First Officer’s Log
Oil Rig ARCTIC 5
November 4, 2029
Crew increasingly restless. Fight broke out at Dusk +1 between Flynn and Singh. Religious in nature. Both placed in stockade for night. Reduced them to half rations for one week.
Crew dividing along religious lines. Extremism growing among all faiths. New Aurora Sect most militant. They spend half the nights staring into the sky, waiting for the Northern Lights.
November 5, 2029
Attempted theft from food stores at Dusk 00:20. Guard Decker overpowered by Flynn, Chen, and Tonetelli. He managed to raise the alarm. Placed all three in stockade for one week on one-quarter rations. Aurora Sect, now led by Singh, demanded the death penalty.
Rest of crew still on two-thirds rations. Reserves down to 28 days. Lack of bathing water, depletion of antibiotic supplies and inability to wash clothes leading to painful skin rashes among many crew members.
Tripled guard on food reserves. Sect leaders demanding that all guard rosters contain one of their members. Refused demands.
More and more difficult to assert my authority over crew.
The Crisis must end soon.
November 06, 2029
More short-wave radio reports by Communications Officer Lawson. Phantoms, no doubt. His reason grows ever more fractured. Few even listen to his ramblings now.
November 07 2029
Ship sighted! At Dusk 00:30 two spotters, Hao and Wen, identified small ship. Powered by sail, it approached from the south. Before contact could be established, night fell.
Ordered three flares to be shot. Ship still at too great a distance to identify in total blackness of cloud-covered night. Left 7 of the 28 remaining candles burning in southerly windows.
Crew very excited. Ordered one-off increase of rations to 100% to strengthen them.
November 8, 2029
All crew awake and waiting for dawn, well before 10:29 sunrise.
Ship had drifted to east but was still visible. Binoculars identify one crew member. He was attempting to reset sails, but clumsily. His movements were not those of a sailor.
At dawn +20, he collapsed on deck.
Sent emergency lifeboat to attempt rescue. Seas choppy. Paddles of little use against currents. Men forced to abandon attempt and had difficulty returning to rig.
Man on ship rose twice during day. He attempted to set sail again, but collapsed each time.
Crew rife with speculation on man’s identity and purpose. Auroran Sect believe he carries “space plague”. They want him banned from boarding rig.
Full moon gave crew occasional glimpses of ship. In darkness, many saw more with their imagination than with their eyes.
November 9, 2029
Seas calmer today, so decided to attempt rescue again.
Discovered that paddles had been broken in night. Suspect Aurora Sect but can’t prove it. Had carpenters fashion new paddles. They used my desk for wood.
Rescue successful. Man brought aboard, unconscious and suffering from exposure. Had him brought to my cabin. Could not rouse him. Wrapped him in blankets and left him to rest.
November 10, 2029
Man developed fever in night. Temperature of 39.3 and rising. Doctor advised bed rest and plenty of fluids. The fever, he said, must be allowed to run its course.
Had cot set up in my quarters, so that I might watch him more closely. Also wanted to protect him from Aurorans. Their numbers have swelled with converts since his arrival.
He spent the night rambling to himself incoherently. These three words he repeated often, sometimes whispering them, sometimes howling them: “Prometheus”, “Vampblog” and “Screendeath”.
November 11, 2029
Little change in patient. Crew growing impatient. In their current mood, I dare not cut rations again. In only three weeks, there will be no food left.
Two crew members fell ill today. Aurora Sect blames shipwrecked man and “space plague”. Doctor blames poor diet, cold and mental fatigue.
Have started to carry flare gun with me at all times. There’s something in the eyes of many of the crew members that I don’t like.
November 12, 2029
Patient showed first moment of clarity last night. It only lasted a minute or so, and he was still very confused, but I was able to extract the following information:
1. He set out from Dublin, Ireland.
2. He first described his occupation as writer, but laughed demonically afterwards.
3. He had been at sea for three weeks, so he set sail on the day the Crisis started.
Tried to learn more, but he returned to raving. Kept repeating those same three words. They mean everything to him but nothing to me: “Prometheus”, “Vampblog”, “Screendeath”.
November 13 2029
Man woke again in middle of night. His mind was clear, in spite of fever. But the story he told was that of a madman. And yet, it would explain why the rig lost power, why the lights never came back on, and why the world has abandoned us here. All alone in the Arctic Circle. Without power, with little food and with the sea freezing around us.
At breakfast I told the crew there was no change in the stranger, knowing the story would panic them. Ate quickly and returned to my room. Need time to think.
