Sustainable Earth (Book 2): Death by Revelation Read online

  Death by Revelation

  Jack J. Lee

  Copyright 2011

  Editors:

  Tracy Klettes

  Deck Deckert

  “God damn polygamists!”

  Hiram Rockwell, April 11th, Year 0

  Table of Contents

  Prologue #1: Hiram Rockwell, May 2nd, Year 1

  Prologue #2, Dalak Naar, 40.62 Million Years Ago

  Chapter 1, Mike Kim, September 11th, Year 65

  Chapter 2, Ari Levin, March 12th, Year 0

  Chapter 3: Ari Levin, March 16, Year O

  Chapter 4: Mike Kim, March 13th, Year 0

  Chapter 5: Mike Kim, March 14th to August 25th, Year 0

  Chapter 6: Mike Kim, September 11th, Year 0

  Chapter 7: Helen Hansen, February 28th, Year 1

  Chapter 8: Mark Jones, February 28th, Year 1

  Chapter 9: Hiram Rockwell, March 2nd, Year 1

  Chapter 10: Mark Jones, March 2nd, Year 1

  Chapter 11: Mike Kim, September 11th to September 14th, Year 0

  Chapter 12: Ari Levin, July 14th, Year 0

  Chapter 13: Ari Levin, July 14th to September 11th, Year 0

  Chapter 14: Ari Levin, September 22nd, Year O

  Chapter 15: Mike Kim, September 15th to October 10th, Year 0

  Chapter 16: Art Bingham, April 9th, Year 1

  Chapter 17: Hiram Rockwell, April 10th and 11th, 2010

  Chapter 18: Ari Levin, September 22nd to October 7th, Year 0

  Chapter 19: Helen Hansen, April 10th, Year 1

  Chapter 20: Mark Jones, April 11th, Year 1

  Chapter 21: Mark Jones, April 11th and 12th, Year 1

  Chapter 22: Ari Levin, October 9th and 10th, Year 0

  Chapter 23: Ari Levin, October 10th, Year 0

  Chapter 24: Hiram Rockwell, April 13th to April 28th, Year 1

  Chapter 25: Mark Jones, April 13th, Year 1

  Chapter 26: Ari Levin, April 11th, Year 1

  Chapter 27: Ari Levin, April 12th, Year 1

  Chapter 28: Ari Levin, April 13th, Year 1

  Chapter 29: Ari Levin, April 28th, Year 1

  Chapter 30, Ari Levin, May 2nd, Year 1

  Chapter 31: Hiram Rockwell, May 4th to May 11th, Year 1

  Chapter 32: Mike Kim, April 12th to May 8th, Year 1

  Chapter 33: Art Bingham, May 8th to May 14th, Year 1

  Chapter 34: Ari Levin, May 9th to May 11th, Year 1

  Chapter 35: Helen Hansen, April 14th to May 20th, Year 1

  Chapter 36: Mark Jones, May 14th to May 20th, Year 1

  Prologue #1: Hiram Rockwell, May 2nd, Year 1

  Ever since we had been thrown into our cage, the head guard, Leo Buckson had been bragging how he was abusing two recently captured sisters aged 13 and 15. Four days ago, Leo had a permanent change in his lifestyle. He was probably still in bed writhing in pain.

  The guards had been dragging one of my men off to be killed and had made the mistake of not paying enough attention to me. I had placed myself behind Leo. I put my hand between his legs and ruined him forever.

  Within seconds I was swarmed by the other guards. I remember being hit on the head with a billy club before I lost consciousness. I woke up a few hours later with my arms chained behind me, and bruises all over my body. I couldn’t see out of my right eye and my nuts were swollen. I had obviously been kicked multiple times in my crotch in revenge. For the past four days the last of my remaining men had been hand feeding me.

  We were now down to just me and Max Sutter. When we had been captured twenty-one days ago, there had been ten of us. Every few days one of us had been killed. Even before the zombie outbreak the FLDS or Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints had been complete fucks, practicing incest and polygamy with underage girls. They had constantly been giving us real Mormons a bad name. Since the outbreak they had been out of control, killing or enslaving other survivors.

