Jackson

  Somewhere in the Stratosphere

  2/01/2020

  The sky was bluer than it had any right to be.

  Jackson hovered somewhere above the troposphere, limbs half-spread in a lazy T-pose, drifting like a stoned cloud across a sea of pale blue. Air didn't rush past him so much as it parted reverently, heatless and whisper-thin, like even physics didn't want to interrupt whatever the hell this was.

  His eyes were wide, pupils dialed up to Maximum Holy Shit, reflecting the curve of the planet beneath him. Clouds stretched out below in lazy curls, bright and cotton-smooth, and far below that: the war-torn, fire-punched ruin of what used to be Earth's greatest cities. Smoke columns. Screaming. Some dude in the distance getting thrown by a tentacle.

  Jackson didn't care. Couldn't care. His brain was somewhere between euphoric jazz and slapstick animation.

  He twisted in the air slowly, letting his arms fall slack. "Okay," he muttered, voice sticky with bliss. "Definitely not just flying. I'm ascending. Like an angel. But, like… the shitty meme kind."

  He tilted forward and rocketed ahead like a goddamn cruise missile on Red Bull. Wind howled past him. He passed a flock of flamingos mid-migration, turned them into jet-powered blimps for no reason, and then kept going.

  Below him, the earth kept flashing through different tones of disaster. Explosions popped in the distance like bubble wrap. A Kaiju fist collapsed half of Berlin. Something that looked suspiciously like SCP-096 was doing pushups in the ruins of the Vatican.

  Jackson snapped his fingers and turned the clouds into screens.

  Instagram Reels began autoplaying across the entire sky.

  Each cloud bloomed into full-color video, sound echoing in surreal stereo from nowhere. One reel played directly overhead—Megamind in a turtleneck and wireless mic headset.

  "TEMU MEGASALE! BRAIN-PILLOWS HALF-OFF!" he bellowed. "GET YOUR VILLAIN SLEEP!"

  Swipe.

  A group of rats wearing army uniforms parachuted into a pizza factory, freeze-framed mid-dab. Explosions behind them. "RATATOUILLE SPECIAL FORCES – BRINGING THE CHEESE TO WAR!"

  Swipe.

  The Joker stood in an alley, hoodie up, sunglasses on. He pulled out a comically large blunt wrapped in hundred-dollar bills. "Society gave me this zaza. Now I give it back."

  Jackson clutched his stomach, doubled over in the air, laughing so hard he started dropping altitude.

  He wiped a tear from his cheek. "Bro, this is premium-tier deranged. What is wrong with me?"

  He reached out and, without hesitation, plucked the Joker's blunt right off the cloud.

  It hissed in his hand—green smoke curling out like dry ice and poor decisions. He took a deep, slow drag. His lungs buzzed. The flavor hit like menthol and lavender sin. As he exhaled, the smoke formed a perfect emoji sequence/

  He blinked.

  And then something clicked.

  The cloud feed trembled. The sky shimmered. Every reel folded inward like cheap CGI, until one word stretched across the heavens in bright Comic Sans:

  OHIO

  Just that.

  Just Ohio.

  A still image. Cornfields, a Taco Bell, a tractor doing donuts in a parking lot. American flags. Blunt smoke curling out from a golden cornstalk. And beneath it, a bold caption:

  "THE FINAL SOLUTION TO WORLD PEACE."

  Jackson stared.

  His hands dropped to his sides.

  The blunt drifted out of his grip and evaporated into the air.

  "Oh my God," he breathed. "It's all been leading to this."

  The realization hit him like a semi-truck full of Monster Energy. His aura shimmered like a GPU overheating.

  Ohio wasn't just a state. It was an answer. A concept. A metaphysical constant. Ohio was the one place humanity could be equally insane together. Unified through chaos. No logic, no reason. Just vibes, trucks, and mild government distrust.

  Jackson cracked his knuckles.

  He pointed two fingers at the earth and yelled, "MIDLIFE CRISIS GUNDAM BEAM!"

  A ray of blue energy shot from the sky, striking a strip mall in Detroit and transforming it into a perfect replica of suburban Columbus. Mini golf. A vape shop next to a church. People immediately stopped looting and started arguing about college football rankings.

  He screamed with joy and spun in a barrel roll. "WORLD PEACE VIA METH-POWERED MUNICIPAL REBRANDING!"

  He swooped lower, dragging his fingers across the atmosphere like a kid painting with chocolate syrup. Every stroke converted another chunk of reality. A field in France became Toledo. Thailand fields became—Daytons. In the valleys of the Himalayas Kroger's were infested.

