Location, location, location was my father’s mantra. He reiterated it to me so much I thought my head would explode. Elementary school, prep school, college… all the way up until he died of a heart attack during a Viagra-fueled sex session with a woman a third his age. Location, location, location! The old man had probably shrieked the phrase as he’d come for the final time and his heart suddenly shut up shop that evening in his Long Island pied-à-terre.
They were the three most annoying words in the universe, as far as I was concerned. But of course, often the most irritating things in life turn out to be the most useful.
On Christmas Eve 2040, eggheads all over the world gazed at four things as they sped down toward the sun from overhead. The eggheads waited for the objects to burn up as they drew closer to the star. But the curiosities, whatever they were, didn’t. They simply disappeared into the sun’s corona. For a few days afterward, the eggheads monitored the star closely. When nothing materialized after a week, they relaxed. A few months later, it was as if the event had never happened.
And then on November 13, 2041, the dulling, as it became known, commenced. The sun’s brightness that had illuminated the Earth for billions of years began to diminish. In hot parts of the world, like North Africa for example, where the sun was a blinding yellow—by November 15, it was no more than orange. By November 18 it was bright red. Humanity no longer had any use for sunglasses. Even fashion obsessives felt ridiculous wearing them.
And then the shit really hit the fan. Four black lines ran haphazardly down along the sun’s face from its northern pole, as though it had suffered a violent blow to its crown and the black lines were streams of blood. Earth immediately grew colder. The lines thickened, covering more and more of the surface of our life-giving sphere. Added to the drop in temperature, scientists issued the alarming message that whatever the black bands were, they were causing the sun to lose its magnetic pull on Earth. We were slipping away from our great star, off into space.
The smart money of the Earth took the expensively bought advice they were given, sold everything they had, and pointed their engines downward. They jetted toward the floors of the oceans, setting up shop by the most powerful hydrothermal vents they could find. Immediately after they had fortified their positions, they pointed their guns above them. There was only so much heat to go around, after all.
And downward they came, those late to the party. With the sun nothing more than a strangely encased black ball over them, they desperately descended toward the heat at the lowest navigable points of the world. Their heat sensors directed them towards areas that had already long been occupied. And heavily armed. The occupants of these locations—myself among them—opened up their guns and fired.
Survival of the fittest, after all. We killed until the seafloor next to our biodomes was thick with death and its remnants. We cared, but not a lot. What we really cared about was that we were alive. In our domes, we lifted our spirits enough to drink, drug, party, and fuck. You could fit about fifty families into each biodome, and each family was paying the dome owner two million dollars a month. I owned four domes.
Five years later, the water above us started to freeze, and day by day ice drew a little closer to us. We turned on our drills and powered down through the ocean floor. The center of the earth had just become prime real estate.
Yep—location, location, location.
***
It was difficult, darkening the view from the domes to keep out the bright lights of energetic activity near the earth’s core. And of course, protecting those inside the domes from the violent heat outside—that was a massive cost that I certainly passed on to my tenants. Not that they cared. To be honest, I’m regretting the loss of an even wider profit margin there.
It was always so weird, having a dinner party amidst the artificial lighting inside our main dome, against the black-colored lining of the heat shield outside. Beyond that all-important coating was the magma and fire of the deep earth, beyond which lay a world that was growing icier all the time.
The increasing proximity of death by extreme cold was lost on no one. We were accelerating away at an almighty speed from a zombie sun. The ice that had frozen the oceans would eventually make its way right through the innards of the planet, to where we were, near its heart. Our scientists came up with something that most of us had difficulty believing could exist until we laid eyes upon its brilliant yellow form—an underground, man-made mini-sun.
Of course, there was a trade-off for this amazing solar replacement. We had to wear spacesuits to keep out the strange little ball’s radiation. There we were in our vast cavern thousands of miles beneath the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, ambling about it in our space-gear, being blasted with cancerous particles from our sphere of artificial energy, blazing away just underneath some jagged stalactites that had probably been dark for nearly a billion years before our refugee party had come bungling into their realm.
It’s a funny thing, sleeping and defecating in an ultra-thick space suit. Cleaning oneself is pretty weird, too. Some of us couldn’t handle it and simply lived the last few weeks of their lives as they’d had way back before all this started, their bodies clad in nothing but the clothes they’d been used to wearing on the surface. The cancer that had hit them had been savage, swiping the hair from their heads in days, and covering their bodies in hideous lumps in even less time.
An obvious and devastating blow to real estate value is decreased population density. When so many of my tenants opted to commit suicide, it meant I had to drop my rental rates. As time went by, I had to drop them even more. I fell short on debt repayments time after time until eventually one day (well it was a day according to our artificial sun) I ended up walking into the dome that housed the headquarters of my good old friends, Trenton Berks, the bank that had funded my family’s property ventures for nearly one hundred and fifty years (the dome next door was a little more than half the size and housed the remnants of the United Nations HQ—an interesting reflection of the public sector’s influence in this new center-of-the-world reality of ours). I informed my loan manager I needed a serious restructuring of my repayments to the bank.
