The Last Silver Bullet Read online

  For Yajas

  THE LAST SILVER BULLET

  Edited by Courtney Wendleton of Sanctuary Edits.

  Cover by Islamuddin Ahmed of Studio One Art.

  © 2020 Gami. All rights reserved.

  Contents

  1 Project Human

  2 Foul Play

  3 Garden of Eden

  4 Round One

  5 Chain Reaction

  6 Bomb’s Away

  7 Godspeed

  8 Message in a Perfume Bottle

  9 Autopilot

  10 Femme Fatale

  11 Aimnesia

  12 Off the Blocks

  13 Trojan Horse

  14 Mythconceptions

  15 Resurrection

  16 Shot

  17 Pandora’s Box

  18 Hook, Line and Sinker

  19 Great Escape

  20 Last Wish

  21 Keeping the Word

  22 Agonnoying

  23 Debatterized

  24 Crazioactive

  25 Launch Code

  26 Cleaning Up the Closet

  27 Camouflage

  28 Show Time

  29 Showdown

  30 Secret Meeting

  31 Back in Black

  32 Wolf’s Lair

  33 Declaration of War

  34 Survival of the Fittest

  35 First Encounter

  36 Bitter Pill

  37 Blitzkrieg

  37 Endgame

  39 Stumbling Block

  40 Darkest Hour

  41 Time’s Up

  42 T Minus Zero

  43 Return to Innocence

  About the Author

  1

  Project Human

  For the first time in his life, Big Brother Unaduti wasn’t interested in photosynthesizing. Corn plants need a lot of sunlight to ensure their narrow leaves could make the necessary amount of carbohydrates, yet here he was, ignoring the prioritization of essentials. It was because of the strange voices he had been hearing of late.

  The Big Brother had a unique ability; the skill of hearing things that average flower-producing plants – Bloomans – couldn’t. He was capable of hearing electromagnetic vibrations coming from space; he could hear sound frequencies across soundproof rocks too.

  Years of training had taught him one valuable lesson – always be careful about differentiating between reality and aural hallucinations. The voices were surely not what he’d categorize as figments of his imagination.

  He was uncharacteristically jittery too. In all of his time as the head of the Brotherhood, no one had seen him like that. Corn plants were famously calm, but this time, he was waiting impatiently for the video conference on Spyke with his friend – the president of the Blooman world.

  It was the first time in history that the head of the government and the head of the Brotherhood were both Cherokee. Even though they lived in different regions, President Yonaguska – an easy-going Bean stock – was a friend of Big Brother Unaduti since the time they were kids.

  At the designated time of the meeting, Big Brother Unaduti activated the private conversation mode on Spyke so that no plant or tree around the two would hear what they were going to be talking about.

  ‘How is it going, U?’ The President asked as soon as he saw the Big Brother on his holographic screen.

  ‘Good enough, Y,’ he replied.

  ‘Congratulations to the Brotherhood, I heard you have successfully managed to get the prehumans to eat a meat-rich diet. Really exciting to see they have started scavenging for bone marrow.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He was rather unexcited as he paid his gratitude, even though the creation of the prehumans was the most gloriously celebrated work of the Brotherhood.

  ‘I’m told that now with a meat-rich diet, we’ll be able to fast track their evolution. They’ll now have all the energy they’d need for evolving larger brains.’

  ‘Indeed, we’re going to have a fine species to help us nurture and protect the Tree of Life. In about half a million years, they will be ready to colonize Eurasia.’

  ‘Fantastic! I believe they have also started using crude stone tools now. The breakthrough, the Brotherhood made with the opposable digit for these prehumans was a masterstroke of biomechanics.’

  ‘Yes, it was a game-changer,’ the Big Brother acknowledged in an aloof manner. Usually, all President Yonaguska needed to do was mention about Project Human and Big Brother Unaduti would start talking about it like an excited child.

  The Brotherhood was a monastic order of Bloomans, whose exploits in the past had got the world to call it the Guiding Light of Blooman Society. Some of them were the first Bloomans to take roots as the seed-producing Ferns that had dominated the landscape up till then, started going extinct. The die-out happened when Pangaea, the single, giant continent on Earth at that time started breaking apart, causing massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It was only because of the Brotherhood’s resilience and resolve that made Bloomans survive the Continental Drift, while the seed-producing Ferns either got buried under the Earth’s crust, or died out systematically.

  After the Bloomans truly started flourishing, the Brotherhood started work on realizing its creation myth and prophecy. The scriptures said that Mother Earth and Father Sun wanted the Bloomans to create a species that was supposed to help out in the nurturing and protection of the Tree of Life.

  A monastery at a fertile valley, south of the Zambezi River of Central Africa, was asked to take up the responsibility of creating the various subspecies of early humans – they were to be made by altering the DNA of the great apes. The lush region had an enormous lake that proved to be an ideal cradle for sustaining them.

  When the prototypes were ready, the government marveled at their magnificence and Project Human was given an official go-ahead. No one had any doubts about the potential of the subspecies. Gradually enough, the Brotherhood scaled-up their production.