  Both Max and I knew that one of us would die today. Every few days the FLDS fed one of us to a vampire for their amusement. According to them God had placed vampires on Earth to kill sinners. I figured I would be taken today. After what I had done to Buckson, they were never going to unchain me and they were too lazy to bother hand feeding me.

  A little after 2 in the morning I was pulled out of the cage and brought into a gymnasium. The center of the gym had been turned into a fighting pit. A 30 foot diameter area was surrounded by steel fencing that went all the way up to the ceiling. There was a hole cut into the top. The gym was lit with kerosene lamps which were too dim to bother a vampire. A couple hundred of the FLDS had gathered on the bleachers to watch me die.

  The guards pushed me into the fighting pit, my hands still chained behind me. One of the guards unchained me through the fence. At first I couldn’t lift my arms but I kept moving them. After about five minutes of stretching I was able to regain normal motion of my shoulders.

  I was weak. I hadn’t had a good meal for twenty-two days. My body was a mass of bruises. I had a constant headache and my balance was still off from being knocked unconscious. My face was so swollen, I couldn’t see out of my right eye. I wasn’t at my best, but I was going to do my damnedest to take out the vampire that was coming for me.

  I had a chance. Director Jones killed a vamp by ripping out its throat, and according to the FLDS, their prophet had killed one too, so it was possible for an unarmed man to take out a vampire.

  The Director had been able to take out his vampire because of his speed. I’ve sparred with him. He’s almost as fast as a vampire. I know my strengths and weaknesses. I’m strong and coordinated but I’m not particularly quick. The technique that the Director used wouldn’t work for me. I started jogging slowly around the pit. I needed to warm up. The only advantage that I had against a vampire was my height and weight. Before I was captured I weighed 260 pounds, even with all the weight I had lost in the past three weeks, I probably weighed over 240 and I’m still 6 foot 4 inches tall. All the vampires I’d had seen in the past weighed less than and were shorter than me.

  I knew the vampire had arrived by the change in the tone of sound from the crowd. I looked up and saw the vamp diving toward me with its claws outstretched. I reached up and grabbed its left wrist with my left hand and slammed the vampire to the ground. I didn’t need to be quick to perform this maneuver. The vampire couldn’t fly. It was just falling with style. Its trajectory had been set since it launched from the roof. Being slammed into the ground didn’t faze the vampire; it bounced up like a rubber ball toward me.

  You can fake speed with anticipation. I knew it was going to do this. I still had a hold of its left wrist. The instant it jumped into the air, I could move its body with minimal effort. I used my grip on its wrist to guide its body as it came at me from the floor. We ended up chest to chest, its left arm trapped between our bodies, my right arm behind its back pulling it toward me in a bear hug. My forehead was at the perfect height to smash into its nose. Its head rocked back from my head butt and as it flexed forward in response to my blow, mouth open to bite my face off, I slammed my left hand into its mouth. I could see the surprise in its eyes as it reflexively bit completely through my hand.

  Vampires feed only on blood. They do not eat solids. It opened its mouth to spit out my fingers. As it did, I shoved the rest of my hand and half my forearm down its throat. It tried to bite through my arm. It got to my bones but it couldn’t bite through them. The mass of my forearm inside its mouth made it impossible for it to completely bite down. The vampire was much stronger than me but I had all the leverage. Its left arm was trapped between us, its feet were off the ground so it had no traction. I was too close to it
for it to kick me. Only its right arm was free but because of how close we were, it didn’t have the leverage to claw through my skull, spine, or rib cage. It was able to rip my back muscles into ruin, but it wasn’t able to kill me, or make me drop it.

  Vampires are basically turbocharged human beings. Their core temperature is much hotter than ours because their metabolisms are so much faster. They are stronger and quicker than us but they also need more oxygen. It takes about 4 minutes to suffocate a human to death. It took less than a minute for the vampire to die.

