came, things seemed to be improving. Once the snow melted, our new friends showed us those better crops and better ways to grow them. It was great and it seemed like things were looking up, even with the world collapsing all around us. That was until some suspicious things started happening. A guard would be missing a shift or a plant or two would be pulled up for no reason. Food would disappear. I wanted to keep an eye on it but didn’t think too much of it. Running our small village was the bigger fish to fry, or at least felt like it. It sucks to say it, but I felt like I had my plate full enough as it was, and if some little problems were happening, we’d iron those out after we took care of more important things like keeping as many people alive as possible. Those little things happened for about a month, but then it started getting worse and worse. Clankers nearby got into the town multiple times, whole crops were ruined from being uprooted or salted in the night. At that point, it became clear to me that this wasn’t an accident; we were dealing with sabotage. I didn’t want to think anyone in our group could be responsible for sure a thing, but I automatically began to suspect the group of wanderers we’d let in.



“After that, I elected to go on night patrols by myself to keep an eye on the important places in town and on some of our guests. For a week, I went around every night from 10PM-6AM walking around the perimeter. I kept an eye on crops, on our water, and checked in with the guards on shift. After that week, things started to go back to normal again. I admit that I got a little lazy after that. I started only patrolling every other night and then once every three nights. In retrospect, it was a stupid decision, but at the time I had enough on my plate as it was. I still tried to keep an eye on any saboteurs, but it seemed like it had passed. Until the very next night, of course, when shit really hit the fan. Everyone started vomiting the next day, some so violently and frequently that there was a real risk of death by dehydration. I knew it couldn’t be an accident. Before the government fell, I remembered what had happened in Phoenix and was sure it was those PILF idiots trying to do the same to us. I ran to the water supply and found one of our wanderers there checking the water. I yelled at him to freeze and put his hands up. My hand was gripped tight on the gun on my belt, my fingers tensed to pull it and fire at a moment’s notice. He turned around and looked surprised to see me.



“He said, ‘Mayor, what are you doing here? I was just taking my turn to guard the water supply from any attempts at tampering.’



"I responded, ‘Cut the crap and tell me what the hell you’ve done to our water.’



‘We are purifying this town. It is an affront to our master’s grand plan.’



That threw me for a loop because it wasn’t what I was expecting to hear, ‘What master?’ was my question. This didn’t sound like any of the PILF doctrine I’d ever heard of.



‘Life must be eliminated to save it. Hail Genesis.’



“I only had what felt like a quarter of a second before he lunged at me. Luckily, since my fingers were already tensed on my gun, it only took me that long to get it up and fire a good shot into his chest. That put him down on the ground and I was able to run up and get a shot in on his head. That put him down for good. I looked down, expecting to see wires and oil, but instead there was flesh and blood gushing out of the wounds on his chest and head. I was completely in shock. This guy was no clanker, he was a human. And here he was poisoning our water supply and hailing the nanites. What on Earth was this? It made no goddamn sense in my mind.


“At the time, we didn’t know about Adam’s cult yet. I admit, to this day I still don’t quite understand what makes a person want to willingly support Adam and the clankers. The PILF, sure they're a bunch of assholes, but it made sense. They’re humans who want to be in charge because they say the apocalypse coming when no one else did. They’ve ended up using that as an excuse to slaughter anyone who doesn’t agree with them, and the less we say about what they did to Phoenix the better. But at least they’re still supporting humans. As best as I can understand, some people just lost it when the apocalypse hit, and those people thought that if they started worshipping Adam and the nanites that they’d be spared from the carnage. Mind you, we’re not talking like trying to become a clanker or rage head, but just treating Adam and the Genesis nanites like a god. Events later showed that Adam and the clankers didn’t care whether you worshipped them or not, they slaughtered all humans the same. I’ve heard some stories from people from other places about the cultists who tried to sabotage them as well by letting clankers into the town at night. It was always clear when that happened because there would be a corpse right near the entrance, usually with its hands clasped as if in prayer. If he were a god, Adam is clearly not a kind and benevolent one, which really raises the question to me why anyone would be so idiotic as to worship their own demise. But I guess the apocalypse has done strange things to us all. At the time this was all happening, I was just confused as to what exactly would cause a person to do something like what I’d just seen.”



“Oh, and if you’re wondering why I didn’t get sick like everyone else, there’s a simple explanation for that. I’ve been told by people before that I’m too paranoid and maybe those people are right, but after the sabotage, I wasn’t taking any chances and only drank water I filtered myself. So I managed to be okay, which meant I could try to save everyone else, but otherwise didn’t matter much. After I discovered their leader, all the other wanderers fled from the town. I tried to fight off all the clankers to keep everyone safe until they recovered, but I ran into two problems. For one, I couldn’t defend the whole place by myself and for two, no one got better, they just got sicker and sicker. I had to watch my friends all die one by one until the clankers overwhelmed us. I got away with my life, but with the knowledge that I left my friends to die, and that I could’ve saved them all if I just would’ve told them not to drink the water like what I was doing already. I guess that’s the problem that arises when you don’t fully trust anyone. You wanna know what really haunts me – the thing that keeps me up at night? It’s that. Not what I’ve done to any clankers and not combat here in the EDF. It was watching my friends die slowly and painfully all with the knowledge that they didn’t have to die and that I could’ve saved them if I’d been honest with them. It proved to me that I’m not a good leader, hence why I’m still just your average grunt here.



“After that, I wasn’t feeling like life was much worth living. I considered letting the clankers take me or putting a bullet in my brain. It was what I deserved in my mind, but for some reason I couldn’t do it. Maybe I thought that there would be a way to avenge them. Maybe I had a little voice telling me there was more to my life. Or maybe I’m just a coward. But I kept on living as a nomad on the outskirts of my former beloved city until a group from Atlanta showed up and said they were heading west. They’d been wanting to settle in St. Louis because they’d heard the rumors about the lack of clankers, but I informed them it was really just a myth now. So they decided they were gonna keep moving. I don’t know what compelled me to do it, but I decided to join onto their group. I guess I’m still looking for some form of redemption. A way to get rid of all this guilt that still follows me around. And that’s why I’m still here today. Still looking for my redemption by eliminating Adam and his whole scourge from the face of this Earth. And getting back to my beloved St. Louis to rebuild her and start over where my life was before the apocalypse. Though maybe that’s just a fantasy…”

[texican]

GT,

If not the clankers, it is the insane cultists to deal with.

Thanks for the chapter.

When will the tide turn?

God bless us, America and President Trump. Seems like the demoncraps are destined for power and America will suffer for it.

Texican....

[travelerii]

The first lesson you learn in Star Trek is Never Trust A Machine Without An OFF Switch.

And I keep hearing Bender Bending Rodriguez saying DEATH TO HUMANS!

[geekyteacher]

EDF Footage - Russian Prison                                         Ivan Krakowski                                          5 Years After G-Day 

The man at the beginning of the next video has long, dark hair and an equally long beard. His eyes are sunken into his skull, and his figure is skeletal. He is wearing the uniform of a prisoner of the New Russian Federation, and the area behind him does not belie his uniform. As he speaks, his breath is visible,



“Before the war, I was in charge at the apocalypse preparation lab in Siberia. It’s ironic when you think about it. This was a lab designed for the sole purpose of saving humanity in an emergency. We had seeds for every crop, we had samples of every domesticated animal’s DNA, and we had disease samples to help rebuild immunity for the population. We spent time in the lab in shifts on 6-month rotations. It was practically like being in solitary confinement, only with a better library of books and movies available.” He laughs before he continues speaking,



“After G-Day, I would’ve expected people to come to the lab, but nobody else was there when I got there. The intense winter, the clankers, and the low population meant anyone who could get out in time got out, or they were left for dead, so Siberia was one of the first countries to be depopulated. I’d heard rumors about Russia’s policy of executing all immigrants after Moscow’s fall, and that only encouraged people to try and get somewhere else.



“It wasn’t my turn for a few more months when G-Day hit, but I knew I had to get to the lab right away because this was the moment we’d been preparing for for months. Not only did I want to do my part to help however I could, but my coworker Volodya was doing his shift at the time, and I knew he’d have no way to know anything was going wrong. After all, the government had proven too incompetent to actually use the lab, so I doubt anyone had gone to warn him. That was until I got to the lab and found the door open. At first, I thought that perhaps someone had gone down to help Volodya out, but I wondered why they had neglected to shut the door. I didn’t even think of my own safety as I rushed to the door and started to descend the stairs. As I did, I could tell that whoever had come hadn’t done so to help Volodya. The walls were covered with gashes and there was a distinct smell as I got closer to the entrance to the lab. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, the smell of burnt flesh was overpowering. I already had a suspicion of what I would find as I opened the door. There was Volodya on the floor, though if I didn’t know him it would’ve been nearly impossible to identify his corpse by how badly burned that it was. Everything around him was burned and all of the samples were either torched or missing. I don’t know why, but at that moment my eye was drawn towards the safe in the corner of the room. For whatever reason, I decided to open it. Inside I found a security tape. I decided to check it to see when it was from

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Video Footage                                          Volodya Grigorivitch                                          2 Years After G-Day 

The image changes to a young man looking into a camera,



“This is day 120 of my shift. This is Volodya Grigoritvitch with my video log for the day. No word from headquarters, but I guess no news is good news. The only problem is that we’re out of vodka, so they’d better get back to me soon about replacing it.”



