I fiddled with my ear prosthetics, ensuring they were securely fastened. I glanced at my reflection in a nearby window, taking a last look at my makeup job, my blue contacts, my coiffed hair. My black suit, replete with skinny tie and pressed white shirt, was trim and dapper. I’d passed for their kind many times before, yet never for a job so urgent.
In Albuquerque, I broke up one of their black market rings that had been moving Indigenous archaeological finds throughout their southwestern network. In Buenos Aires, I successfully derailed a kidnapping plot of a local politician who’d found one of their enclaves in the Argentinian jungle. The Moscow purge had proved especially effective in corralling a number of their human informants. Then there was the Stonehenge affair, a reconnaissance mission to assess the armament strengths of the Celtic contingent. That job gave MI6 a leg up on the underground elven resistance in London.
The elves were tricksy bastards, I’d give ‘em that much. Unlike the rest of their first age brethren, they learned to assimilate themselves in the rise of man. The dwarves and halflings went to ground in Siberia and the Sahara. Goblins, orcs, ogres, and trolls were all exterminated before the onset of the industrial era. The faerie folk had shifted their vibrational frequencies to a different plane. Only elves had stubbornly refused to recede into history, their envoys to current world powers insisting they retained rights of manifest destiny, that their longstanding prophecy of once again retaking their natural place atop the food chain pyramid would come to fruition, with or without mankind’s blessing.
Naturally, their appeals fell on deaf and decidedly rounded ears.
I tipped my entry badge lanyard toward the taller of the two sentinels guarding the passageway leading inside the cavern. “Top of the morrow to you, J’ev,” he muttered to me, scanned my ID with a handheld keypad.
“And to you, Orenn,” I replied, smiling wanly.
I spent the better part of eight months incorporating myself among the grunts and middle managers of the Shasta basin’s underground sanctuary. It was a long haul undercover. I was freelance, often finding myself working for the CIA’s elven intelligence divisions. Elves were considered the world’s foremost eco-terrorists, ever prepping their prophesied ascendancy through passive means (like the Greenpeace and UNESCO fronts) or more aggressive tactics (Chernobyl, the Mississippi Delta spill, Mexico City’s sewer sabotage). The United States, Russia, and China had spearheaded a quiet global initiative to wipe out the species for good, but the ancient race was hardy and knew how to spread themselves thin enough to never have all their eggs in one basket. Wily buggers. I’d learned not to underestimate them. I barely made it out of Albuquerque alive.
“Overnight shift, then?” he queried.
“Probably a double. New inventory’s going to take twice as long.”
“How unfortunate. Still, the presence of our elite craftsman makes the day a bit brighter, does it not?”
“It does indeed, friend,” I said. “Fair tidings to you and your esteemed family.” I briskly strode away toward my expected post.
It was true. The Toolmaker had finally come to roost somewhere concrete. If our intel had been correct, he’d brought his rumored coup de gras with him. That was my mission: eliminate both the puppeteer and his rumored doomsday machine. If I escaped before dying a grisly death (long odds), I’d be swimming in international amenities across the globe. But it wasn’t really about my Swiss account. I’d taken the job for its exclusivity. Assassinating the elves’ premiere engineer would be a colorful feather in my cap. Reputation preceded near all else in my line of work.
Shasta Mountain in northeast California had been known for some time as an elven bastion. Its inner catacombs deep beneath the earth were fortified with ‘magical’ defenses of all types. Magic was a dirty buzz word to the intelligence community, a weak generalization of an advanced ability to manipulate matter and energy at higher frequencies of ionic and electromagnetic spectra. The trouble was, their wherewithal, pocketed as it was, far exceeded our own. Outright assault had never been possible without alerting the mainstream masses to the very existence of elves, which would subvert all of western civilization’s infrastructures. Only spy craft and sabotage had been effective deterrents over the last two hundred years, though never enough to force the elves into the inner earth, or the Antarctic savage lands, or space itself. They wanted their turf back. All of it. As far as my employers were concerned, nothing was more annoying than the conquered refusing to accept they’d been conquered.
I’d known my vetting and incorporation would take several months at minimum. My cover as a transplanted pencil pusher from their sub-T station in Spain was an easy one to forge. The credentials were child’s play, the genetic code buffer a bit more complex, but all in all, it was another cloak-and-dagger jam, one I’d run a hundred times before. The only difference was, there was a much bigger chicken to pluck on this mission.
Normally I’d have continued on to my office, located seven floors deep in the conclave. Today, after reaching a precise junction in the passage where surveillance cameras were out of sight, after quickly looking both ways for oncoming pedestrian traffic, I whipped out my collapsible grappling hook and took aim for a ledge above an air vent located fifty feet up near the ceiling of the cave. The hydraulics of the rappelling tool hissed as the prongs of the fork extended mid-flight. It found purchase on the ledge with a metallic clink and embedded its sharp ends into the bedrock. I activated the cable’s retracting function and was whisked upward. I grabbed the ledge and used a multi-tool to unscrew the air vent. I pushed the screen aside and crawled within, taking care to collapse the rappel rod and putting it back into the folds of my suit. Then I set the screen back into place and began crawling toward my target, a location five hundred yards southeast through a winding series of air ducts.