  Once it stopped moving, I let it slide to the ground. I almost passed out. I willed myself awake; I still had things to do. I slammed my heel down on its neck just below the skull. I could feel the vertebrae beneath my heel separate and its head flopped loose on to its side. I slammed my foot down again and again. Each time my foot came down, the vampire’s head moved a little further away from its body, and the area beneath my foot got thinner. I don’t know how long it took, but eventually, its head was crushed away from its body.

  The room was completely quiet. I sank to my knees. It was either that or fall. I pointed with my right hand to the FLDS Prophet. The guards had told us that he was the chosen one because he had been able to kill a vampire in unarmed combat. I laughed “That’s my second vampire, asshole. See if you can match that.”

  Prologue #2, Dalak Naar, 40.62 Million Years Ago

  My sensors indicated that the Consortium Armada was five parsecs away. I was out of fuel. When the Consortium reached me, my ship would be destroyed. Since I was the last Zutar alive, my nation, species, and civilization would die with me.

  My race had reached the pinnacle of technological progress close to three million years ago. We learned how to use the gravitational pull of black holes, giving us access to unlimited perpetual power. Almost everything became possible and we became immortal. In the early years, we played with the power of gods. I spent thousands of years playing elaborate games in worlds I created. I built space habitats millions of miles in diameter. I designed and created entire biospheres based solely on my imagination. I downloaded my mind into machinery, vat grown organic bodies, and hybrids of both. With unlimited energy, all things were possible.

  My generation was the first to achieve immortality, and the first to become utterly bored. After hundreds of thousands of years of unlimited power, there was nothing that had not been done before to the point of utter tedium. I saw my friends and companions of close to a million years commit suicide one by one. I tried to come up with a way to revive the desire to live in the members of my generation -- to no avail. As time passed, I was the only one of my generation left alive.

  Ennui ravaged my people. Our civilization’s ability to satisfy any citizen’s whim at any time had given us a culture that was completely self-based. The last Zutar had been born 700,000 years ago. No one could be bothered to have children. There was no need for marriages, families, communities, or nations. When everything was possible and available for anyone at any time, there was no conflict, crimes, or war. It wasn’t until ennui was recognized as an existential threat that I was able to convince other Zutar to join me in my quest to save our species. I became the founder and head of an organization called the Preservers.

  The Preservers tried everything that we could think of without finding a viable treatment for terminal ennui. Our population which had once numbered in the billions shrank to millions and then to thousands. The actual numbers of Preservers were always fairly small, less than fifty thousand individuals in a population that had originally numbered in the billions. As our species shrank, only the Preservers remained. Our ability to care, our desire to help our fellows kept us alive. Altruism was a survival trait.

  At some finite point, self-involvement becomes a dead end. I became the oldest Zutar. My desire, my need to help my people gave me a reason to stay alive. Eternity is unbearable without meaning. Meaning can only come from something greater than oneself.

  The Universe is designed to create intelligent life. Amongst the countless planets, there are always a few that can support life. Given enough time every planet that can support life will have life appear. Low probability events happen rarely but when billions of years are involved even low probability events become inevitable. Intelligence is the natural result of evolution. In the same way that a biosphere will always create creatures that are small versus large, prey versus predators. Given enough time, natural selection will come up with a species that can create a civilization.

  After millions of years of recorded history, it became clear to the Preservers that all sentient beings are brothers. In the remote past, religion and the belief in a soul had been important to our culture. Our need for religion and the belief in souls disappeared when we became immortal. But we never gave up the idea that the spirit was more important than the body. I have lived in manufactured bodies, some organic, others made of silicon and metal. What does DNA or genetics matter to a being that inhabits an artificial body? There were thousands of years where I did not have a body at all. Regardless of my form, I was still a Zutar.

  No matter what planet it originated from, any intellect that could wonder, dream, and create was my brother. The Preservers mission changed. We included all of intelligent life in our circle of concern.

