Karin Maatman

Wag the Dog

Over her mobile, Caila peered at her husband. They’d taken a day off to visit Hever Castle and shop for new curtains. After a stroll around the castle’s 38-acre lake, enjoying the unseasonable warmth, they’d spread out a blanket on the picnic lawn beside the outer moat. The Boston Ivy which scaled the castle’s façade, concealing arrow slits, providing shelter for blackbirds, robins and collared doves, flaunted snippets of its autumnal, fiery crimson brilliance.

“Drum’s planning a Wag the Dog,” she said.

“What dog?” Chris, Caila’s husband of thirty years, eyed her dumbfoundedly.

“Wag the Dog... You know, a diversion, military, to distract from damaging issues—in politics. They made a film about it.”

“And the president of the United States wants to...” Chris skimmed the article. “Er, the Wormhole Express isn’t exactly a broadsheet.”

“No, but it’s fun, and Men in Black read the tabloids.” Mathematician, Caila, was a dedicated follower of science—with or without fiction.

“Rrright...” Chris pushed himself up from the picnic blanket. “Sausage roll?”

“And mochas— Ouch!” Caila winced, glaring at her bandaged right hand.

“Minor injuries unit, instead?”

“No thanks.” Yesterday’s blistering disagreement with the oven had occurred after minor injuries hours. This morning, despite it hurting like hell, Caila had convinced her fussing husband to wait and see.

As he crossed the picnic lawn and the gritty path between the information booth and souvenir shop, a flash of grey caught Caila’s eye. Ghost, her imaginary childhood friend—name unknown because he didn’t speak, moniker reflecting his diaphanous, silver-grey cloud-like cloak—had stuck for life. He sensed when she was ill, injured or sad. Or perhaps, feeling out of sorts triggered her imagination.

Ghost kneeled behind her, touched her shoulders, and a gentle warmth flowed through Caila’s body. Her mind filled with images, single frames, too short to register. It lasted seconds, minutes, she couldn’t tell. Then Ghost stood beside her, six-foot-tall, while a crow cawed in the birch’s canopy overhead.

Erit Sapiens. Meaningless words weaved through her mind.

Part of a sentence—demise of your planet.

“Darling.”

“Shi...take.”

“That’d be nice, with garlic butter.” Chris laughed at his wife’s take on cursing.

“Sorry, I was miles away.” Beside Caila, Ghost vanished.

That evening in the kitchen, after their Hever-books-coffee-curtains-supermarket schedule, had turned into: Hever-books-coffee-books-tea-mad-dash-around-the-supermarket, Chris offered to rebandage Caila’s hand.

“My hand?” Caila balled her hand into a fist, stretched it back out again. “It’s fine,” she shrugged. The bandages were a bit grimy, but otherwise... She picked at the curled-up edge of the tape.

“I’ll do it.” Chris fetched the first aid kit and meticulously lined up gauze, tape and scissors beside the sink. Peeling back the tape, he said, “Tell me if it hurts.”

When he lifted the smudged gauze, Caila giggled. A surgeon performing open heart surgery couldn’t be more meticu—

“What?”

Chris’s expression morphed from sweet spousal concern to wide-eyed shock. His jaw dropped.

“What is it? Let me see.” Caila pulled her hand out of Chris’s.

“Eh...?” she gasped.

“Guess, I don’t have an excuse for not doing the dishes then?” Caila eyed yesterday’s caked-on pasta carnage in the sink.

“This is ridiculous,” Chris said, her recovery seemingly causing him more distress than her injury twenty-four hours ago, when he’d suggested a trip to A&E in Pembury in lieu of Edenbridge’s closed minor injuries centre. “That was fire-engine red and blisters this big.” Chris held his fingers an exaggerated two inches apart.

“Perhaps it wasn’t that bad.” Caila grimaced, stroking the flawless skin of the offending appendage. She hated being made a fuss of. Even from Chris she accepted fussiness only in small doses. “We’ll Google it: ‘My hand got better after I burned it a bit.’”

“A bit much. And it healed within a day. Completely.”

Five hours later, after chili con carne (extra chillies for Caila) and a bottle of red, Caila picked up ‘Gifts of the Crow’—one seventh of their bookstore crawl yield. It’d slipped on the bedroom floor as she dozed off.

“Night, darling,” she whispered, snuggling up to Chris, out for the count.

But as she switched off her bedside light, the room lit up a warm honey ochre.

Eyeing her silently, Ghost floated to the foot of their bed.

