Rapture

The stables were empty.

The first Piresh Varna heard about it was a brief, puzzled conversation between his father and his uncle. The workers had not reported for the start of the day shift, a changeover that Sumash Varna liked to be present to witness. The task sergeants had not roused the workers in a timely fashion -- that's what Sumash thought, until he looked in at the factory's labor rooms to see why the night shift workers had not yet begun to file out.

The factory was empty.

His alarmed conference with Rivak over with, Sumash and his brother set out to investigate in person just what was going on. Their first stops were back at the factory, where worktables stood unattended and machinery left running hummed, then sputtered to silence once Rivak threw the master power switch. Then they made a quick tour of the stables, where the beds sat, row upon row, unmade, in the men's dormitory. It was the same in the women's dorm. The communal areas were similarly abandoned: Cups of tea still warm, sitting on the refectory tables; taps running cold water in the lavatory.

Once Sumash and Rivak had determined the workers were in neither the stables nor the factory, they began to look further afield, though remaining within the boundaries of the industrial compound. Sumash feared an attempt by the workers to consolidate or even unionize; he half expected to find all seven hundred-odd of his workforce in one of the deployment fields or heavy equipment areas, listening to a charismatic leader describe absurd visions of shared wealth and shorter hours. Limited efforts to organize the workers had taken place before; they were part of doing business, and the Varna industrial complex saw no more nor fewer of these outbursts than any other company. The security squads usually sorted it out in less than an hour.

But there were no security personnel on hand, as Rivak discovered when he attempted to contact them using his PCD. Thinking the device had become defected, Rivak tried to make contact using his intralink, but that failed also. Sumash made similar attempts --again, to no avail.

Nor were the workers anywhere to be seen within the walled limits of the industrial compound: Not by the raw materials warehouses; not by the drone hangars; not by the fuel depot; not even in the Varna private gardens that surrounded the family manse.

Sumash and Rivak raced back to the big house, worry swiftly mounting to fear. They pulled all the resident family members into the home's safe wing, which was maximally fortified and supplied, and there they tried everything they could to reach the outside authorities: PCDs, satellite uplink, the Internet. No one seemed to be responding to their calls and messages. Rival thought to try the vendors, transport services, and industrial partners, but no one was responding there, either.

It was only when Sumash reached out to Ganifor Dured at the Dured Industrial Complex, eighteen miles away, that the Varna family succeeded in making contact with the outside world. But Dured, pale and panicked, had the same tale to tell: His workers, too, had vanished: Everyone from the floor foremen to the security commanders to the greensmen and stewards and house managers. All of them.

The Varnas had not even thought about their domestic staff; in their haste to fall back to the fortified Safe Wing they had simply assumed that the house workers were doing their work invisibly, silently, as they always did, and if some sort of attack or siege were about to descend, they would have to fend for themselves. But when Sumash tried to raise someone using the house intercom system, he got no reply. Finally, venturing out with Rivak's hulking son Samil, Sumash searched the domestic areas of the house, looking in the basement kitchen, the garage, and even the small on-premises security office. There was no one.

The family's workers -- industrial and domestic, from the IT support team to Sumash's own valet and Indira's personal maid -- had simply vanished, leaving the house and facilities intact and taking nothing with them. There was not even any record of their mass exodus on the security video record that Sumash and Rivak examined later on.

It was as though they had simply been swallowed by demons in the night.

That, in fact, was the first though Indira had: She and Piresh's sisters gathered into a wailing knot of femininity, screeching that the underworld was rising and they would be next to be devoured. Sumash shouted at them harshly to stop their gibbering and set aside all such talk: Fantasies about supernatural predators would not solve the riddle of where all their human property had gone, nor would it secure the family's safety.

Nor would it get the machines going again, transport material from the warehouses, and return the fabrication line to productivity and meet the day's quota, Rivak noted dourly.

The two brothers retreated to Sumash's office, which was not located within the confines of the Safe Wing but was not too far away. The rest of the family stayed put, though Piresh was starting to doubt that their falling back to the Safe Wing had been necessary. There were no people anywhere about; how could there be any actual danger?

He voiced this thought to his sister, Amula, who hissed back at him that something had happened to the workers, something terrible, and for all anyone knew the family itself might be next!

Piresh responded that Amula was acting like the stupid girl she was. It was one thing for workers to vanish, whether thanks to demons or their own treachery in leaving. But the family was something entirely different. The things that happened to ordinary people -- human property -- could not ever happen to the family. The family were owners, after all. They lived above all such possibility of harm or chaos. Sumash himself had said that the family was special -- The Elect, he'd said. The Beloved of All the Gods. Surely, Shiva-gi and Hanuman-gi and all the other gods would protect the family.

***

No human menace threatened the family over the weeks that followed. No hordes of angry workers surrounded the manse; no terrorists attacked or issued demands. Society had not collapsed, but rather evaporated -- that is to say, the social order had dissolved, but not because of trouble or discontent. The workers had not risen to try to steal from the owners, as Sumash and Rivak often predicted would happen unless the strictest scrutiny of the workers was maintained and the harshest discipline enforced. But by vanishing, the workers had attacked the family every bit as grievously as if they had risen up in a blasphemous insurrection.

In the first few days, as Sumash and Rivak contacted other owners -- the Guratis, the Balatas, the Dhoris, the Suvanas -- and attempted to find new workers as quickly as they could, only to find no one from the work deployment centers answered their calls or emails, Indira and her daughters reluctantly took on the task of securing and preparing food. The women descended to the basement kitchen, inventoried the cold storage facilities, the wet and dry supplies, and, with Samil's help, the on-site supply of potable water and natural gas. They had provisions for several months, but it was a matter of learning how to cook the foodstuffs. Indira plainly resented the burden of feeding the family, and she frequently flew into fits of ill temper as she supervised her daughters in the task.