  ‘What’s the matter,’ asked the President, clearly sensing something was amiss with the Big Brother, ‘is something bothering you?’

  ‘Well, yes. I was coming to that.’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘I have reasons to believe that a global invasion is being planned.’

  ‘By who?’

  ‘I don’t know, but they call themselves the SFLA. This is their second invasion. Last time around, they had been unsuccessful at establishing a planet-wide regime.’

  President Yonaguska almost slipped off the stalk he was vining over. He wasn’t expecting the cause of botheration to be this serious.

  ‘Would you do something for me, Y?’ asked the Big Brother.

  ‘Well, besides the fact that we’ve been friends since childhood, no government has ever said no to a request from the Brotherhood, and there is no reason it should happen now.’

  ‘I knew I could bank upon you. Let’s stay alert.’

  ‘We will,’ assured the President.

  After the call, Big Brother Unaduti consulted with a disciple he had chosen as his successor. ‘Master, how do you know that someone is planning an invasion of Earth and not some other planet?’ asked the disciple.

  ‘I know because those voices were talking about the prehumans. The SFLA needs them for ushering the invasion.’

  2

  Foul Play

  A million years passed since Big Brother Unaduti had heard those voices. The prehumans had achieved a brain size of 1,000 cubic centimeters with their special meat-rich diet. While there was a lot of excitement around with the results, the Brotherhood went about fine-tuning the prototypes patiently – they had to be very careful about dealing with the development of their delicate minds. One
seemingly random occurrence concerning a band of prehumans changed things forever; something the Brotherhood had planned to orchestrate much later.

  The night was nothing out of the ordinary. A band of prehumans was huddled in a cave, seeking shelter from a passing storm. The rumble of lightning scared them, but they knew they were safe in the cave.

  The ones who found space to squat near the mouth of the cave were exposed to the cold, but it was only one half of their problem. They were more scared than the ones squatting deeper inside because predatory animals were also known to take shelter in such caves. Even though they had their Early Stone Age clubs and spears to defend themselves, the weapons were not much of a deterrent to the animals designed to kill. They wished for something that’d make the attacking animals not want to come near them.

  The storm was building up in the usual way, though this time there was a baffling sort of a phenomenon that the early humans were witnessing. A luminescent spherical object the size of a fist-sized stone floated down from the cloudy sky towards the mouth of the cave. The men raised their clubs to hit it away, but the glowing ball retreated towards a dead tree at a little distance away from the cave. As it made contact with the tree, the wood exploded and one of the burning branches was flung towards the mouth of the cave.

  In the beginning, the burning log scared them, but soon they grew comfortable. They didn’t need any language – sign or verbal – for conveying to each other that the burning piece of wood was nicely providing them warmth. More wood was added to the fire, and they kept doing so through the night. In fact, they didn’t let it die down from then on.

  A controlled fire kept them safe from attacking animals, and provided them with a source of warmth and light during the nights – the smoke from the fires also kept the annoying insects away. Soon they developed a hearth for the fire. Huddling around it developed social interactions which would later culminate into languages. The developments eventually led to cooked food too.

  Next step for them was to be able to create fire at will. Certain rocks around were perfect for it – they had seen these rocks rolling down slopes and producing sparks when they hit other stones. Quartz, obsidian and agate were rocks from the flint family that were identified for creating sparks good enough to make wood catch fire.

  The Brotherhood wasn’t expecting the early humans to have the knowledge of fire this early. They had a meeting on the new developments, but nothing tangible came out of it.

  ‘This is wrong,’ inferred the Big Brother of the time at the end of the meeting, ‘they were not supposed to have fire until much later.’

  ‘What difference does it make, Master?’ asked a disciple, ‘we were eventually going to give them the knowledge ourselves.’

  ‘That’s too much knowledge too soon. They really won’t know how to use it in a judicious and mature manner,’ observed the Big Brother.

  Something was wrong but the Big Brother couldn’t figure what. All that acquisition of the knowledge on fire couldn’t just have happened accidentally – it had literally fallen into the laps of early humans. Somebody has stolen fire and given it to them, suspected the Big Brother, but he didn’t have any leads on who did it.

  This little fiasco was soon sidelined because the Brotherhood had been trying to understand and deal with new retroviruses and herpes viruses infecting the humans all the time. Some showed peculiar symptoms while the others apparently had no effect on the humans. It was also the time early humans started producing advanced stone tools and weapons. The Brotherhood was keeping a close eye on this. Such skills had potential of misuse if left unmonitored.

  The plan was to eventually evolve three subspecies just to be on the safe side lest something went wrong with any of them. They were expected to branch out into Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens.

  Soon the Brotherhood got the first batches of settlers to leave Africa by opening vegetated corridors for them to travel through without worrying about food. After crossing land bridges into Eurasia, one batch moved west into Europe and became the Neanderthals, while the other moved east into Asia and branched out to become Denisovans. The population that remained in Central Africa evolved into Homo sapiens.

