L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 35 Page 18

  Li curses by Shockley and Nader alike the quirk of timing that set him on the Doctor’s trail in winter. Barring flickers of the old, mild October, there will be nothing but long sleeves and hats and heavy coats in every town clear out to Boise. Half the population could be walking around with surgical dressing packed from crotch to throat and he’d never know it. And coats can hide other things. He has two nickel-sized scars low on his back where a godpuppet tried to ventilate his kidneys with a derringer. When the cutters let him go three months later with a massive bill, two legacy Percocet, and a bag of willow bark to chew when the opioids wore off, he finally cleared up enough to realize why the thing hadn’t gone for the easy headshot, and he had nightmares about it for the better part of a year, nightmares that mingled weirdly with those left over from Burden’s Ford.

  Illustration by Qianjiao Ma

  Three weeks. She had been here three weeks ago.

  He parks behind a stable and tips the muckrakers a legacy skin mag to keep his tires from disappearing. For extra insurance, he makes sure they get a good look at the gun on his hip and the flat wand of the scrubber slung across his back. The signs of his office, such as it is. He tries not to think too hard about the scrubber; the capacitors are degrading, and it only works about half the time. And it never does what he tells people, never kills the godpuppet but leaves the person. The scrubber’s real value is its aura of hope, which tends to keep the situation from devolving for an extra three minutes or so. Enough time to get in, sometimes even enough to get out.

  If Boon is uneasy, she gives no sign. She straps a Turnwell-issue automatic to her belt with the easy nonchalance usually reserved for donning socks.

  “The house is a block north,” she says, eyeing his scrubber with an air of disapproval. “And you know those things don’t work on solid-state memory, right? You can’t degauss nonmagnetic storage, and almost no implants use hard disks.”

  “The ones that are supposed to be perfectly safe do.”

  That keeps her looking pensive all the way to the house.

  A man answers the door after three knocks. His eyes lock on the scrubber. Boon gives him a bright smile. “Hi.”

  He bolts for the back door. Li tackles him at the ankles, rolls him over, gets a forearm across his throat, and leans on it for a while. The man goes still.

  Boon crouches in the doorway, pistol down by her side. “Should you be that close?”

  “It’s only been three weeks. Even if he’s turned, God hasn’t had much time to improve him.” Li peels back an eyelid, studies the pupil, the deep clear brown of the iris. He pulls open the mouth and checks the gums, the soft palate. “He’s either clean or a slow burn.” A lie: the man is clean, and Li can feel it, but Boon doesn’t need to know that.

  A flicker of motion from the corner of his eye. A kid on the short side of fourteen is standing in the kitchen three yards off with a shotgun pointed at Li’s head, his mouth working around uncertain sounds. Li ignores the weapon. “What was wrong with your dad?”

  “He couldn’t see.”

  “Degenerative nerve disorder,” Boon adds. “He needed two chips, one at the base of the skull, one in the frontal lobe.”

  Li feels around and finds the healing incision on the back of the unconscious man’s head. There’s nothing on his forehead. The Doctor probably went in through the nose. No denying she’s good at what she does.

  “High-splice?”

  “No,” Boon and the kid say together. The kid: “She said it was just old tech. No radios in it, no nothing.”

  Boon holsters her automatic. “He’s clean, Alan.”

  “How do you know?”

  She points down the hall to a spray of broken glass he hadn’t even seen. “You knocked his glasses off. If he were infected, his vision would be perfect, not just better.” She pushes past Li, reaches out, and takes the shotgun from the kid’s unresisting hands. When she opens the breech, Li sees light glinting inside empty chambers. “Not even loaded.” She passes the gun back to the kid, sighing. “The world doesn’t deserve people like you.”

  Li grimaces. “It doesn’t tend to keep them around real long, either. Kid, we need to know what you paid the Doctor and anything and everything she told you.”

  The kid shakes his head. “She was good,” he says. “I don’t care what you say. She was good.”

  “She rolled the dice with your lives. Ever hear of Bayside? New Tampa? Burden’s Ford?”

  The kid sticks his chin out.

  “I need something from the car,” Boon says, and she slips out the front door, moving without sound.

  The kid kneels beside the unconscious man, feeling for a pulse.

  “He’s fine,” Li says when the quiet starts getting heavy. “He might even still be fine tomorrow.”

  Boon returns with one of her heavier personal effects: a cloth-covered parcel in a leather sling. She sets it on the floor and whips off the covering with a flourish.

  It’s a cylindrical glass tank. Inside, a brain and part of a spinal cord float in clear fluid, surrounded and penetrated by silver threads drifting and twining like kelp. With the sudden rush of light, one thread reaches up and taps the glass.

