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What? My "Information Club" is Actually an All-Knowing Secret Society?
Genre : Apocalypse, Fantasy, Superpower, Action
Tag : Misunderstanding, Secret Organization, World-Freezing, Super power
Chapter 31 : The Recollection
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[Time remaining until The Great Freeze: 5 Days]
[Location: Arlen's Apartment, 4th Floor - West Jakarta]
[Time: Day 7 - 01:15 PM]
Arlen stared at the silent, steady blue flame of the Penny Can Stove for a long moment. He evaluated the complete absence of suffocating grey smoke and the highly localized, upward-directed heat output. It was a perfectly pragmatic, incredibly effective solution to a lethal problem that would have otherwise compromised his entire perimeter.
"This is highly efficient, brilliant Maya," Arlen finally spoke, breaking the heavy silence of the insulated living room. His voice retained its flat and measured pragmatism, though the underlying acknowledgment of her skill was clear.
He looked directly at Maya, who was still kneeling beside the small mud kiln. "You have proven your value. Your presence here generates positive effects for me. You just bought your place in this room."
Hearing that cold, calculated validation did not instill Maya with the dread a normal person might feel when being evaluated like a piece of tools.
Instead, her heavily traumatized, exhausted mind processed his brutal honesty as a profound, undeniable sense of security.
"He was not going to throw her out into the freezing void, and he will keeping her safe." Is the only thing in her mind right now
A deep, vivid flush of red spread rapidly across Maya's pale, dirt-smudged cheeks. She quickly looked down at her hands, a small, incredibly awkward, and entirely out-of-place smile tugging at the corners of her lips.
She fidgeted nervously with the frayed hem of her oversized sweater, looking exactly like a bashful, embarrassed teenager rather than a survivor trapped in the middle of a frozen apocalypse.
Arlen narrowed his pale eyes slightly, observing the bizarre reaction with detached focus. He noted the sudden flush of blood to her face and the erratic, nervous shift in her body language.
"Is she developing a fever?" Arlen analyzed silently, his mind rapidly running through a medical checklist.
"No, there is no shivering, no glazed look in her eyes, and no excessive perspiration indicating any infection. There is just something fundamentally wrong with her psychological coping mechanism."
Realizing that investigating her mindset would require an unnecessary emotional energy and yield absolutely zero survival revenue, Arlen immediately chose to ignore it.
As long as she continued to build efficient thing and help him, her bizarre internal thoughts were entirely irrelevant to his immediate survival.
Maya cleared her throat softly, attempting to compose herself and banish the intense heat from her cheeks.
"Ren... do you happen to have a way to charge a device? I know the city's main power grid is completely dead, but my phone battery died two days ago. I just want to check some information ... maybe look at some downloaded architectural PDFs to see if we can reinforce the door frame."
Arlen did not answer anything. He simply walked over to one of his heavy, military-grade supply crates, unlatched the thick metal lid, and retrieved a massive, brick-like 20,000 mAh heavy-duty power bank and a braided charging cable. He handed the heavy lithium battery toward her.
"Keep the screen brightness to the minimum setting," Arlen instructed, sitting back down on his overturned plastic crate. His tone was a hard, non-negotiable command.
"If the glow of that screen reflects off the window plastic at night and creates a visual beacon for the things outside, I will confiscate your device permanently."
"Understood. Thank you," Maya whispered eagerly, immediately plugging her dead smartphone into the heavy power bank.
[Time: Day 5 - 04:30 PM]
A few hours passed in quiet silence. The ambient temperature in the room remained comfortably stable thanks to Maya's multi-layered composite insulation, allowing Arlen to sit outside his cramped micro-tent without wearing his heaviest winter parka.
He spent the time sharpening the heavy steel blade of his tactical hatchet with a whetstone. The rhythmic, metallic scraping of the stone against the metal served as a steady, grounding white noise against the relentless howling of the freezing wind outside.
Suddenly, a sharp, excited gasp broke the silence.
Arlen stopped his hand immediately. His thick fingers tightened aggressively around the rubberized grip of the hatchet as his pale eyes darted toward Maya, fully expecting a perimeter breach.
She was sitting cross-legged on her foam mattress, her face faintly illuminated by the dim, heavily reduced backlight of her smartphone screen. Her dark eyes were wide, scanning the digital text with a frantic, eager intensity. Her thumbs hovered over the glass screen, trembling slightly.
"What is it?" Arlen asked, his voice low, steady, and demanding.
"The signal... The signal is still active," Maya stammered, looking up at him with absolute, unadulterated disbelief.
"I mean, what I'm talking about isn't the old cellular network. It's a localized mesh network bouncing off independent, battery-powered routers and makeshift repeaters. It has been active since the very beginning of the Long Night. I just couldn't access it because my phone died two days ago. I missed so much information."
