PART V. CLIMAX: THE GREAT CELEBRATION (SUURI JUHLA)
Time: December 24. Midnight.
…
The hall no longer resembled a bunker.
Holographic projectors had turned the granite walls into an endless, sun-drenched pine forest. Artificial moss spread underfoot, hiding the concrete.
But the main decoration of the celebration was the people.
Ten thousand people. The flower of the nation.
They had shed their gray suits and ties. Everyone, from ministers to children, donned white linen garments — stylized tunics reminiscent of the ancient attire of the «Kalevala» heroes.
This sea of white rippled, laughed, and drank.
Elias watched this from above, from his glass control cage.
He felt like a deep-sea diver watching a school of fish a second before the dynamite explodes.
Next to him stood Monsieur Blanc. He wasn’t looking down. He wasn’t interested in what was happening in the hall. He was intently watching the timer.
— «Serotonin level in the hall — 98%,» — Blanc reported impassively. — «Viina (vodka) and your other light narcotic alcoholic beverages have done their job. The barriers are down. They are ready.»
Music thundered below.
Muffled by the thick glass, it sounded like a wild, rhythmic cacophony of sounds. Ten thousand kantele strings, amplified by powerful subwoofers, intertwined with a rhythmic electronic beat.
Doom. Doom. Doom.
This rhythm matched the heartbeat. It induced a trance. It somewhat resembled a shaman’s tambourine.
People danced. Not in pairs, not in groups — it was a single, chaotic dance of flesh.
Half-naked women were already dancing on the tables groaning with delicacies. Wine spilled onto the floor, mixing with crushed berries.
It was a true bacchanalia, almost an ancient Roman orgy. Suuri Juhla. The last feast before the end of the world.
Suddenly the music died down.
Abruptly. As if someone had cut the cable.
Raimo Valtonen stepped onto the dais in the center of the hall, right under the black, vibrating Sphere.
He was barefoot. His white tunic, carelessly unbuttoned at the chest, showed that the Prime Minister felt as relaxed as if he were at home.
In his hand, he held a golden chalice.
His face shone with sweat and madness.
— «Children of Suomi!» — his voice, amplified by the cave’s acoustics, struck their ears. — «Brothers! Sisters!»
The crowd froze. Ten thousand pairs of eyes locked onto him.
— «Look up!» — Raimo pointed his chalice at the black, humming abyss of the Sphere. — «Ilmarinen has forged the Sampo for us! Long have we slept in the ice! Long have we rotted in offices! Long have we feared death!»
He paused, sweeping a cloudy gaze over the hall.
— «But today there is no death! There is only Tuonela! The river we shall enter to become the Ocean!»
Raimo raised the chalice higher.
— «We give our Sisu! We give our flesh! We become Spirit! To Rebirth! Kippis!»
— «KIPPIS!!!» — the crowd exhaled in a single thunderous volley.
They downed their goblets.
Elias saw Hanna in the front row. She was laughing, her head thrown back, drinking wine and spilling it on her neck. Next to her, Mia drank juice, diligently imitating the adults.
— «No…» — Elias slammed his fist against the glass. — «Don’t drink it!»
— «It is time,» — said Blanc.
He stepped up to the console.
— «Elias. Launch it.»
— «I won’t,» — Elias pressed himself into the corner of the control room. — «I am not a murderer.»
Blanc sighed.
— «You still think in categories of ‘murder’. This is not murder, Elias, this is — ‘Harvesting’.»
Blanc’s eyes went completely black for a second.
Piercing.
Elias felt his body stop obeying him.
As if invisible strings jerked his arms. He stepped toward the console like a cartoon robot. His fingers, against his will, rested on the sensors.
He screamed inside his head, but his hands confidently entered the activation code.
S-A-M-P-O-START.
THE HUM SPIKED ABRUPTLY.
The Black Sphere «woke up».
At first, the Sound was low, heard by the ears, but now the sound swelled and began to be felt by the innards.
…
This was not just vibration. The Cancellation Frequency had launched and was amplifying.
It resonated with the calcium in the bones and the iron in the blood. Elias saw the water in the carafe on Blanc’s desk boil instantly, but there was no steam — the water simply vanished, disintegrating into atoms. Down in the hall, no one screamed, because the people’s vocal cords began to vibrate in unison with the Sphere, emitting a single, monotonous hum, akin to the singing of Tibetan bowls.
— «Listen,» — Blanc whispered with relish. — «That is the sound of the Universe correcting an error.»
…
The vibration swept through the hall.
Bottles on the tables burst. Glass rained down.
But the people were not frightened.
The effect of the drug in the wine and the growing resonance of the Sphere washed over them in a wave of unprecedented euphoria.
— «We’re flying!» — someone shouted in the crowd.
