The Trials of Charlie – Initialization

  “What can I tell you about the Tower? It is a machine. It cannot be stopped. You cannot reason with it, bribe it, or threaten it. It does not care who you are, be you man, woman – it does care if you’re a child, it only takes humans after their 15th birthday – it doesn’t care if you are rich, poor, famous, infamous or a nobody. All it does is take you, test you, and spit out the ones that live.”

  Opening statement to the Senate Committee regarding the Tower

  March 20, 2023

  Charles Fitzgerald sighed as he revised the commissioned drawing for the 20th time – he counted. The 19 rejects lay in a folder next to him as he scanned the latest version, added his watermark and sent it off.

  “What the hell was I thinking.” He glared at the screen. “He’ll probably throw another fit. What is his problem. I even read that shitty story of his to try and understand what was wrong.” He shuddered. “F’n Mary Sue.”

  He picked up the hard copy of his latest version and reviewed it once again. The character in question was a tall woman with black-highlighted silver-white hair that fell to her waist, elfin ears, red eyes with cat pupils and ivory skin. A very generous bust and rear filled out a corseted leather armor with spike-heeled boots . . . Charles’ attention was drawn back to his computer as a ‘ding’ let him know the client had replied.

  *You still haven’t captured the essence of Gloria Crimson Bloodwine Angelique. As she is the child of the Goddess of Light and a Demon of the Night, everything must -*

  “Try again, more boobs?” Charles bit off the words. “And remove the watermark!? Fuck you! Your story is very clear that she’s an ‘F’! I spent too much time in anatomy class to not get the size accurate!” He took a deep breath and started typing.

  *Since I am apparently unable to satisfy your request, I am canceling this commission. I hope you find another artist, but it won’t be me.*

  *You can’t cancel! You owe me my picture!*

  *Since you haven’t paid me a single penny, I don’t owe you anything.*

  *I thought you were doing this for exposure.*

  *Exposure doesn’t pay the bills. I regret ever talking to you. Ever. I regret drawing this character, and especially reading that shitty dreck of a story that is nothing but a softcore lesbian porn stroke fantasy written by someone that failed every English class he ever took, has clearly never touched a woman and only seen badly dubbed hentai. I am deleting my files, shredding the hardcopy and blocking you. Goodbye forever.*

  Charles took great pleasure in doing exactly that and decisively shut down his computer and walked out.

  “Problems?” Ben, his roommate asked as he looked up from a handheld game.

  “Just ending a toxic relationship.” Charles sighed. “I finally gave the boot to that guy.”

  “About time.” Ben shook his head. “You’ve been trying to finish that for a month. You must have redone it a dozen times.”

  “Try twenty.” Charles groused.

  “Seriously?” Ben looked at him in disbelief. “I’d have given him the boot after half a dozen. You’ve really got to work on asserting more. You put up with way too much – and blow up when you’ve hit the limit.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” He looked down. “I really thought he would pay in the end.”

  “Lemme guess, another ‘for exposure’?” Ben pushed up his heavy glasses and sighed.

  “Yeah, what can you do?”” Charles shrugged. “This is all I can do around classes and what jobs have flex schedule.” He grabbed his jacket. “I’m going to clear my head. Want anything?”

  Ben shrugged. “I could go for a smoothie if you’re going to that place with the girl you’ve been crushing on all semester.” He grinned. “You ever going to ask her out?”

  Charles slumped. “I did.”

  “That bad?” He winced in sympathy.

  “Already seeing somebody.” Charles shrugged. “She was nice about it.”

  “Forget about it.” Ben waved him off. “It’s good that you tried, especially after Crystal.”

  Charles flinched slightly. “Can’t hold onto that, with her moving back home after . . .”

  “. . . yeah.” Ben shook his head. “Fucking Richard. That guy’s gonna get it coming to him one way or another.”

  “I just hope I can see it.” Charles said darkly, then shook his head. “I’ll be back in a bit.” He slipped into a jacket and left the student apartment and into the early Michigan Spring. He looked at the setting sun and sighed. “Well, it’s the equinox, so more day than night now. Should I have Mom or Sis meet me at the mall during Spring Break?” He mused. “Maybe for a day. I’ll see if I can pick up some shifts somewhere the rest of the week. Get ahead on some bills, maybe. So long as I don’t have to be anywhere near Sir.” He shivered, but not from the cool breeze.