  The kid yells and recoils. So does Li, and his gun clears leather before Boon catches his wrist.

  “Wait,” she says.

  Li jerks his wrist free. “You kept one? Have you lost your mind?”

  Boon ignores him, eyes on the kid. The questing threads feel around the edges of their enclosure, seem to reach a conclusion, and lapse into quiescence.

  “What’s your name?” she asks.

  “Kevin.”

  “I’m Jackie. This is a mature high-splice node. We call it a squid. You’ve heard of them? I’ve seen and dissected more than I want to think about, Kevin. This is what could have happened to your dad. Then it would have happened to you, and to your mom, and maybe to your friends, your neighbors, your whole town.”

  Fighting every instinct, Li forces his gun back into its holster and follows Boon’s play, which he has to admit has a certain shock value. “In one sense,” he says, voice almost steady, “nobody knows how God spreads. In another, I know perfectly well how it spreads: it spreads when somebody thinks that they’ll be lucky, that this time it’ll be different, that they’re so special they don’t have to think about who and what they’re putting at risk.” He points at the mass swirling in the tank. “When they think that can’t happen, not to them.”

  The kid tells them everything he knows. When his father wakes and sees the monstrosity exposed and impossibly alive, so does he. For a chance at sight, he gave the Doctor a few thousand Turnwell dollars, a tank of hydraulic fluid, and several sets of replacement gaskets. The father was a mechanic before his vision went. Now, he might be again. Li can see that possible future rattling around in the man’s brain, no longer quite able to balance out all the nightmare alternatives. Relief will fix him up soon enough. But for a day or two, he’ll convince himself he’d have chosen to stay blind had he known what might have taken root in his head.

  “She’s pretty,” the kid says after Boon leaves with the squid.

  Li almost smiles. “You’re fourteen.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Fourteen.”

  A sigh. “Fourteen.”

  Li pauses on the doorstep and turns back. “You’ve got some courage,” he says. “And I’ll give you that. But you listen, and you listen well. You never point a weapon at somebody you’re not willing to kill, and never at somebody you’re not able to. Yeah?”

  The kid just stares.

  The father says, “You look for God in men’s eyes, and yet have you beheld the man?”

  Doubt, sudden and cold, uncoils inside him, bound somehow to the prostitute’s non sequitur. “Sure,” he says, which is no answer at all. But then, he can’t be certain the father a
sked a question.

  They spend the night in a rebuilt hotel south of Olathe, as close as either is willing to come to the ruins of Kansas City. There hadn’t been many deployable nuclear weapons left at the Spasm—the world had attained near-perfect nuclear disarmament—but the few dozen that remained had all been launched. Some, like the ones that did for Washington and Kansas City, had been old strategic types, the sort with yields so high into the megatons they had no practical use outside the mad counter-value logic of the Cold War.

  Looking out the window to the north, Li can almost see the ghosts of that holocaust, each one a shadow against an incandescent wall. Flat and featureless and imperfectly blotted from the world. So like the silhouettes of Burden’s Ford.

  Boon has taken the bed nearer the door. She’s paging through a notebook, scribbling, a vaguely contemplative expression flickering across her face. Her nerve, initially arresting, has become an obvious liability.

  He drags the room’s sole chair over. “We need to talk about the world-killing abomination you’ve got in my trunk.”

  “It’s contained. That’s ballistic glass.”

  “Physically contained. It could be transmitting.”

  “We’ve never detected any transmissions, and as it has no sense organs, I don’t know what it could be sending.”

  “You don’t know how God works. Or if there are sense organs in there you can’t identify. I could have sworn it was responding to light. It might have been listening to everything we said. It might be sending location information. Last I checked, you can still get signals off GPS satellites.”

  Boon finally looks up. “There is a point beyond which paranoia is unproductive. I can make educated guesses, and it is my professional opinion that the danger is minimal.”

  “I’ll buy that if you can answer me one question: the squid can’t live without a functioning brain. And I’m guessing you’ve had it sealed up in that jar for months. Yeah? So how’s the brain oxygenating itself?”

  She lays aside the notebook. “All right. I don’t know how God works. Nobody does. It’s possible nobody ever knew how high-splice worked, or why it … behaved. What is beyond dispute is that the Spasm arose from a perfect storm of circumstances unrepeatable in the present world. The squid is dangerous, yes, but not nearly as much as you think.”

  “Because everything’s already broken?”

  “In a way. There’s no American Congress now, no concentration of critical demographics within key sociopolitical and economic structures.”

  He can feel the lecture coming, but short of going out and killing the squid himself, he doesn’t see an alternative. “All right. I’ll bite. Explain.”

