The Last Silver Bullet Read online

  Around the last bend of the millennium, humans were abuzz with the possibility of a Y2K bug that could potentially cause massive malfunctions of computer programming systems of the entire world. It turned out to be a massive malfunction all right, but of the programming systems of their intellect. They were going to sleepwalk through the final phase of SFLA’s invasion, hooked to Pokémon Go and Blue Whale Challenge; hooked to entertainment.

  To further dumb things down, this junk-food loving, couch-potato model turned out to be compatible with a world already slobbing over escalators, ATM machines, getting stuff delivered right to the doorstep, loving the power of buying a PET plastic bottle of water on the go and sometimes, even bottled air of the mountains.

  They were also infused with the travel bug. Globetrotting was a mere ticket away. Earlier people travelled with some purpose which was mostly related to survival, now they were travelling to satisfy an itch – even at the cost of over tourism. It was a cool thing to take selfies at destinations one had already seen in pictures, and jet-setting around, even to space.

  Bloomans were at the mercy of their creation now. It was a catch 22 situation for them, where at one end, the humans were rapidly destroying the Tree of Life, but on the other, they were getting advanced enough to comprehensively protect it. A century of devastating wars and spurious sciences had somehow given them great advancements in the medical and biological sciences – they were nicely learning the tricks of editing genes within organisms too. This, along with stem cell technology, had the potential of eradicating cancers and many other diseases.

  Nevertheless, the corrupt Blooman government had already given up. Those in power were just ensuring that they can misuse it to have themselves and their kids live in protected environments, besides earning more than they worked for. Fearing for his life, the President of the Blooman world had already set up his office in the White House, which the U.S. was going to protect at all costs.

  This was the last leg of the preparations, before the final phase of the invasion could be ushered in. The countdown had begun ever since humans successfully put the last batch of 66 satellites in orbit required by the SFLA to complete the blanket coverage of the planet. With this Iridium satellite constellation, establishing communications from anywhere in the world – including Antarctica – was now possible for the invaders. They always knew that tactical communication in war was key. Now they had the capability of coordinating attacks and keeping an eye on the proceedings, even from the remotest corners of the world.

  But growing around an oil-field of a desert in the Middle East, Ayesha was planning to take the SFLA Commander-in-Chief out of the equation. What she didn’t know was that she was kick-starting the Brotherhood’s Plan Zee.

  10

  Femme Fatale

  Ayesha was a True Rose of Jericho bush of the Mustard family growing in the vicinity of one of the Kuwaiti oil-wells that had been set on fire by a retreating Iraqi army during the early 90s. It was one of those mini-wars for control of oil that were peppering history and leaving a strong, bad taste.

  The Iraqi dictator had already realized he would have to concede the conquered territory of Kuwait. But the way he saw it, if he couldn’t have it, no one should. Saddam Hussein sent his men to detonate all of Kuwait’s oil wells. Some 600 of them were set ablaze. They burned for seven months, covering the Gulf with poisonous smoke, soot and ash. Black rain fell, lakes of fire were created. The sand and gravel on the land bonded with oil and soot to form a human length deep crust of hardened tarcrete over the desert, killing all plant life under it and making the region a dead zone for vegetation. Along with the marine creatures dying from oil-spills, scores of livestock and other animals perished because of the oily mist blackening their lungs with oil and soot in the air.

  The tenacious Ayesha had eked out a life within a rift in the hard tarcrete where rains and storms had brought in fertile desert soil over time. The species was one of the quickest to take advantage of those fleeting moments in the desert when favorable conditions present themselves. It was because the True Rose of Jericho could take position in dry channels where water could collect during periods of rain. In those channels, the seeds could germinate in less than 12 hours of pouring down.

  Once all the water in the sandy soil evaporated, the bush shriveled up and died, but apparently, that was not the end of the story. As the skeleton dried out, the branches curled up into a ball-like formation with extremely hard-shelled fruits tucked away in the interior – that is, if it had been pollinated and was able to produce the fruits in time before the water in the soil dried up. All set now, the curled-up skeleton waited for the next showers.

  This was where the species’ physiological quirk showed up in full glory. As soon as there was enough water surrounding them, the dried tissues of their fist-like curled branches absorbed the water through the roots and unfurled to their normal shape. The unfurled stems exposed the spoon-shaped fruits to the favorable elements, with their convex shape adaptation giving them an effective way of seed dispersal. Though there was nothing stopping the bush from taking roots in mellower environments with better rainfall, the species relished the challenge of having to fight the elements for survival.

  Ayesha followed Bruce Lily’s philosophy, ‘Don’t pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.’ But, being in a desolate landscape with no companions, she was entirely reliant on the weak hotspot internet connection she was managing to get from a distant source. She spent her time researching on bioacoustics of non-Blooman origins – it kind of kept her sane amidst that sort of isolation.

  The lonely researcher had read reports on the Jeffrey Pine that had lived for 500 years over the Sentinel Dome. She had also studied the work of the Lemmon family which had made her quite gung ho about finding the many unpublished works of the family on non-Blooman communications. Even through official sources stated that the unpublished works had been destroyed in that forest fire the SFLA had started, it didn’t dampen her spirits.