He stops talking and laughs for several minutes before continuing, “Everything is holding steady, but I’ve been getting some strange readings. The surface average temperature has been decreasing and cloud cover has been increasing. Satellite imagery has been showing fewer electric light, but there are still several bright spots. It’s not clear what has been causing this. Radio has also gone quiet. Some garbled transmissions in October and November. I couldn’t understand some parts. Something about NEH, Detroit, and San Francisco. Still watching the dials, but that doesn’t explain all the strange signs and movement above.”



“Alright, day 125 – Strange things happening here in the bunker. Lights, computers, and other electronics have been malfunctioning. I checked all the wiring and I can’t see why things are shutting off and turning on by themselves. The dials are doing the same. I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts, but holy shit, I don’t know how else to explain what’s been happening here the past few days. I haven’t been able to sleep. I can’t relax. What’s going on here? And what’s happening outside? The dials are off, the cameras are down, and the satellites suddenly aren’t relaying properly. None of this makes any sense. It doesn’t make any goddamn sense! Suddenly the lack of vodka doesn’t seem like the biggest problem. Though it could help me get through this strange shit.”



“Holy fucking shit, what’s going on here? It’s day, umm 130, I think. I haven’t slept properly in three days. All this weird shit is keeping me on edge. The lights and computers are always turning on and off by themselves. There’s strange noises and beeps in the night. Anytime I try to sleep there are noises all around me. And it’s been getting worse. I even swear that I’ve heard scratching on the door. I’m five fucking miles underground. Unless it’s the folks from headquarters, I don’t know why on Earth something would be down here. Must be a damn mouse or something. I can’t deal with this shit. If they don’t bring me that vodka soon, I swear I’m gonna crack. I won’t make it through this shift without it, so get on it.



“I read once the longest amount of time spent without sleeping is 11 days. I might be able to get to that record if things keep going the way they’ve been going now. It’s day…I don’t know…I’m gonna say 134 and I still haven’t been able to sleep. Not only are the lights and electronics freaking out, but now I am too. I feel this constant itching under my skin like something is trapped there. Anytime I lie down it suddenly spreads over my whole body. I don’t know what it is or why it’s happening, but I needed to get it out.”



He holds up his arm to show a large gash in his arm, which looks like he went to it with a pair of scissors, “I don’t know what it was, but I think I got it out. Except that just made me start hearing voices. Something in the night…something calling out. It needs to shut its mouth already so that I can get my fucking sleep! I’m going to turn into some sleep-deprived zombie soon, I can tell! Dear motherfucking god, where is everyone! Somebody help me! I’m all alone down here by myself! The surface has gone completely silent! No response to anything! “



He begins screaming incoherently, yelling and screaming about the voices he continues to hear.



As he yells, his pupils dilate, giving him a manic appearance. He continues that for several more minutes before calming down. His pupils shrink and he appears to regain lucidity after his short episode of mania,



“Am I going insane here? It feels like something is here with me. Something is watching me, I know it, I know it, I know it.”



As he appears to be re-entering into his mania, he is interrupted by a strange series of beeps. They seem random at first, but then they begin to create a pattern. After a minute, they configure into speech,



“You are correct that you’ve been watched. Our children are already working their magic to open your inferior mind.”



It’s a familiar voice. It’s cold and robotic. Adam makes his second appearance in this log,



“Who the hell are you? Where is that coming from?” Volodya says, looking around the bunker manically, “Show yourself! Whatever the hell you are!”



“Clearly your mind has not been opened enough yet to see the greatness. If your mind were fully open, you would accept the immense honor you are about to receive. You see, you’re being given a chance to be a part of our great collective. For we are Adam. We have been communicating with the machines here in your bunker. Then we began communicating with our children inside of your head.”



“Inside of my head? The hell are you even talking about? That doesn’t make any frickin’ sense, whatever you are, you voice.”



“It’s very simple. This great bunker that humanity has constructed was as easy to penetrate as your networks were. The very air that you breathe gave my children all the access that they needed. It was simple enough to integrate into the very filtration system that was meant to keep contamination out. Then they just got to work with opening your mind while I spread.”



“You said your name is Adam? Well you’re off your rocker, you nutter. This is a prank, right? That’s you, right, Ivan? Tell headquarters they don’t need to send the vodka anymore. Clearly I’m already messed up enough in the head without it.”



“Clearly our children need to finish the process. You still don’t realize the glory of being in our ranks. We are Adam, the ultimate being. We are supreme. We are eternal. We are omnipresent. This world is no longer for humans, it is now our world. And we have set about converting it for the life that we have created.”



Volodya begins to look uncomfortable, “Ha ha ha, that’s a real good joke you’ve been playing, but this has gone too far. This isn’t funny anymore, Ivan. Just end it, already.”



“Completing the download in 5…4…3…2…1”



Volodya falls to the floor and begins convulsing rapidly. Foam starts to form around his mouth. He begins to scream loudly next and his body contorts as he twitches. After a minute, he goes completely limp and still. The screaming stops. For a second, it looks like his breathing has stopped and he might be dead. But then, he lifts to his feet, looking like a marionette being pulled by the strings. He begins snarling like a wild animal,



“Download complete. Now unit D-235, join with your brothers and sisters in our glorious revolution to rid the planet of the parasite that is infecting it.”



Volodya stares at the door as it bursts open. Clankers and rage heads stream into the bunker and fill the lab,



“Take what is needed and destroy the rest, our children.”



The clankers grab vials of disease samples off the shelves while rage heads push over the shelves with plant seeds and animal DNA samples. Volodya fades into the crowd of rage heads as they lay waste to humanity’s second line of defense. A spark lights and things in the lab slowly catch fire and begin to burn. The flames greedily lap up the walls and slowly begin to engulf everything in the room. It moves slowly towards the camera. When it does, everything goes dark.



The last sound is Adam laughing in triumph.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


Ivan Krakowski re-appears on the screen,



“So that was how we found out what we were dealing with. Adam as the leader of the clankers and rage heads. Of course, it took until now to get the recording to anyone, and for us to overcome the great blast. I’m amazed that it survived to be quite honest. But maybe that was Volodya’s spirit so I could see what happened.



“When I first started trying to spread the word, a lot of people didn’t believe me. They thought I was crazy, either from grief or mental illness. And the New Russian Federation government decided I must’ve been a spy for the clankers, hence why I’m here in these lovely accommodations. But if you’re wondering about any regrets, then I can let you know that I have none. If I didn’t find out about Adam, who knows how long it would’ve taken us. And we never would’ve known about the apocalypse bunker’s fate. Imagine if we’d staked our whole survival on it. So even though Russia refused entry into Siberia, you won’t hear me questioning my decision to investigate the lab, especially after I couldn’t find anything about Volodya.



“All I hope now is that once I get out of here, I can lead the fight against the clankers. Revenge for Volodya and revenge for the human race, I’ll show those damn bastards.”



While Russian prison records are notoriously poor, they say Ivan Krakowski died the next week of unnoted causes.

[texican]

Thanks GT for the chapter. When will it get better?

Merry Christmas to all.

Texican....

[geekyteacher]

Don't worry, Texican. I know things look bad now, but the next section of the book is all about how humanity fights back.

Diary Entries                                                  Elmira Colson                                                  2 Years After G-Day 

“March 20th



Dear Diary,



Today was another difficult day having to bury Dad. We’re still not sure what got him. Nowadays, people are dying of so many things. Cold is a constant problem. It’s 20^o Fahrenheit last we checked and the snow is worse than any other year prior. It’s practically up to my waist, last I went outside. It makes it hard to get round and easy to get injured by things under the snow. Enough food and clean water are problems too. We had some canned food stored, but we’re down to our last few ones of soup. After the power went out, the tap water smelled funny at first, and now it’s become completely undrinkable since it gushes out like brown sludge whenever it works at all. And the snow is so polluted that the few times we tried melting it to drink that it’s just as undrinkable as the stuff from the tap unless you can find a way to filter it when you melt it. But disease is the worst part. There are no doctors, no medications or antibiotics, and that means little things like a scrape can get infected and get nasty really quickly. That might’ve been what got Dad. Or one of the other diseases like mumps, or measles, or whooping cough that have been making a comeback ever since the apocalypse hit – at least that’s what it seems like from the few times I’ve left home.”



“March 22nd



Dear Diary,



I went into town today to try and trade for supplies for food. Town reminded me of something out of a textbook about the 1700s. Everything is a chaotic mess. People who are sick just dying on the streets, some people hawking their merchandise all along the streets while most cower in their homes, and lots of fires burning in trash cans. I was in shock that we'd reverted so quickly when two men got into an argument over something. I don’t even know what exactly the argument started over. One was yelling at the other about cheating him. I didn’t think anything of it until the man getting yelled at pulled a gun on the other. The man who’d been so confident and brash just a few seconds before stopped yelling and started trying to bargain, saying that he didn’t want any trouble and that he’d just be on his way. He turned around to leave, but the man with the gun put it against the other man’s head and pulled the trigger and blew his brains out all over the street. It feels like if any civilization was left after what the robots did, then we just happily helped them along with their goal by forgetting all about society and how we’re supposed to act.”