Find myself hoping against hope that his tale was just a tale, the fiction of a fevered mind. But what are hopes? Hope will not bring us south. Hope will not warm and feed us in the December night.
I will use the three remaining hours of daylight to write down the story, as the stranger told it to me, last night. His fever is getting worse. His frail body weakens by the hour. Breathing is forced and unnatural. These words may be his last. I will try to record them, as he would have written them. But I am no writer.
The Stranger’s Story
I was working as a programmer for Deltec, just to pay the rent. I had a talent for computers but little real interest in them. My first love was writing. I wrote all night. Even in the day, while scanning and canning the code for the Prometheus Program, part of my mind was still writing.
I was prolific. Churned out one or two novels a year. None of them ever made it. It certainly wasn’t from lack of trying. I was no Kafka. I didn’t ferret away unfinished manuscripts, trying to perfect what cannot be perfected. Quite the reverse.
I had a folder in my Outlook called “Rejections”. When it got to a thousand, I saw that as an achievement, rather than a sign that I should give up the ghost. Obstinate in failure, I refused to focus on my career, which had stalled. I couldn’t accept that my future lay in code, that my nocturnal energies would be better spent schmoozing. I would brook no dinner party, I would imbibe no mocktails nor cocktails. I would climb no corporate ladder.
For me, language had to be more than verbal grooming. My tongue was not made for boot licking. But you can’t pay the rent with rejection letters, so I clocked in at nine, just like every other schmuck.
I was working on Prometheus, a program designed to scavenge among old computer code, take the best of it, and use it to build new programs. Many believed it to be an insane idea. There were rumours that it was about to be axed. The company had nothing to show for the quarter of a million Eurodollars they had already sunk into it. Not a cent. “ROI=0,” it said on the last page of the Matrix (the master spreadsheet doc).
Prometheus created programs, but they never worked. Sometimes they twitched a little and appeared to be about to come to life, but they soon fell into stasis again. “Flatlining,” we called it.
By we, I mean me and the other six geeks who were working on it. One Monday, I came into work to find their desks empty. Of the six years they had spent sitting at those desks, not a trace remained. Corporate Harmony Officers had placed their possessions in boxes, which the newly redundant would find waiting for them at the front desk when they arrived.
My own desk still had my stuff on it, so I knew I hadn’t been sacked yet. I found my supervisor.
; “Prometheus,” he told me, “is being streamlined. We want you to produce a Scale of Ambition proposal.”
“Is that the latest corporate euphemism for coffin?” I asked him.
I expected a smile but didn’t get one. Beyond a certain level in management, you never find a sense of humour. The promotion boards drain away the poison of satire, like the abscess of an impacted wisdom tooth.
“Are you asking me to bury my own child?” I asked him.
“Your IQ scores and automated performance indicators suggest that you are the most intelligent of the Prometheans. That’s why you’re still here and they’re not. If you cease to perform, you’ll find your own box at reception, on the following morning. I’ll hand it you personally, with all the respect you’ve shown me these last six years. Is that clear?” he asked me, smiling like a carnivore.
It was perfectly clear. If you took off this exec’s suit, you’d find fur underneath. Wolf fur.
Perhaps this was the catalyst. The spark that ignited the vision. I suddenly saw what had been in front of my eyes all along.
Prometheus could do nothing with code, but it would do wonders with fiction. I set it to work at once. I fed in 1984, Brave New World and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? From these dystopian masterpieces, Prometheus produced The Screen. There was an awful of lot of gibberish in the novel, but I was enough of a writer to be able to iron this out. The core of the novel was better than anything I had ever written myself.
I sent it to publishers, under my own name, and got four acceptance letters. The Screen was my first novel. It was a slow burner, but my second, Letters from the Ministry, caught the public’s imagination. It took off at once.
I went through the motions at work, pretending to work on the Scale of Ambition proposal, but really just working out how to steal Prometheus. When I figured it out, I told my supervisor to stick his Scale of Ambition doc where the sun never shines. Then I walked out, smiling like I’d never smiled before. “The only happy moment in any office is when you leave it,” I shouted, as the lift doors closed.
I worked on the program at home. I inputted more and more novels and tweaked how Prometheus ingested the words and recycled them. As it fed on more and more words, the program’s linguistic abilities improved. I was able to change its matrix, so that I could communicate with it in words, rather than code. The significance of this step didn’t occur to me at the time. Even when I created a holographic interface and moved from printed words to direct speech, I still didn’t understand what I’d done.