  She decided to inspect the area through the Blooman Hyper-Reality Experience that allowed users to feel the simulation of a real environment with 4D touch and other sensory features like heat, cold, force of the wind, and sound. You could also have a physical interaction with other users exploring the same area as you are, even brawl with them and exchange impact feedback to the body. Only thing that was not possible with it was to move objects and have physical interactions with non-Bloomans.

  The Lemmon family and its beloved Jeffrey Pine had been dead for decades and new families of Lemmon’s Needlegrass occupied their patch of land. Ayesha asked around for anything they had found in the soil around them, some documents that had survived the fire, any pen drives. There was nothing to be found. It was finally when she climbed to the top of the Sentinel Dome and checked the remains of the Jeffrey pine that she got something of worth – she literally stumbled upon Big Brother Lemmon’s external hard disk.

  Big Brother Lemmon was known to spend a lot of time conversing with the Jeffrey Pine. He was preparing the Jeffrey Pine to keep the secrets of the brotherhood; instructing him to store it in an external hard disk in case anything untoward happened.

  The cones of the Jeffrey Pine were the tree’s data-storage devices. Even when the Jeffrey Pine was in a state of hopeless despair after Big Brother Lemmon got done in by the fire, he had remembered to follow his Blooman companion’s instruction. Before he himself succumbed to the SFLA-manufactured drought, he used the last of his energy to store the knowledge of the Sacred Weapon, along with everything that was there to be known for triggering it. The gentle-to-touch cones were perfect for storing such critical information, since their security features were matchless. They even had complex security passwords for good measure.

  Ayesha scanned the data-storage device to download its contents onto her system – no one could go through the contents without feeding-in the passcode anyway. She got back home and immediately
got down to cracking it – a knack she had developed out of nothing better to do. An extensive exercise of trying out various permutations and combinations followed before she managed a breakthrough. She was shocked.

  Along with files on the workings of the Sacred Weapon, there was a folder containing the history of the SFLA, their agenda and where they had come from. There was a lot of information on the SFLA’s tyrannical leader, how he rose to power and details of his ultra-sadistic subjugation tactics. Above all, Ayesha could see how important he was to the SFLA’s mission with his immaculate planning and execution skills.

  As she went through the rest of the folders, she noticed that the one on the exact location of the weapon was empty. There was only an introduction to the weapon and the design of the key for activating it. A bit of scanning revealed that the contents had been deleted. Acting on instinct, she exported the files on the Sacred Weapon to a secure server in New Zealand, wisely scrambled her IP address too. She also tried contacting the Brotherhood but couldn’t get anywhere with it.

  It was then that the forward-thinking Ayesha decided to contact the SFLA Commander-in-Chief. She was seeing things in a different light now. She wanted to take him down. Ayesha was practical; she knew she wouldn't be able to live long enough to make any significant contribution to the fight with the SFLA. She knew because she only had time till the moisture was gone from the soil and she died. At least she could finish off their leader and make the job easier for the Brotherhood.

  When the SFLA operatives came to know about her, they paid a visit. Ayesha was insistent about only wanting to speak to their leader. She claimed that she had some critical information about the Brotherhood’s plan for the SFLA. The operatives believed her and were convinced that she wasn’t bluffing since it wasn’t every day that a Blooman popped up knowing so much about them. She was even addressing their leader by his name and military designation, General Zorx. A back-check on her was enough to eradicate any other fleeting doubts. After all, she had visited Yosemite and retrieved data from the Jeffrey Pine’s cone – they had one of them in their possession too, but hadn’t been able to crack its code.

  Ayesha lured them further into getting her way by telling them that she wished to live long and have a family, that too living right next to her. She said she was done with solitude and the briefness of existence. She asked the SFLA to arrange for a constant supply of moisture too, ‘And, no acid rain, ever,’ she negotiated for effect.

  That was the last she was going to be successful in her mission. What she hadn’t anticipated was that Zorx was going to send a double who would claim he was the SFLA leader. Though Ayesha did manage to eliminate him, it exposed her double-cross.

  Having ensured that Ayesha revealed her true intentions, and couldn’t pose a threat any longer, General Zorx waltzed in to have a word with her. Immediately she knew she made heavy weather out of the situation by trying to ambush him.

  It was the first time a Blooman was seeing the SFLA leader. He was paler than she had imagined. Towering over her, out of harm’s way, he brandished his insanity like a weapon – a sight overpowering enough to put fear in the bravest of souls. She literally felt the pressure mounting over her.

  The General still needed Ayesha to tell him about the Brotherhood’s plan. ‘We were going to give you everything that you want in life, why did you try to pull a fast one?’

  Ayesha brushed aside the air of unease creeping up on her soul and laughed it off. ‘Everything wasn’t good enough.’

  General Zorx played it cool. ‘I see. Still, let me keep my part of the deal. I shall let you live, and have a family, that too right next to you.’ He was grinning. ‘If you are not going to keep your part of the deal, your kids would.’