Arlen frowned deeply, the muscles in his jaw tightening. He knew about the mesh network. FrostBite, his loyal Pillar of Information, was the one actively maintaining the digital infrastructure for the Echoes and the Information Club using satellite uplinks and heavy military routers. But FrostBite's network was highly encrypted, requiring specific hardware and passwords, designed strictly for internal communication among the Pillars.
It was absolutely not supposed to be an open Wi-Fi connection accessible to a random survivor with a charged phone.
"Explain to me. What are you looking at?" Arlen ordered, leaning forward, the hatchet resting heavily against his knee.
"It is a massive organization. They call themselves 'Recollection'," Maya explained, her thumbs scrolling rapidly across the screen, pulling up entirely new pages of data.
"They are providing an open, unencrypted website for everyone who can find their signal. It is a massive digital forum, Ren, and the scale of it is absolutely terrifying. It isn't just West Jakarta."
She tapped on a specific directory on the screen, her eyes wide with awe.
"They have connected survivors across the entire country. Look at these location tags. There are active survival threads from Sumatra all the way to Papua. People are coordinating safe zones, establishing barter locations, and warning each other about massive mutant hives. There is even a dedicated thread created by a group of engineers in Bali discussing an ongoing attempt to establish a digital bridge to international networks in Australia and Singapore."
Arlen felt a cold, heavy, and deeply unsettling knot form in the pit of his stomach. The blood in his veins seemed to run colder than the ambient temperature of the room.
"Recollection?" Arlen thought, his mind racing frantically to search through his own memories of the manuscript.
"I never wrote an organization by that name into the story. The Information Club was supposed to be the only functioning digital entity during the early stages of the deep freeze."
"But the forum isn't the main issue. That's just the public communication side," Maya continued, her voice growing incredibly serious, pulling Arlen back to the glowing screen.
"The administrators of 'Recollection'... the people actually running the servers... they have an official broadcast board locked at the very top of the site. They are posting highly accurate, incredibly detailed survival guides."
She tapped a pinned post and began reading the contents aloud.
"They have uploaded full anatomical breakdowns of the mutated dogs we saw outside. Listen to this: 'The Alpha Hounds hunt primarily through advanced thermal tracking receptors located directly beneath their primary olfactory glands. Do not engage with standard kinetic firearms unless targeting the central nervous system located at the base of the skull. To evade, utilize dense clay or mud to mask your thermal signature.'"
Maya looked up from the screen, her expression entirely focused and deeply unsettled. "Ren, I am an architecture student, not a biologist, but the level of scientific detail in these posts is insane. It reads like a military research document."
Arlen remained completely silent, his grip on the hatchet turning his knuckles white.
"And it gets better!," Maya navigating to a different section of the broadcast board.
"They are posting predictions. Look at the timestamp on this specific post. They warned the entire network about the massive drop in temperature and the arrival of the black snow two full days before it actually happened. They are actively predicting future weather events, massive structural collapses, and specific mutant evolutions with pinpoint accuracy."
Arlen stopped breathing entirely.
His analytical mind immediately began processing the massive, world-altering implications of her words. The hatchet in his hand felt as heavy as a lead weight as his thoughts spiraled violently out of control.
"An organization freely distributing highly classified biological data and perfectly accurate future predictions across the entire country," Arlen analyzed, his pale eyes staring blankly at the concrete floor. In a world governed by my flawed manuscript, there are only two logical explanations for this phenomenon.
"Theory one: It is an organization founded by another Regressor. Someone exactly like that dark gray squad leader. But instead of silently hoarding physical resources and speedrunning the apocalypse for his own personal gain, this specific Regressor is actively trying to manipulate the entire surviving population by acting as a digital, omniscient prophet. They are building an army through information."
"Theory two: It is an organization led by an anomaly who actually possesses the supernatural ability of Future-Sight or Clairvoyance. A variable that completely breaks the laws of physics and time, accessing the future without needing to die and regress."
Both theories were absolutely terrifying. Both meant there were incredibly powerful, highly organized entities operating in the world who understood the mechanics of this apocalypse just as well—if not vastly better—than he did. He was no longer the sole proprietor of the world's secrets. He was actively competing against people who were playing a completely different game.
"Ren? Are you okay?" Maya's voice cautiously pulled him back to reality. She was looking at him with genuine concern, noticing the rigid, unyielding tension completely locking up his broad shoulders. He looked like a man preparing for a physical impact.
"You went completely quiet."
Arlen blinked hard, aggressively forcing the cold, detached, and pragmatic mask of the 'Architect' back over his face. He could not afford to show panic to a subordinate variable.
