Elbies - part 1 Page 6

Singularity' – but I didn't know if I wanted to post it. How depressing would it be to finally get a girl and then find out she's on the extraneous list?

  Of course, I didn't know if I would even feel depression anymore. I didn't know if I was going to feel anything at all. I had a million questions, but the only person I could ask was Bilbette, and my questions might end both my access to her and my pending ascension, and I was becoming used to the idea of being a god.

  This was the point where I wished that I was a millionaire, or at least comfortably well-off. There were lots of people that I wanted to visit before the end of the world, and I didn't know if two months was going to give me enough time. The other problem I had was that I didn't know how many of my friends and family were going to be extraneous, and it would probably be a major faux pas to ask Bilbette for a complete list.

  Not that I didn't think of asking her.

  I called up a lot of old friends that week, trying to say goodbye without actually saying it. It was a lot of awkward conversations, which made me feel OK with never seeing them again, but then that made me feel guilty. I thought about calling family, but in the state I was in, I was afraid I'd burst into tears as soon as they said 'hello'.

  I decided on game night that I was going to ask Bilbette if it was all right to let out the secret. I'd talked to Rod, and he agreed. I didn't know if I was going to reveal the fact that I was in no danger, but holding it in was going to give me a heart attack if I did it any longer. The pressure was too much.

  Bilbette arrived last, as usual, and I asked her to for a minute out on the stoop. She agreed, and my neighbors filled a few megs on their cell phones taking footage of the alien visitor. "Bilbette, uhm, I want to know if it's OK to let the gang know about… about what's going to happen."

  She considered for a minute, then asked, "Do you wish to reveal their extraneous status?"

  "No," I answered quickly. "Well, not unless they ask."

  "Agreed."

  I let out the breath I'd been holding. "Thank you so much. You don't know how hard it's been to keep that secret."

  The sarcasm she was able to convey with a robotic voice was amazing. "I believe I have some idea."

  The gang took the news a lot better than I thought they would. Rod, having had a week, had moved into the acceptance stage of grief; Will was nearing catatonia. Cindy and Rory were both pretty quiet. I found out later that Cindy had been thinking about having kids with her husband, and Rory had just bought his girlfriend an engagement ring. Bad timing.

  "There is one more thing," Bilbette said. "We have reached agreement with the final governmental bodies and will be announcing humanity's entrance into C.O.I.L. this Monday. This moves up our timetable by a lunar cycle."

  "How long will it take you to mark the extraneous?" Cindy couldn't look at Bilbette; she kept her head down and sounded on the near side of suicidal.

  "We are working on the procedure now. It may take as long as a lunar cycle before the marking begins."

  Everybody looked over at Bilbette. Three months. Rod asked, "Does everyone get marked at once?"

  "Yes." Bilbette's sensory stalk gazed at each of us. "One of the programs we will assist your governments with implementing is free travel for each of the extraneous, so that they may visit loved ones in their final days. There will also be communication and locational services provided."

  "What if," Will said, his voice trailing off. "What if the 'extraneous' decide to take some of the others with them? What if we decide that instead of gods, they're just going to be dead?" A really ugly emotion sat on his face, and I didn't want to look at him.

  Bilbette didn't waver. "This is something I didn't want to talk about, because it might seem like a violation of your rights, but one of the effects of the marking is to eliminate violent tendencies. We will also be monitoring the planet for large-scale violence in case an unmarked leader decides to initiate hostilities against others. That should be an unnecessary precaution, but we prefer being thorough."

  "Will we be able to kill ourselves?" Will's plea was barely audible.

  Bilbette's attention was all on him, now. "If you wish, as long as it harms no one else. I think it is best to live the full length of your days. If you leave too early, you will never know what could have been in the fullness of your time."

  I put away my books, because I knew that there was no way were gaming after this. Cindy looked disappointed. "We're not going to play?"

  "I didn't think… I mean, after all this…"

  Much to my surprise, the others all wanted to play, too. "I told you," Rod said, "you need to wrap this campaign up quick."