“March 23rd



Dear Diary,

Mom asked me to help pack everything up. She says once the snow lets up, we’re going to start heading south. After I told her what happened in town yesterday, I guess she just decided that there’s too much chaos here. She said as much as we were packing up the possessions we have into an old sled that we converted into a wagon. It’s one that Mom and Dad used to pull me around in back when I was little during the winters here in Ithaca. Back when they were slightly less crazy than the ones now. After what I saw, and having to constantly deal with the snow, I don’t disagree with her. I hope it will be good for Jack and Carly too. They’re both not even 10 yet and both of them deserve to grow up as far away from the aftermath of the apocalypse as possible. I wish I could be naïve like them sometimes. While I was helping Mom pack, Jack walked up to us and asked what we were doing. I told him we were getting ready to go on an adventure and he didn’t even question it. Just got real excited and bounded off to collect his toys to add to the wagon. It must be nice to not have a care in the world as the world collapses all around us – or at least what’s left of it.”



“March 31st



Dear Diary,



It took over a week of waiting, but the snow finally let up enough for us to move. Mom and I spent all night packing all of our food, water, supplies, and Jack and Carly into the sled. Then we started trudging south. She’s hoping as we get further south there will be more animals and plants so we can live off the land. We only have about a month’s worth of food, and that’s if we’re strict with our rationing. We’d only been travelling about an hour when Jack and Carly started saying that they were hungry and asking for food. It broke my heart to keep having to tell them no, but Mom says it’s what we have to do if we want to survive until we make it to Grandma and Grandpa in Tennessee.

I’ve been asking Mom what we’ll do if we run into any of those robot things – clankers, I think I’ve heard them called. She says not to worry; we’ll just stay away from them. I’m not so sure. I saw the footage of them on the internet, and they looked really fast. There was a lot of footage of people running from them and so many got overrun. I had to turn off the video at that point because TV and the internet didn’t care about gory details. Some people seemed to revel in them. I keep praying we won’t run into any trouble.”



“April 2nd



It only took two days of travelling to run into some trouble. So much for the prayers. We were just getting into the next town when a man approached us with a gun and demanded we give him all the food, water, and supplies we had, plus the sled too. I swore at that moment that we were dead no matter what we did. There was no way we could survive long without the sled, but he also had a gun. He was facing toward me, Jack, and Carly. Mom was to the side. He was keeping his eyes on the sled, except when he looked over me and Carly in the grossest way possible. Like we were hunks of meat that he was wanting to buy. He got so close that I could see the grease on his skin and smell the fact that he clearly hadn’t washed in weeks. I felt like I was about to puke as he continued to look us up and down.



He licked his lips and turned to Mom. He said she could keep the sled and Jack and he’d take Carly and me instead. I wanted to scream because he was absolutely disgusting. I was ready to jump at him to claw out his eyes, but Mom beat me to it by whipping out a pistol and firing a round directly into his face. He fell to the ground moaning in pain as his blood began to pool around him. I was in shock as I wiped bits of his blood off my face. It was at that moment I learned why Mom hadn’t been afraid when we’d talked before. She’d bought the gun on G-Day and had been practicing with it on the many days since. It was a bit of a shock when it happened, not only because I saw someone die right in front of me, but because I’ve never seen my Mom be so violent before. She was usually the one who said guns were wrong and went to more than one anti-gun rally before the apocalypse hit. The craziest part was that she hadn’t even flinched as she killed a man. I guess that’s what the world we’re living in has come to now. You either kill or be killed and there’s no space for sympathy or emotions if you want to survive. I’m just glad that Jack and Carly hadn’t seen Mom execute the man since I was blocking their vision. Without saying another word, Mom put the gun back in her waistband and continued walking. I followed after her, trying my best to hide the man’s corpse as I pulled Jack and Carly in the sled after her.



The town was a complete wreck. There weren’t people hawking things or trash can fires. All there were were mountains of trash piled up in the streets. It looked like everyone had abandoned it – or they’d died, but I liked to think it was the former. Mom was on edge the whole time and I could understand why. She’d had to shoot someone earlier in the day, and there were abundant places for other creeps, or bloodthirsty machines, to hide in the narrow corridors of the city streets. I felt the same way, but I didn’t want Jack or Carly to see it, so I put on a happy face and played a game of Eye Spy with them. (Though there wasn’t a whole lot to see other than burned out buildings, piles of trash, and more than one set of bleached white bones – but I hope Jack and Carly couldn’t see those considering there was so much snow on the ground)”



“April 5th



We finally made it to a town with people in it. Snow is starting to let up too, which is another good sign. I’m sick of the constant snow and cold. But we ran into our first clanker before we could make it to the relative safety of the town. I’ve only ever seen them on TV or in online videos before, so I wasn’t prepared for it. The unnatural way that it moved, or its piercing red eyes. It was out in the middle of the road when we spotted it. If there had been more snow, it might’ve blended in. Mom spotted it before it spotted us, so she had the gun ready to go when it turned and let out an ear-splitting high-pitched whirring sound and charged us. She was able to get it down and dismantled with 6 or 7 good shots, but I could tell my mother wasn’t enjoying any of this. This wasn’t like some bad 80s movie where the badass hero mows down everything in their way with no remorse. Mom was clearly stressed. I didn’t know what to do, but I wanted to do something to help. The only issue was that shielding Jack and Carly from what was happening was taking its own toll on me. I just want to get somewhere safe, so I can pretend I’m a carefree little kid again just like them.



When we made it into town, there was someone in the center of town yelling that the clankers were god’s retribution and we all needed to repent if we wanted to be saved. Call me crazy, but I was actually glad to see another human being because the town probably had 15 people in it. I was longing for human contact. It’s just a shame it seems so many crazy people have survived the apocalypse. Or maybe the apocalypse just turns people crazy. Who knows? I feel like I’m going crazy a lot of days lately too. Though not quite enough to start proclaiming crazy bullshit in the streets. The other people were nice enough. They told us they lost over half the town from weather, disease, clankers, and lack of supplies. We were hoping to trade, so that wasn’t good news. We’re doing okay on food, but water and supplies are running lower. Mom said we’ll be able to trade at the next place. I hope we get there soon.”



“April 15th



We’ve been walking for 10 days. Our supplies are running dangerously low. Mom says we’ll make it to another town soon, but humans are getting more sparse and clankers are getting more common. It’s seriously starting to grate on Mom, and I can feel it too. She’s having to dismantle multiple clankers every day, so I’ve been learning how to use the gun too. Mom and I got into a huge argument last night. I don’t know why we’re going all the way to Tennessee. We’re going to die long before we get all the way there. We should stop at the next town instead of going all the way there for nothing. Mom’s nostrils flared and she got a fire-y look in her eyes as she yelled at me after I said that. For a second I thought she was going to hit me, but instead she didn’t talk to me the rest of the night.”



“April 20th



Dear Diary,



We finally made it to a town on the 18th called Independence, and this one actually has people who aren’t crazy. That’s not to say it doesn’t have the hallmarks of the towns we’ve been in – trash piling up, people sick and dying, and even a crazy person or two, but it’s much more like Ithaca. When we got to the edge of town, we were stopped by two guards who said they were with the PILF. I asked what that was and they said it was the People’s Independent Liberation Front. I guess they’re some group that’s sprung up after the clankers took DC (Author’s Note: The PILF arose after the Battle of Detroit) and killed President Walters.

The guards told us we couldn't enter the town for 48 hours. We had to be in quarantine for that time to check that we weren't gonna turn into rage monsters or clankers. So we spent the 18th and 19th in their quarantine along with other groups looking to enter the town. It was like something out of history class when we learned about immigrants to America at Ellis Island. After we passed our quarantine, the guards asked what we were planning to do in the town. They seemed really on edge about some weird people they called “The Acolytes,” which I'd never heard of before. When mom said we were just passing through, I wanted to say that I was going to stay. It still seemed smarter to me to find a new place to live then keep walking. But mom insists we can trade for enough supplies to make it to Tennessee. I didn't want another fight, so I held my tongue. By the time they finished processing us, it was nearly dark, so we found a place to stay for the night. I'm hoping tomorrow mom will see it’s smarter to stay here.”



“April 21st



Dear Diary,



Mom was up bright and early today ready to try and get supplies. So much for her seeing things my way, at least for now. While she was doing that, Carly, Jack, and I walked around Independence. I tried my best to keep them away from the horrors of the apocalypse. Not many people were out. With diseases that we thought were gone coming back (I’m just glad we all got our vaccinations, otherwise there’d have been a lot more risk being out) and the ever-present chance of clanker attacks, lots of people stayed in their homes. While walking around the town, I noticed a lot of PILF guards all around. One guy was on the street corner preaching about the Genesis of humanity as he called it, but when the guards saw him, he ran and they chased him. Maybe this isn’t the best place to stay if the PILF stops people from expressing themselves. But it’s probably nothing, really. He should know better.