  The wily General knew that a True Rose of Jericho bush was known to the humans as the resurrection plant, with some seeing in it the resurrection of Jesus. Though, technically the bush died off and curled over the seeds to protect them until the conditions were favorable for the skeleton to uncurl back its original shape, it was the consciousness of the parent bush that got resurrected in their kids’.

  What followed was an extended period of torture for Ayesha. She was kept alive all right, but just about. Her internet hotspot connection was culled and it was just her and the SFLA. They wanted to break her resolve before she died, since those weak moments would be recalled by her kids and that’d make them gullible. Ultimately she died and the SFLA waited for the next rains for her skeleton to unfurl and the seeds to sprout. What they didn’t know was that Ayesha had other plans in place.

  Before she had asked for a council with General Zorx, she had already made arrangements for slipping away. One stormy night, her curled-up skeleton did a Houdini and was nowhere to be found. Though they lost her, the SFLA had a fresh lead now. They knew all the action was happening in the Yosemite Valley and they needed to look there for the answers.

  Meanwhile, an awkward bunch of Blooman youngsters were coming together and getting to know of the mess the human race was creating on the planet. A meeting with Ayesha’s son was going to change their lives forever.

  11

  Aimnesia

  Buddy Smalls didn’t feel like going to school that day, though it wasn’t like it was happening for the first time. Lately, he had been looking to avoid attending school a bit too frequently.

  ‘Oh, c’mon, sweetheart; it’s gonna be a nice school trip,’ Gia – his mother – egged him on.

  All young plants and trees looked forward to school trips, but not Buddy. It was the bullies he hated dealing with – school trips invariably got them going on overdrive. Though they’d never train their guns at him because he generally kept to himself, he just hated the ugliness.

  For Buddy, the funny thing about entering high school was that you started to notice it was more than a place to learn new stuff and develop some social interaction skills – a school was a bully farm too. When you are younger and tiny, you get bullied, but the moment you enter high school, you are in a position to be the bully. Sadly, a lot of kids start cherishing that change of position and conveniently become bullies.

  ‘Well, it is either the school trip, or you’re coming with me to the seminar,’ Gia laid it out.

  Buddy would get so disinterested in things sometimes that Gia would have to give him an option she knew he’d hate even more. He couldn’t see himself as someone going to environmental protests and seminars, even though he generally cared about the issues.

  While the kids around him were all busy gaming, playing Selfie Olympics and dreaming of becoming a Greenstagram star, Buddy was into infotainment. It didn’t take him long to figure out that things were fast going to the dumps. It was because of the global warming crisis and the kind of exploitation humans were doing of the planet out of what he thought was their trashy sense of speciesism.

  His little sister, Milli Ann, shared his sentiments but was vociferously critical of human activities, even getting nicknamed Militia for that. After all, they were calling this the Anthropocene epoch – the passage of time where human activities had started having a significant impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems.

  Though she was still to make it out of middle school, Milli Ann was notorious for having issues with almost everything. She even had issues with human beings obsessed with cut flowers, saying that it was utterly sadistic to cut off a species’ reproductive organs and giving them to each other for expressing love and other emotions. Sometimes she would get so angry in life because of the helplessness, that the family would have to take her on hiking trips quite frequently. Keep her on the move so that she doesn’t get enough time at one place to notice the problems, they believed. ‘Come now, it’d be fun,’ Milli Ann coaxed Buddy. He had already chosen to go on the school trip though.

  The school was going on a trip within the Yosemite Valley itself. The kids had only seen from a distance some of the tourist attractions they were going to visit. Living in the vicinity of
the Sentinel Dome, Milli Ann had always wanted to climb atop and enjoy the panoramic view. Hiking to the top was a great way of experiencing miles and miles of scenery in whatever direction one looked in.

  As soon as Buddy saw the bullies warming up before the hike, he knew he had to keep to himself. The hike was not going to be particularly spectacular since it was only mid-February and quite cold for the vegetation to be luxurious. He knew he had to find ways to look busy.

  They started off by crossing a bridge over a picturesque brook. Buddy and Milli Ann were only tiny Succulents, hence the impressions their feet were leaving on the snow made the kids bigger in size chuckle privately. Buddy could sense that.

  ‘Boop boop bee doop,’ he tried to misrepresent the awareness with a small, fidgety tune.

  The upright anatomical position Bloomans assumed in Hyper-Reality, depended almost entirely on the type of roots one had. While the part of a plant growing above the ground formed the head, roots braided up to form the body and limbs – plants and trees with tap roots curved them up behind like a tail of an animal.

  Walking in Hyper-Reality, Buddy and Milli Ann were at a disadvantage with their roots being extremely delicate and thin. On top of it all, their disproportionately big heads gave them a wobbly walk.

  The heckling pack upped the ante. Bored and looking for some enterpainment, they started placing bets on who, out of Buddy and Milli Ann, would take more steps to cross a certain distance. This time Milli Ann too felt something was going on behind her back.

  ‘Can’t wait to click a selfie with you on Sentinel Dome using the 360-degree-panorama-stitching software I have,’ Buddy said to Milli Ann. He had to ensure she got distracted from getting a proper whiff of the buffoonery going on.