  Down below, people were blinking out of armed conflict and blinking back in as shift managers at Arby's. Militants dropped their weapons to post passive-aggressive Facebook comments about neighborhood dogs.

  Jackson lit another cosmic blunt from the sky and flew loops around himself, cackling.

  "THIS IS THE WAY!" he shouted, wearing American flag swim trunks and a shirt that read 'Corn Fed, Government Led' in comic sans. "THIS IS THE FUTURE!"

  Somewhere in the distance, a choir of bass-boosted phonk started echoing through the sky.

  He bobbed to the beat midair, jerky and off-rhythm, like a dad trying to be cool at a school dance.

  "M-Made in O-Ohiooooo~" he slurred, voice cracking as he attempted to hit a nonexistent note. "Yuh. Uh. Tax fraud go skrrra. Subwoofers in my Lambo. Grill cheese in the Glock."

  He pointed to the clouds, raising both hands like Moses with two corn dogs.

  "WE ARE ALL BUCKEYES NOW."

  And with that, he turned a passing volcano into a Wendy's.

  The world kept turning.

  And Jackson kept flying.

  D.C. Al Fine

  ???

  2/06/2020

  She hadn't looked away from the screen in hours.

  The main display inside the GOC's subterranean command hub—one hundred meters below sea level and just shy of a miracle to keep powered—was a mess of satellite feeds, combat logs, and red-zone alerts. Even muted, the air pulsed with tension. Boots thudded over polished concrete. Voices murmured across encrypted comms. Somewhere behind her, a thaumaturge hummed under his breath as he recharged the last of the perimeter wards.

  Al Fine stood perfectly still, eyes fixed on the map of the world.

  Or what was left of it.

  Half of Europe was gone—greyed out, wrapped in sensor static and atmospheric distortion. Entire countries reduced to telemetry noise. Africa and South America flickered under low-level anomalous interference, Foundation Sites blinking red one after another. The eastern U.S. coast had gone silent three days ago—only three fires still burned near D.C.—and in the middle of the continent, a wide, unnatural green band pulsed across the Midwest like a heartbeat.

  A junior officer handed her a tablet. She scanned it without a word.

  "Begin the update," she said.

  Oud stepped forward. He looked worse than the last time she saw him—shaved scalp scarred by ward-burn, coat mottled with old blood and fresh ink. Still steady. Still sharp.

  He tapped the console. The display shifted.

  "Civilian recoveries have surpassed projections. Approximately 134 million evacuees relocated to stable safe zones. Twenty-seven high-risk zones fully cleared and sealed. Extraction rate is holding at 8.2 percent of displaced global population."

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He tapped again. "Triage and resettlement coordinated with cooperative anomalous organizations. We've secured support from Serpent's Hand medics, Cogwork Orthodoxy engineers, and two anchor cells from Marshall, Carter, and Dark. Light casualties across all operations. Coordination remains viable."

  Another screen flicked on—this one marked with red pulses.

  A war map.

  Foundation Sites.

  Each blink was a confirmed kill. Each unlit zone, a question with too many teeth.

  "Twenty-one Foundation black sites eliminated," Oud said. "Nine confirmed by satellite. Four neutralized via thaumaturgical strike. Two were handled with full burn-and-seal. The remaining six taken offline by allied groups."

  He didn't need to elaborate. Everyone in the room knew what 'burn-and-seal' meant.

  "Memetic purges successful. Minimal fallout."

  Al Fine skimmed the list. The numbers were high. Too high. But they weren't comforting. Numbers never were. Numbers didn't scream.

  "Site-62?" she asked.

  "Gone," Oud said. "Sinkhole. No survivors."

  "19?"

  "Off the grid. We lost contact five hours before the war started. Last transmission from the AIC was an empty file."

  She paused. "And 17?"

  Oud's jaw flexed. "Corrupted. We were on-site when it happened. Sublevels compromised. All entities lost. We had to burn it from the inside."

  The room fell into a beat of silence.

  Someone wrote something down. Somewhere, a light dimmed and realigned. Oud swiped to a new display—this time, faces.

  Dossiers. Photos. Names.

  "Personnel tracking remains incomplete," he said. "Rough estimate: 27% of known Foundation field agents accounted for. About half confirmed dead in combat. The rest scattered. A few presumed rogue. Others likely hiding—from us, or from each other."

  He paused, then added, "We might have a lead on Dr. Gears—possible trace signature near Mongolia. But most of the high-profile defectors have gone completely dark."

  He tapped twice. A blurry security photo filled the screen: an older woman, gray-haired, hunched, wearing civilian rags over what looked like a tattered Foundation command uniform.