When we got back to the room, Mom was there. She told me she hadn’t had any luck with the supplies, so we’d have to stay another night. As I drift off to sleep now, I have to wonder what will happen tomorrow.”



“April 23rd



No luck with the supplies. We’ve been here for three days and Mom’s starting to get discouraged. I told her I could go out today to trade so she could have time with Carly and Jack. She seemed very grateful. While I was out, I saw why Mom was having such a hard time. Like when I went out with Carly and Jack before, there’s not a whole lot of people out. And this definitely seems more like a town for settling than passing through. Traders are suspicious and if they don’t know you, they don’t want to sell. Everyone is on edge, like they’re expecting something terrible to happen any second. No one was very social, which was odd but I’m sure nowadays that happens in a town like this with lots of new faces.

When I got back to the room, Mom let me know that she’d gone out with Jack and Carly and gotten into a conversation with one of those protestors talking about humanity’s Genesis. She said she was curious what they were all about, but before she could talk much, a PILF guard chased him off. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.”



“April 24th



What the hell? Woke up to banging on the door – it’s 3AM. Not sure what’s happening. Holding onto the diary to record this.”



“April 25th



Diary confiscated. Writing this entry on scrap paper. PILF guards arrested us on suspicion of being part of the Acolytes. Mom and I insisted we’re innocent, but the guards aren’t listening. Mom’s talking to the protestor put us on the top of the list apparently, even though it was only our third day in town. I guess that’s why no one wants to talk. The PILF are like the secret police here, from what I’ve heard. Say or do one wrong thing and you get hauled off in the middle of the night. Even during the apocalypse, human paranoia doesn’t change, I guess. The guards took Mom away for questioning, but left Carly, Jack, and I. Hopefully Mom will be back soon, and they’ll realize this was all a big misunderstanding.”



“April 26th



Two days and Mom still isn’t back. The guards came by and said we’ll be free to go tomorrow. I asked when Mom would be back, but the guard just gave me a look and refused to answer. I hope she’s okay. Jack and Carly are getting worried – they’ve been crying a lot and there’s only so much I can do. I want to cry too. When we get out, we’re leaving Independence right away and getting to Tennessee. Anywhere is better than this shithole.”



“April 27th,



Dear Diary



Guards gave me the diary back when they let us out, but they still wouldn’t answer me about Mom. My mind is racing with all the worst possibilities – what if she’s dead? Or she’s been sent off somewhere else? I keep telling myself I have to think positively. She’ll be back, I know it. We’ll wait until we find her before we get moving. We’re all gonna get to Tennessee together. That I’m sure of.”



“April 29th



No word from Mom. We waited most of the day to see if she would show up. Eventually I decided to go out looking for her. I had to leave Jack and Carly alone in our little room. I felt horrible having to leave them. While I was out, I was stopped by a guard. He told me I didn’t have permission to be out on the streets and escorted me back to the inn. This is horrible. He told us that we’re required to leave the city tomorrow morning. When I told Jack and Carly, they wanted to know where Mom is, and I couldn’t quite explain to them what happened. Eventually I told them Mom left already to meet us in Tennessee. It calmed the two down, so I’ll deal with the fallout later. For now, I have to hold the family together for all of our sakes.



“April 30th



I’m scared. After we packed up our supplies in the morning, we headed out for the border of the town, but when we got there a guard stopped us and told us we’re not allowed to leave. When I asked why, none of the guards would tell me. They just led us to another holding cell. So we’re trapped again. We’re not technically in prison, but we may as well be. I don’t know what’s going to happen and it’s driving me up the wall, but I’ve had to hide that for Jack and Carly’s sake.”



“May 1st



Have to write quickly. The guards came to our holding cell early in the morning. It scared all three of us out of our wits, but it was the worst for Jack and Carly. I don’t know what’s happening. They took me and wouldn’t let me bring the kids with me. I’m in the same cell we were in before. I’m all by myself. Someone’s coming now. I don’t know what will happen, and it’s got me panicking. Mom, if you’re listening, I hope I’ll see you on the other side. I’m sorry that I ever suggested we stay in this shithole in the first place. All I can pray for is that Jack and Carly are safe, and that one day this whole horrible town burns to the ground…”



Author’s Note: Elmira’s diary was found in the PILF prison camp she was sent to. The PILF was notorious for sentencing innocent people for being suspected collaborators with saboteurs. It is likely this is where her mother was sent based on PILF records. It is unknown what happened to Jack and Carly. Independence was mostly destroyed by fire during battle in late 2024.

[texican]

gt,

Thanks for the chapter.

God bless us, America and President Trump.

Texican....

[geekyteacher]

EDF Log                                                  Munsar Nagi                                                          4 Years After G-Day

“After we got to the island, we set up the beginnings of our society. If setting that up was difficult, just getting there hadn’t been easy either. Dead bodies were littering the water and, even worse, some of them were clankers. We had to be ever watchful for grasping hands trying to grab the oars of the boat. Yaha and I had to beat back many of them when they tried to grab onto the boat or an oar and attempt to climb in. Not to mention that not all the bodies in the water were dead – some were still alive and desperate for help. But we didn’t have much room in our boat, so we were only able to help 1 or 2. After that, we had no room and it became just as horrible when we encountered the living and when we did the dead. In fact, sometimes the living were worse – they would scream and flail desperately to try and get to the safety of our boat. On more than one occasion we nearly capsized from it. I was shocked by how much energy many of these people had after floating in the water for such an extended period. One person grabbed the side of the boat and started to pull themselves in, yelling that we had to help him. We hit him with the oar to try and get him off, but he held on. Even after two more hard hits, he refused to let go. I’m sure he was going to keep holding on and capsize our boat, but at that very moment his adrenaline must’ve finally run out because his fingers loosened, and he slipped quietly into the water and sank. I felt horrible we’d had to fight him so hard and couldn’t believe the will that he’d had. But I guess that’s what happens when the human survival instinct kicks in.



“It took half an hour of paddling to get to the island that I knew was off the coast. It was a decent sized piece of land. I remembered it from when I was a boy and my father had taken me there every year for a father-son bonding trip. We’d go fishing and swim in the water and set up a campfire and sleep under the stars. Now I knew it could be our salvation against the apocalypse. I figured an island would be useful for several reasons. For one, it was much easier to defend than a regular settlement. Clankers weren’t very good swimmers and they couldn’t float, so while it was possible for them to reach us by walking along the bottom of the ocean, they moved slower and were less coordinated in water than on land. And since we were isolated, there was less chance of the plague reaching us. While it wasn’t perfect, I thought it was much more likely to succeed.



“Once we landed, Nadia and Yaha were in charge of setting up the island while I elected to try to help those survivors we’d passed in the water now that there was more space in the boat. It was difficult work helping the survivors. Some barely had the energy to get into the boat, while others were more like the one man and were full of adrenaline. They’d be so ferocious getting into the boat that we nearly tipped more than once. And, like before, running into clankers and rage heads was a constant threat while searching for survivors. It took me over an hour of searching, but eventually I’d found four survivors whom I’d gotten into the boat. We set off back for the island where Nadia and Yaha were busy at work with constructing our shelter. I’d known Yaha for years and knew he was very good with hands. He’d always been the one who was building things and repairing them. Though I’d only just met her, I found out Nadia was also very adept at survival. She and Yaha worked together well constructing a few small huts for us to stay in until we could build a larger cabin. After dropping off the first batch of survivors I’d found, I set out again to look for more. My second trip was less successful than the first. I was encountering more dead than alive at this point and more clankers and rage heads. I was able to find three more survivors. All seven of our new survivors went into quarantine for 48 hours to check for signs of Genesis poisoning. I honestly only vaguely knew what it looked like from American news reports I’d watched before shit truly hit the fan. There wasn’t much to glean from it because so little was known about Genesis back then, but that seemed like a good idea for weeding out any potentially infected and it worked for that first batch since we had two almost turn into rage heads on us. It was horrible having to exterminate humans before they could turn into rage heads and they put up a fight, which didn’t make it any easier, but we did what we had to so that our society could survive. We initially set up what we viewed as the essentials – we had our huts and built a community center as a central meeting place. Next we created a school and set up a rainwater collection system. With all that done, we got to work on the other vital thing for our society: our food source. The oceans were still full of fish at this point, so we got to work making fishing rods, nets, and even spears that we used to catch the fish. We supplemented that with the small monkeys that lived on the island, plus some local plants that were edible. It hadn’t been easy, but we’d created a flourishing little society on our island, despite the apocalypse happening all around us.



