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What? My "Information Club" is Actually an All-Knowing Secret Society?
Genre : Apocalypse, Fantasy, Superpower, Action
Tag : Misunderstanding, Secret Organization, Wolrd-Freezing, Super power
Chapter 19 : The Script
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[Time remaining until The Great Freeze: 14 Days]
[Status: TOTAL ATMOSPHERIC OBSCURATION]
[Location: Arlen's Apartment, 4th Floor - West Jakarta]
[Time: 02:15 PM]
Several hours had passed since the sun died.
According to the digital clock on Arlen's laptop, it was early afternoon. In reality, the world outside his fourth-floor window remained trapped in a suffocating, absolute midnight. The dense, continent-sized Megaplume of volcanic ash completely blocked the solar radiation, plunging the equator into a freezing eclipse.
Arlen sat curled in his corner sanctuary, enveloped in the heavy layers of his tactical bodysuit, wool sweaters, and the massive down parka. The ambient temperature inside his barricaded apartment continued its relentless descent. The cold was an aggressive, creeping entity seeping through the concrete floor, biting at his toes and numbing the tips of his gloved fingers.
He noticed the change in the air with every breath he took.
Breathing through the P-100 filters of his military-grade gas mask required conscious, deliberate effort. The air drawn into the mask tasted stale, filtered entirely of moisture and carrying a faint, sterile scent of activated charcoal.
Outside his mask, the atmosphere of the room had grown heavy and toxic. The microscopic volcanic glass and sulfur dioxide leaking through the microscopic gaps in the building's foundation made the air thick, rendering it lethal to unprotected lungs. He could feel the dense, sluggish resistance of the atmosphere pressing against the rubber seals of his mask.
The silence of his isolated room stood in horrific contrast to the symphony of destruction playing out in the city below.
The apocalypse was loud. It was a cacophony of metal, fire, and flesh.
Muffled by the thick concrete walls and the boarded-up window, the sounds of Jakarta's collapse still reached his ears with terrifying clarity. Every ten or fifteen minutes, a distant, heavy explosion rumbled through the bedrock. Fuel stations, compromised gas lines, and abandoned industrial boilers buckled under the shifting tectonic pressure and detonated, sending localized shockwaves vibrating through the floorboards beneath Arlen's heavy boots.
Then came the sounds of the fires. The hungry, roaring crackle of uncontained blazes consuming entire city blocks echoed through the freezing air. The flames fed on the dry, shattered timber of collapsed houses and the spilled fuel of thousands of wrecked vehicles.
But the most paralyzing sounds were not all of that.
It was the streets belonged to the mutants. The high-pitched, agonizing howls of irradiated dogs echoed off the ruined skyscrapers.
The radiation had fried their neural pathways, trapping them in a state of permanent, blinding neurological pain that manifested as pure, hysterical aggression.
Arlen listened to a hunting pack cornering their prey in the alleyway behind his building. The horrific chorus of their frenzy filtered through his taped-up window. He heard the wet, sickening crunch of jaws snapping bone. He heard the frantic, tearing sounds of claws shredding flesh as the starving, mutated beasts devoured each other in a blind, bloody frenzy.
Intermingled with the roars of the beasts were the screams of the remaining survivors.
Human voices, ragged and desperate, tore through the darkness. People trapped in the ruins screamed for help, their voices echoing hopelessly into the falling ash. Arlen heard the frantic, rhythmic pounding of fists against metal rolling doors down on the street level. A man begged for someone to let him in. The pounding grew more frantic, accompanied by a breathless, terrified sobbing.
Then, the howling of a mutant pack drew closer. The man's sobbing escalated into a raw, ear-piercing shriek of pure agony. The scream lasted for exactly four seconds before ending in a sudden, wet gargle.
The street fell silent again, save for the low, rhythmic growling of the feeding beasts.
Arlen squeezed his eyes shut behind the visor of his gas mask.
He pressed his gloved hands over his ears, desperate to block out the sounds of the slaughter. He felt a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead, chilling his skin despite the heavy thermal layers. The sheer, overwhelming scale of the horror threatened to crush his sanity. He was a prisoner in a suspended concrete box, forced to listen to his species being eaten alive in the dark.
He needed an anchor. He needed to focus his mind on something, anything, other than the sound of tearing flesh.
He uncurled his stiff legs and reached for his laptop. The battery icon displayed a healthy seventy percent, sustained by the high-capacity power bank he had connected to it. He pressed the power button.
