Read Apotheosis: Stories of Human Survival After the Rise of the Elder Gods for Free Online

they were. People like Pandora’s parents, people who gave the invaders a name, the Yith.
    “Endora Peaslee!” The sound of the voice over the bullhorn was familiar, a ranking Yithian who went by the name Mister Ys, a man, for lack of a better word, who was very good at his job: tracking and capturing unruly humans. “Endora Peaslee, fifth daughter of Robert Peaslee and Megan Halsey, you have been tried in absentia and found guilty of crimes against humanity. A warrant has been issued for your execution. Surrender now and I assure you that the method will be painless.” His voice was nearly void of emotion.
    Pandora looked at her watch. Her pursuers were right on schedule – her schedule, not theirs. Hopefully everything she and the others were doing wasn’t on the Yithian timetable.
    The Yith were time-travelers, aliens that had, eons ago, discovered a way to mentally move through time, leaping forwards and backwards, stealing bodies and infiltrating societies, all on the premise of doing research. They were obsessed with gathering historical data and documenting eras they considered historically important while ignoring events that men might consider critical. Pandora’s own grandfather had fallen victim to their machinations. He like many others had been released from their grasp, but only after they had finished with him. The event had devastated the family. Her uncle had become obsessed with the Yith, and hunted them down whenever he could. In contrast, her father had spent years trying to avoid the taint that had cursed his family, only to be drawn into altogether different but just as sinister matters. That may have had more to do with her mother, who had seemed born to the mysterious and macabre and had drawn her husband into the darkness with her. The resistance had grown up out of what Pandora’s parents could tell them about the Yith and how they behaved.
    Pandora and her friends in the Resistance – and that is what they called themselves, no fancy names or acronyms, simply the Resistance – didn’t particularly like what had become of the world. They knew more about the universe, but less about their government. They were building power stations, but not families. They understood chemistry and physics and ecology, but not command structures and decision-making. In the eyes of the resistance, humans were becoming technicians, leaving the leadership to their newfound masters; masters that often went unquestioned about motives or goals. When the Resistance found the first baby factory, children engineered to be stronger and faster than normal humans, Pandora knew it was time to act. She and her sisters formulated a plan, gathered like-minded friends, and started a worldwide underground network.
    They’d been on the run, building to this day, ever since.
    On the side of the stairwell, she found the hole she had cut that led into a utility shaft. It was tight, but she squeezed through it and found her footing on the stirrups of the zip line. She clipped herself into the harness and squeezed the regulator. She flew up through the darkness as the weights she was connected to fell down. She whisked past rats and loose material at breakneck speeds, clearing the rest of the floors in seconds. At the top, she stepped out onto the roof and cut the line with her knife, making sure no one could follow her using that particular route.
    She walked away as some overzealous trooper fired up through the shaft. The bullets stopped almost immediately and she could hear the soldier being berated by his or her commanding officer. She threw the first switch on the control panel. She needed the troopers to be oblivious to what was going on around them. The aging speakers blared to life and babbled out a cacophony of prerecorded noise: animal sounds, growls and shrieks, and cages rattling. Sounds designed to mask the noises of what was going on in the prison itself.
    While her enemy climbed the stairs, she slipped into her