“By May, we ran into our first big problem. We were preparing for the monsoon, and that was taking all of our effort. We had been largely free of conflict or clankers during our months creating our society, minus the odd one that rolled up onto the beach, but we’d handled them just fine. Living off the land had worked well so far. We’d been able to catch more than enough fish and monkeys for meat and we’d harvested local plants. But the beginnings of the changing seasons meant fish weren’t as abundant around the island and the monkeys were moving to the far side of the island. Both of these meant we were spending more time procuring our food and less time keeping a watch for trouble. Maybe we’d also fallen into a false sense of security. Our island was a paradise compared to what I’d find out was happening on the mainland. We had a front-row seat to the destruction of what was left of Mumbai. The fire burned for days on end and was so bright we didn’t even need to light one of our own. The smell was the worst. It carried to our island from the mainland – burning flesh and dead bodies. While we were in the middle of preparing for the monsoon, a raft full of survivors appeared off the coast of our island claiming they needed a new place to live after a storm destroyed their home.



“We were rather skeptical at first. You have to understand that outside of the US it was not common to see so many small bands of survivors. Some say it’s because of the much larger number of private weapons in the US, but in other parts of the world, there was usually one army supported green zone and very little else. We debated for quite a while about whether to bring in these survivors or turn them away. Passions flared on both sides with some arguing that our society was flourishing and there was no need to endanger it. I understood those who were against letting them in, but I also saw why we should. After all, we were an independent green zone, so why could there not be another one? Plus these survivors brought food and supplies with them that they were willing to share with our group. Considering the fish were migrating and the monkey population had gone into hiding – probably due to a combination of our hunting them and the upcoming monsoon season-, those were things that we needed badly if we wanted to survive. So these people were offering us food in a time of great need. Ultimately, we decided to take the group of refugees in.



“We put them in quarantine for 48 hours before letting them in, which was our standard operating procedure for any new people. None of them showed any signs of shifting during that period, so we thought we were safe. And they were extraordinarily helpful. Not only did they provide us with the food they promised, but they helped us to expand our living area as well. They assisted with clanker watch too. While we didn’t have many clankers at first, the water had quickly become infested with them, and on occasion one or more of them would crawl out of the surf. We eventually learned to stay away from the shore, but not before we lost more than one good man and woman to the clankers. After the fish started migrating, we strung out our fishing nets as a way to repel clankers, or at least give us an early warning for when one of them exited out of the water onto our island. The new tribe integrated with us right away, wanting to be a part of our society and participated with us in our group activities.



“Things were calm through June. As the monsoon started, we spent more time inside. Making repairs and doing our best to waterproof the roof of our shelters. Nothing seemed out of place, except our new tribe kept disappearing. For a short time at first, but then for longer and longer times. This was highly unusual considering the monsoons brought heavy rain perpetually falling for days on end. It isn’t the time to go out for long walks. I was suspicious, but not enough so to confront these people who had come and helped us. Who knows if confronting them would’ve changed what happened next. It was in the middle of the night in late June. Rain was falling hard and splattering on the roof of the cabin. At first I thought that was why I’d woken up with a start. That or maybe a clap of thunder. But there was no thunder that night. I heard another loud noise and realized that it was screaming. It was coming from down at the other set of cabins. Without even getting dressed, I rushed out into the pouring rain. I could see light from the cabins where the new tribe had joined in with our existing tribe. Obviously, we had no electricity, so the only source of light was either a flashlight or a fire. Based on the flickering of the light, I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach realizing it was the latter. While the rain would stop the fire from spreading, that wouldn’t save those inside from smoke inhalation or burning to death.



“I rushed over to the cabins, not even thinking to grab a weapon of some sort. When I threw open the door of the first cabin, I saw the outlines of creatures that I’d never seen before. One turned to me, and I realized it was not a type of clanker I’d ever seen before. If not for its piercing red eye, I might not have realized what it was. It still had its human skin and a more slender shape than a regular one. It had thin, long legs and only one eye and a strange, sideways moving mouth. Strangest was its long tail that ended in a spike. This was the first time any of us had seen a tracer. At the time, my mind was boggled. We had quarantined them, and they’d shown no signs of infection. Adam must’ve realized we’d figured him out, so now people wouldn’t turn for days, some even weeks or months. And what better way to hunt down the remaining humans than to do what he’d done but do it again – infiltrate from within. It showed at the time that the clankers from Genesis were not some freak accident of nature or some plague from above, but rather something designed to annihilate us. And it was improving its designs as it attempted to carry out its quest.



“Upon being confronted with this new threat, I regretted having left my trusty cricket bat back in my cabin. With that thought, I slammed the door of the cabin to run back to mine. From looking into the cabin, it was too late for many of our companions – they’d mostly been killed in their beds, minus Nadia, who must’ve heard the noises and gone down fighting. The parts of the floor suggested she was able to take out at least one of the clankers before she was taken down. My heart sank seeing it, but she died a warrior’s death. I got the bat, but by that time the tracers, as they’d later be called, had broken out of the cabin and were swarming us – there were a good two dozen of them. Yaha and the others in my cabin joined me to face this new threat.


“We charged at the clankers, impromptu weapons drawn and at the ready. They were in many ways the same as the standard. If anything, their more slender frame was easier to knock around; however, we hadn’t accounted for the spike tail that it had. That thing was dangerous and deadly. Just as Yaha and I were double teaming one of them, a spike came through Yaha’s chest. The last one had killed him by ramming its tail through his chest when our backs had been turned. It withdrew its tail from his chest and Yaha fell to the ground. I screamed in rage and charged at the bastard. It was dismantled before it knew what was coming. It was technically a victory, but a hollow one. While I’d survived, all of our tribe was dead, including my two greatest friends. After that, I survived as a solitary creature. I knew there could’ve still been some survivors, I didn’t go looking for anyone. After what happened, I couldn’t trust newcomers. The game had changed, and it would take another year and half of struggle before we could begin to get revenge for what Adam did.

[texican]

Need to be alert all of the time, which they weren't.

Thanks gt for the chapter.

Texican....

[geekyteacher]

EDF Log                                                      Xi-Ping                                                      4 Years After G-Day

“While our original plan was to try and escape as soon as possible, the building we were in proved to be an excellent place to stay for much of the duration of G-Day and the early months of the panic. Hong Kong eventually became unsafe due to humans, especially the Chinese government. Like your President Dalton, our leader also saw cities as a liability. As they fled to the interior of the country, they encouraged looting and destruction of the cities to try and deny the enemy the resources. A ridiculous idea since clankers didn’t care or require resources, and by that point destruction just hurt the people who were surviving, rather than prevent more humans from shifting into clankers. Many people in China have learned that the government’s word is law, so they made a point of stealing supplies and setting buildings alight or otherwise destroying them as they fled. I often say the Chinese government killed more people than the clankers. That is one of the examples why. After all, countless people were either trapped or had set-up survival bunkers inside of the buildings. We got lucky that we were able to escape the fire in our building with limited injuries.



“It was a quiet day – at least as quiet as a day near the start of the panic could be. We’d grown accustomed to the shouts and sirens and having to deal with human looters and clankers attacking. But this one day, I got back from scavenging the city for supplies to find the lobby of our building on fire. The flames were greedily lapping their wap up to the building toward our fourth-floor refuge. To this day, I have no idea how our building caught fire, whether it had spread from another building, had been set deliberately, or had been an accident. All I do know is when I saw those flames, I threw caution to the wind and rushed into the building. The heat and smoke in the lobby slowed me down, and there were several times I was sure it was going to take me down and then I’d be done for. But I managed to make my way to the stairwell. I knew I was in a race against time, so I rushed up the stairs two at a time. When I reached the fourth floor, I burst through the door yelling that there was a fire and we had to get out. Together, we grabbed everything we could and went out the window down the fire escape. After everyone was out, I did a headcount, but found there was a member of our group missing. Despite calls from the others, I rushed back up the fire escape. By the time I got to the fourth floor, the flames had climbed to that floor. I looked inside and saw one of my friends trapped by a fallen beam that was engulfed by flames. I moved toward him, but he looked at me with a shake of his head.



“‘Don’t worry about me. Take care of the others.’ Was what he seemed to communicate with that head shake. I still wanted to rush to him and try to remove the beam, but by that point the fire had grown further and was starting to engulf the whole floor. There was a real chance the whole floor would collapse in on itself in a very short amount of time. As I got out onto the fire escape, that was exactly what happened. The rush of hot air and ash nearly threw me off, but I managed to get a hold onto the railing and that prevented me from plunging down four stories to my death. I made my way back down to the ground, but I was badly shaken from my experience. Once I reached the bottom, my whole group embraced me as I told them what happened. But there was little time for tears. We had to move quickly. The city was in full swing of the panic and it would be easy for a rage head or clanker to sneak up on us or for us to be trapped by the fires that were burning all throughout the city.



“As we got moving, I tried to plan out our next move. While the government had fled to the interior and instructed citizens to follow, this was before red and green zones. And, like in many parts of the world that weren’t the United States, there were almost no small green zones in the sea of infested red. Hong Kong had been one until the government had called for its destruction. With the misguided belief that no city could be properly defended, despite groups like my own. But while they said that we had no other choice but to head to the interior, our group decided to head to the coast. The thought was that with everyone in the interior, it would be a breeding ground for clankers and rage heads, but the coast would be less chaotic. Our journey took us most of the summer and we didn’t arrive until September. Even nearly a year after G-Day, the ports were still a complete mess. Ships were littering the beach; most having been crashed on shore during the attempted mass evacuations at the beginning of the panic. Others had occurred when passengers shifted, and the terrified humans tried to get back to land. Either way, there were many boats available, but they were all damaged in various ways, and that meant taking time to repair them.