"It is nothing," Arlen lied smoothly, his voice flat and controlled. He stood up from his crate and calmly sheathed his hatchet at his hip.
"Keep reading the forum. Gather any specific data regarding mutant patrol routes or hostile survivor groups operating in our immediate sector. I need to rest."
Without waiting for her reply or giving her a chance to ask further questions, Arlen turned his back on her, ducked quickly into his insulated micro-tent, and pulled the heavy plastic zipper completely shut, sealing himself inside.
The exact second the zipper closed, Arlen collapsed heavily onto his back, staring blindly up at the dark plastic ceiling. He pressed the palms of his hands hard against his closed eyes.
"Haaah..." a long, exhausted, and deeply frustrated sigh escaped his lips. His true personality, stripped entirely of all the cold pragmatism and calculated confidence, finally bled through the cracks of his facade.
"I am so unbelievably tired of this world going completely insane."
He rubbed his face aggressively, his chest feeling incredibly tight with mounting anxiety.
"With so many unpredictable variables walking around with these crazy, logic-breaking powers, what am I supposed to do? What can I even do?" Arlen muttered to himself in the suffocating darkness of the tent, his voice thick with a profound sense of helplessness.
"Ugh. The realization that the novel I wrote is just the basic, bare-bones framework of this current world is useless right now. I'm just a guy sitting in a plastic tent while real monsters rewrite my script."
He lay there in the quiet dark for a long time, forcing his breathing to slow down to a steady, rhythmic pace. He had to calm his racing heart. Panic yielded zero revenue.
He needed to process the existence of 'Recollection' and figure out how to navigate a world where he was no longer the only one who held the blueprint to the apocalypse.
***
[Location: Logistik Raya Warehouse Bunker (The Gateway) - Cikarang Industrial Zone]
[Time: Day 7 - 08:00 PM]
Miles away from the quiet, psychological tension of Arlen's apartment, a massive, heavily armored man stood completely motionless on an exposed steel observation deck.
Tank, the Pillar of Fortitude—a man whose real name was Marco—looked out over the sprawling, heavily fortified perimeter of the Logistik Raya Warehouse Bunker.
The massive industrial zone in Cikarang, acting as the critical stronghold the Information Club referred to as 'The Gateway', had been transformed into an impenetrable fortress of heavy steel barricades, spiked trenches, and elevated watchtowers under his direct, uncompromising command.
He no longer wore just his heavy blue-collar work jacket. He had upgraded his gear significantly since the deep freeze began. Over his thick, insulated industrial clothing, Tank now wore a custom-forged suit of heavy ballistic armor plating, heavily modifying standard military gear to fit his massive, broad-shouldered frame.
His broad, rugged face, weathered heavily by years of grueling industrial labor, was set in a deep, permanent scowl. The biting, lethal -15°C wind howled relentlessly across the exposed steel balcony, whipping his heavy dark coat violently around his armored legs, but Tank did not even shiver.
His mutated physiology, an early evolutionary adaptation triggered by the Architect's Breath Technique, rendered him practically immune to the freezing temperatures that were currently slaughtering the unprepared masses outside his walls.
Tank slowly tilted his massive head upward, his stoic, calloused hands resting heavily against the freezing steel railing of the balcony.
He looked up into the absolute, monolithic void of the sky.
The heavy layer of volcanic ash churning in the stratosphere ensured that the sky remained a canvas of pure, unbroken pitch-black darkness.
There were no stars. There was no moon. Not a single trace of light entered or exited the earth's atmosphere. There was only the suffocating, eternal dark that trapped humanity in the Long Night.
But as Tank stared intently into the abyss above the eastern horizon, his thick brow furrowed deeply.
Something was fundamentally wrong with the darkness.
The absolute black void was not uniform. High above the ruined industrial city, far beyond the reach of the freezing clouds, the darkness seemed to be warping. It was a subtle, terrifying visual distortion that made the thick hairs on the back of Tank's neck stand straight up.
It did not look like the ash clouds were parting due to the wind. It looked exactly as if the solid, impenetrable fabric of the pitch-black sky itself was being grabbed by massive, invisible hands and slowly, violently ripped open from the outside.
The jagged, unnatural tear in the sky did not let any sunlight or starlight in. It only revealed a deeper, more profound, and infinitely more terrifying shade of absolute darkness waiting behind the veil of their world.
Tank's jaw clenched tightly, his calloused fingers gripping the steel railing tight enough to leave shallow dents in the metal as he watched the anomaly silently tearing the sky apart.
"The Architect warned us that the world would break," Tank rumbled, his deep, gravelly voice entirely swallowed by the freezing wind.
"But I've never thought that something was trying to break in."
›› To Be Continue ‹‹
—KS