Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(4)
The studios wouldn’t stand for that, though, so your protagonist would be someone who worked at the facility. Or maybe someone who was married to someone who worked at the facility. Someone like me.
(I’m lying to myself, of course. If Hollywood had the purse strings, we wouldn’t be married, we’d be dating. And 15 years younger. And our genders would be flipped, so that I was the one working at the facility and she was the one at home, tapping out movie reviews on her laptop in the kitchen window. We probably also wouldn’t be in Montreal, but hey, maybe. They’re filming more and more movies in Toronto these days, or they were, back when they were still filming movies.)
Maybe she’d tell me about the project in the evenings, over plates of spaghetti, like she really did. Or maybe she’d keep it all secret from me, but I’d read some notes or something, after the whole thing started. One way or the other, I’d discover how they found the machine in a bricked-up basement underneath an abandoned insane asylum. (The studios would love that!) They thought it was some kind of computer, maybe one of the first computers ever built. Not really a computer at all as we know them today, but something more like a difference engine, like the ones Turing worked on. All brass and levers and numbered keys, like a cross between some kind of ancient cash register and a pipe organ. All the project was ever supposed to do was to see what this thing did, what it was. This was going to be a big break in the history of computing, but, instead, it was the end of the history of anything.
They knew that something was wrong the minute they started the machine. There wasn’t some slow build-up, it all happened at once. When they turned it on, there was a wave of poltergeist activity that swept out from the machine throughout the entire lab, across the river, and through all of Montreal. Every table and chair in the lab was shoved against the wall farthest from the machine. In the lunchroom a few floors up, chairs and tables overturned, plates slid off shelves to smash on the floor. Silverware magnetized. Every electronic device in the building shut down, and the entire city suffered a massive power failure.
In our apartment, all the doors slammed shut simultaneously, and the handful of VHS tapes that I still had in a box under the entertainment centre all melted.
Things went to shit from there.
Following on the heels of the poltergeist activity, so close behind it that no one in the lab had even reacted, the ectoplasm began to materialize out of the valves of the machine, flowing down the sides, forming a sort of barrier around it, something that shimmered and moved almost like water. Nobody in the lab had any idea what it was then, of course, but the first one who touched it died instantly. His hair turned white, he fell to the floor choking and slapping at his chest. By the time anyone else got to him, he’d ossified, and there were hundreds of spiders crawling out of his mouth and nose.
? ?
In the movie version, the machine would have been the heart of everything. Its destruction would have been the end of the film, the salvation of mankind. That makes for a better ending, sends the folks in Peoria home happy. In real life, though, the machine was just the key that turned the lock. Once the door was open, there was no closing it.
They did manage to destroy the machine, eventually, and when they did, they found a corpse in the middle of it. The mummified body, hooked to thousands of copper wires, of a woman named Katrina Something, the rest of the name illegible, a powerful physical medium, born 1899, died 1916. We only know any of that because there was a plaque on the inside of her abstract coffin that told us.
By then, the handful of people who were left from the facility had figured out sort of what the machine did. Or, at least, what it had done. By then, almost everyone had kind of figured it out. Everyone knew, at least, what was happening, even if a lot of them didn’t give it a name. Some did, though. The Internet, when it still worked, came to our rescue, prepared to turn anything, even the end of the world, into a kind of meme. They called it the Ghost Apocalypse.
It’s funny, in a way, because we had all been culturally preparing for the dead to come kill us for years by then. We just expected it to be their bodies, not their restless spirits. We had zombie apocalypse survival guides, and over on the U.S. side of things the CDC supposedly had a disaster plan for a zombie outbreak. Nobody had a plan for ghosts, and they proved a lot harder to deal with than zombies because, frankly, nobody knew how they worked. You couldn’t lay them to rest or settle their unfinished business, destroy the fetters that bound them to this mortal plane. They were pouring through now, this was their world. And you certainly couldn’t just shoot them in the head. Sometimes they already didn’t have a head. Sometimes they were just a voice, or a shape, or a cold draft, or the elevator door suddenly closing on you no matter what you did, and then the rest of the elevator dropping 27 stories to the underground parking garage, killing everyone on board.
We only had one movie that predicted this. Well, two if you count the remake. It was Kairo in Japan in 2001, Pulse in the U.S. in 2006, during the height of the J-horror boom, starring that girl from Veronica Mars and that guy from Lost. Well-known prognosticators of the end of the world.
(Did Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters 2 predict a kind of ghost apocalypse, albeit one staved off, twice-over, by a more Hollywood-friendly happy ending? Maybe a little bit.)
It was from Pulse that we got the idea that saved those few of us who got saved long enough to see what a world was like populated mainly by the dead. Some kid figured it out, disseminated it on Reddit and everywhere else. After most of the power went down, people started spreading the news with hand-lettered flyers written on red paper.