The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 28 - ROGER

It was a city, but a city unlike any Roger had seen before. Buildings of shining glass and metal clustered together so tightly they formed a continuous mass. They arched over the few open spaces in feats of architectural impossibility. Some seemed to hang unsupported in midair. He squinted at the strange sky and realized it was actually a roof interrupted by large windows showing a night sky. The sky was in motion, racing from one end to the other like an endless shower of shooting stars.

Stranger even than the city were the creatures inhabiting it. Every shape and size and color was represented. Monsters like giant insects. Tentacled beasts riding on wheeled contrivances. A large slug with dozens of eye stalks. There were also people with the usual arrangement of limbs, but even these often departed from the normal. They might be blue or green or covered in fur. They might have extra eyes, or none at all, or be wearing a breathing apparatus that concealed their features.

Machines also moved purposely throughout the city. Some rolled on wheels or tracks. Others flew through the air, hovering like airships or darting about like hummingbirds.

A small, blue-gray creature composed mostly of tentacles and eyeballs scurried up to them. It stood only four feet high and seemed to possess no mouth or claws, but Roger chose not to underestimate it and prepared himself for a potential attack.

"Captain, I'm so happy we ran into each other," the creature declared as it slid to a stop before them. The metallic voice seemed to come from a device strapped to one of its larger tentacles.

"Yes, that will happen when you hover around my cabin door all the time," Sydney replied.

"I've recently begun reading the works of Jacques Pelletier du Mans and was hoping you would join me at the café to discuss it. Your human perspective would help my research immensely."

"You are such a charmer, Marguerite, but I'm a bit busy at the moment."

"Oh I'm ever so sorry for the intrusion. Do stop by the café if you change your mind." The creature scurried away as quickly as it had arrived.

Roger felt his muscles unclench one by one. "What an extraordinary creature."

"You like her? I got the basic body design from the cover of a trashy sci-fi novel. What I'm really proud of, though, is her personality. I leveraged some cutting edge speech recognition and deep neural A.I. code I downloaded from Berkeley University. Her responses are surprisingly lifelike, though she mostly only talks about Renaissance French literature. I should broaden her data set one of these days."

"I did not understand a word of that."

"She's an NPC, a non player character. She's not real. I made her, just like I made everyone and everything else here." She waved her hand to take in the entire city. "Welcome to the USS Wonderland."

"You... conjured all this?"

"Yup. Just like that coffee table. Poof, from nothing. Well, not exactly poof. I've been working on it for the last three years, nearly every moment I wasn't hacking the ship's control systems."

"The ship. You keep speaking of that."

"Yes, we're traveling on a spaceship. We've both been abducted by space aliens. I hijacked the ship I was on, then rescued you. Got a pretty sweet upgrade in the process. This bucket has bigger engines and more processing power."

"Space... aliens. Like something from that writer, H. G. Wells."

"Pretty much, but I doubt these blokes come from Mars. We've been there. Nothing but sand."

Roger wasn't sure he could believe what he was hearing. "You've been to Mars?"

"Well not me personally. The human race. We've sent robotic probes. Cute little buggers, rolling around leaving tracks across the Martian desert. Hey, you want to go get some tea?"