  "One O5 confirmed dead—apparent suicide. Two more are suspected in hiding, based on thaumaturgic residue and intercepted psychosphere pings. The rest are unverified. No chain of command. No coordination."

  He swiped again.

  "We're catching ghost orders," he added. "Old clearance codes on loop. Kill programs with no origin. Several Foundation AICs broke protocol—either self-destructed or started issuing recursive execution commands."

  Another screen blinked on. This time, just a single line of text—decrypted from a deep blackfeed.

  Harden your hearts.

  Oud's voice lowered. "It's the only thing that keeps repeating. Every channel. Every node we intercepts. Just that."

  Al Fine didn't speak.

  Oud continued. "Senior leadership has either vanished into sites we can't access or self-terminated. From what we can tell, it was initially chaos—panic. Fracture. Some personnel disappeared. Others killed themselves. No strategy or notable anomalous effect."

  He tapped again. A new map. Dozens of moving pings.

  "Then something changed. Now they're following doctrine. But not orders. Pure protocol. No mercy. No deviation. They're fighting like dogs on a leash made of bone."

  His hand hovered over the Pacific cluster. Dozens of red pulses blinked across the ocean like a field of mines.

  "Several Sites still operational. Their orders are simple—containment through annihilation. Anything non-Foundation is a target. Civilians. Us. Other anomalous groups. No diplomacy. No demands."

  He pulled up a pulse chart. A slow, rising line.

  "Timeline suggests a critical break five days ago. No known trigger."

  One final feed blinked online. Orbit footage. A wide, circular distortion off the coast of eastern Russia. Something vast and wrong twisted just behind the storm front.

  "SCP-610," Oud said. "Breached. Deliberately. They opened it."

  Al Fine's expression hardened.

  "Motive?"

  Oud exhaled. "None that make sense. If there's a plan, we can't see it. The only observable pattern is extermination. Maybe external interference. Maybe a last-ditch failsafe. Or maybe they just broke—ideologically. Something snapped. And whatever snapped…"

  He shook his head.

  "It's irreversible."

  The silence that followed wasn't quiet. It was heavy.

  Nothing moved. No one interrupted.

  Al Fine let it hold—three seconds longer than comfort allowed.

  Then she keyed the display, dragging the map west.

  A new set of zones flickered into view.

  Not red.

  Green.

  "Now," she said, "the other problem."

  Field Commander Korra stepped into the ring of light. Boots polished. Jacket crisp. Her gloves shimmered faintly with fresh runes.

  "We've cataloged one hundred and thirty-two anomalous green zones in the last five days," she said. "Placement is erratic. So are the contents. Terrain, structures, weather—all retroactively altered into copies of a specific midwestern cultural pattern."

  She tapped the screen. Zones pulsed.

  "Ohio."

  Muted murmurs. No smiles.

  "These pockets reconstruct terrain into full-functioning suburban environments—homes, stores, road networks, signage. All fixed to a 2010s-era snapshot of American suburbia. Language shifts. Regional dialects develop in locals within ten minutes. No memetic trace."

  She brought up drone footage—grainy, timestamped, hovering over a Kentucky hillside that had become a perfect replica of a Kroger parking lot. Shopping carts neatly lined up. A slow-moving minivan looping the block, eternally signaling left.

  "These zones repel anomalous activity," she said. "Reality benders fail. Parathreats refuse to enter. We observed SCP-106 approach a converted Wendy's, then retreat after the drive-thru speaker began blasting Life Is a Highway."

  No one laughed.

  "Internal conditions remain stable. Food replicates every hour. Materials regrow—wood, fuel, basic supplies. Ammunition found in labeled caches. Civilian evacuees report high morale. Mental health improves. No memetic bleed detected."

  Oud crossed his arms. "Twelve of our current evac centers are inside these zones. Conditions are… optimal."

  Al Fine raised an eyebrow. "And the source?"

  Korra hesitated. "Unconfirmed. But every zone appears shortly after ontokinetic surges. All surges correspond to one known Type Green."

  She tapped the screen.

  "Field designation: Jackson Von Doom."

  A new dot appeared—tracking across Brazil.

  "No confirmed sightings," Korra added. "But the trail is consistent. He moves. Ohio follows."

  Al Fine stared at the screen.

  Stability in absurdity. Safety born from nonsense. Bass Pro Shops and Walmarts shielding the remains of humanity.

  A dreamscape made real by a drunk with godhood.

  She didn't blink.

  "Maintain presence inside the green zones," she said. "Use them. Move evac through them. Fortify lightly. But do not expand."

  "Yes, ma'am!"