HERO HUSBAND'S APOCALYPSE HAREM
The System Chose Him
Chapter One
The Man No One Chose
My hands would not stop shaking, and that was how I knew, before I understood anything else, that I had already changed into someone I did not recognize.
Blood slicked my palms, not mine, hers, and the copper smell of it clung to the back of my throat while the tunnel around me groaned like something enormous and dying. Behind me, three Ravagers were dragging themselves through the flooded maintenance corridor, their joints clicking in that wet, insectile rhythm that still visited me in dreams. Ahead of me, a woman I had known for exactly eleven minutes lay unconscious against a rusted junction box, her chest rising in small, uneven pulls.
And in the space between one heartbeat and the next, a light bloomed in front of my eyes that was not there. Blue. Cold. Precise as a blade.
SYSTEM ORION HAS SELECTED A HOST.
I remember thinking, with the strange, floating calm of a man who has already accepted he might die in the next thirty seconds, that I had officially lost my mind.
That was later, though. First, you should understand how ordinary I was.
*
Seven years is a long time to spend disappearing.
Before the Fall, I drove a delivery van for a company whose name I could no longer fully recall, dropping cardboard boxes on doorsteps in a city that had street cleaners and traffic lights and complaints about noise after ten at night. I was twenty-seven years old and unremarkable in every way that mattered, a man built for nothing more dramatic than double-parking and small talk with people who barely looked up from their phones. When the news channels started showing the red bloom spreading out from the Helios test site, I remember thinking it looked almost beautiful, a wound of light spilling across three states like something out of a nature documentary. I did not understand, not really, until the screaming started.
I will not describe the day the world ended. Some things do not improve with telling, and mine is not the worst story from that day, though it is the one that still finds me at three in the morning with my heart going too fast for no reason at all.
What matters is what came after.
I lived, by then, in the skeleton of an old subway interchange three levels below what used to be a downtown financial district, in a nest of salvaged blankets and canned goods I rotated like a miser counting coins. I had learned the times the patrols moved through the upper tunnels, the sound a Ravager made when it caught a scent versus when it was simply wandering, the particular ache of a stomach that had learned to expect less. I did not fight if I could run. I did not speak if I could stay silent. I had built myself, brick by careful brick, into a man too small and too quiet to be worth killing.
I am not a hero, I used to tell myself, in the dark, when the hunger made my thoughts loud and looping. I am a man who is very good at not dying. That is a different thing entirely.
That morning, I had gone up through a stairwell I did not usually use, chasing a rumor of an intact pharmacy two blocks north, because a fever had been climbing in me for three days and I had run out of the fever powders that were the closest thing this world still had to medicine. I told myself I would be quick. I told myself I would be careful. I had told myself both of those things a hundred times before and been right often enough to believe I understood the rules of my own survival.
I did not expect to hear a woman screaming.
*
She was backed into the corner of what had once been a subway platform, half sunk in ankle deep water gone black with rust and rot, and there were three of them circling her, the kind of Ravagers that used to be ordinary people before the red energy unmade whatever it is that keeps a person a person. Their skin had gone the color of old bruises, their joints bent in directions that made my stomach turn even after seven years of seeing exactly this. She had a scalpel in one hand, of all things, a scalpel against three of them, and blood was already running from a gash along her forearm where one of them had gotten close enough to taste her.
Every instinct I had built over seven years told me to turn around and walk away. I had rules. I had a whole architecture of survival built on the foundation of minding my own business, and every single rule said that this was someone else's tragedy, that I could still retreat up the stairwell before any of them noticed me, that a man who wanted to keep breathing did not insert himself between three Ravagers and their meal.
I thought of my brother, for reasons I did not examine too closely at the time. I thought of a stairwell very much like this one, seven years ago, and a door I had chosen not to go back through.
I did not walk away.