  I didn't wrap things up, but we went pretty late and everybody was really into it. Exhaustion finally got the better of me, and I asked everybody if we could finish the next week. All eyes turned to Bilbette, who said, "I will be here."

  "Me too, then," Cindy said, and the guys all agreed.

  "I'll make it the best I've ever run."

  "You better," Rory said. "Or else we'll have to continue this in Heaven."

  "OK," Cindy, the group's atheist put up her hands. "If there is an afterlife, we all have to make a pact to game together in it."

  "Screw that," Rory said, indignant. "I'm finding Gary Gygax and Dave Arnett and making my own group."

  "It's a deal," I said, putting my hand out. They all slapped their hands on mine, with one exception. We all looked over at Bilbette.

  "I do not believe in the human afterworlds."

  "Like that matters," I told her. "It's not like you're gonna die, anyway." I didn't mention that I wasn't either. "Slap a tentacle down here, girl." She slithered over and flopped an appendage on top of ours. "Gaming forever."

  "With Gygax and Arnett."

  "Yeah, Rory, if we can convince them to join us instead of the millions of other gamers who are going to try to convince them."

  "Hey, we played with an alien – I think we're one up on everybody else."

  We all had to nod at that. "All right, be sure to stress that advantage when we see them, guys." I pulled my hand down, and the others followed me. "And – break!" We all threw our hands into the air except for Bilbette, who simply withdrew her tentacle. I grabbed my stuff and started making notes on where we'd stopped. "OK, you guys were trapped in the pits of Anansi…"

  Monday's announcement was not received well. There was widespread condemnation of the C.O.I.L. and the Fhh-bop-uh and every government that had agreed to the deal. Christian fundamentalists considered the marking of the extraneous members of the human race to be nothing less than the mark of the beast, and refused to allow it. When they were told that there would be no physical mark, it deflated them a bit, but genocide gave them enough high dudgeon to keep their outrage machine going.

  The only thing that saved the deal was that nobody knew who was going to be marked and who was going to be a god. Although most people realized that they were extraneous, everybody secretly hoped that they would make the cut. There was still a lot of unrest, especially from the south, but the Fhh-bop-uh gave governmental agents a lot of support, and after the initial hubbub, people calmed down.

  Part of it had to do with the odd promise that everyone was going to be backed up. We asked what this meant, but the Fhh-bop-uh just said that it would be a shame if people weren't backed up because of fear or superstition. Bilbette, who teleported into my apartment rather than walking up to my door from concern about troubled people taking potshots at her, told us that it was vitally necessary to get through the entire marking period in order to be backed up. She said that getting backed up was like being a Cylon, which almost made me give up being a god, until she explained that it was more like being in the Matrix.

  "So, we're going to be batteries for everybody else?" Rory had been particularly upset by that aspect of the movies, and was a little frantic.

  "No, no," Bilbette said. "There is no need for batteries for those who will be converted
. I am not quite sure how to explain it; all I can assure you is that your existence will continue if you allow our process to reach its conclusion."

  I tried to keep the questions down by getting our game going as soon as she showed up, but there was always time to talk in games, and they peppered her with questions whenever there was a lull in the action. They didn't get much out of her other than wait and see – the ability to translate what she meant by 'backing up' was beyond her.

  Part of me, the deeply cynical and pessimistic part, thought that the 'back-up' concept was brought out by the Fhh-bop-uh as a method of crowd control. Just like religions used the afterlife as the ultimate carrot for followers, C.O.I.L. was waving an afterlife over our heads to let us all go peacefully to our end. Once word got around that the extraneous were going to live on, the riots calmed down, except for the luddites and religious fundamentalists who were offended by the very idea that they might get some kind of tangible hereafter.

  Three weeks into the process, the Fhh-bop-uh announced that the marking process would begin on the first of October, giving us all five days to speculate on who was going to win the galactic lottery, and who was going to lose. Every community had a teleportation station installed in a central location, and more were set up in isolated areas so that no human was more than a couple hours walk from a teleporter. For those who had some unusual bucket list items, there were also