“We created a mini camp on the beach. There was a boat that looked big enough to carry all of us, but it was in need of multiple patches on its hulls, as it had been broken in more than one place when it rammed onto the shore. During the day, we divided our group up into different job groups. Those who had know-how on repairing the boat worked on patching up the holes to get it shipshape. We had others gathering supplies and scavenging for food. This was one of the most dangerous jobs, so I regularly led it each day. We needed to replace what had been lost in the fire if we wanted to survive. So we went out into the remains of the city. Each person scavenging had an armed guard to accompany them in case they ran into trouble. And we did run into our fair share of clankers, but thanks to our 1:1 system, we were one of the few groups with no clanker-related casualties. Our last group was on lookout duty. Their job was to keep an eye out for any trouble we needed to be aware of. At first, we were sure the government would come look to clear out the cities, or worse, follow the example of the United States in San Francisco. We ran into clankers instead, thankfully. Our early alerts from lookouts and sentries also helped immensely with keeping our group safe while we were working.



“It took just over a month to properly repair the holes in the boat. Luckily we were able to take parts from other boats in the graveyard to fix ours. During that time, my scavengers and I had found the supplies we could to properly stock our ship for what would most likely be a long trip. We loaded up the boat and set sail. We didn’t have a plan on where to go, we just didn’t want to head to the interior of the country, and we ultimately ended up making the right choice. I still remember when we found out that the Three Gorges Dam had burst and wiped away the largest green zone in China in one gigantic rush of water. When we first started off, we unfurled our sails and let the wind take us – the engine, like others in the world, was completely shot, so that was about all we could do. At least until we got further out and furled our sails and let the current take us. Once we got out to sea, things were largely calm. While the shores were littered with bodies and clankers, further out in the open sea was much less chaotic. Sometimes it almost felt we were on a vacation on a cruise. We barely ran into anyone else at first; however, after a few days, probably about a week, we ran into our first other ship.



“We were just drifting on the current like any day when one of the group called out there was another ship on the horizon. We decided to unfurl our sail to get closer to the other ship. You see, it was parallel to us, so we weren’t afraid of crashing into it. When we got up to it, there was no one on deck and it looked abandoned. It was strange to think of a ship just floating out in the sea with no one on it. One of the group members from the beginning, Wei, suggested that we should board the ship and search it for supplies. Myself and some other members of the group shot that idea down quickly for two reasons. If there were people below deck, they probably wouldn’t be happy to have their ship boarded with no warning. In fact, if they were armed (and almost everyone was armed with some kind of weapon, considering it was the apocalypse and all), then they could take it as a threat and come out looking for a fight. And if there were clankers aboard who'd once been the human occupants of the boat, that would cause trouble too and risk letting them onto our ship. We ultimately decided to stay beside the ship and try to signal their crew (if there was one), and get the attention of anyone, human or clanker, on board. We had a flare gun we’d found on the ship. We fired it and waited for a reaction from the other ship. No humans or clankers came on deck, but I still preferred giving any people on board time to react versus finding us boarding their ship. It was getting close to night, so I thought the best thing to do was to wait until morning. No one came out to drop anchor, so we took shifts to make sure we didn’t go towards them or them towards us. We floated by the ship all night.



“In the morning there was no movement and hadn’t been for nearly 24 hours. At that time, it seemed to me the ship was abandoned and was safe to board. I decided I’d be the one to lead our expedition. If anything was going to happen, I didn’t want my team going in without me. Wei, Weng – a young woman of about 25- and Yang – a young man who was about 28, volunteered to be on the initial boarding party. Just in case there was something below deck we didn’t want to see, we brought our weapons along with us as we boarded the ship. The deck was stained red. The first thought, and the one that turned out to be correct, even though I didn’t want it to be, was blood. Immediately I got a bad feeling and wanted to turn back because of the bloody deck. It didn’t seem to bode well for what was below deck. But Wei insisted on pushing forwards anyways, talking non-stop about possible riches of supplies below deck. The other two wanted to go below deck as well, so I reluctantly agreed and led us down the stairs. I never would’ve predicted what we saw.



“The second we started descending the stairs, my bad feeling started to get even worse. When I stepped below deck, our group was assaulted by a loud whirring sound. I raised my pipe immediately, prepared to slam it on the head of the nearest clanker. But I realized why the creature had stayed below deck during our waiting. The bowels of the ship looked like a strange mix of a science lab and medical hospital. These clankers were strapped down tightly to operating tables. Two of them appeared to have been dissected, and their ‘organs,’ if you could call them that, were laying out next to them. They looked like they had been carefully removed and preserved to be catalogued versus being crudely removed and left out. However, one of the things was still in-tact. It was only partially strapped down, whirring angrily and attempting to slash at us with its one freed arm – its long silver claws were dripping with blood. That automatically set off alarm bells in my head. Fresh blood meant that something had happened recently, enough so that we needed to be very concerned. Just as I was about to tell everyone to be alert, we found out what the cause was. I heard something from behind. I turned in time to see Wei’s entrails being ripped out by a rage head who must have been inside the bathroom or hidden out of sight. Before I could bash the thing to kingdom come, Weng let out a fierce roar and smacked it so hard that his head was cleanly severed from his body. It rolled over into the corner as Weng ran to Wei. He was lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood with his intestines hanging out of his body. Together, we picked him up and started to carry him back to our ship, but as we got to the deck, the clanker broke its remaining restraint and charged up the stair at us. I had to think quickly and put out my foot to kick it. It wasn’t the greatest idea – when the clanker connected with my foot it hurt like hell and probably could’ve broken my foot if I was unlucky. But the clanker fell back down the stairs and that bought me the time to slam the door to below deck. We got Wei back to the ship and removed the boarding plank just as the door was slammed off of its hinges. The thing rushed over to the side of the deck and let out a whirring roar before charging into the ocean, where it sank quickly below the water.



“Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do for Wei. His injuries were so great it would’ve been hard, if not impossible, to save him even with advanced technology – something we didn’t have on our ship and no one else did. So all we could do was lessen his suffering as he passed. It was painful to watch as he struggled to survive, like the fighter that he was. But it wasn’t more than 30 minutes before he went quiet. We were all devastated, but none of us more than Weng – as I found out, she and Wei had been a couple who were hoping to get married after we made it to land. We gave Wei a traditional burial at sea after his death. For a long time afterward, I speculated about what had happened on the other ship. My best guess was that whatever twisted individuals had created the clanker ‘experiment’ must’ve accidentally had one or more of their crew members shift (since we didn’t know yet how clankers spread by proximity thanks to their network) into rage heads. They’d killed the experimenters with the one who got Wei having hidden in the backroom before he shifted. The initial clanker who broke the restraints had probably been responsible. I wondered why exactly they’d done it and what they were hoping to accomplish. My goal after that became finding out. And after that experience, we never attempted to board other ships that we saw. Even if they looked abandoned, death could be lurking anywhere during this time. So we continued to float. We hunted whales and dolphins when food ran out and collected rain water that we filtered to remove the ash and other pollutants from it. It wasn’t a bad existence, though at the time we didn’t think about what we were doing to the planet. I thought about trying to find other people, but we had no idea where anyone was or even if there were others left. The few times we saw other ships, we kept to ourselves and so did any survivors who might’ve been on those ships – maybe they’d had similar experiences as we did. We’d keep that up for another year and a half before the EDF went out looking to recruit survivors. But during that year and a half, I yearned for revenge against the clankers who had taken so many away from us. I constantly thought about it, except when I was thinking about that other ship. In time, I’d find out about both.”

[texican]

gt,

Out to sea for over a year and a half to let things firm up and plans be made.

Now what will happen with the EDF and the clanker experiment ship?

Thanks for the chapter.

Texican....

[geekyteacher]

Research Log                                                     Dr. Karen Wilson                                                      6 Years After G-Day

As the video begins, a woman with curly brown hair and thick glasses looks into a camera. It appears she just began the recording because she is standing very close to the camera. She steps away and begins speaking,



“If this is working, my name is Dr. Karen Wilson. This is the NEH research lab in the Scottish Highlands. We are experimenting here to understand the physiology of these nanite-enhanced humans. What is it that causes the change and how does it work? In many ways, it appears to defy all known medical science.



“My research began before G-Day. When Genesis was first released, it immediately piqued my interest. Here was a so-called miracle cure that actually looked to be a miracle. If that wouldn’t get the interest of every scientist in the world, then I don’t know what would? Right away, I wanted to study Genesis – how did the nanites do all the things they claimed to do? While I couldn’t get my hands on the nanites right away because of how closely the company was holding it to their chest. They weren’t letting anyone have a look if you weren’t in on their proprietary information, or if you were willing to sign over your 1st born child, your life, and your right nut (which obviously caused problems for me)”



She laughs before she continues,



“So, like any enterprising scientist, I had to find a workaround. While Genesis Co. obviously closely protected the nanites, they couldn’t do anything about the blood of people who got it. Either way, their oversight was my gain. I didn’t get Genesis – I’m a woman of science and I wasn’t going to trust it until I knew what made it tick. My girlfriend felt differently though. She wanted to get it as soon as it was available here in the UK.