  In my youth before the discovery of unlimited energy, I was an archeologist. I studied the remains of civilizations that pre-existed the Zutar. There was evidence of countless of extinct species that had achieved our level of technology. When my culture was still vibrant, this wasn’t a concern and when we obtained the power of gods, we saw no need to study the past. The Preservers reinvented archeology. We needed to understand why sentient species died.

  Our civilization was millions of years old but compared to geological time, we had only been around for a blink of an eye. Planets and solar systems existed for billions of years. We studied the civilizations that had pre-existed ours and we learned that the price of technological advance is death.

  Biospheres that did not have intelligent life could exist in balance for hundreds of millions of years. The rise of intelligent species often resulted in complete environmental degradation. Our research indicated that ninety-seven percent of civilizations limited to just one planet over utilized their irreplaceable natural resources and created industrial waste to the point that their planets could no longer sustain their species.

  The most common cause of extinction was environmental degradation. Civilizations that developed space travel and colonized multiple solar symptoms could escape environmental degradation, but remained at risk for destruction by war. It is easier to make technological advances than it is to achieve lasting political and social maturity. The imbalance between the power to destroy and wisdom to refrain was extremely dangerous. Less than one out of ten thousand cultures survived this stage.

  Individual immortality is the natural endpoint of advanced technology. Our research extended back almost a billion years. The historical record revealed that all societies that achieved immortality died out within a few million years. Stable species, especially ones with cultures that did not advance past Stone Age technology, survived for hundreds of millions of years.

  We committed ourselves to trying to save and preserve sentient life throughout the galaxy. We cloaked ourselves in the bodies of different species. We sent prophets to our younger siblings. We tried to teach them how to respect their environment, to remain in balance with their biospheres. In the short term we were able to succeed. We created philosophies and religions which for a few hundred to a few thousand years kept young civilizations stable. Eventually however the seduction of technological progress proved too powerful.

  We attempted to control societies by taking over their leadership. Again on a temporary basis, we were able to keep species balanced. But we were unable to make a permanent change in these cultures. Industrial societies could not be forced into stability. It was impossible to halt technological progress once a culture became
industrialized.

  We were faced with a dire choice, to give up, to let younger civilizations choose to die or to intervene drastically, to purposely limit the choices of younger species in order to save them. Our decision was difficult. In the end we had no other option; we had to choose life over death. We had to intervene.

  We created probes designed to study and preserve all life and all cultures. On rare occasions our probes found technologically stable and balanced civilizations. In such cases our probes did not interfere. Usually our probes found unbalanced societies headed toward self-destruction. With great sorrow but without regrets, we intervened. Our probes were programmed to try to work within the mores of the cultures we were trying to save. For almost a million years we were able to prevent the extinction of every sentient species we found. Hundreds of thousands of species were able to live in balance because of us.

  Our problems began as our sphere of influence spread. We came across societies that were almost as advanced as ours. These species resisted. With their limited insight, with their lack of experience, they couldn’t see that we were working for their own good. It was ironic; these civilizations saw us as an existential threat when we were their only chance for long term survival. They attacked us.

  At first we only lost probes. Later as more and more civilizations banded together to fight us, we lost Zutar. If we had been willing to commit genocide, we could have easily destroyed all who attacked us. We would not, could not use any defense or attack that could potentially cause the extinction of a species. Slowly the numbers of Zutar dropped and the numbers of our opponents increased. Demographics is destiny. We were unwilling to increase our numbers. The numbers of our opponents increased. They still had children and over time more and more cultures joined them.

  If we had been willing to stop trying to help younger civilizations, we most likely would have been able escape the Consortium. It was only through our interventions and actions that they were able to find us. There would have been no purpose to our lives if we gave up trying to preserve, to stop loving our children. Three weeks ago, the last Zutar outpost was destroyed. I was the only Preserver who survived. All that was left of our civilization was me and a few distant exploratory probes. I transmitted new programming instructions to all the Zutar artificial intelligences within range. There was no hope for me. It was possible that a few probes would escape destruction. I could only hope that after my death some of these probes would remain to continue our work.