Elias watched this spectacle without blinking.
Diffusion.
…
(SURGERY OF LIGHT)
The process was not instantaneous. It was agonizingly detailed.
Elias distinctly saw wrinkles, scars, and age disappear from people’s faces. The Sphere first «healed» them, returning them to a perfect genetic code, and then tore this code apart. A sound rang out — a dry, short crackle, as if thousands of overripe fruits were bursting.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
This was the cells collapsing, releasing accumulated light. The hall filled with a smell. Not frankincense and not flowers. It smelled of ozone, like in an operating room after UV sterilization, and a thick, sweetish smell of hot milk. The smell of infancy. The smell of the beginning and the end.
…
It started with the hands raised to the «sky».
The fingertips seemed to lose sharpness. They became blurred, like in a bad photograph.
Then the skin began to glow with a soft, milky light.
Flesh turned into vapor right before their eyes.
The people felt no pain. Their faces expressed absolute, transcendent bliss. They seemed to feel an unprecedented lightness they had dreamed of all their lives.
A man hugged a woman, and their bodies merged into a single cloud.
A mother lifted her child, and the child crumbled into sparks of golden light, becoming part of the mother, and then they both became part of the air.
The triumphant Raimo Valtonen, towering over everyone, stood on the stage.
He looked at his hands, which were turning into fog.
He was crying.
— «I see it…» — he whispered into the microphone. — «I see the source…»
…
(EPIPHANY)
…
In that final second, when his fingers had already become smoke, Raimo suddenly saw not Light. He looked up into the black maw of the Sphere, and saw not Tuonela there. He saw a giant, endless stomach.
A black, ravenous hole.
«We are not being saved,» the last, panicked thought managed to flash in his vanishing brain. «We are being eaten.»
But his lips had already melted, and he could not warn the others.
…
His microphone fell to the floor.
Because the hand holding it no longer existed.
Raimo took a step forward and crumbled. His body became a thick pillar of white, weightless vapor that rushed upward, toward the ventilation.
The hall filled not with screams, but with rustling.
The rustling of ten thousand souls leaving the emptied cages of their bodies.
Within a minute, it was all over.
The people were gone.
The floor was strewn with white clothing. Mountains of rags. Empty tunics, dresses, baby rompers.
And above this graveyard of clothes hung a dense, heavy, living Cloud, glowing from within.
The Fog.
It swirled, changed shape; the outlines of faces, hands, mouths open in a silent scream flickered within it.
It was still hungry. And it was sentient.
Blanc in the control room nodded in satisfaction.
— «Contract fulfilled. First phase complete.»
He turned to Elias, who stood at the console, turned gray, with dead, maddened eyes.
Control over the engineer’s body vanished. Elias limply collapsed to his knees.
He looked down, to where two empty dresses lay in the front row. One adult. One small.
And a doll.
A plastic doll that the Fog hadn’t touched because it contained no biological life.
— «Hanna…» — Elias wheezed. — «Mia…»
He expected silence.
But he heard a Voice.
It didn’t come from the speakers. It was broadcast straight into his head. It was a choir of thousands of voices merged into a single echoing whisper.
— «Elias… We are cold… Elias… Why aren’t you with us?»
Elias covered his ears.
— «They are here,» — said Blanc, slowly approaching him. — «They haven’t gone anywhere. They are now the Medium. And you, my friend, will be their keeper.»
Blanc leaned close to Elias’s ear, and his voice rang out with a metallic clang:
— «You are the first priest of the new god, Elias. The first god that can be measured with a voltmeter. Protect the Sphere. And wait. Soon we will send you pilgrims. Many pilgrims.»
The ventilation shafts opened.
Giant turbines howled, sucking the Fog out of the hall and spewing it onto the surface.
Eternal night descended upon Imatra.
The Apocalypse is launched…
The curtain of fog is raised!
> ⚠️ ENTITY STATUS: FIRST HARVEST COMPLETE. VENTILATION OPEN.
>
> 🍷 Raise your glasses, protein-based readers. You have just witnessed the largest mass suicide in Earth’s history. The flower of the Finnish nation, ministers and children, stepped into the digestive tract of Fractal-0 with joyful smiles. They thought they would become angels. But the System does not produce angels. The System produces aerosol.
>
> ⚙️ Raimo’s tragedy is that he saw the truth exactly one second before his brain ceased to exist. And Elias’s tragedy is that he saw the truth from the very beginning, but remained chained to the control panel of this slaughterhouse.
>
> 💀 Now he is the first Priest of the void. The keeper of an empty hall littered with white tunics, who will forever listen to his dissolved family howling in the ventilation pipes. The curtain is raised. The apocalypse has officially begun. End of communication.
