Radio Silence - Part 9

There was no one to blame but him. Not the engineers. They did their job, they did everything correctly. It was the compounds. Well, and maybe it was the idiot that didn’t secure the area before leaving the room too, causing the compound to escape the secured air locked space and get out into the main hangar. Yeah, that was him. And, Richard thought, he might’ve put a touch too much of the solidifying agent and not enough of the chemical that would make it fill the gap, and stay up there, like some form of cosmic caulking agent. Oh and the fact that it wasn’t actually loaded into the dispersal mechanisms. The rockets that were supposed to launch it into the atmosphere and send it to where it was supposed to go. The guys that had all those specific trajectories and timing and everything worked out. They weren’t given the opportunity to play their part.

If Richard McGillivray ever wanted to play the part of public enemy number one, he was certainly at the top of everyone who worked at MeteoTech’s list. And, he thought with a dry laugh. He would’ve been at the top of the list of everyone on the planet had they known that he was the cause of it all. That he was the downfall of human civilization. But of course no one did. No one outside of MeteoTech anyway and that was exactly the way the bigwigs wanted it. If something like that got out, that would be the end of them. All their government funding would be pulled like someone doing one of those magic tricks where they pull out the tablecloth from underneath a table set with a full set of dishes and glassware and not a single piece is broken. It would be pulled faster than you could say hocus pocus.

Richard laughed. Of course, it had been the end of them anyway. The end of everyone. Absent-mindedly he flicked the safety of the gun he held in his lap on, then off, then on again as he sat on the patio of his former employers office building looking out across the fields that surrounded them.

He laughed again and he didn’t care that it sounded a little bit crazy, a little bit maniacal. There was no one else to worry about. And that was the ironic thing, wasn’t it? He thought as his thumb went flick, flick, flick across the safety switch. It was the ironic thing that he was the one, the single cause of everyone being gone. Except him. He was still alive. Was that irony? Richard thought. It had to be something more, something bigger, more profound than just being ironic. Ironic didn’t seem to cover the scope of the situation.

He looked up into the sky that he couldn’t determine whether it was cloud cover, or a blanket of the chemicals he had released onto the world. He tried to imagine looking through whatever chemical-cloud cover it was to a man sitting on a giant puffy cloud. One who had a long white beard and matching long white robes. He raised a hand and pointed to the sky. “Hey God, if you’re up there. If you haven’t abandoned us because I royally screwed up and totally killed off your entire experiment with us, I just wanted to say I know you’re doing this to me to get back at me. You, keeping me alive like this? It’s some sort of punishment, right? You’re teaching me some kind of lesson? Trying to hit me over the head, aren’t you, leaving me the last man on earth. That’s not very funny, you know.”

Richard paused, turning his face to the sky as if waiting, listening.

“Wait, are you saying I’m being naïve and ridiculous to think that I’m the only person left alive? You are, aren’t you. I’m being ridiculous. But I’m just a personification of Pandora, and I’ve opened a box. Well, I’ve let something escape anyway, there was no box, unless you consider the whole hangar to be like a giant box, then I did release something from the box…” Richard paused again. His thumb had slowed its movement of the safety on the gun. “You haven’t heard of the story of Pandora’s box? Really? I’m amazed, considering I thought you knew everything, because you created everything. Or at least I think that’s how you work, right? I’m not religious so I don’t really know how it all works specifically. But I thought you’re supposed to be omnipresent? Or is that omniscient? In any case you really should know the story of Pandora’s box. Except the story I was told was different. The story I was told was of a girl called Anesidora. Want to hear it? No, I’m sure you don’t really, but what else have you got to do? Since I’m the only person left alive….Okay, okay, probably not, I guess I’m not that naïve. To think that. That’s like believing that planet earth is the only source of life in the entire universe when that is clearly very statistically unlikely. Though, if I may say so, it is probably a lot more likely, from my initial calculations, and from the fact that I haven’t seen another living soul in oh…” he glanced at the watch on his wrist as if it were a calendar that would give him the date. “About a month, maybe two. That’s a whole lot of time to not see anyone. Especially in a place as big as this. Correct? And since you have time to kill, and so do I, even if you maybe still have a handful of people to watch over…” He paused again, thoughtful. “Then again. If you were watching over us, then why didn’t you do something to stop me? To stop me from screwing everything up? From entirely wiping out your little petri dish?” He shook his head. “I digress. Who am I to tell you how to do your job? When I just confessed to not even knowing what your job really is!”