The sudden, harsh blue light of the LED screen illuminated his corner of the room, casting long, distorted shadows of his stacked water gallons against the peeling wallpaper. The glow reflected off the plastic visor of his gas mask, giving him the appearance of a deep-sea diver stranded on a dead planet.
He bypassed the encrypted communication network of the Information Club. He needed to look at his own creation.
His cursor hovered over a folder on his desktop labeled My_Novels. He opened it, revealing dozens of disorganized files, character sketches, and rough outlines. He clicked on the master file: The_Frozen_Era_Draft_Final_v3.docx.
The word processor booted up, filling the screen with hundreds of pages of dense, cramped text.
Arlen scrolled past the title page. He bypassed the character introduction chapters. He scrolled directly to the massive lore appendix he had written months ago, the world-building foundation that dictated the laws of his fictional universe. He had poured hundreds of hours of obsessive late-night research into these pages, blending actual fringe science with his own dark imagination.
He began to read his own words.
[Appendix A: The Mechanics of the Freeze]
"The planetary core destabilization severs the magnetosphere. The sudden absence of the magnetic shield allows unfiltered cosmic radiation to bombard the troposphere. This triggers immediate, catastrophic hyper-aggression in species reliant on magnetoreception for navigation. The animal kingdom collapses into a state of rabid, cannibalistic frenzy hours before the temperature drops."
Arlen stopped reading. He stared at the glowing letters. He listened to the horrific, wet crunching sounds echoing from the alleyway outside.
He scrolled down, his finger trembling on the trackpad.
[Appendix C: Biological Countermeasures]
"Standard thermal insulation fails against the deep freeze. Survival requires internal exothermic manipulation. A specific combination of alkaloid-rich root extracts and high-density sodium, when subjected to sustained thermal bonding, creates a biological antifreeze. The resulting compound forces the human metabolism into a state of controlled hyperthermia, elevating core temperatures to combat the ambient absolute zero."
Arlen recalled the messages from Apothecary in the restricted channel. She had synthesized his fictional "Vitality Stew" into a functioning, life-saving exothermic sludge using exact chemical principles she extracted from his lore pages.
He scrolled further, his breath coming in short, erratic gasps inside the mask.
[Appendix D: The Violet Heavens]
"The sky will bruise before it breaks. The ionization of the upper atmosphere by incoming solar particles will paint the heavens a deep, pulsing violet. This visual phenomenon serves as the final warning. The violet sky is the immediate precursor to the total atmospheric obscuration by silicate ash clouds."
Arlen closed his eyes. He remembered standing on the balcony of his apartment just days ago, staring at the exact same bruised, sickly purple smear stretching across the Jakarta skyline.
The core concepts. The biological mechanics. The atmospheric physics. The behavioral collapse of the animal kingdom.
Everything he had typed into this document over the past year was currently happening outside his window with terrifying, one-to-one accuracy. The rules of his fictional apocalypse were the exact laws governing this real-world extinction event.
But as he continued to read, a massive different turn had happened.
He scrolled back to Chapter 1: The Genesis.
He read the opening scene of his novel. His protagonist, a hardened mercenary named Kael, was navigating the frozen ruins of Neo-Siberia.
In Arlen's manuscript, the apocalypse was not triggered by a meteor striking the Pacific Ocean.
The catalyst in his story was a catastrophic failure of a global geoengineering project, a rogue climate-control satellite network that malfunctioned and plunged the Earth into an ice age over the course of six grueling months.
In his novel, there was no sudden "Hammer of God" crashing from the sky. There was no instantaneous destruction of the Ring of Fire. The tectonic plates in his story remained perfectly stable. The freezing of the world was a slow, agonizing political thriller, not a sudden, violent geological execution.
The sequence of events was entirely wrong. The arrangement of the disasters did not match. The initial inciting incident of the real world—the 10-kilometer rock slamming into the ocean—was completely absent from his meticulous world-building.
Arlen stared blankly at the screen, the blue light reflecting in his wide, terrified eyes.
He had predicted the exact mechanics of the apocalypse, but the plot itself was completely different.
The physics of the dropping temperature, the exact biological reaction of the mutated dogs, the chemical composition of the survival soup, the visual manifestation of the ionized sky, he had nailed the rules of the nightmare with impossible precision. Yet, the engine driving the nightmare was an entirely different narrative.