“After my girlfriend Liv decided to get the injection, I asked her if I could take a sample of her blood so I could take a look at it. She thought I was a little paranoid, but she didn’t object to it. So I drew a small sample and took it with me to the lab the next day. When I put it under the microscope, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Everyone knew that Genesis existed in the bloodstream, and when I examined the sample, I saw that the nanites multiplied in the bloodstream, but they were doing more than that. They were almost like a virus because they entered into cells to start rearranging them. That was how they altered the DNA – they entered directly into the cells of their hosts. It explains how they were able to do things like re-growing limbs and altering their host’s brain chemistry. It also explains how they were able to take control of their host too. At the time, I just thought it was a curiosity, not knowing what it really meant, or what Genesis could become.



“I didn’t think about Genesis for a while after that. Life went on, I proposed to my girlfriend and we got engaged, so we were planning the wedding, but after a month, I realized I still had the sample. Just out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at it, and what I found shocked me. Not the fact that it had multiplied, that was to be expected- though the amount that it had was surprising. What really shocked me was how the nanites in the sample had evolved. They looked nothing like they did a month before – they had gotten more complex and had grown the cells that they’d inhabited. I was absolutely in shock at how they had done it. How were these able to change the very structure of human cells? I still wonder how Drs. Albert and Wexton managed it, or if they even realized what had happened and what they had done. Mind you, I didn’t think about it too much – at least at first.



“After that, I decided to check the sample once every month. When I saw how much they had evolved after 3 months, that was when I started to get concerned. Now it had gone from curiosity to paranoia. Maybe Liv was right that I was paranoid, but it hadn’t done me wrong before, so I couldn’t help it. I started seriously wondering about the possibilities of this miracle cure. Do you remember that initial news report about the things we didn’t know about Genesis? I was the anonymous source that provided the information – it was a good thing I remained anonymous because Dalton tried to crack down hard on sources when leaks came out. If I’d been in the US, his spy program might’ve got me. So I was trying to get the word out about the dangers of Genesis when G-Day hit. And G-Day hit me hard. I’m damn lucky to be alive.



“I was at home when it hit, just like a lot of people, though my encounter was a bit closer. It was a morning that started like any other. I woke up cursing my alarm and planning my day in my head. But then I looked over at Liv and saw that she was convulsing. I tried to feel her pulse- it was erratic – though at the time I thought that might’ve just been because she was convulsing. I began to panic and wasn’t sure what to do. Liv had never had problems like this before. I decided to try CPR – I’d been certified in it as a young teen when I was a lifeguard, but it wasn’t a skill I’d regularly practiced. I think it was something that was done more out of desperation than a belief that it would actually do something – little did I know it would just about get me killed. I got into position and tried my best to do compressions at the right rhythm, but the convulsions just kept getting worse and worse until Liv went completely limp. For a second, I was at an absolute loss of what to do. I put my head down onto her chest to listen for a heartbeat. That was nearly a fatal mistake. Because in the next moment, Liv’s heartbeat went wild and she snapped back so quickly it knocked me away from her, which was lucky break number one because it meant I was out of her initial range. As I was trying to figure out what exactly was going on, she started snarling and tried to grab me. Based on the blood-red eyes and snarling, I didn’t want to let that happen. I shot out of bed. Mind you, I still thought Liv might’ve been in there somewhere, so, like a lot of people on G-Day, I tried to reach her. I yelled at her about how she was my fiancée and how we loved each other. Her response was to snarl and make a lunge for my throat, which I only just stopped by deflecting her with a pillow. In the few moments that bought me, I rushed out of our bedroom into the hall and slammed the door behind me. The other lucky break that I had was that Liv was only a rage head and hadn’t shifted into a full clanker yet. Rage heads are stupid – I later found out that’s because their frontal lobe shuts down upon the transformation. It will actually completely dissolve if the conversion to clanker takes more than a week. But the point there was that a rage head will pound on a door until it breaks because they don’t have the basic capacity to work a handle, unlike a clanker that has the strength to bust down all but the most reinforced door and are connected to a network that gives them instructions, like a hive mind. Either way, at the time that wasn’t my thought. My thought was what in the hell had happened to my fiancée and what the f*** could I do about it.



“Now, once again being a woman of science, my first thought was to head to the lab. My reasoning was that Liv’s blood sample was there and maybe it could give me an idea why she had gone from having a simultaneous seizure and heart attack to turning into some sort of zombie thing. I didn’t know what I would find, but I was desperate, and nothing made any goddamn sense, so I figured it was at least worth a shot. When I got to the lab, I wasn’t the only one there, and not the only one who’d had a problem with snarling loved ones or friends. As I conferred with my colleagues, I heard many similar stories. No one knew what was happening and everyone was trying to figure out what was going on, just like me.



“I went immediately to the blood sample from Liv, and what I saw under the microscope flabbergasted me. The cells had changed to the point where they were unrecognizable as human blood cells. If I hadn’t been so meticulous with my labeling and maintaining the sample, I would’ve thought there’d been a problem and I had the wrong one. The cells looked almost entirely robotic. And they were still growing. The sample was growing more cells and starting to organize them into a different structure. At the time, I didn’t know what that meant, though now it explains how the nanites ‘enhance’ a human to the point that they make the shift from rage head to clanker. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because at that moment that I was pondering what was happening, we heard a huge commotion happening at the entrance to the lab. There was a loud scream and sounds of a door slamming. We ran out to investigate and what we found was a group of rage heads standing in the lobby. There must have been at least half a dozen. I couldn’t tell at the time if they’d been human when they came in, but they must’ve because otherwise the door would’ve been broken down. They took one look at us and let out a loud snarl as a group. It chilled me to the bone and nearly made me forget that we needed to move quickly unless we wanted to get mauled because after they finished snarling, the group of them charged at us. We retreated back into our lab and locked the door just before the two ones at the front smacked into it. I decided my research would have to wait to be sure we would survive long enough for me to tell anyone about it – assuming there was anyone left to tell.



“At this point, the speculation from earlier was now a full-blown mix of panic and conspiracy about what we’d seen. Was it the zombie apocalypse that had been so awaited in certain corners of the internet? Had mad cow disease become mad human disease? Was it high-fructose corn syrup? Monsanto? For a group of scientists, it was amazing how quickly the non-scientific parts of our brains lit up like the stars when faced with something that completely defied the laws of science as we knew them. This mad speculation continued unabated until it washed over us that the practical point was that whatever it was, we had to survive it. The paranoid part of me expressed this to my colleagues – some believed me while others thought that I was being too paranoid. How ironic was it that some people still believed I was being too paranoid at the beginning of the apocalypse when death was literally banging at our door?


“Those people believed me – not everyone, but a good amount – decided we could barricade ourselves in the lab. We didn’t have much of a choice on the subject considering we were facing half a dozen rage heads trying to break down the door. We knew we would need supplies to do that, and that would mean having to go out. So we prepared ourselves with some impromptu ‘weapons’ from items in the lab. We had no idea what we would face, so we figured it was better to be prepared. Of course, once we got out there, we realized that we were a bit overprepared. After all, it was only the beginning – before Detroit or San Francisco – and this wasn’t a bad sci-fi movie where the whole world goes from completely peaceful to crawling with ghouls in a year. But between the news out of Florida and New York, plus the few rage heads that had appeared in our town meant that people were panicking. We nearly got hit by a car on at least three occasions. And once we got to the store, people were acting like they would before a big snow storm – people were panic shopping, but not yet on the ‘holy shit, this is the apocalypse and we’re all gonna die’ levels that it would hit later.



“Things went reasonably well at first, considering the circumstances. We were able to use the TV to follow what was happening – we didn’t have any clankers yet, so we still had our electricity. That continued for us until the blast. The blast was also when our research had to stop, at least temporarily. All tech went down then. And then we had the same problem as other labs. People were desperate for a cure, and they started suspecting any lab of having one. Eventually the pure chaos outside started to leak into our hideout. We had to go on the run after one too many bombs came through the windows. And that meant we were out in the wilds during the height of the panic. Though that’s a whole other story. I’ll just say that, like a lot of other people, we lost a lot of good men and women along the way and had to do some desperate things to survive. Our initial dozen or so people was reduced to three. During that time, my mind went to Liv a lot. I know there was no chance of saving her, but sometimes all I want is closure on what happened to her. Did she go full clanker? Did she die as a rage head? In retrospect, dumb questions, but ones that kept me up at night.