“I’m afraid I can’t accommodate that, Mr. Gantry,” the young, bespectacled woman behind the desk said.
“What do you mean you can’t accommodate that?” I asked. “In case you hadn’t noticed, human beings—especially rich ones capable of paying astronomically high rent—are in short supply these days.”
The young manager slowly removed her spectacles, speaking as she did so. “I’m saying we’ve given you a lot of latitude, Mr. Gantry. We’ve shown significantly more forbearance than your contract warrants.”
“I know, and I appreciate that—”
“The board is moving for repossession of all your rental properties, Mr. Gantry.” The manager remained silent for a second before adding, “And we will also be calling in the personal guarantees you have made to us.”
I swallowed.
“My family has done business with you for one and a half centuries. And now you’re coming for my house?”
My dome, to be more accurate.
“I’m afraid so, Mr. Gantry.”
“You realize that this is a death sentence for me?”
Which it was. It wasn’t as if I could wander the streets like the homeless people of old could. Rivers of magma didn’t allow for the existence of streets. Or walkers.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gantry.”
Ha. Capitalism at its finest.
***
She gave me six weeks.
For the first fortnight, I blundered around my dome in a drug and alcohol induced daze. Near the end of the fourth week of my stay of execution, I decided to grab the bull by the horns. For a few days, I’d contemplated going out into the magma and just letting it melt me away for however long it took to do so, but my courage left me and the simplicity of self-preservation kicked in. I swallowed my pride and asked my friend—or at least the only person in my life who I could even closely categorize as such—Tyler Matheson, could I stay with him until I got “back on my feet.” Blinking, good old Tyler, a fellow property tycoon, said yeah, of course I could. The number of blinks he emitted told me I had at most a month.
His girlfriend, Iris, who was less than half his age, and a tall pale-eyed beauty, was a serious party animal, who I could tell hated having to explain my presence to those she frequently invited around to her soiree nights. Tyler was enough of a relic to have hanging around her neck. She couldn’t stand to have another borderline senior citizen—me—under the same roof, too. Not that I gave a shit. I was of a serious survivor disposition. I had no intention of letting Iris get rid of me. Hell, not even Tyler himself would get me out of his own house without getting some serious muscleheads to physically drag me from the premises.
So, there I was in Tyler’s spare room, with too much time for contemplation. Sometimes Tyler and Iris were partying below me, sometimes having sex in the room adjacent. I was not a religious man, but while they were copulating, I actually prayed that Tyler would survive the action so that in the case of his demise Iris would not have the aforementioned muscleheads barging in my door in the morning with my impending eviction etched on their features.
Punctuating the worry of this existence was a business thought—why had Trenton Berks repossessed my properties? What use would empty, tenantless properties be to them? The properties were hardly vacant for three weeks before my question was answered.
Two species of fucking alien life forms moved into them.
The first species was basically what you would describe as the torso of a human (they had no head or legs) with four of what resembled arms—one pointing north, the others south, east, and west. At the end of each arm there was no hand, but eight fingers. The second creature… well, I suppose the easiest way to describe it was a faint light inside a ragged, translucent dressing gown.
I heard through the grapevine that the things that had struck our sun had hit countless stars in many other galaxies too, and the same thing had happened to them—the dulling, followed by the black goop (the dressing gown aliens think the objects that struck the stars were some sort of “star virus” that incubated in their cores and ate their way out of the stellar bodies from the inside), cue millions of rapidly freezing planets flying pathetically off into deep space. Some of these poor unfortunates had even become uninhabitable at their core. The denizens of these coffin worlds had sent out distress signals, and who had the strongest signal intercept beacons on good old Earth? Why, commercial enterprises, of course. “Come to Daddy!” Trenton Berks (amongst others) had said. “We can put a roof over your head! Don’t stress! We got this!”
Well. It’s interesting how things turn out. Yesterday was Tyler’s turn. Now his domes are being repossessed. He knows the alien things are going to become tenants of his soon-to-be former properties. And he’s not one bit happy. Iris is gone—shacked up with some guy who actually works with the bank that Tyler had his loans with.
So that’s it for me and him. We’re finished. But it doesn’t mean we’re going to slip quietly into the night (or, more accurately, into the magma). No, sir. Me and Tyler have some money stashed away—a lot of money, actually—enough to go out in one hell of a blaze of glory. We’ve bought a huge stockpile of guns and ammo. We’ve bought off the police for twenty-four hours.
So our strategy is as follows—first the bankers, then those pesky alien renters.
