At Last, the Final (RB Vs. Empress Theresa, Chapter 28) · 4:53pm May 16th, 2021
Previously, on Empress Theresa:
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?
And now:
Welcome to the last chapter, folks. It's been a wild ride, hasn't it? Let's see what Mr. Boutin has to play us off.
If you'll recall, Theresa's apparent plan to deal with the new HAL users is to put the ENTIRE WORLD into suspended animation. She began doing this, as usual, without telling anyone and with no one's permission. Could have at least given us some warning, Theresa.
The deep sleep spreads across Africa, then to Australia, and then to India. The President of the United States makes a speech:
“My fellow Americans. The last time Prime Minister Blair and I met with Theresa and Steve, Steve said something which I considered a statement of pessimism and hopelessness. He said it might take Theresa many years to find a way to control the other HALs, and we didn’t have that much time. What Steve was really doing was giving us a hint of what Theresa was about to do. She is putting the world into deep sleep to arrest any activity of the other HALs and their hosts until she can find a way to control them. This is a reasonable course to take and the only one that will rescue us from a political and social nightmare we can’t even describe.
Reasonable, she says. As if anything about this is reasonable.
“My advisors tell me when the deep sleep comes near you are advised to sit or lie down. That’s what Jack and I will do.
“What Theresa is doing is not without risk. Many things could go wrong. But she hasn’t failed yet. I can’t believe a God who has brought her this far without mistakes will let her make one now. From her ingenious self-preservation in the fall from the plane to her suicide mission in Pyongyang, she has shown a remarkable ability to survive and triumph.
“Have courage. It will seem to pass in a moment and Theresa will have everything under control. Good night and God bless America.”
Anyone else here seen Local 58's Contingency? It's what I'm immediately reminded of.
Anyway, most people seem to blindly agree that this is the best course of action.
Prime Minister Peter Blair went on television and summed up the situation.
“Even if we found Theresa we couldn’t stop her. I don’t believe we should want to. Do you want to see a hundred unstoppable Adolf Hitlers in the world?”
Two hundred, and isn't that a little extreme, Mr. Blair?
Anyway, the media is being contrarians, making the absolutely unreasonable point that maybe Theresa should have sought more advice before rashly embarking on this course of action. Steve sends them a scathing rebuke. Well, as scathing as Steve can muster, anyway.
The sleep continues to spread across the globe. President Stinson cancels all air traffic going out of the US. Wouldn't want anyone escaping, after all.
Europe went silent.
This is the most powerful line in the entire book, and it terrifies me. In one chapter, this has gone from science fiction young adult fiction to outright sci-fi horror. Credit where credit is due, I suppose—although I can't help but feel this wasn't Mr. Boutin's intention.
Veronica Stinson shakes the hands of her cabinet members. Then she goes to her husband. They sleep.
And sleep.
And sleep.
Veronica Stinson woke. Jack was still asleep next to her. She felt for his pulse and found none.
She's initially panicked, but her security detail quickly comforts her. She's just woken up from the deep sleep before he has. People are waking up in a semi-random order. It started with people in critical infrastructure, then police and firefighters, and now the rest of the world's adults are beginning to wake. The children are still asleep; they need the adults first. Forty percent of the world has reawakened.
It's been six hundred years.
You read that right. Six hundred. They can tell from the positions of the planets.
“Did Theresa get the other HALs under control?”
“We talked to known hosts of HALs. They all say their HALs have disappeared. They don’t have super strength or throwing accuracy. It seems Theresa did find a way to put them to sleep a year later but couldn’t destroy their HALs. ”
And that's not all Theresa's been up to.
“There are countless new medical devices to do things we never dreamed of. We have thousands of new drugs to treat every disease, and specifications for how to manufacture them.
“The South Pole has been eliminated except for a few small islands. Greenland has been cut up in many pieces and moved South. The ice is gone and nothing can ever change ocean levels. The salt content of seawater has been reduced by half. It multiplies marine life and keeps bacteria under control.
“There’s a new building near the beltway. It’s a library filled with millions of scientific books and articles on every subject: the complete genomes of every creature on Earth, every kind of chemical compound and their syntheses, physics of the complete set of subatomic particles, the resolution of the unified field theory, designs for workable commercial hydrogen fusion power generating plants. The list goes on and on.”
“Who wrote them?”
“A large number of fantastically intelligent beings. The authors have numbers instead of names.”
