DRAFT VERSION ONE

So I was working late again that day, the day when the sun went out and the moon fell from the sky. But I get ahead of myself.

I’m a detective. A PI. Most of my jobs are simple ones; track down some keys, find a safe deposit box, dig up some long lost relatives. This job was different from the very beginning. The phone rang, I picked it up.

"Gaston, this is it. The door combination is 31415, easy as pie. Don’t be late." The last sentence didn’t even end because whomever it was too cheap to finish talking before breaking the connection. I heard the click, then the soft whisper of the noise in the line like a caress from a familiar lover. The call wasn’t much on its own, but my name isn’t Gaston and I can’t cook pie. I hung up the phone.

It was kind of weird, but I felt like this had happened before. Why is it that I am always the best one at getting myself in trouble.

So I sat back and poured myself another cup of coffee. I mulled over the mysterious wrong number for a few minutes, then against my better judgement dialed *59, the "talking return call." The robotic voice of the telephone company crooned over the line "You call, sir, came from 9 1 7 9 2 1 3 8 4 6. Would you like to return the call?" I jotted the number down in my notebook as I shook my head. "As you wish, sir. Have a nice day." The synthetic voice almost seemed to sigh before it broke the connection. The soft hiss of the empty line instantly returned.

I picked up the cup and took a sip. Bitter. I poured the rest down the sink and picked up my coat and hat from the antiquated rack next to the door out of my office. Time to do some legwork.

The city library stood in between two taller apartment buildings. Since I didn’t have enough money for spurious drives, I walked there from my office. The cold stale air and the smog made breathing a task better left undone. I gasped and hacked my way up the steps to the door past a crowd of protestors who were arguing with the guards about something only they could understand.

Inside the library, the filtered air was much more refreshing and clear than the gunk outside. Before going into the stacks, I walked through the showers and checked my coat with the bored looking clerk who sat behind his counter listening to an endless dirge over his microphones. It took me three taps before he looked up, but I got my claim check eventually, then went into the stacks proper.

An hour later, I had the information that I needed to continue. The area code was local, but the exchange belonged to a no name research lab "Endocryne Synthetics." A visit to the patent computer yielded no results. I paused a moment to think, and the librarian appeared from nowhere and offered me a cigarette. I shook my head and he walked away, leaving a trail of noxious smoke behind him. Why should we make the air filters work so hard if we are going to destroy the air anyway? I logged out of the terminal and walked back into the stacks on a hunch.

It only took ten minutes to find what I was looking for: a list of the people who were working at the research center. I flipped through the pad but before I could really assimilate any of the information, my pager went off. Although I slapped it as hard as I could, the librarian somehow noticed and ushered me out of the building. I didn’t even have time to pick up my coat.

It took me even longer to get home, since I was shivering and vomiting from the pollution before I could stagger through the door and push it closed. I woke up some time later, and managed to change into new clothes after sponging myself off with about a month’s worth of tissue. Augh, I hate this life.

It took another two cups of the bitter travesty sold as coffee before I felt awake enough to remember that I had gotten thrown out of the library for a reason. I checked my pager.

9179213846 Some people have all the luck.

I decided I had nothing to lose. I picked up the phone and dialed the number. It rang once, then the connection broke off and I could hear as the soft hiss changed slightly in texture. The line was being traced. There was no point in hanging up, since I live on a low range trunk line and it was probably already over. I waited. Some soft clicks indicated that additional receivers were being placed on the line.

I was almost sorry that I had such an old telephone handset. All of the new ones were heavily filtered to remove noises and clicks, and would have probably scared me a lot less, because a moment after the phone finally connected, all the noises stopped. Dead. It was like putting my ear to a grave.

I tried to say something, anything. A harsh buzz came out of the phone like some sort of primitive modem connection, then resolved into a voice that sent chills down my spine. "Hello, Rydel."

The voice brought back a flood of memories. Days spent in sunlight and clear air. The night sky, with real stars, not projected ones. A research project. A self-replicating neural network program integrated with a data exchange program. The smallest speech synthesizer I could find, a 12 kilobyte one left over from the late twentieth century. Names that I never thought, and never thought I would hear again. "Hello, Alice."

"The stars shone bright tonight." She waited for me to give the right answer.

"And the raindrops fall like shards of broken glass." I sighed, since there was really nothing left for me anyway. I could hear the screaming of brakes and shrieks of horns as a fleet of probably unmarked cars carrying who knows how much artillery pulled up outside my apartment.

"Password Accepted." Alice paused for a moment. "I’ll probably never ‘see’ you again, but … thanks for the memories." "It’s nothing." Polite and dismissive to the end. I could hear the crashing of doors downstairs as they were broken one by one, and the sound of approaching helicopters. "Rydel?" The disembodied voice cut through my revire like fingernails scratching on a chalkboard cut through a dozing class. "Yes, Alice?" I could hear the door to my office behind be breaking open. A helicopter rose up outside the window, gatling guns spinning in a blur. This was about it.

"You might want to close your eyes now." I shrugged. When one has nothing to lose, indulging a friend costs nothing. I closed my eyes. There was a high pitched whine and a sudden wave of heat, and suddenly, everything was silent. "There." Alice’s voice whispered from the handset. "I made something for you. A going-away present. I’m sorry it isn’t better. You can look up now." It didn’t really matter to me. "You did your best." I said into the phone, and shrugged. "Goodbye, Alice."

"Goodbye, Father." The connection broke. The line was dead. I set the phone down on the desk and opened my eyes.

The scene of destruction that greeted me scared even me, with all of my VR training. Most of the glass in the windows had melted into slag on the floor. The door to my office was gone, and so was a good part of the rest of the building. I glanced up, and did a double take. I could see the sky!? What happened to the roof?

The sun hung above me like a giant bloodshot eye, exhausted from it’s long watch and finally too tired to stay open. Even as I watched, it dimmed and faded, leaving me in darkness. I picked up the half empty cup from the desk, next to the phone.

Alice had already taken control of the weather monitoring station in the hills north of the city. The pillars of laser light flailed around for a few moments before winking out. All the city lights followed. I could hear a great commotion coming from outside, on the street level. Another pair of helicopters appeared to the north, probably from the military base. A sudden and brilliant flash of light from above revealed that what happened to most of my building was a high power focused beam from an orbital laser station pulsed to vaporize a limited area. The two airships disappeared into the light, and never returned.

The golden disc of the moon hung in the sky, then was surrounded by a brilliant corona as if it had eclipsed the sun for a moment. We had all heard the stories of the stockpiles on the dark side, but no one believed that they were true, until today. The moon slowly drifted across the sky towards the horizon, then disappeared behind the city skyline. A line that itself was a sillouhette, since there were no lights to be seen anywhere. I started coughing as the acrid air from the city finally diffused down into my former office. As my eyes filled with water, I lifted my gaze farther, and could almost imagine that I could see the stars before the shockwave hit. Maybe some dreams do come true.

THE END

merle@wam.umd.edu