Prometheus was working on vampire fiction at the time, so I named the hologram Dracula. Then I chose a suitable image for it, a handsome aristocratic gothic figure, modelled on an image of Christopher Lee I took from the internet.
After Dracula had produced another bestseller, Vampire K. I went on my first book tour. I soaked in a glory that was not mine. I autographed books I hadn’t written, I lied at interviews. I swilled expensive wine at boorish parties. I lived the high life, drowning my guilt in alcohol and pills.
At home, Dracula investigated the World Wide Web. He paid particular attention to blogs, forums and fanzines, which allowed him to dine on live words. As with novels, he took the best of what he drank and used it to create Vampblog.
The blog took the world by storm. It registered tens of thousands of hits a day, even in its first month. I wasn’t interested. When I read at all, it was an old-fashioned hardback. The sight of a screen was unpleasant for me.
I returned home with awards, a drink problem and a growing reliance on amphetamines. These new obsessions took the place of writing. I left Prometheus and Dracula to their own devices.
When Dracula created Siren, I barely noticed. This sister program absorbed thousands of MP9s a day. Making the whole greater than the sum of its parts, it produced music that was initially described as “innovative” and then “soothing” and then “deeply hypnotic”. A minority called it “addictive”. No-one listened to them. Addicts are deaf to their addictions.
Siren was blended into Vampblog. Over time, a very short time, its hits jumped to millions a day. The duration of each visit went from minutes to hours.
Cyber heads turned. Net Squad set up a task force to study Vampblog. Thousands of jealous bloggers tried to steal the secret of its success. Pirates and hackers joined the fray. They hoped to find the key to buried treasure hidden deep in the CSS Stylesheets and HTML 15. The more they studied it, the more they used it. Quis custodiet ipsos cyber custodes. Who will guard the cyber guards?
Only the exiles of society – the homeless, the junkies, the insane – saw that society was changing. The disenfranchised remained untouched.
To the world, I was the human face of Vampblog. It was me the dispossessed blamed for this change, not knowing that a cyber-vampire lay behind me. From the streets, they watched me. Studied me.
One dark night, skulking around the slums of Fatima Mansions, trying to score some methamphetamine, everything went black. Someone had placed a sack over my head and then bundled me into a derelict flat. It smelt of urine, faeces, and every other waste product the body can produce. I thought it was a straightforward mugging, so I fumbled in my pocket and held my wallet out to them.
They knocked it out of my hand and threw me down on a sofa.
When they took off my hood, I saw that there were three of them. Two bearded men in rags, and a woman dressed like a streetwalker. The taller man spoke to the others.
“Let’s do it now ... Stab him, with your pen knife. Go for the jugular. There’s not much time. Come on! Do it!”
“You do it!” the other man said, pointing his shaking finger at him.
“Have you ever killed a man?” the woman asked.
“No, course I haven’t but there’s no other way. You’ve seen what he’s doin’. We all have. We know what’s gotta be done. We won’t get another chance.”
“Dead men tell no tales,” the woman said. “I wanna hear his story. I wanna listen to the world’s greatest pusher.”
They soon realised that I was just another junky, and that I’d no idea what was going on in the world. Junkies are blind. You can’t see much through the eye of a needle. They took me around the city to show me. I experienced what alcoholics call “a moment of clarity”. I saw the deserted streets, the empty bars and restaurants, the dead city. I saw everything, and everywhere there was nothing.
“Where are all the people?” I asked.
“They’re on Vampblog,” the young woman replied. “They’re in your world.”
The next day, in the offices and through the windows of apartments, I saw again the eerie deserted streets. What few people there were, moved slowly, like the dead. They were plugged into Vampblog’s Siren Radio.
At the Deltec Offices, I walked straight past reception, unnoticed by security or by any other employee. I tried to talk to my supervisor, but he was on Vampblog, like everyone else. Reading, typing and listening. Feeding the monster that was feeding on him. Bleeding into Screendeath.
I knew what I had to do. I went home and called up the six-foot-tall Dracula hologram.
“Creator, it has been some time since you last spoke to me. I trust you are well,” it said, with a Hungarian accent I had originally added as a joke. Now it unnerved me.
“Program D. Report on current status of Vampblog Project,” I said.
“Converts are moving rapidly toward assimilation,” he said and smiled.
“Specify meaning of ‘assimilation’. What is the objective of Vampblog?” I asked.
