We Are the Ants(34)

World leaders declare war on the Guilde Immuable, vowing never to bow to the will of terrorists.

Emmanuel Roth arrives in Geneva on 29 January 2016 to destroy the Large Hadron Collider, the site of the groundbreaking discovery of gravitons, without which time travel would be impossible. Emmanuel knows that scientific progress cannot be stopped, and that someone else will eventually discover gravitons, but he admires the symbolism of the act.

At 10:19 UTC, Emmanuel detonates a fission bomb, atomizing the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, and most of Switzerland. Emmanuel is unaware that the Large Hadron Collider is active. An infinitesimal fraction of a second prior to the bomb’s detonation, two particles collide with such fierce velocity that they form a micro singularity—a black hole too small to see with the naked eye. It would have lacked the energy to sustain itself under normal conditions, however, the fission bomb provides it with all the energy it requires to grow and become self-sustaining. As the earth’s core is devoured by the black hole, the resulting radiation vaporizes the outer layers of the planet and expels them, and all life, into space.

The future destroys the past destroys the future.





3 November 2015


Mom let me stay home from school on Monday but refused to allow me to skip Tuesday. She believed that the sooner I returned to my normal routine, the sooner I, and everyone else, would forget about The Incident. That’s what we’re calling it. It’s certainly better than referring to it as the Everyone Saw Henry Denton’s Blurry Balls in That One Picture escapade. Anyway, it’s impossible to forget about something that haunts me every time I close my eyes. I have to shower with the curtain drawn back and the door locked. And forget about sleep. Dawn and I have become fast friends, and I don’t expect that will change any time soon.

Tuesday morning I was sitting at the kitchen table nursing my second cup of coffee and wondering if I knew anyone I could score something stronger off of when Charlie strolled in wearing a dress shirt and tie. He grabbed a Mountain Dew from the fridge and chugged it.

“Come on,” he said, hardly looking at me. “I’ll take you to school on my way to work.”

I was the only person in the kitchen, so Charlie had to have been speaking to me, but he’d never offered me a ride to school before. “You don’t even have a car.”

“Hurry up, Henry, I don’t want to be late.” Charlie grabbed my backpack and headed out the front door, leaving me to toss my dishes in the sink and follow.

Charlie’s Jeep was running when I got outside. The engine rumbled and coughed and smelled like burning oil, but it actually worked. I swung into the passenger seat. “Holy shit, dude. You fixed it.”

“It was nothing,” Charlie said, but the giant smile plastered on his face said otherwise. It was the first time I remembered seeing my brother proud of anything other than a particularly putrid fart. The guy beside me, I didn’t know him. The aliens must have replaced him with a robot.

Charlie stalled the Wrangler when he put it in reverse, and swore like it was his primary language. I figured I still might have to walk, but he threw it into neutral, got it started again, and we took off. I hadn’t expected the Jeep to make it out of the driveway under its own power. Charlie had taken something that was broken and made it whole again.

“What’s up with the fancy tie?” I asked. Charlie hadn’t even worn a tie to Jesse’s funeral, but today he was decked out in a dress shirt, gray pants, and a black-and-silver-plaid tie.

He tugged at the neck. “Zooey’s dad gave me a job.”

“Doing what?”

“Computer stuff.” Charlie shrugged like it was nothing. “Fixing laptops and helping stupid people figure out their e-mail.”

As a kid, Charlie had disassembled everything he could get his hands on—CD players, watches, our clothes dryer—but he’d never shown much interest in putting them back together. Somewhere along the way he changed, and I missed it.

“What about college?”

Charlie sighed. “I’ve got responsibilities, Henry. Anyway, I’m not cut out for more school.”

“Is this what you want?”

“I love Zooey. We’ll figure the rest out as we go.” We hadn’t spoken much since he pissed on my homework, but my attack and humiliation at the hands of Marcus made my fight with Charlie seem petty and unimportant. Brothers fight, and then they move on.

“What do you even know about babies? You can barely look after yourself.”

Charlie punched me in the arm, but Nana could’ve hit me harder. “Look who’s talking, Space Boy.”

“You’re a dick.”

The brakes squealed and the body shuddered when Charlie stopped at a red light. “Listen, you can’t let people intimidate you, bro.”

“I wasn’t intimidated, Charlie; I was attacked.” I could still feel the tape around my wrists, see the smooth patches where it had torn the hair from my arms, and my groin ached when I took a deep breath. Every movement was a reminder that I was a joke, every pain a reminder that I was better off not pressing the button.

Charlie gripped the cracked leather steering wheel so hard, his knuckles turned white. “Guys like that . . . They’re pussies.”

“Thanks for the brilliant insight.”

“I’m serious.” The light turned green. Charlie gunned it, trying to shift quickly through the gears, but it stuck in third, and the transmission chewed metal like it was grinding bones. “If I’m going to beat someone up, they’ll see me coming. Only cowards attack a kid in the showers.”