  His phone beeped and he paused to fish it out of his pocket. He started to unlock it but noticed that everyone around also paused to get out their phones . . . if they weren’t looking at it already. Charles felt a creeping sense of unease as he saw everyone hyper focused on the screen. He re-swiped to unlock and frowned at the message. “Tower?” Another alert popped up. “Missing people? What . . .” Alert after alert spammed his phone and the chorus around him was deafening as everyone had their phone alerts chiming over the growing unrest.

  ~~~

  “Ben you ok?” Charles called out to Ben as he burst back into their apartment.

  “I’m good, yeah.” Ben called back from where he was scrolling through news feeds on his computer.

  “Thank God.” He pulled up a chair next to his roommate and looked over his shoulder. “My phone can’t connect to anyone, so I didn’t know what to think.”

  “Yeah, network either crashed from the volume or they shut it down except for emergency services . . . and there’s a two hour wait to talk to someone real.” Ben shook his head.

  “You’re the electrician, you’d know.” Charles said absently, staring at the screen.

  “Electrical engineer.” Ben stressed. “There’s a difference.” He adjusted his glasses.

  The two college seniors scanned through the news sites and found a live broadcast from a station, a pale faced news anchor addressing the camera.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  “Amid thousands – perhaps tens of thousands reports of disappearances, we have a report of a mysterious structure at the South Pole rising at least 5 miles above the ice and . . .” He glanced to the side as he was handed another page and blanched. “Just in, a similar structure has been spotted at the North Pole. This is in addition to numerous cave-like structures that have appeared all over the world.” He swallowed heavily. “Authorities have asked everyone to remain inside unless vitally important and report any such structures to emergency services. . .” Another page was handed over and he took a deep breath. “The President has announced an emergency state of address . . .”

  As he continued to speak, yells and screams could be heard in the station as well as crashing sounds. The anchor looked to the side and screamed as a furry blur crashed into him and dragged him under the desk. Blood flew for a moment and the screen went to the emergency broadcast image.

  “This is a joke, right?” Charles said hesitantly. “Marvel or somebody going too far for a movie trailer?”

  Ben gave him a side-eye. “If they are, their company is dead. Deliberately going ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast panic . . . nobody is that stupid.”

  “Yeah, guess I was just hoping for a moment.” Charles sighed. “What’s the plan?” He asked.

  “Weapons, water, food.” Ben said shortly. “I don’t know what’s going on, but something ripped that guy apart. Could be aliens, apocalypse, demons, don’t know.” He stood up and started rummaging though his drawers, moving with a purpose. “What I do know, is that even if nothing else happens, this shit is going to make us reminisce about the good old days of Covid lockdown.”

  “What about your dad?” Charles asked quietly, following him out of the apartment and down the street. “He’s big in the army, right?”

  “If this was just me, or just Lansing, yeah, he’d pull rank and damn the fallout.” Ben nodded sharply. “But this looks world-wide. I’d love him to swoop in, but he’s a Lt. Colonel. He has responsibilities a lot bigger than me.” He closed his eyes and thought. “Joe is at Pendleton yet, forget how close he is to graduating, and Ruth is 2nd Lt. on a base. So . . . aside from probably ending up in the thick of it, they’ll be as fine as can be. Mom’s got a house on the local base. If shit really goes down, we’ll steal a car or something and make our way there. But for now we’re on our own.”

  “So, where are we going?” Charles looked at him.

  “Military surplus store a couple miles down the road. We’ll get what we can haul, maybe see if they will deliver or something.” Ben paused a moment to pull out his inhaler and take a puff. “Hopefully.”

  “Take it easy, bud.” Charles held him back a little. “Twenty minutes won’t be life or death.”

  “It’s the apocalypse or whatever, man. It might be.” Ben said grimly.

  ~~~

  Luckily for the two, the walk was uneventful and they had beaten enough of the crowd they managed to snag a couple small kegs of water, some cases of MREs, heavy duty knives and a couple metal bats. As they waited in the checkout more and more people started filing in and the shelves got more and more empty. Of course, delivery wasn’t an option but they were allowed to buy the shopping carts too to haul their purchases.

  Once everything was safely hidden away at the apartment, the two went to sleep, but spent the next day browsing news sites and social media to see what was happening.

  Charles finished his browsing (after making sure his sister was ok though Facebook) and turned to Ben. “What I got is the Towers on the North and South Poles are at the Earth’s Axis, and not Magnetic Poles. Monsters are popping up everywhere people had vanished, some right away, some after a while. And the ones after a while are a group of them. All different kinds, too. There’s goblins, skeletons, weird animals, walking trees and rocks and stuff straight out of Lovecraft. And people are finding those cave things everywhere. Five at least in Michigan, one right here in Lansing. Oh, and each cave has this weird black obelisk in front of it, about nine feet – or 3 meters exactly, it says. At least hundreds of thousands of people just blink and gone.”

