Icon #50 Cool

Icon #50  - 

The morning sky over Tokyo was a wash of muted purples and orange. Breathtaking. Sean stood on the balcony of his suite, near the edge of the city, took off his sunglasses, and breathed the air in deeply. His eyes filled with tears, both of fondness and regret.

Behind him the television was a buzz of voices too low to distinguish, yet too insistent to be ignored. He knew what they were saying. The reports were all the same, only the location of the disasters changed each hour.

The attack had been as sudden as a summer rain in his native Louisiana. No wide-eyed warnings from the astronomers, tucked away with their sensors and radio-telescopes in the observatories, no multi-media blitz from far above the Earth by green-skinned, antenna-laden aliens who usurped the airwaves to demand surrender. Nothing.

They appeared first in the Americas, sliding relentlessly across the continent like an impenetrable wave of destruction. There was no communication at all, no negotiation. Sean’s countrymen had hit the aliens with everything they had, and they had failed. The final reports had come in from New York City, and there had been rumors of nuclear armament, but he had no way to the exact details. He had to assume that the termination of their communication meant that they had failed.

Next had been Europe, where efforts had been concentrated on escape and fortification. In the end, the European defense proved as ineffective as the American offense, and they fell. They very simply ceased to be. No transmissions. No more pleas for help that nobody knew how to provide.

Sean spun back toward his apartment, a grim smile planted on his lips. He should be excited, he told himself. It was the story of a lifetime — the story of all lifetimes, it seemed; a journalist’s dream. Here he was, smack dab in the middle of the last battlements. His was the honor of historian and chronicler of mankind’s final battle. The ultimate news report to an extinct audience.

He found the half-full bottle of Sake he’d been working on all morning and grabbed it, heading for the door. He had the sensation that something was imminent — it was in the air. He didn’t want to die alone.

As he passed the television, he paused. The endless reports had stopped. All that filled the screen was a yellow symbol, a Japanese word he was not familiar with, floating on a field of iridescent blue. There were no more voices, either — not exactly. A strange chanting sound, almost a hum, flowed out of the speaker in rich, melodious tones. The sequence of notes repeated in an endless hypnotic pattern.

He shook his head and moved into the hall. It was hardly the time to wonder over the idiosyncrasies of Japanese television. He moved quickly toward the elevators. The feeling of energy in the air was growing, and he didn’t want to be caught up in his destiny quite so soon. Not alone.

As he passed the closed doors of his neighbors, he noticed that the sound was following him, the humming chant from his television. It filled the air about him.

“Damn,” he muttered, pushing the down arrow and watching the numbers rush toward his floor. “Everyone is listening to that damned station.”

He stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the ground floor. The building was modern, almost annoyingly impeccable in every respect, and the lifts were no exception. It took only seconds to make the transit to the ground floor, and he was almost out the door of the lobby before he realized that there had been no break in the sound. The elevator speakers had been broadcasting it. The stereo in the lobby was broadcasting it, and the large-screen television there showed the symbol in crisp, clea,r electronically-generated color.

If the halls of the building had seemed deserted, the streets themselves were teeming with people. Or, perhaps teeming was the wrong word. The citizens of the city lined the streets, arm in arm, in unbroken lines that paralleled one another and ran on as far as the eye could see. Every man, woman, and child stood as if rooted, eyes on the horizon.

Far above him, floating on a screen of cloud — projected there by some holographic mechanism Sean could not immediately understand, was the symbol. He stared at it and felt the meaning coming clear, the essence of it, though he had never seen it before. The sound absolutely filled the air. He felt that if he relaxed his muscles completely, it would hold him erect, and without further thought, he moved forward and joined the nearest rank. A hole just appeared, and he found his hands gripping those of an elderly woman and a small child.

No words were spoken, only the chant, and he felt his own voice rising to join theirs. His mind began to clear of its fear, of its impediments. He stared at the huge symbol, floating far above them, and he could perceive a deep harmony in the symmetry of the swirls and slashes. A unity.

The horizon darkened. The alien craft were so plentiful that they filled the sky, a plague of locusts, a rain of doom. Somehow his fear did not return. He felt a wave rushing up the length of the line in which he stood, a flare of energy — of combined wills. And then it happened.

The ground beneath his feet lurched. The horizon seemed to dip and sway, and the Earth, ripped free from its axis, tilted, altering its centuries old path through the solar system. The oceans reared up and over the land. Volcanic eruptions burst free across the globe.
Sean felt it all in an instant, a photo-flash vision of Armageddon, and then he was free — floating, and all that remained was the symbol — the unity.

He saw the front lines of the alien force crumbling, swallowed by a suddenly angry Earth, wiped clean even more completely and than they had the first continents of humanity that they had faced. Then came a blinding flash of light, and from above, Unity perceived that it was good.

Written by David Niall Wilson - Visit Website
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