89 Seconds

“Bonum mane, Caila.” His warm and gentle voice was an audial reflection of his silver-grey, diaphanous cloak.

“Ghost.” Pushing herself up on her elbows, Caila pulled the duvet up to her chin.

Fifty years ago, when she was little—littler than her towering five-foot stature today—, she’d watched him watching her from the corner of the living room. Her four-year-old self had been suitably aggrieved when her parents dismissed him as a figment of her imagination.

Still, Ghost had been at her side when she injured her knee, skating, at twelve. When she'd studied for a number theory exam at university, staring at the same page for ages, he'd held out his hands. Without hesitation, she’d placed her palms against his. Had it been time travel? Space? A hallucination? She didn’t know, she didn’t care. Human-like creatures—two arms, two legs, one head, like Ghost—, shrouded in hued, translucent cloaks floated over mossy, multicoloured soil. Birds, mammals, reptiles, species unlike any she’d seen before, in colours she couldn’t begin to describe mingled effortlessly and elegantly. Houses—dome shaped, pyramids, octahedrons—, sheer and vibrant like their occupants, blended fluently into the iridescent pellucid atmosphere of a planet which put Earth’s Aurora Borealis to shame. Caila hadn’t told anyone—who’d believe her anyway?—, not even...

Caila glimpsed at her husband.

“Don’t worry, Chris won’t wake up.” Before today, Ghost had never spoken.

“This morning at Hever. You said,...” Caila faltered, memories of Erit Sapiens and demise of your planet dissipating, as she noticed a red haze around her body. She tried to brush it off, but her hand went straight through. “What...?”

“A spheream. Currently, only visible to you and me.” Ghost floated closer. He took her hand, and as he rested her arm back on the duvet, the lump in Caila’s throat melted away.

“I never introduced myself. My name isn’t Ghost,” he said with a hint of humour in his voice. “It is Mateos. I am a Neteru from planet Etherun. How do you feel?”

“Confused.” Caila studied him. Underneath his ‘spheream’, she distinguished Mateos’s human-like silhouette clearer than ever. Something—he, she?—had changed.

Mateos.

E.T.

From space.

In her bedroom.

And she felt perfectly at ease.

Still...

“Could you hand me my jumper, please, I feel kind of underdressed for the occasion.” She pointed at the chair by the door, where she piled up the clothes she’d worn the past— Oops. Grimacing, Caila peered around Mateos and puffed out a breath of relief (she’d dumped her knickers in the laundry basket).

Mateos returned, handing her, not her jumper, but a moss green cardigan—close enough, for an extra-terrestrial whose wardrobe consisted of a single opaque, grey onesie. “Thanks.” Her head spinning, ‘why, what, why now,’ Caila slipped her arms through the sleeves and buttoned up. “Could you sit down, please? You’re kinda towering over me.”

“A long time ago,” he said, sitting beside her, “we initiated an experiment, building an ecology from scratch on a deserted planet.”

“On Mesu,” Caila blurted out. She frowned. “Mesu?”

“Our name for your planet. The aim was to observe how species evolved and interacted. For a while, the initial balance remained. Then humans, as I mentioned this morning—”

“Florence Nightingale and Stephen Hawking on the one hand, doom and destruction on the other,” Caila paraphrased, remembering Mateos’s ante meridiem communiqué. Lifting her palms, she weighed Nightingale and Hawking against doom and destruction.

“You got it.” Mateos laughed tersely. “But the scales tipped, irreversibly; within seventy years, pollution and aggression will bring about the extinction of a significant number of Earth’s species, humans included.”

Caila’s shoulders sagged. She dropped her right hand, then her left. Seventy years... The couple on the corner had just had a baby. The cutest little girl with a tiny button nose, big brown eyes, the cutest dimples in her cheeks when she chuckled. Seventy years, what sort of future—

“However, recently, we learned a planetwide war is imminent. If we don’t intervene, a series of catastrophic events will annihilate all life on Earth within weeks; affecting the wider Universe as well.”

Caila gazed at Chris. Blissfully unaware of imminent extinction-level mishaps—

“Caila.” Irritated, Mateos dimmed the light on Chris’s side of the bed, reminding Caila of the one big event in her life he hadn’t attended: her wedding.

“When we seeded Mesu, we tagged key species with a string of dormant DNA, inherited from great-grandparent to one great-grandchild to—as much as possible—avoid overlapping generations. Tagged individuals are called Khered.”