He laughed. “Okay ready for story time?” Richard shivered as a strong breeze blew across the rooftop. “You know what? Let’s continue story time somewhere nicer. Follow me.” He got up from his position of sitting cross-legged on the cold concrete and made his way back into the main building, across the floor to the CEO’s office and stopped at the solid wood door. “You know,” he said to the bearded man in the clouds he was sure could still hear him, if he was even paying attention to him at all, “I’ve only ever been in here once.” Out of habit he lifted his hand to knock on the door and then stopped himself and opened it. The room was long and narrow. At the far end was just what he was looking for. A long, low, leather couch and two reclining armchairs faced a large electric gas fireplace. “Now this is where you can tell a good story!” he said approvingly, plopping down heavily into one of the two recliners. He leaned back in it, and the footrest popped up. “Aaahh,” he said with a satisfied moan. “This is more like it.” In between the two recliners was a square table of dark polished wood. On the table was a small remote. He picked it up, pointed it at the fireplace and pressed the red power button at the top. The flames came to life with a small pop. “Huh, would you look at that? It still works! Guess it pays to make the big bucks. The world is still running for you.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Unless you had something to do with it?”

He shrugged and stretched out. “Anyway. You probably want to get to the story don’t you? You must be pretty bored now, thanks to me. Well the least I can do is keep you entertained with some good old fashioned storytelling. As I said this version of Pandora’s box is different from the original, but since you’ve never heard the original before anyway, it doesn’t really matter. This version has a…-” he stopped speaking and his mouth snapped shut with an audible click. “Well, would you look at that. It’s some sort of prophecy, or prophetic foreshadowing if nothing else. Kind of funny if you think about it.” He said. “This version takes place on a floating island because someone,” he raised his hands defensively. “Not saying who, but at least it wasn’t me this time. I can’t be blamed for something in a fictional story.” He lowered his hands again after a moment. After waiting for lightning to strike, he continued. “This version takes place on a floating island. Well, it’s more like a floating continent, high above the earth, but,” he raised an authoritative hand, “still within earth’s atmosphere, because something destroyed the earth below, so everyone moved up to this massive floating continent above so that they could continue living, because earth below had been destroyed. I think from some kind of nuclear war, if I remember the story correctly. So them living on this floating continent, it was a second chance for humanity. For civilization.” Frank stopped again. “You know, you could’ve learned something from this story,” he said. “Maybe you should’ve thought some something like that. Some kind of contingency plan for when someone like me does something stupid and fucks everything up. So really,” Richard wagged a pointed finger to the ceiling again. “Really if this is anyone’s fault, it’s your fault for not thinking this through and having some sort of back up plan.” His face screwed up. “Mind you, though if this happened there, all those people who lived on that continent would be the same as here, because it would be within the atmosphere, not above it. But if the world had ended some other way, besides the big mess that I caused, then a floating island would be the perfect contingency plan,”

Richard admitted, and then laughed. “You better be taking notes on this. For next time. So, Pandora was a girl who was tasked with just looking after a big earthenware jar. Simple enough task, you’d think. But she was told to never open it. No matter what. And as I’m sure you already know, if you ever tell a person not to do something, or else…99.9% of the time they’ll do just the opposite, and what they’ve been forbidden to do. And that’s what happened here. She opened the jar and war and famine and desire and sickness escaped, ravaging the world. And there was something to do with an airship pirate that got mixed up with Pandora somehow. Let me think,” he said, stretching out in the recliner. “Maybe he’s the one that helps Pandora get all the evil back into the jar.”

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Need to start at the beginning or want to read on to the next part? Check out part 10 and part 1 below!