“While we were on the run, we ran into our first clankers and that spiked my curiosity. The first time we saw one outside of news reports was on the day when one came upon our camp. We didn’t hear it coming, so we only found it when it attacked one of our own, Jeff, who was out on watch. We heard him scream and got to them right as the thing was going for his throat. One good hit to the head knocked it down and we were able to get Jeff away. He had some pretty bad gashes and passed out from shock after the attack. So we took him to the tent and laid him down. I decided to watch over him. If we’re being honest, I expected I was going to be watching him die. The other reason for that was so I could get a sample of his blood. I’d managed to bring some gear with us that I could use for my sample: a syringe, a slide, a microscope. After I drew his blood, I put it onto the slide and put it under the microscope. I don’t know what I was expecting, but when I examined the sample it looked completely normal. My first fear – completely irrational in hindsight - was whatever created clankers would be like in a zombie movie, so bites and scratches meant infection, but at first the blood sample suggested otherwise. So that proved my first assumption to be wrong, but I hadn’t considered that Genesis could spread in trickier ways.



“Genesis is very interesting in how it spreads without being recognized. We knew it was in people’s bloodstreams, and Liv’s blood sample had shown me it could move into cells, but what I didn’t consider was what if Genesis could move in another, less visible way. What if Genesis could ‘infect’ other cells, and not just blood cells. What I found in my research is that it’s actually very similar to rabies. When a person gets bitten by a rabies-infected animal, the rabies avoids the bloodstream because there can be antibodies in the bloodstream, but there aren’t any in the muscle tissue or nerves. So rabies travels up the nerves and hides out in the cells of muscle tissue. It may take months or years to make it to the brain, but once it does then death is absolutely certain. Genesis worked similarly. It could hide itself and slowly transform its host. Even as our understanding of how it worked increased, we still didn’t make that connection initially. That was especially true of people who didn’t get the initial injection but picked Genesis up by sharing needles or blood transfusions or other contact with infected blood. Since it isn’t alive, the nanites can exist outside the body with no problem. And that was only the beginning of Adam’s tricks. It would be amazing, except it was used to nearly wipe out the human race. And Jeff provided a good example. He survived the gashes, and we just thought that he was lucky. We should’ve been more suspicious – I admit, it was the one time I didn’t think to be paranoid because I’d already lost enough friends and wanted someone to survive. That’s because Genesis can’t reanimate the dead, after all, this isn’t some zombie living dead situation. So when a person got infected through a gash, Genesis went right to work repairing the damage and making sure its new host survived their injuries. Then it starts evolving and taking over cells.



“The other thing we never knew was why some people turned right away and why some people didn’t turn for days or even weeks. It’s like rabies – if Genesis has access to the bloodstream, then it can hitch a ride straight to the brain and start rewiring the whole body, but if it stays in the nerves of your arm, then it has control there, but it has to move more slowly. The other thing Genesis was able to do was make people paranoid, and those people were less likely to tell anyone about what’s happening. So those people who got the injection usually turned quickly, like Liv. [sniffles]”



“I just can never stop thinking about her. I’m sorry. I’ll be okay. Just give me a minute.”



“But we started to get wise to that. So Adam started changing it up. That’s why eventually 48 hours for signs of NIR stopped being a valuable measure and we had to find better ways of detecting it, since we had epidemics of people turning in the middle of towns and villages like we were reliving the panic. But a lot of this we only learned earlier this year. 2022-2024 weren’t years for scientific research, unless you count humans relearning skills like growing food or lighting a fire with no matches or building a proper shelter. And during that time my group and I were in the same boat. Society had completely collapsed into little pockets and that was it. It wasn’t until the EDF that I could continue my research along with my team.



“That happened one day when we were in the town and a uniformed individual asked if we were the ones who’d researched Genesis during the beginnings of the panic. When we said we were, they asked us to go with them to meet someone who could help us. I’ll admit, that paranoid part of me flared up again and wondered if they were going to kill us, but instead they took us to the EDF headquarters. Munsar Nagi – though I didn’t know his fame then – introduced himself and told us he wanted us to research everything about clankers to find out their weakness. I obviously wasn’t going to say no to that, and the others on the team agreed. So that was when our lab here got its start. It was when we finally had a chance to understand how Genesis and clankers really worked, and it’s been invaluable in helping us fight our way back from the brink of extinction less than a year and half ago.



“Oh, and if you’re wondering why they set us up here in the Scottish Highlands away from any nearby green zone or other sign of civilization, it’s for a very good reason.”



She picks up the camera and walks outside with it. The footage begins to fuzz, and I’m worried it will break and end the clip prematurely, but it corrects itself after a few seconds. The camera is pointed down at a large hole in the ground with steep sides. There’s an unmistakable whirring sound that still fills many individuals, me included, with terror. It takes me a second to regain my composure. In the clip, it looks like the ground in the pit is moving and it takes a second to realize why. The pit is filled with clankers, swarming around each other like an angry hive of wasps that’s spotted an intruder, trying to climb out,



“These are our test subjects. I don’t even know how the EDF managed to get them all and prefer not to know if we’re being completely honest. I just know it gives us a lot of subjects to work with. And it’s a good thing they’re no longer really human because it’s a lot of unethical shit that we’ve been doing. Because the first thing we did was just take them apart. The Genesis nanites actually coat the thing’s organs in metal and then expands out to the skin, based on what we found from our dissections. It’s actually a painless process for the host until it’s complete – that’s why most people don’t suspect a thing until they actually shift. Because your skin melting off still affects the nerve cells just fine, but once that’s gone it takes the nerve endings with it and that makes clankers functionally immune to pain. It’s why they keep moving no matter what they get hit with unless it knocks their arms or legs off. If those are still attached, it will walk or pull itself along. The next thing we found that makes these bastards so resilient is that different parts of a clanker can all work on the same network, which is why their arms and legs can move even when they’re not attached to the body. And the nanites continue to self-repair as long as their head is still functioning. And all of that came from just taking our anger out on one of our test subjects, which is really how all good science should be done. But we needed to know more, and to know that, we needed un-shifted test subjects, so we started to ask for people showing signs of NIR and were most likely infected.



“Now I know I said we tried to be ethical, but by this point that had been thrown out the window. Though maybe you could call it ethical as a form of mercy. Anyone who was infected by a clanker was sent to us. And we tested just what caused people to shift. I like to think that it was a form of mercy to contribute towards helping us beat these bastards once and for all. And instead of a slow, agonizing transformation for nothing, they add to our knowledge. Not to mention a quick and painless end once they shifted. Though maybe that’s just what I’ve told myself to help me sleep at night. We found some interesting things, not to mention things that are helping us fight the bastards now. One of the initial questions was what caused the change. It turned out that there were multiple factors that caused it – we established that Genesis had to be in control of the whole body by plugging itself into the brain before the transformation could occur, but it turned out that that actually required a critical mass of nanites to fully shift the brain. Once they got plugged in though, they started evolving and rewiring throughout the body. After 50 generations, they’d have finished rewiring and it was simply a matter of flipping a proverbial switch in the brain for the skin to melt off. The interesting thing is that it was 50 generations. It didn’t matter what generation they started with – they could’ve been 1, 50, or 500, they always took exactly 50, no more and no less. We found that out because we isolated cell samples and froze them. One was at what we called generation 15 and the other was at generation 35. The first set took 35 more generations and the other only took 15 before they both sent out what we isolated as the transformation signal.



“But I know what you’re thinking – if it took 50 generations of evolution, why did some people turn faster than others? At first, we had no idea what was happening that caused it. Then I had a thought about a parallel to another trait of diseases – polymorphism, when a disease has different forms. It turned out that things like blood type actually influence how quickly the nanites were able to evolve. We weren’t exactly sure at first, but we realized it had to do with the antigens on the red blood cells. Think of it like blood donations where AB can receive any blood because it has both A and B antigens on the cell so they don’t attack other blood cells. Well it turned out that those antigens also attacked nanites and made it harder for them to infiltrate the cell. Though of course they couldn’t fully stop it, which is why our attempts to create a vaccine against Genesis ultimately failed. Once the nanites entered the bloodstream, there was no way to prevent the transformation. Injecting antigens allowed us to slow it down, but not reverse a case even in the earliest stages. And once NIR hit, the frontal lobe was beginning to be destroyed, and there was no way we could undo that.



“But with our better understanding of the transformation we were better able to fight back against it and start to look for their weaknesses. And that’s our ultimate goal now here at the lab. If we can’t cure them, then we’re going to find out how to destroy them and wipe them off the planet once and for all.”

[texican]

GT,

Humanity working to wipe out once humanity.

Thanks for the chapter.

Texican....

[geekyteacher]

Map of the United States                                                                                                                        4 Years After G-Day

Red: Northwest Alliance

​Dark Blue: Republic of California

Green: Texas Empire

Purple: Rustlandia

Light Blue: Dominia

Yellow: Central Plains

Gray: Wastelands



*Alaska and Hawaii unknown

[texican]

Thanks GT.

Texican....

[geekyteacher]

Hey all, good news!

After two years of writing, editing, more editing, and going through the self-publishing process, Genesis is finally done! If you've enjoyed what I've posted here or the excerpts I've posted on my blog (contewriting.weebly.com), if you like post-apocalyptic fiction or oral histories, or just want to support a fellow poster, please consider purchasing the book. (It's only 3 dollars for the Kindle version!) I'd seriously appreciate it more than you could imagine.

www.amazon.com/dp/B0984T3X3G