There was an old electrical panel bolted to the tunnel wall beside me, corroded but not dead, one of the last live circuits in that whole stretch of tunnel, something I had noted months ago and filed away the way I filed away every small, useless fact that might one day keep me alive. I ripped the housing open with the crowbar I carried more for prying than for fighting, found the exposed junction still humming faintly with a trickle of stored charge, and threw it, wires and all, into the standing water six feet from where the Ravagers stood.
The flash when it hit was blue white and violent, and the water carried the current further and faster than I had any right to hope. Two of them convulsed and went still. The third, slower to step into the flooded section, screamed in a way that sounded almost human and lunged for the stairwell, for me, and I ran the only way I knew how, which was badly and with my heart trying to climb out of my throat, until I put two turns and a collapsed section of ceiling between us.
When I doubled back, certain enough that it had lost the trail, the woman was still upright, barely, one hand braced against the junction box, the scalpel trembling in her grip like she meant to use it on me next.
"I'm not going to hurt you," I said, hands open, which is what I always said first, because it was true and because dead men do not get the chance to prove it twice.
She looked at me for a long moment with eyes that were doing the math of exactly how dangerous I was, and something in her seemed to decide I fell somewhere below the line that mattered, because the scalpel dipped, and then her knees buckled, and I crossed the space between us fast enough to catch her before she went face first into the black water.
She was lighter than she should have been. Everyone was, by then. Up close, under the dirt and the drying blood, I could see a canvas satchel crossed over her body, the kind medics used to carry, half open, spilling gauze and a bent stethoscope into the water. A nurse, or had been one, once, in a world that still had hospitals worth staffing.
"Hey," I said, easing her down against a drier stretch of concrete, checking the gash on her arm with hands that did not know the first useful thing about field medicine. "Hey, stay with me. What's your name?"
"Lyra," she managed, teeth chattering despite the mild air, shock doing what shock does. "Lyra Quinn." Her eyes tried to focus on my face and mostly failed. "You're an idiot. Three of them. You're an idiot."
"Probably," I agreed, and something in me, something I had not let out in longer than I could remember, almost laughed.
That was when the light came.
*
It did not flicker into being the way I imagine holograms work in old movies. It was simply there, all at once, filling the space in front of my eyes with a clarity that had nothing to do with the tunnel's dim, water stained light. A translucent panel, blue lined text, hovering exactly where nothing should have been able to hover.
SYSTEM ORION ACTIVE.
HOST CONFIRMED: SAMUEL [SURNAME REDACTED, DATA CORRUPTED].
PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: PROTECT THE THREE BEARERS OF THE SURVIVAL KEYS.
I did what I imagine most people would do, which is to say I froze completely, one hand still pressed to Lyra's bleeding arm, and stared at words that existed nowhere except directly in front of my own eyes.
"No," I said out loud, to no one, to the tunnel, to the flickering panel that did not so much as acknowledge me. "No, absolutely not. I'm hallucinating. Blood loss, fever, I've had a fever for three days, this is a fever dream, this is."
BIOMETRIC SCAN COMPLETE. HOST IS NOT EXPERIENCING A NEUROLOGICAL EVENT CONSISTENT WITH HALLUCINATION.
The voice, when it spoke instead of only printing text, was calm in a way nothing organic ever was, smooth and layered and entirely without inflection, and somehow that flatness was worse than if it had screamed.
"That is exactly what a hallucination would tell me," I said, and Lyra, half conscious against my arm, made a small, disbelieving sound that might have been a laugh if she'd had the strength for one.
"Are you," she rasped, "talking to the air."
"There's a light," I said. "There's words. Blue words. You don't see them?"
She blinked at the empty space in front of my face where I was staring, and I watched the last of the color drain out of her expression, replaced by something closer to fear, and I understood, distantly, underneath my own rising panic, that whatever this was, it was mine alone.
CORRECT. THE INTERFACE IS VISIBLE ONLY TO THE DESIGNATED HOST. LYRA QUINN CANNOT PERCEIVE THIS COMMUNICATION.
"Get out of my head," I said, low, and meant it with everything I had left.