“We serve as a backup; skills and memories are stored within our DNA. When activated, it enables a species-level restart. Like a hard reset?” This knowledge, Caila guessed, came courtesy of her Khered DNA database. Crossing her legs, she reached behind her to drag her pillow onto her lap. Resetting a laptop was pants; resetting a planet: pants, squared-cubed-to the power gazillion.

“Only first-order Khered retain memories. We seeded twenty-nine first-order lines; twenty-three were killed during witch hunts.” Mateos paused. “You are the sole surviving first-order Khered, almost weeded out too.”

“Burning witches wasn’t our finest hour. But... Hey!” Mateos’s last words evoked an image of a disembodied hand spraying a beautiful, sunshine-yellow dandelion with herbicide, yanking the flower’s withered remains from the lawn—a regular spring and summer commercial. “Weeded out?!”

“Nothing to worry about. I dealt with it when you were born.”

“Dealt with when—” Caila inhaled deeply, puffing up her cheeks. Pulling her legs up, wrapping her arms around her knees, she tried but failed, as always, to raise her eyebrows. “You’d better fess up.”

“Over a century ago...” Mateos caught her pillow as it tumbled to the floor. “...We called a general assembly. As a precaution, we’d arranged for Khered to view each other as images of themselves. One contacted Earth authorities, describing Khered as redhaired females—first-born, like herself, she assumed.”

Caila twisted her hair over her shoulder. Copper, from a bottle admittedly, but red felt so much more natural than her natural brown.

“Fifty-three years ago, your grandmother was—mistakenly—identified as a Khered and eliminated.” As Mateos handed her, her pillow back, Caila frowned. Neither of her grandmothers were first-born, neither had red hair—no one in the family had—and there was nothing suspicious about their deaths.

“Your mother, on holiday in the Netherlands, went into early labour, giving birth to twins. Another woman birthed a stillborn girl, I switched you around.”

“My parents weren’t...?” Hugging her pillow closer, Caila gasped. “What happened to my birth parents? I have a twin? What happened to... them?”

“Your brother is safe.” Mateos reached out as if to comfort her but lowered his arm again. “This isn’t the time, Caila. I’ll tell you about your birth family later. Your first assembly is on Sunday; you’ll need to concentrate on your options.”

“Right.” Caila sighed. “The total annihilation of life on Earth.”

“You’ve heard of the Doomsday Clock?”

Caila nodded. The fourth quadrant of a big cut-out clock against a blood-red background had been on the 6 o’clock news. Black dots marked hours on an ashen face; stygian stick hands all but met at twelve. Underneath, it said:

IT IS 89 SECONDS TO MIDNIGHT

“Measured on a twenty-four-hour scale, you have, in fact, less than a millisecond. Your leaders developed a new weapon; within weeks they’ll deploy it.

“The Interstellar Assembly concluded there are two...” Mateos wavered, waiting to catch Caila's eye. “Did I say two?”

Caila tilted her head. Chewing her lip, she nodded.

“Sorry, the Interstellar Assembly instructed me to say, you have a choice of four options.

“One: a reset of Earth; all species remain, except humans, who’ll be removed.

“Two: similar to one, only, human Khered remain to restart and supervise new populations.”

Caila bit her lip harder. When Mateos touched her this morning, she’d counted twelve others. Was he asking her to choose between zero or thirteen survivors? Scylla or Charybdis—eaten by a six-headed monster or drowned in a whirlpool.

“Three-wipe-Earth-clean-four-do-nothing,” Mateos mumble-rushed over options three and four. “I left out some details which are of no concern at this stage. Questions?”

“Are you sure? About this disaster?” Caila said softly, her hand gliding aside underneath the duvet, until it rose and fell with Chris’s chest.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“We tag your leaders. Countdown has commenced. Any other solution would be a temporary patch, causing considerable unrest and suffering during humans’ and other species’ final years.”

“And there’s no alternative to those—two?—options?”

- No. -

Mateos hadn’t spoken out loud, but she’d heard him clear as day. - What, how? - she thought.

- Lectanimo. A form of mind communication. -

- Brilliant. The end of the world is nigh, and you teach me mind-read— - “Ouch.” Slumping backwards, Caila banged her head against the wooden headboard. She scrambled up, glimpsing at Chris.

“You don’t seriously expect just the thirteen of us to restart a population?” she squeaked, rubbing the harbinger of a massive lump.

Mateos reached out, gently touching the back of her neck.