He leaned back against the cold concrete wall, his mind spiraling into a vortex of existential confusion.
"How?" Arlen whispered, his voice trembling, the word echoing hollowly inside his gas mask.
He ran his gloved hands over his face, pressing the hard rubber of the respirator against his cheeks. He tried to apply logic to the impossible.
He was just a broke, struggling writer. He had spent hours on obscure science forums, reading fringe theories about magnetic pole reversals and cosmic radiation, piecing together interesting concepts to make his fictional world sound grounded and gritty. He had thrown these scientific buzzwords together to create a cool, engaging survival system for his characters.
"It's just research," he muttered, shaking his head rapidly. "I just researched worst-case scenarios. I took theoretical astrophysics and biological anomalies and mashed them together for a story."
But the sheer accuracy of his guesswork defied all statistical probability. He had predicted the exact chemical, biological, and atmospheric reactions of the Earth undergoing a specific type of cosmic trauma. Apothecary, a certified genius running an advanced biochemical laboratory, was literally using his scribbled notes to synthesize a cure for the freezing temperatures.
Viper, a hardened military commander, was using page 2 paragraphs to predict the behavioral patterns of mutant animals.
Arlen stared at the glowing Word document, viewing it no longer as a manuscript, but as a cursed artifact.
Was it sheer, astronomically impossible luck? Had he simply rolled a billion-sided die and landed on the exact blueprint of the Earth's destruction?
Or was something else happening?
Did he subconsciously tap into some hidden, foundational truth of the universe while sitting in his sweltering apartment typing on a mechanical keyboard? Had his obsessive late-night research accidentally uncovered a classified, suppressed scientific reality?
A far more terrifying thought crept into his mind, chilling his blood faster than the dropping temperature outside.
What if his role as the "Architect" was not just a misunderstanding by a group of fanatical preppers? What if he hadn't written a story, but rather transcribed a preordained reality without realizing it?
Arlen shook his head, violently discarding the thought. The idea of being a cosmic conduit or a chosen prophet disgusted him with its sheer absurdity.
He looked down at his trembling hands encased in heavy tactical gloves. He swept the beam of his flashlight across the cracked plaster ceiling, the duct-taped window, and the pathetic tower of discount canned tuna sitting in the corner.
If he possessed genuine divine foresight, he would currently reside in a subterranean fortress alongside Viper or Seraph, surrounded by impenetrable steel, geothermal heating, and infinite resources. A true Architect would never trap himself on the fourth floor of a structurally compromised, freezing apartment building. A true prophet would never sit in the dark, terrified and praying a mutated street dog wouldn't smell his sweat through the floorboards.
He was merely a broke writer who had hit a terrifying, astronomically impossible jackpot of scientific guesswork. He was a statistical anomaly forced to live inside his own worst-case scenario. This is the easiest way to make it to work in his head.
He reached forward and snapped the laptop shut.
The blue light vanished instantly. Absolute, suffocating darkness reclaimed the room, pierced only by the sharp, narrow beam of his tactical flashlight. The time for questioning the universe had expired. The mechanics of his luck meant absolutely nothing if he froze to death before tomorrow morning.
Arlen pushed himself off the cold concrete. He moved with sudden, mechanical focus. He crawled over to the Type-A Pelican case and began a rigorous physical inventory.
He checked the intake valves on his gas mask, tightening the rubber straps until they bit firmly into his skin, ensuring an airtight seal against the toxic ash. He unsheathed the tactical hatchet, feeling the heavy, freezing weight of the matte black steel in his grip. He positioned the weapon exactly one inch from his designated sleeping mat.
He reorganized his survival cache.
He dragged the heavy water gallons and the high-calorie MREs away from the freezing exterior walls, stacking them tightly in the insulated center of the room to prevent the liquids from turning to solid ice. He checked the digital displays on his high-capacity power banks, calculating exactly how many hours of artificial light he possessed.
Outside, the human screams had completely ceased. The low, guttural growls of the mutant packs echoed freely through the ash-choked canyons of the ruined city, signaling their absolute dominion over the streets.
Arlen sat cross-legged in the center of his barricaded tomb, his hatchet resting heavy across his knees. He stripped his mind of the lore, the plot holes, and the fanatical cult worshipping his username miles underground. He focused his entire existence on the rhythmic sound of his own breathing and the bitter cold pressing against the concrete. He had to survive the dark, one freezing breath at a time.
›› To Be Continue ‹‹
—KS