The men were none too fond of the food that resulted, but they were too perplexed and worried to take much note of the provisions or to complain. They ate their dahl and other meals in a state of agitation, trading theories as to what was going on.

Sumash suspected the Chinese had somehow stolen their labor. Perhaps with a teleportation beam? Or a disintegration ray? Or flesh-eating nanites? This theory changed to the Americans, and then the neo-Soviets, and finally the EuroUnion, the putative culprits changing identity every time word reached the family by way of the other regional owners, or via direct satellite feed, that the situation was the same in other places around the world. Britain had lost all of its subjects; America's underclass had disappeared from sea to shining sea in the space of a heartbeat; China's teeming masses were reduced to a handful of well-placed and wealthy officials.

Rivak, upon hearing the theory the Americans were advancing, became obsessed with the idea of their "Rapture," the conviction that the Christian God had assumed the working poor, the destitute, and all human property directly into Heaven. The American first families were practically in a shooting war with one another, hysterical with terror that the End Days had arrived and the Antichrist was already among them. At first, it was accusations that flew back and forth among America's first families; within a few weeks, however, they resorted to repurposed commerce drones that had been outfitted for tactical offense.

Sumash and Samil vocally derided Rivak's pronouncements of the Christian God's wrath, noting that this made absolutely no sense at all. Why would the Christian God, or any God, attack the owning families by taking away their human property? The way of nature was for The Elect to guide the masses, give them constructive work, and discard or even cull the remainder. All attempts to govern in some other manner -- democracy, for example, that miserable failure the Americans had attempted before reverting to oligarchic theocracy -- had only generated discontent and thrown human society into disarray.

But then Samil advanced a new theory: Aliens, he said, had used unimaginably superior technology and taken away the workers for purposes of their own. Maybe to serve as workers for some extraterrestrial civilization. May even to be devoured as food!

Indira and the girls began wailing and sobbing once again.

Sumash told Samil he was a stupid boy who had no place putting forth idiotic theories such as the "alien hypothesis." Moreover, Samil had no place remonstrating with his father and calling him mocking names like "Born Again." If anyone was going to put Rivak in his place, it would be Sumash himself, the elder brother. Samil should just mind his place.

Samil grew silent, but glowered. Occasionally he muttered sentiments to the effect that foolish old men could not hope to adapt to a world in flux, and the day would come when those who did the real work -- the literal heavy lifting, as Samir did with all his muscle -- would claim their place at the head of the clan.

Other family tensions arose as the supplies began to run low, but were put aside when trips into the city became necessary in order to gather new supplies. It seemed that some of the other prominent families had already thought to avail themselves of shops and markets that were now desolate of human beings, but remained full of goods. Those families that had been slower on the uptake now scrambled to avail themselves of what was left. The Guratis were especially aggressive about laying claim to food stores, and when hostilities erupted, Samil took a terrible beating: Samil was built like a bull, but the Guratis had three sons, and they traveled in a nasty little pack.

The Guratis and the Dhoris became locked in an escalating series of strikes and counter-strikes, with the Balatas playing both sides off one another, and this bought the Varnas some breathing room. But other problems were quickly mounting: The national infrastructure was starting to fail. The power had stopped only a few days after the workers had disappeared, but the prominent families hardly noticed this, as they all had their own on-site energy production facilities. But without power, the cities, empty as they were, grew toxic as refrigeration failed, meat rotted, storm and sewer facilities began to back up, and fire suppression systems stopped operating. Between fires, wild animals, an uncheck proliferation of vegetation, and the corresponding decline of the physical integrity of buildings, streets, and bridges, supply expeditions became more and more problematic.

Sumash tried to work out an arrangement with the Duptis, who owned the closest agricultural supercomplex, but the Duptis were unable to exploit their own land holdings, especially once their large farming machines started to break down. Their last word was one of warning: They were carving out enough acreage to attempt a family farm to sustain themselves, and anyone who approached their complex would be assumed hostile and "dealt with." Sumash laughed that this no doubt meant the family was trying to use the weapons left behind by their vanished security personnel, and probably microwaving, lasing, and shooting each other more frequently than repulsing raiders.

But his father's laughter, Piresh thought, carried a harsh and bitter note.

The fragile network of communication between families in different nations started to fray. Contact with the Surimishas in Japan abruptly ended after they sent out a last frantic message about the local nuclear power plant melting down. Almost all contact was lost with the Americans even before that, as their internecine wars escalated and then raged out of control. The EuroUnion seemed to be fragmenting: The prominent families of Germany announced that they had little intention of retaining or honoring agreements with the Finns, the French, or the Germans. The Icelanders had recused themselves from the affairs of the rest of the world by curtly announcing that since all international cooperation had become a matter of courtesy calls on satellite links and shortwave radio, there was no real purpose in participating.

Piresh took all of this in, but hardly said a word to anybody. He was far too deeply terrified to speak up; ever since the vanishing, he had kept quiet. No one seemed to notice. Piresh had a deep, intuitive sense of what was going on, but it wasn't until his uncle Rivak's flirtation with American evangelicism that he was able to articulate, even to himself, the thought that nagged at him.

This really was the "Rapture," the time when the Gods pronounced judgment and cleansed the Earth. But it wasn't the workers the Gods had snatched away, and the Raptured ones had not been sent to paradise.

It was the prominent families -- the owners -- whom the Gods had taken from the face of the Earth.

And this was Hell.

Watching, listening, Piresh knew that these difficulties were only the start. Soon enough, their real problems would begin, and then they would truly taste damnation.