Caila’s suffocating end-of-the-world angst lifted like sun breaking up a smothering fog. Mateos moved his hand upwards, to where she’d hit her head, and the dull ache melted away. Caila reached up, smiling as her hand brushed against his.

“No,” Mateos said. “The probability of a successful restart with only thirteen humans would be negligible.”

Caila relaxed in the gentleness that radiated from his spheream.

“Chris...?” she asked.

Mateos sat back abruptly.

“Keep your husband, if you must. Although I strongly advise against selecting your companions on such an emotional basis.”

Caila sensed his irritation as a nail dragging across a blackboard.

“Companions?” He’d said nothing about that. And, were she made to choose, she’d never, think-again-ever-never, leave Chris behind. “And this morning, you said other Khered species had already agreed.”

“I’m not at liberty to say what they decided; you must make up your own minds. But to summarise, a consensus would be best. Yes, that too would be the best outcome. If you consider presenting an alternative, the IA’s position, too, is unbending.” Mateos said, rather too unsubtly.

“Got you in one. You’re asking us to decide between total and near total human extinction. Why not get rid of just the gunslingers, impound their ammo?”

“We’d need to impound a lot more than their ammunition. The raw materials, some essential to Earth’s ecosystem, are easily come by. Additionally, removing your leaders would have to include their governments, most of their employees and related organisations. It would affect extreme instability—nationally and globally—, bring about intractable anarchy and the extinction of a great many innocent species.”

Caila paled—humanity was wading chin-deep in excrement of the most nauseating, stomach-churning kind. She gripped her pillow tighter.

“From tomorrow, you and your fellow Khered will meet regularly until the final assembly, next Friday.” Mateos glanced at Chris, impassively. “We are not asking you to leave your hearts out of it, but oftentimes your head knows what’s best for your heart.”

7 days.

168 hours.

10,080 minutes.

“For the second option we ask you to select seven companions, I’ll—”

“I’m to invite seven people into a post-apocalyptic world?!” Caila cringed. “Brilliant.”

“Don’t worry.” Mateos pulled his legs onto the bed and leaned back against the footboard. “I’m here to help you. What more could you want?”

“If that’s your attempt at humour, it’s not brilliant. But thanks.” Caila smiled crookedly. Even after dealing her world an Earth-shattering blow, Ghost, no, Mateos, managed to make her smile. “One thing. I need to know. The end, will it be disturbing, painful, for...”

“Humans who are removed won’t experience pain or distress; the telumparticula creates a sense of euphoria, trigging their fondest memories. It will be quick, a fraction of a second. We’ll also release a mild sedative, for your companions, to ease the transition.”

Thanks.” Caila grimaced at the irony.

Earth minus eight billion.

Because of a murder of maniacs.

Rubberstamped by a baker’s dozen Khered.

A mild sedative to dull the shock of selected survivors.

“That crow—at Hever this morning—, you said we’d be assigned a crow Khered, is it going to follow me around, until the reset?”

“A local jackdaw, yes, he will be your corvidaean liaison.”

“Liaison? You seriously expect me to believe, Jackdaw won’t indulge in a spot of spying?!” Scowling, Caila hurled her pillow at Mateos. “And what about you?”

“I’ll be here most of the time too.” Mateos lobbed her pillow back, laughing as it slipped through her fingers onto the floor. “In your case, I’m sure, to assist only. Now, do you have any other questions before I let you go back to sleep?”

Caila stared at the streetlight, sneaking through the vertical slits along the ragged edges of their cream-erstwhile-white blinds.

Sleep?

Now?

After propelling the Doomsday Clock to a millisecond to twelve?

Who, was, he, kidding?

“What is my best corvid friend’s name? I can’t just call him Crow.”

“Corvid names are difficult to pronounce for humans. Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’ll introduce himself in the morning.” Mateos swung his legs off the bed.

“What would be s smart question?”

“A smart question would be,” Mateos said, looking down on her. “‘How much sleep do I need to prepare for the Event?’ The answer: a few more hours. Goodnight, Caila, call me if you need me.”

“Mateos.” Caila savoured his name. Mateos. It rolled of her tongue as if she’d said it a million times before. “You can’t expect me to sleep after what you’ve just told me.”

He touched the back of her neck.

Her eyes grew heavy.

“Cheat,” she grumbled.

***

Mateos lingered. He pulled the duvet over Caila’s arms, and their sphereams mingled in a playful, red-and-grey, two-toned aurora.

Caila sighed. Smiled in her sleep.

They were so alike.

Soon, he’d have her back.