It took me about an hour to reach my destination, a huge grotto dynamited straight into the mountain’s bedrock, in which a storehouse of technology and arsenals resided. I peered down into the space below. Its floor was littered with crates of heavy caliber weapons, strange hybrid crystals augmented with odd circuitry and glowing mechanical parts. The contraption I’d been sent to destroy stood smack-dab in the middle of the cavern, a short pyramid-shaped ziggurat slithering in streams of nanobots.
My heart raced. A bona fide doomsday weapon had been out of my pay grade until now. I removed the grate from the air duct exit and used the grappling hook to ease myself down to the ground. There was only a single soul present, a tall elf sitting at a desk near the ziggurat, scrawling on a piece of paper with a quill pen, surely the Toolmaker, though I wondered why he hadn’t a guard contingent posted at the main entry to the storehouse.
I removed the EMP device I’d brought to render their weapon inert. It was a simple round globe activated by the flick of a thumb switch, only needing to be set into proper place. The steel of my pistol lay heavy in its holster under my dark blazer. It was a one-two punch; cold-boot the bogey, take out the Toolmaker and make a run for it, smash and grab, hopefully getting the head-start I needed through the air duct system before coming out topside on the mountain, then a dash to my mini-copter hidden in the woods three miles out.
I crept silently toward the pyramid, its nanobot streams giving it an appearance of mechanized breathing. It was a creepy thing. There were several recesses set into its framework, and I reached up and placed the EMP grenade onto one of its sills.
“Are you certain you want to do that, Agent Jones?”
I was made.
Worse than that, they’d expected me.
No…they let me walk right in.
The Toolmaker turned in his swivel chair, appraising me. He had long, braided whiskers reaching down to his belly. His sparkling green eyes belayed the weighty span of ten thousand years. His white eyebrows waggled.
“I’m fair certain, yes,” I said, stammering.
“It’s your choice,” he replied, his eyes darkling.
“You’re not going to call any guards? Aren’t you going to try and stop me?”
“Oh, no. No, all is as it shall be.”
“Is this more of your prophecy nonsense?”
The Toolmaker laughed heartily. “Your species has its own myths. We have ours. Let us see how our legends pan out.”
“Your funeral, buddy,” I said, and thumbed the remote in my pocket to set off the EMP device. The globe flashed and burst apart, its concussive wave washing over me, the Toolmaker, across the entire cavern. I expected all the electronics and lights to wink out immediately. Instead, everything lit up, including the nanobot pyramid, its slithering streams coursing and pulsing in a frenzy. Then it issued a second discharge, this one far more demonstrative than my EMP grenade, knocking both me and the Toolmaker to the floor. A pounding reverberation echoed throughout the mountain.
The Toolmaker shakily rose to his feet, chuckling.
“It was supposed to shut down,” I whispered.
“Unless I reversed its ionic polarity in advance, Agent Jones. What might it do then?”
Horror dawned upon me. “It would activate it,” I said hoarsely.
“The prophecy is fulfilled. By a pretender, exactly as foretold.”
I was loathe to ask, but forced myself nonetheless. “What did it do?”
“Shut down your global grid. Entirely. Everything digitized, everything computerized, all records, systems, and infrastructures codependent on e-networks.”
The thought was staggering. “Everything?” I whimpered.
“Wall Street. Utilities. Airliners. Automobiles. Bank accounts. All of it. Back to the Bronze Age you go. Well deserved, I might add. Your stewardship of the planet has been a poor reign, I’m afraid. It took us a few hundred years to fashion the device. We only needed one of you to turn it on. All empires must fall from within. Something you humans ought to have learned by now.”
I shuddered. “You’re lying.”
“When you return to the surface, you will know the truth,” he said.
“Am I not to be executed?” I asked.
“You have fulfilled the prophecy, Agent Jones. You’re now an exalted figure in our history, and yours, I daresay. You are free to go. Might I suggest you expedite a search in the local town nearby for a vehicle constructed before your year of 1979. There may be a handful of fueling stations left in the eastern Sierra whose pumps still run on analog circuits. You might make it to safety if you have somewhere to go away from the cities. I’d hurry, if I were you. You know how your people are. Once they miss three square meals…they’ll start eating each other.”
I walked straight out of their mountain enclave unchallenged. Every elf I came across stopped what they were doing and smiled at me, some even bowing at my passage, most of them regarding me with utmost amusement.
The sounds of gunfire echoed across the Shasta basin.
It was possible I could make it to my cabin in Tahoe. It was fully stocked, propane, wood, nonperishable goods, water tanks.
They’d come for me eventually. Elves, or more likely, humans.
The man who ended the world was no small chicken.
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