“Why numbers?”
“We figure it makes it easier to look up who did what. Names can be confusing when they’re similar. Numbers are unique. It simplifies the paper trail. We have found four hundred and twelve numbers.”
And then:
Veronica Stinson’s face saddened. Her mood spread to all. They knew what she was thinking. “Theresa died hundreds of years ago.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I actually like this.
I like this a lot.
I like this enough to ignore what six hundred years of natural phenomena would do to the world humanity left behind.
Figures the book would suddenly get good as soon as Theresa wasn't in it.
People continue to wake up. It takes ten days for all the adults to reawaken. Then the children come back. Then people in hospitals. Soon, everyone on the Earth is back.
And everyone is—*sigh*.
Everyone is mourning Theresa.
“Peter Blair told me something about Theresa. Theresa was never that popular with many people. She wasn’t cool, hip or totally awesome. Do I date myself? What people don’t understand is the cool, hip, totally awesome don’t save millions of lives and change the world. Theresa did.
What a stunning eulogy, President Stinson.
“Steve once said Theresa never got in trouble because she was perfect in every way. That’s what got her in trouble. A lesser person would not have risked herself to go after the terrorists which is what lead to the OPEC and Israel situations, and she certainly wouldn’t have gone to North Korea. She triumphed over everything because her real power was her character.
“I’m at a loss to say all that can be said about her. Let me give her a toast.”
She picked up a glass of wine and so did everybody else.
“Here’s to you, Theresa. You did a wonderful job. May you rest in peace.”
She and all the others drank. They put their glasses down and gave a final round of applause for Empress Theresa.
So, here's a question for you:
If Theresa is dead...
Who's narrating the story?
Well...
Some unspecified amount of time later, radar detects something flying up from the South Pole at four hundred miles an hour. Telescopes reveal it to be a silver object, shaped like a coffin. Four-hundred feet long. One-hundred feet wide. And it's headed for Washington DC.
No one knows what might be inside. Stinson figures it must be whatever beings wrote all those documents in the library. She has the Air Force escort it. It lands in the Mall of America.
The doors open, and out comes...
...a whole lot of ten-year-olds.
Oh, and also Theresa and Steve.
Figures we weren't that lucky.
Steve and I walked out with a crowd of what looked like ten year old children. The crowd roared in delight. The line of “ten year olds” coming out the doors behind us was endless. There were a hundred of them in sight and still they were coming out. I smiled proudly. Steve maintained his cool as did the children who looked out casually at the crowd. They didn’t act like ten year olds. But neither were they adults. I’d kept them in a pre-puberty state so they wouldn’t fool around with each other. They didn’t mind. All of life experiences in the ordinary world were still ahead of them.
There are, by all coincidence, four-hundred and twenty children in total. They follow their parents to the Capitol steps, where the President is standing on a makeshift platform. There's a microphone. Steve walks up to it.
When the noise downed down Steve loosened up and said words he’d been waiting hundreds of years to speak.
“You should see our bathroom!”
This is what passes for humor in the future, folks. Take notes.
Anyway, they explain that they figured out the physics behind how HAL works. Theresa's HAL now has the ability to absorb other HALs, and has been rigged with a contingency if Theresa ever dies.
Oh, and all the kids? Yeah, they're all old as shit, with their aging suspended until they came back. Which was a thing HAL could do. Apparently. Theresa and Steve as well; they'll all age normally now, though.
And, as I went to copy out the last paragraph of the book:
You have reached the publisher's copy limit set for this title.
Ha! Perfect timing.
THE. END.
And so we leave this book—but not entirely.
There's still one more thing that has to be done, folks.
So.
I'll see you folks tomorrow for the wrap-up.
Bye!
Sucks to be anyone driving in a car and not currently watching TV.
So if the HAL-infected people are potential Hitlers, does that mean Theresa...
Nahhhh. :V
Yeah, that's... actually surprisingly effective writing, that line.
A total fluke, I'm sure.
That bastard author won't even let us enjoy her being dead!
FUUUUUUCK
So is there an explanation for who or what these ten-year-olds are?
What could be it? :O I'm all a-twitter! A-Facebook even!
What the absolute motherfyaying shit.
5520113
The kids are implied to be Theresa's kids. I guess that comes with its own set of implications. Ones I don't want to think about! So yeah.
5520192
yeah, I just
what?