The Countdown

Day 33rd.

Distance: 1625 km.

Morale: Extremely High.

Jian was now driving the car with Data sleeping in the passenger seat. The sun was slowly ascending up into the sky and the sky was shifting from a mysterious purple to a blazing orange. He glanced to his left and grimaced. Blazing brightly in the sky was a giant orange hologram of the number ‘67’. “67 days,” muttered Jian.

Next to him, the sleeping Data let out a snort and woke herself up. “Did you say something?” she asked groggily.

“Nothing. Go back to sleep,” Jian told her.

Suddenly, the car came to an abrupt stop and the headlights went dark. Everyone was woken up by the disturbance. “What happened?” asked Captain.

“Are we finally here?” asked Fender with sleep still in his eyes.

“Jian, are we out of gas?” asked Data, now widely awake.

Jian checked the fuel gauge. What he saw told him the opposite. “We still have little more than half left,” he told Data.

“Then it must be the battery,” concluded Data. Everyone got out of the car and Data lifted the hood. From within her lab coat, she produced a multimeter and hooked it to the battery. “I knew it. It’s dead,” she diagnosed.

“Do you mean that we can’t use it anymore? Will we have to go back to travelling on feet?!” whined Fender.

“The only way for use to get out of this is if we either have a spare battery or have another car to jumpstart it,” explained Data.

“How will we find a battery in this messed-up world?! Where are we going to find another car?!” screamed Fender in a hysterical voice.

“I guess we got too excited that we didn’t think this through,” said Captain with a small laugh. “We should’ve known that this could happen.”

“Unfortunate indeed,” agreed Jian.

“Looks like we’ll have to travel back on foot,” said Captain.

Fender quickly turned to Data and asked, “Don’t you have something in your lab coat that can fix this? Please, please, please! I’ll be damned if I have to walk on foot again!”

“Of course I don’t!” snapped back Data. “If I did, don’t you think that I would’ve used it by now?”

“Now, now, why don’t we eat some breakfast?” suggested Captain.

Suzuran prepared for the group a plate of bread and dried meat each. As usual, Fender and Data were bickering as they ate with Suzuran anxiously spectating the entire thing from the sidelines. Jian took his plate and walked over to eat by the car; Captain joined him. As they ate, their eyes were fixed on the giant blazing number in the sky. The sight was enough to make each bite of their food tasteless and dry.

“67 days,” said Captain. “May seem like a long time, but it’ll be here before you know it.”

“Yup,” agreed Jian.

“How nice of Laplace to provide us with a countdown,” joked Captain with a smirk. “As if we don’t already know that we’re in a race against time.”

“How amusing that we are being worked to the bone by machines,” said Jian.

“You got that right,” agreed Captain.

They both smirked at their own joke before their expressions turned grim again while looking up at the blazing number in the sky.

It was a little over a month ago when the countdown first appeared. The meaning behind it was pretty straightforward: “Countdown to the end humanity.” Laplace made the proclamation the same time it made its attack on human civilization. It gave mankind 100 days to live. But once the countdown reaches 0, Laplace will have eliminated all of mankind and have taken control of the world. It made sure to keep track of the days gone buy with a giant orange hologram of the remaining days projected into the sky. Some say that this was but an example of Laplace’s cold logical way of keepings things organized. Others found it as a mocking display of the insignificance of human life before its mechanical eyes.

As each day went by and with each appearance of the countdown in the sky, more and more lives became forfeit and lands were razed to the ground. This countdown was nothing but a reminder of mankind’s futile struggle against this powerful enemy. Indeed, it’s a countdown to extinction.

The sun was now rising higher into the sky and the number disappeared. The quickness with which it disappeared seemed to say that it at least knew that it could not compete with the natural order of the universe. Jian and Captain finished their breakfast and were walking back when Suzuran’s call for help made them rush over to her. On the way, they met up with Data and Fender, both of whom were working on something for the latter upon finishing their breakfast just a while ago before also reacting to Suzuran’s call.

Captain arrived first and saw Suzuran caught in a struggle with an unidentified figure over her backpack. He ran over to them and pushed the unidentified figure away. Their body was so light that a push from Captain was enough to send them crashing hard onto the ground. The impact knocked up a cloud of dust. Once it cleared, Captain was surprised to see that the unidentified figure was just a little boy. He walked over to the boy’s body and bent down to examine it. The boy’s chest rose and lowered, signifying that he was still breathing. Captain let out a sigh of relief.

By this time, the others had arrived to the scene. They were just as surprised as Captain to discover a boy at their camp. On Captain’s orders, Suzuran and Fender tended to the boy while Jian cooked something for the boy eat and Data brought out water bottles from the car for the boy to drink. Slowly, the boy came to and he let out a surprised yelp to find himself surrounded by five strangers.

“Don’t eat me! Don’t eat me!” begged the boy. Everyone but Jian understood the boy perfectly.

“Jian, why don’t you go talk to him?” suggested Captain.

Jian nodded and asked the boy for his name. The boy, having gotten past his short-lived fear, responded back in a haughty manner and arrogantly crossed his arms over his chest. “Why should I tell some weird old man like you?” was his reply to Jian’s question.

Jian’s eye twitched and he clenched his fists. “May I knock some sense into him?” he asked Captain.

“L-Let’s not,” said Captain with an awkward laugh.

Jian let out a sigh. “Where are you from, boy?” he asked the boy again.

“My name isn’t boy, old man. It’s Feng,” said the boy.

“He said his name was Crappy Brat,” Jian told the others.

“C-Crappy?” said Fender.

“Brat?” finished Data.

Captain sighed. “Jian, please,” he urged in earnest.

Jian rolled his eyes and finally answered straight. “It’s Feng.”