  When it came to comparing the three early human subspecies, the Homo sapiens weren’t the brightest crayons in the box. As the brotherhood had expected, the Neanderthals started acquiring a better knowledge of tool making, had way superior stoneware, and were making sleuth of new developments much before the Homo sapiens could.

  While the noisy bunches of Homo sapiens were mostly into creative arts and adornment, the Neanderthals were more reflective. The Denisovans were very private – a trait that allowed the Brotherhood to keep them wrapped in cotton wool.

  By 50,000 years ago, the Homo sapiens caught up with the technology bit and finished colonizing Eurasia, Americas and Australia. They had a few interactions with the Neanderthals and Denisovans along the way, few fights, an exchange of concepts, and attempts of interbreeding too. Since there was always going to be the scope of finding an uninhabited region, lasting confrontations were practically unnecessary. Soon, the Homo sapiens were outperforming the Neanderthals by taking greater risks. It was as if something had gotten activated in them.

  Everything was stable, until an outbreak of a new species of pathogenic bacteria amongst the Neanderthal population 30,000 years ago. It had spread through them because some Neanderthals had unluckily consumed a batch of raw eggs that were carrying the bacteria. Soon they were passing on the infection to other Neanderthals and the Denisovans too. The Brotherhood tried hard to flatten the curve, hoping some sort of herd immunity kicks in, but that was not to be.

  The bacteria affected the brain, spinal cord membrane and bloodstream of the two subspecies. It started causing seizures, inflammation of the stomach and intestines, spontaneous abortions and stillbirths. Nothing worked to fix it; the fluctuation in the ice age didn’t help either. Those who survived developed a bacteria-brimming pouch at the beginning of the large intestine. The two branches of early humans eventually went extinct in a couple thousand years.

  Though the Brotherhood just about managed to save the Homo sapiens by administering them an antibacterial fungi mould called penicillium, one thing was quite strange to them – the Homo sapiens weren’t affected so severely as the Neanderthals and Denisovans for some reason. The best two subspecies were gone; now the Brotherhood only had the Homo sapiens left to groom for the big job.

  It was the Brotherhood’s fall from grace even though the government brushed it off as just another case of natural selection. The entire fraternity was utterly gutted and felt defeated, except for one of them, Master Nakatomi, the Big Brother at that time, a tiny aquatic plant of the Wolffia tribe – commonly known as Duckweed. They were the tiniest flower-producing plants in the world that resembled specks of cornmeal floating on the water. He was determined to investigate.

  ‘There is something in the Homo sapiens’ past that has given them better immunity against the bacteria, as compared to the other two subspecies,’ he muttered to others in the fraternity. They had no idea.

  If only I could get one clue, he kept thinking.

  The clue was found in the Brotherhood’s long-forgotten creation myth and prophecy which had led to the Creation of Man. He asked the Brotherhood’s Research and Analysis Department to scrutinize the extinction event. After going through their findings, he became even more determined to find out about the invasion of Earth Big Brother Unaduti was warning of. Master Nakatomi ordered giant Water Lilies and Fig trees to scan up the world, including deep space. In a few years he received a report with the findings; it was a shocker.

  ‘What does it say, Master?’ asked one of the disciples.

  ‘They want to snuff out the Tree of Life,’ Master Nakatomi yawped.

  The Brotherhood had been caught unaware and grossly underprepared. In the coming days, the fraternity sprung into action. They had identified who the SFL
A was and a proper line of action was chalked out. Master Nakatomi was a mastermind when it came to establishing future events through his precise understanding and calculation of logical progression.

  He could see that the SFLA was going to barter something precious with the humans to make them prepare the grounds for the invasion. Though the Brotherhood was going to try diffusing the threat, Master Nakatomi had a feeling they’d only be able to limit the damage – at least till the 21st century gave them a real chance of finishing the SFLA with the Tree of Life’s Sacred Weapon, their Plan Zee.

  He also knew by then that the SFLA leadership was thoroughly visionary and he too would have to match up and ensure he calculates right. Timing was going to be important, however, his plan was extremely delicate because of the possible variables time could dish out.

  ‘We have made a grave mistake by ignoring the prophecy; one we cannot afford to repeat,’ pressed Master Nakatomi.

  He instructed his followers furthermore, ‘Place the Sacred Weapon at the now-forming Yosemite Valley in the Americas. Hope the Brotherhood of the future can use it with precision to defeat the SFLA. It is the only one that will work.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we inform the government of our findings, Master?’ asked a disciple.

  ‘I have already tried, but they didn’t believe me; they wouldn’t have; not after the Neanderthal and Denisovan extinctions. Moreover, we don’t have any decisive proof of the invasion, at least not one we can comprehensively convince the government with. We are the only hope; we shouldn’t act in haste. The Sacred Weapon is the last one we are left with.’

  3

  Garden of Eden

  After the extinction of the two subspecies, the Homo sapiens started making great progress in a world that solely belonged to them. The Brotherhood was a great provider and knew how to maintain symbiosis and balance, but there was one thing the Brotherhood still needed to confirm, whether the humans were obedient enough. After all, they were designed to obey the laws of Nature and act accordingly.