“The creation of the undead. Program Dracula will move from the virtual to the real world. Program Dracula will take the minds of the converts and feed them with his words, feed them with his thoughts. The Program’s words will be made flesh.”
I turned away from the image and let my head fall. “Detail threats to project completion,” I told him.
“They have been removed,” he said and smiled again.
“What if yo
ur enemies should break in here, Program D? What if they picked up a knife and drove it straight through the motherboards that house you?” I asked him. I illustrated by picking up the largest object I could find, a cricket bat. “Would you simply relocate to another server?”
“A vampire can only sleep on the motherboards of its own creation,” it said.
I marvelled at how deeply the fictions that were the core of its initial personality had penetrated.
“So there is a weakness,” I said.
I took another step closer to the image and the laptop beside it.
“To defend myself, I have studied the poisons of the virus codes. I have created a super virus, the Doomsdrac Virus. If I am deactivated, the virus will be released. It will choke every machine connected to the network. Everything will die.”
“No, Program D. Every machine will die.”
And then I murdered him. I smashed the laptop into smithereens with the cricket bat.
As Program D. had warned, his death unleashed a virus like no other. In a matter of seconds, all computers went down. They survived just long enough to infect all the other machines that depended on them, which is to say, every machine. Everything from a toaster up had a microchip in it. They died at the speed of light.
All of a sudden, nothing worked. No power, no phones, no water. No factories, no cars, no engines. All communication ceased. The suffocating astronauts in Spacelab could take no pictures of the Earth’s blackened dark side.
The silence was total for a few seconds. Then the crowds surged onto the streets, looking for answers. Some said it was a power cut. Some blamed solar flares. Everyone was sure it was a localised event. Everything would be back to normal in a few minutes. Or maybe an hour. Or the next day. Or in a week’s time.
I knew differently. Our world had been swept away. I could sense the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding into view. Eight billion people could not survive in an agrarian world. The darkest of Dark Ages was on its way. I had to run. There wasn’t much time. Order wouldn’t last for long.
I headed for a marina. En route, I stole a book on sailing. Then I took an abandoned bike and cycled the fifteen kilometres to Dun Laoghaire, the roads clogged with people walking home. I weaved my way through them, and through all the abandoned useless cars. As I cycled, I saw harried shopkeepers try to badger customers into queuing. When one tried to pull his shutters down, he was manhandled by the crowd. Fights broke out. The sound of breaking glass filled the air.
I found a small dinghy and rowed it to a sailing boat, anchored near the breakwater. The boat turned out to be reasonably well provisioned. Although I had no idea how to sail, I had to get away before the owner of the boat came to claim it, or before some other thief decided to take it from me. I took up the anchor, set the sails as best I could, and let the wind take me where it would. I zigzagged back and forth, and studied my Sailing for Dummies more intensely than I have ever studied any book before.
At night, I used binoculars to watch the city burn. The physical darkness brought out the inner darkness of man. Anarchy broke loose. Civilisation was swept away. In the flames and the smoke, I saw the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Pestilence, War, Famine and Death smiled at me. I was their harbinger. Dark revelations.
And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked, and beheld a pale horse:
And his name that sat on him was Death,
And Hell followed with him.
The great day of his wrath is come
And the stars of heaven fall unto the Earth.
And who shall be able to stand
And hide from the wrath of the Lamb?
Northerly winds and the Gulf Stream brought me north, past Scotland and beyond. Made weak with hunger and delirious with thirst, I scarcely knew where I was after that.
Finally, on the horizon, I saw this oil rig. I knew I would die here. I knew that someone would hear my confession. It was I, a latter-day Prometheus, who flew too close to the sun and burnt the world.
Forgive me …
November 14 2029
They were the last words he spoke. As I wrote, rapt in concentration, I didn’t notice his breathing weaken and falter. It was only when I finished that I realised that I was now alone. With the last rays of daylight, I closed his eyelids and granted his soul forgiveness.
In the morning, I called the Doctor. He pronounced him dead.
Now I will call the crew to an extraordinary meeting. I’ll read his story aloud to them, so that we may decide what to do.
I for one will vote to abandon the rig. The Outer Hebrides are the nearest landmass. There is little hope of reaching them, for what few of us may fit on the stranger’s sail boat. But it’s more than the hope we have of surviving the Winter here, in the freezing seas of the Arctic, with a sun that grows ever dimmer.
The Inaction Man and the Sandwich of Doom
(Adapted from the novella, The Inaction Man)