  “At least the monsters die to guns.” Ben played a posted video that showed a bipedal tail-less lizard going down in a hail of gunfire from a group of cops. After it stopped breathing it faded away, leaving a scrap of pebbled leather.

  “That was a worry?” Charles frowned as the looped video played again.

  Ben shrugged. “Some of the stories I read about that were like this, had a theme of electricity and/or some types of combustion not working anymore. So no guns or engines.” He clicked to another tab. “Here’s a guy going into a cave.”

  The two watched as a guy with a body-cam entered one of the caves, giving talking commentary. The archway was total black even with a handheld floodlight pointed right at the entrance. Once he passed through, there was a stutter in the video and everything lit up to reveal a square tunnel over 10 foot high and wide, made of stone. An ambient glow in the air gave light to see once the floodlight clicked off, and in the distance viewers could see the path split into a left and right passageway. The camera moved along the path, pausing before the split and the explorer quickly looked around each corner before choosing the left path.

  After a few more such turns, always left, the camera caught sight of a waist high walking shrub that slowly shuffled along the corridor. A few black leaves turned on its ‘head’ towards the explorer and its shuffling sped up to what would be a leisurely stroll for a human, a couple branches covered in thorns that dripped a viscous sap reaching out. Out of the corner of the camera, the viewer could see a fire-ax being readied to strike.

  The explorer waited carefully and dodged to the side and behind the toxic shrubbery and swung the ax hard, carving out a chip of wood and knocking it down. Once down, the explorer didn’t give it a chance to get back up and kept chopping wood, another half dozen blows cut it in half, making it fade away and leave behind . . . a twisted root.

  The video continued, the explorer making several more turns and defeating more shrubberies until he spotted a chamber with three shrubs standing guard around a wooden box. The explorer retreated all the way back to the entrance brushed against the obelisk as he went, triggering a shout as a black and white panel appeared in front of him.

  “Apparently only he could make out the pictographs.” Ben reported as he paused the video. “But he said it told him ‘Store access only available after Initialization’. And it said he had 5.14 points available.”

  “He killed five of those things.” Charles said thoughtfully.

  “So, we learned a few things.” Ben nodded. “There’s points, killing monsters gives points, and there’s a system for using points.”

  “And not everyone is ‘Initialized’ but can still get points.” Charles added.

  “So, tomorrow we go to the nearest cave and start grinding.” Ben said seriously. “And getting drops for whatev-”

  Charles yelled in shock as he blinked and Ben was simply gone mid-sentence.

  ~~~

  It was the next day. Charles hid inside his room, only leaving to use the facilities and send a message that Ben had vanished like the others. The news reported that the second set of vanishings had been exactly one day apart, to the microsecond. The news about ‘points’ had started to circulate and a number of the most enterprising people had started going out to hunt monsters. Results were mixed, most of the ones that succeeded had some form of training or experience fighting, but a few did well that never picked up a weapon before. Still, enough died that the government put in covid style stay at home orders and Police and Swat were out in force to deal with monsters and looting. The National Guard was being mobilized to keep people out of dungeons, and to take out things that had started to exit. That evening another set of people vanished.

  Charles just held his bat tight and shivered.

  ~~~

  Day 4 of the Towers.

  Charles stayed sitting in his room, still holding his bat clenched tight . . . at least until the football players down the hall burst in and started grabbing everything they could, tearing the apartment to pieces. When he tried to fight back they simply pulled the bat out of his hands and laid him out, kicking him when he was down and blaming him for fighting back. All the food and water bottles in the apartment were gone, along with anything that could be considered a weapon.

  The various governments’ teams had reached the Towers by now and hadn’t found any entrances or windows, just smooth unbroken white stone. Digging showed nothing different, but they kept going, trying to find anything. Direct attacks had no effect either, no explosives or even diamond drills did anything.

  NASA announced that GPS was starting to show errors, but they were working to correct the algorithms.

  ~~~

  Day 5.

  Charles snuck out to the side stash he and Ben had made, but the guys that robbed him before followed and took that stash, beating him again as well for fun. When he limped back to the apartment he spotted a giant rat that glared at him malevolently, but he managed to lose it as he scrambled faster to get to safety. It was almost a relief when the clock ticked down to zero hour and he blinked to wake up in a room of white stone.