The moon had changed. Swollen as a celestial bubo, looming over the earth, regardless of night or day. It had appeared a week ago, craters and fissures contorted into a weeping face, punctuating the passing hours with heavensward quakes. Crowds had gathered in the streets of Holy Gothica. Murmurs filled the stagnant air as rays of sickly moonlight filtered through the Iron Sky. The stench of unwashed bodies was overpowering. Children clung to their parents, looking to them for answers, as eyeless prophets rambled on about the apocalypse in the gutters, quoting obscure verses and books long since burned. The smog was thick with uncertainty and fear. Not even the stormtroopers could disperse the traffic of morbid curiosity.
Doctor Somme avoided stepping in filth if only to keep his lab coat clean. Despite his standing as a man of science, he was just as curious as anyone else.
What is this phenomenon…?
High buttresses and parapets leered over the masses as monstrous gargoyles kept watch over would-be rioters and dissidents. Streetlights sizzled as the land itself moaned in anguish. Somme brushed his oily bangs behind his tea shades, laying a thumb under his chin, contemplating what could be done and what to do next. Though it was impossible to tell, he had a hunch as to what was happening. Somme kept to the alleys, passing dumpsters and beggars by, pondering what the coming days would look like. If the world was truly unraveling, what would humanity do when faced with extinction? Once, it had been a slow burn, a march down deadman’s walk to unseen gallows. Death was in sight. None could escape her embrace. Man had deemed himself unworthy of life. This wasn’t like the leprosy outbreak, the famine, or even the Hundred Years’ War. This was the beginning of the end.
What good is science at the end of all things? What good are my deductions when tomorrow they won’t exist? All those theses. All those hypotheses. Neither proven nor disproven. All of the progress and empirical evidence from these dark ages. Dust in the atrophying void….
Somme sighed deeply. This wasn’t about science, rather, his own hubris. A codec call interrupted his thoughts. He answered with a sigh, “Hello? Who is this—”
“I think you know the answer.”
Somme almost dropped the cell and shuddered. “Amadeus? How did you—? I mean,” he hushed his tone, “why are you calling me?”
“Meet me at the bar near Serfdom Two. There is something I wish to discuss.”
The call had ended. Somme flicked the cell shut. Cobblestones shifted under his lacquered shoes as he peered around the bend, checking over his shoulder. The smog rolled in, shadows stirred against the neon lights. The road to Yoshiwara was long and led through many junctions and industrial ghettos until the doctor came to the den of iniquity. Across the tracks by Haber Station, Somme noticed a hooded figure under a swaying sign reading SALEM BAR. With a nod, he departed into the dive. In the end, there was only one thing left to do.
“Gin and tonic,” Somme leaned on the bar, “make it a double.”
The balding server nodded and slid him a shot glass. Most of the clientele were the punks in patched denim jackets or off-duty officers, huddled around their drinks like flies on dead flesh, delinquents, and the dregs of society. Somme was not a drinking man and didn’t mingle. Only Amadeus could drag him to such a dirty place.
The hooded figure sipped his drink. “I regret that we didn’t part on better terms.”
“Likewise,” Somme said, “you’ve been quite busy. What with this doomsday business. Destroying an entire city. Millions of lives. Gone.” He chuckled and shook his head. “I don’t suppose many fathers would be proud of their sons.”
Amadeus raised his glass. “Yet here we are.”
“You’re getting better at social cues,” Somme admitted, “and wit.” They clinked their glasses together. Awkward silence lingered in the air. “What do you want?”
Amadeus’s eyes gleamed from under his hood. “I need your help, doctor.”
“Let me guess,” Somme said, “another specimen of occult science?”
Amadeus scoffed. “Hardly. Yuko has returned to the heavens, as it should be, but that is not enough to usher the end. Not quite. I’ve heard rumors of an artifact at the cornerstone of this city. Something that ‘official history’ forgot. Something that would usher our salvation.”
Somme looked away, guessing what he was referring to.
