Lightspeed: Year One

Months passed like everything was normal, even as the birds finally went extinct, the old died of pulmonary and cardiac disease at accelerated rates, and Black Betty’s Disease took root. People’s sclera’s disappeared, and their irises widened, so their eyes seemed entirely brown or blue or green. These colors contracted and expanded within their pupils, and the victims often lost their sense of balance, along with sight. Occasionally, they were violent. More often they babbled about the end of the world, or got stuck in loops of their own histories, where they repeated old conversations over and over again.

Joe won his case for Santo Monico, and the Vaughan family used the money to secure their seats on Kliffoth Cybernetics’ Black Betty escape pod, Second Coming.

Sarah reported back to work at the clinic where she’d performed abortions until it became illegal, and now delivered high risk babies with congenital defects such as organ dysplasia and spina bifida. Most died soon after they entered the world, and wound-up in county graves or donated to science. To commemorate them, Sarah and the rest of the staff took turns carving numbers into small quartz stones, then piling them in the courtyard where the nurses smoked their Winstons. Scottsbluff was the only high risk birthing clinic in six states, and at first, it had seemed heartless not to name them. But after a while, it was only practical.

In the lobby during those days after Black Betty, more and more women showed up high risk. Betty was altering the genetic structure of living things, and bending it in all the wrong ways. The clinic waiting room television, tuned to news, often aired real-time human sacrifice, as well as a reality television program based in Los Angeles called “That’s My Monkey!”.

In the delivery room, Sarah spent her days pulling crowning babies from between their mothers’ bleeding legs while picketing Jesus freaks warned about The Rapture through the windows. The worst part was consoling the mothers when it was over. Always, they’d convinced themselves that the tests were wrong, and their babies would be born alive.

Betty spread. Relativity turned fungible. Small objects floated up, and into space.

It started with plastic grocery bags, moved on to the engraved quartz stones in the clinic courtyard, and after twelve months, ended with human beings. They held each other, a chain that lasted for miles, until, one by one, they were gone. Some got lost in space, others ended up spinning with the garbage around the Earth’s orbit, like Saturn’s rings.

Sarah and Joe boarded their windows from rioters and stopped going to work. She was sorry for the women who would surely die in labor without her help, but not sorry enough to continue. By now, the infants had become disfigured abominations.

The Vaughans waited, and waited, and waited some more, for news that Second Coming was complete. Fresh food by then was gone, but they’d stockpiled cans, which was better, at least, than those who starved, or resorted to cannibalism.

On air one morning, Jack the Jerk-Off and the rest of his morning show killed themselves. With the laws of physics so confused, the bullets didn’t penetrate like they should have. They fired dozens of rounds, and still died slow.

Sarah, Joe, Bradley, and Sally listened to the slaughter from the kitchen floor. ”It’s not real; it’s make-believe,” Joe assured the children while Sarah wound Sally’s favorite music box. Carved men spun tiny circles around a painted wooden peak while “Climb Every Mountain,” played.

Toward the end of life above, the cars and mobile homes took flight, like something out of The Wizard of Oz. Finally, the lights went out, and never came back.

Joe cashed his money into gold, and stole a gravity car. The family set out for the military base in Omaha, in the hopes that Second Coming was complete. They made it halfway before the engine died. The rest of the trip, carrying their gold bricks that were light as styrofoam, they walked. By then, the sky was dark, even during the day. The animals were gone. In two days, they reached the Kliffoth-American Military Base, eating only burrowing insects, and to slake their thirst, the blood Joe drained from his arm, and offered them to suckle.

Can you love someone more after something like that? Can it restore your faith in a mad world? Sarah Vaughan thought so.

When they arrived, Second Coming edged out from the earthy plains like an alien spaceship. Her skin was black and organic; her organs a neural net that glowed like jellyfish phosphor. For a quarter-mile in all directions, people gathered, and seemed, from the way they bowed and moaned, to worship. Some held each other. Others tied themselves to the cemented fences that would soon come loose. Armed guards lined every entrance.