These are the last days.
Oh goddamnit, he told himself. Stop it.
These are the last days. Beware the antichrist AI. He’d been reading in his old King James bible again, confirming what he remembered from his childhood studies: when Christ returned he would return at the end of the world. He had found several references to it, a phrase that Christ had apparently been fond of: “… I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.”
Of course nothing like this appeared in the United Church version. They seemed to have mixed in a little Eastern religion, changing it around so that when the Savior returns it is a time of joy and new beginnings. The part about Armageddon was reduced to a time of “struggle and change” but war had been eliminated altogether. The term “Armageddon” wasn’t even used.
Or was it? Dodd punched keys on his phone terminal, calling up a copy of the United Church Bible. “Search for references of Armageddon,” he told it. The reply came on the screen, little words between two asterisks:
Not Found
“Search for any occurrence of the word Armageddon,” he asked.
Not Found
Dodd shook his head in wonder. Armageddon was missing. He asked it for references to the Rapture, and it retrieved passages where people were “in rapture” at the voice of the Savior, but never were they “raptured”, the true believers taken away to heaven before Armageddon, spared the pain and agony of the Trials and Tribulations. People who were taken away during “the Rapture”
simply disappeared off the face of the Earth.
Not Found
Jesus is the beginning and the end, Dodd thought. If Jesus shows up, it will be the end. The finish.
Two weeks from now.
BEWARE THE ANTICHRIST AI! The slogan kept popping into his head. THESE are the LAST DAYS.
It was depressing to Dodd, because he couldn’t help but feel that these were the last days. The world was going to hell. Robots and AIs were taking all the jobs. The poor and the disturbed were disappearing into euthanasia centers. Child taxation was making it harder and harder to have children, unless one happened to qualify for the “special circumstance clause” – which Dodd didn’t.
People were selling their progeny rights. Things changed so fast that one was apt to wander around in confusion from one week to the next, forever trying to get used to their surroundings. Thirty years ago interstellar colonies were still an impractical dream, and now they were reality – normal everyday people, Dodd’s neighbors, were packing up and leaving. Going to the new frontier, billions upon billions of miles away. It was incredible. Dodd couldn’t see how this could keep up, this constant change. It was like society was stretching reality to its limits, and like anything – it was a universal law – if you stretched something too far by God it was going to break.
Maybe Jesus is coming, he thought.
The phone began ringing, startling him, and he exited the UC
Bible. He touched the key to accept video and picked up the handset. He recognized the lurid, painted Oriental face of Mr.
Chang, the apartment manager, as it appeared on the screen. “Is Sheila Xonos there, Mr. Corely?” he asked in his pleasant, patient voice.
“Yes. Just a minute.”
“Thank you.”
Dodd touched the HOLD key and padded down the hall into the living room, stood in front of the television and faced Sheila.
“Hey,” he said. “Telephone.”
She stared at his legs, mouth slack, eyes half-open. She looked like she was either dead or dying. “Hey,” he said, waving his hand in front of her face. “Sheila. Sheila! Sheila!”
Sheila jumped, startled, covering her bare breasts with her arms. “What?” she said, irritation in her voice.
“The manager wants to talk to you.”
“What manager?”
“The apartment manager.”
“Is he here?” Sheila looked around the room.
Dodd sighed, shaking his head. He pointed toward the kitchen.
“On the phone.”
“Oh.” Sheila snatched a robe that had been sitting in a heap on the floor. Dodd went back into the bedroom as she answered the call, but after a few minutes she appeared in the doorway. “Hi,”
she said.
Dodd was lying on his bed with the old King James. He threw it aside and said, “What?”
“The rent on my apartment is due.”
Dodd nodded, accepting the inevitable. “I’ll pick it up.”
“You still want me to keep it?”
Dodd stared at her with a blank expression. Then his eyes lit up. “What, are you saying you want to move in with me?”
“I’m more or less moved in now.”
“You said you wanted to keep your place.”
She shrugged, the loose robe sliding down to expose one of her smooth shoulders. “It doesn’t matter. I mean, you’re the one paying for it.”
True, Dodd thought. It would save money to get rid of her apartment … and if she were officially moved in, living with him, they would be that one step closer to a marriage contract, and–-
With Sheila? he thought. Would I want to have a child with her? Would she want to have one?
She frowned at his odd expression. “What?” she said. “Look, it’s okay, I don’t have to move in. I mean–-”
“You can move in,” Dodd said. “I mean, why not? Why not make it official? Besides, we can use that money we’re paying out for your apartment for something else.”
“Really?” She smiled, walking gracefully from the door to the bed, sitting down next to him. “For what?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.”
“We will?”
“Yes.” Dodd was smiling at her now, fingering the side of her thigh. He drew spirals inward, then outward. “I’ve got some money saved up, too. We can do something special with it.”
“A trip?”
Dodd pursed his lips, tilting his head to one side. “Maybe. A trip would be nice, but we can take a trip anytime. I was thinking of something really special.”
“Like what?”
The spirals Dodd had been drawing on her thigh now turned to figure eights, working their way, coaxing, up across her pelvis and inside her robe. He was leaning against her, his head almost touching her’s; she was motionless, waiting. “How would you feel if,” he started, then hesitated. He was staring into her eyes, and she stared back, unblinking.
“What?” she said.
“How would you feel if I suggested that we both stop taking our birth control pills?”
She continued staring at him for a long moment, unmoving, then at last she looked down and leaned her head against his.
“You … you want a baby?”
“You know I do.”
“I didn’t know you were that serious about me.”
“How do you feel about it?” Dodd listened very carefully for her answer.
“I’ve thought about it,” she said after a long pause. Her voice was distant, without inflection; it sounded almost dead. It rang hollow. Dodd felt as though he hadn’t heard it; he wanted her to say it again, louder, so he could guess what she was thinking.
She leaned forward and there was a warm, wet feeling at his neck – she had started kissing him, brought her hands up to caress his chest. Her fingers trembled, but he had no idea why –
was it out of emotion, or nervousness? Was she saying yes with kisses, or avoiding an answer? She tongued his ear, growing more passionate, then pulled back, eyes closed, her nose touching his.
He kissed her hesitantly, but as soon as their lips touched she was fervid, pushing him backwards and landing on top of him, her tongue twirling and probing in time with her entire body, squirming, grasping, rubbing.
She worked her way down his neck, kissing and licking, then down his exposed chest, his nipples, down across his stomach, and then her strong, short fingers were ripping at the cohesive tabs of his pants. He stared at the ceiling, trying to think, trying to interpret … lips and tongue touched his penis and it was all ripped away, his mind was gone. He closed his eyes and let go.
Travels music drifted down the hall, reeling, racing. Sheila made slurping sounds. Dodd began grasping desperately at the bed.
It was like the process of thought reduced to a laser tracking a spiral on a disk, and during sex there is no spiral, the disk is blank, so the laser searches for something to track and quickly moves from one side to another without finding anything. When it reaches the end there is an explosion, and the power goes off.
Dodd felt the explosion. Orgasm is a time of non-existence, like dying or meeting God, or falling asleep in a sailboat in a calm sunlit ocean, nowhere to go, nothing to hit, wander where you will. You hear waves, you hear gulls, there is an occasional cool breeze over your warm skin. A pillow beneath your head. No worries.