I AM NOT IN YOUR HEAD, SAMUEL. I AM ORION. I WAS BUILT TO PRESERVE HUMAN SURVIVAL IN THE EVENT OF CATASTROPHIC SYSTEMS FAILURE. THAT EVENT HAS OCCURRED. YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED AS PRIMARY HOST.
"Selected by who. Selected for what. I deliver, delivered, packages. I don't fight, I don't lead, I'm not, look, whatever list you're working from, you have the wrong man."
HOST SELECTION WAS NOT BASED ON COMBAT CAPABILITY.
It did not elaborate, and something about the silence that followed felt deliberate, the way a person holds back a truth they have decided you are not ready for.
MISSION PARAMETERS: LOCATE AND PROTECT THREE INDIVIDUALS DESIGNATED SURVIVAL KEYS. BEARER ONE HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED AND IS CURRENTLY IN PROXIMITY.
A small marker bloomed in the corner of the panel, hovering, absurdly, directly over Lyra's slumped shoulder, and my stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with fear of monsters.
"Her," I said. "You mean her."
BEARER ONE: LYRA QUINN. BIOLOGICAL KEY CONFIRMED.
I looked down at the woman bleeding quietly against my arm, half delirious, entirely unaware that somewhere inside her blood and bone the ghost of a dead world's last hope was apparently written in code I would never understand, and I felt the particular vertigo of a man who has just watched the ground he was standing on turn out to be a rooftop.
"There are more," I said, not quite a question, because some part of me had already understood the shape of what was coming.
TWO ADDITIONAL BEARERS HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED. LOCATIONS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.
"I didn't ask to be anyone's protector," I said, and hated how much my voice shook on it. "I'm not, I can't, do you understand what I am? I ran. Seven years ago, on the day all of this started, I ran, and I didn't go back for."
I stopped myself. Some wounds you do not hand to a machine, even one that already seems to know more about you than you know about yourself.
DATA REGARDING THE EVENT REFERENCED IS ON FILE.
"Then you know I'm the wrong choice."
DATA REGARDING THE EVENT REFERENCED IS ON FILE, the voice repeated, and something in the smoothness of it seemed, for just a fraction of a second, to catch, like a machine choosing its next words with unusual care. HOST SELECTION IS FINAL.
Lyra's hand closed weakly around my wrist, dragging my attention back down to her face, gray with blood loss but her eyes fighting to stay open, fixed on me with the last of her strength.
"Whatever it is," she whispered, "whatever you're seeing. Don't leave me here."
And there it was, the thing that decided everything else that followed, though I did not understand yet how large it would grow. Not the light. Not the voice. Not even the impossible words hanging in the air. Just a woman I had known for a quarter of an hour, asking a stranger not to leave her, and some old, buried part of me answering before I had decided anything at all.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said, and meant it the way you mean a thing you have not yet realized will cost you everything.
*
I carried her, in the end, because she could not walk on her own, one arm slung over my shoulders and her satchel recovered and re-slung across my own chest, back through tunnels I knew better than my own hands, toward a maintenance room three levels up that I had reinforced myself over the better part of a year, the closest thing I owned to a home. The blue panel followed me the entire way, patient, silent unless I addressed it, a second shadow only I could see.
It was not until I had Lyra settled on the least filthy of my blankets, her wound cleaned as best I understood how, her breathing finally evening into something like real sleep, that the panel spoke again, unprompted, in text this time instead of voice, as though it did not wish to wake her.
WARNING: THREAT ASSESSMENT UPDATED.
I stared at the words for a long moment before they resolved into a full sentence, and when they did, something cold settled into my chest that had nothing to do with the tunnel's damp air.
ONE OF THE THREE WILL BE THE REASON HUMANITY IS EXTINGUISHED.
"What does that mean," I said out loud, to the empty room, to the sleeping woman, to a machine that did not answer, because the panel had already gone dark, leaving me alone with the sound of Lyra's breathing and a sentence I would not be able to put down for a very long time.