Amadeus lay a hand on his back. “They call it the Machine.”
The doctor’s mind jolted to corners of distant memory when he and a few colleagues were exploring the cyclopean tunnels under Holy Gothica. Older than the city’s earliest foundations, they followed strange pulsating lights along the corridors, deciphering the walls of cuneiform and glyphic runes. Never before had Somme seen such architecture; reflective of modern technology with circuit boards of stone and stained glass interfaces.
“So the legends in the are true,” said an archeologist, spectacles caked with the dust of centuries. “These are the halls of the Old Ones.”
“It would seem,” Somme said, “I’d encourage you to not touch anything.”
It was a labyrinth delved deep into the bowels of the earth, centered on a singular black obelisk in a sea of liquid azoth, bound to knotted entrails of ducts and wires.
“Fascinating,” Somme said, “truly fascinating.” He came to the dais and squinted at an inscription chiseled upon its clay. “This,” he managed, “is something best left alone—”
Whirls and mechanical footfalls filled the stagnant air as dozens of fluorescent eyes glimmered in the darkness—guardians and ancient automata hewn from the obsidian of the Holy Land, forged in blood and tempered with ritual sacrifice. Spidery drones and great iron hulks animated by the offered dead as living ossuaries and tributes to heathen gods. A stone fist cracked against a workman’s skull, splitting bone and splattering gore. Somme couldn’t quite remember what happened next, only a montage of broken limbs and bludgeoning digits. He fled down the caverns as the gunners opened fire upon the emerging juggernauts.
Until consciousness failed him.
Somme awoke to a medical team before the excavation site, babbling deliriously about the majesty and horror he had uncovered. A feat of cosmic engineering built by a long lost culture. One of antediluvian origin. It was a phenomenon no one understood, save that it wasn’t something to be trifled with, and yet, its energy alone fueled the grids of Holy Gothica with more than ample surplus. Heretics called the Machine a god in its own right, a beacon from earth to heaven, a cornerstone which bound the physical to the immaterial. The implications of such an engine filled Somme with dread. For it had lain dormant for millennia, gathering dust in those darkened arcades as a slumbering beast. And should it be awoken by a madman.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied.
Back in the present, the doctor watched the fiend sip at his drink. The overhead lamps flickered for a moment as the radios whined with a tinge of static.
“I wonder who’s killed more people,” Amadeus kept his voice low, “you or me.”
Somme stared into his empty shot glass. “I’m sure I’ve ruined more. It’s a long way to the top.” He flagged the bartender for another round. He knew more than Amadeus likely realized—where it was located, who was its de facto warden, how to activate it. After all, the doctor had devoted his life to daemonology and weird science. “And what, pray tell, would you do with said device. Accelerate the end? Bring about the apocalypse even faster?”
“In a word, yes.” Amadeus let those words sink in like knives. A choir of passing monks broke the dreadful silence, voices hoarse in prayer, whipping themselves with scourges, reciting latencies and requiems for the sinful earth. “It needn’t end like this. Not for those willing to aid in the world’s rebirth.” He offered the doctor a gloved hand. “I am more than capable of ensuring the survival of your spirit. All I ask is your cooperation.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Nothing. I’ll leave you to your fate. With the rest of the world.”
Somme cracked a bitter smile. “Trying to paint yourself as a generous and merciful god? You know, I’m not exactly a man of faith.”
“It makes no difference to me in the long run,” Amadeus said. “I am merely offering you a chance to preserve your genius. For mutual benefit. Or would you rather face the apocalypse? Another soul to be tallied come Judgment Day? You could be a king of the new world.”
Morals rarely weighed on Somme, but these implications were hard to swallow. Then again, what else could he do? Wait until the clock struck midnight? Die in an orgy of blood and violence as daemons swallowed the world, like a sow in the meat grinder? Sometimes, the best thing one could do was say yes. The world would burn. He may as well reap the benefits.
“Well then,” Somme scoffed, “when you put it like that.”