  “Ten years before the Spasm, the median age of a Congressperson was sixty-two, the median net worth in the low millions. Access to their medical records is difficult for obvious reasons, but actuarial data suggests that up to seventy percent of them had conditions treatable via high-splice and other networked neural correctives—and they could almost universally afford those treatments. The situation was similar for the European Parliament and even worse for the Chinese Central Committee. Commercial interests were a bit different, but the overall pattern held, especially in the central banks. With the right thousand or so people, you could control the world. God had several times that many in key positions. Hence the success of mutual disarmament treaties, free trade policies, and, obviously, the aerosol sulfate and reflector mitigations of climate change.”

  Li remembers clawing through five feet of snow to get to a courthouse in South Carolina the previous year. He’d almost lost a few toes. “Which ended so well,” he mutters.

  She pushes on. “Now, you’d need to distribute high-splice or hackable implants across the leadership of several thousand unstable, highly decentralized city-states and small nations. To reach the same level of influence God had in the old world, it would need to turn more than forty-five thousand people based on conservative estimates. At an infection rate of ten percent, that means nearly half a million installations of high-splice chips.”

  “You’re leaving out the secondary infections. This thing spreads, Boon. And you’re not accounting for the outbreaks that started with nothing more advanced than a pacemaker from the 1990s. Burden’s Ford started with an insulin pump that barely had an abacus-worth of processing power—but God hacked it from the outside. The original hijacked tech with no biological components at all. We’re talking about kitchen appliances, transit automation, factories. We don’t know where any of the thresholds are. I’m not worried about the Doctor doing half a million operations. I’m worried about her doing just one in Columbia, or Mexico City, or Havana.” Or Austin, he doesn’t add.

  “So far, outbreaks have been self-containing. There’s no definitive evidence of high-level coordination among infected individuals.”

  “Godpuppets.”

  “We dislike that term.”

  Words, he thinks. She’s actually concerned about words. “I dislike the thing.”

  “There’s every reason to believe God is dead, Alan. It was as much the people that comprised it as the technology inside them, and those people are gone. What we’re seeing is just a remnant, a few random high-splice nodes talking to each other. The squid is inert, a single cell without a larger body.”

  “God had a psychotic break when it realized it had overshot its climate-change fix, that half the population was gone no matter what it did. That doesn’t mean it’s dead. It just means it’s insane.”

  She sniffs. “That’s a metaphor drawn from single human minds, and almost worthless.”

  “You’re the one who said it was made out of people. And you can’t look at the PRA or Tinfoil or those white supremacist hacks out east and then tell me people can’t go crazy in groups.”

  Silence. Boon glares at him, or maybe just at his unreasonability.

  “How old are you, Boon?”

  “Thirty-eight. Would you like to know my weight next?”

  “I’m forty-nine,” Li says, rubbing at his eyes. “I was wearing onesies when the Spasm happened. My parents died less than a year later. My stepmom raised me on stories of watching C-SPAN and seeing most of Congress screaming incoherent apologies in unison like a madhouse choir until the government folded up and the nukes started flying, all while the readout on the office microwave kept trying to explain that this was really for the best.”

  “You’ve internalized an irrational fear of science rather than a rational fear of a specific application of a specific technology.” She folds her hands, and there’s something prim in the gesture he finds exasperating. “That’s how movements like Tinfoil survive. My generation has more distance on the issue. And the theory that God had anything analogous to a psychotic break is entirely unsubstantiated.”

  “So are all the other theories. Seeing as the most popular runner-up is that it got fed up halfway through saving the world and decided to kill us all, I don’t find much comfort in the alternatives.”

  “True. That’s true.” She gnaws at her lip for a moment. “The squid stays. You saw how effective it was at convincing the boy, and it’s worth the risk.”

  “Never seen an outbreak, have you?”

  “No. But I’ve studied them. I understand the danger.”

  He strips off his jacket and crawls into his bed, tucking his revolver into the bedside holster. He leaves the knife at his ankle undisturbed. No reason to call attention to it. “If you understood,” he mutters, “you wouldn’t be trying to hand the Doctor over to your government alive.”

  “We’re not trying to resurrect God. Yes, the Doctor might give us certain technological advantages in the coming conflict, but we’re not so foolish as to try that.”

  He turns out the oil lamp. “Nobody was trying to build God in the first place. Nobody even noticed it until the world was coming apart. And I honestly can’t believe you�
��re naive enough to believe half of what you’re saying. You don’t take risks with the likes of the Doctor. You shoot them.”

  “Tell me, Alan, what did you feel after Burden’s Ford?”

  “What do you think? I felt the insides of bottles.” He hesitates. “Guilt.” It feels wrong not to say it. “Mostly guilt.”

  “Interesting, given that it wasn’t remotely your fault. It’s nice to meet a man who’s not afraid to express his feelings.”

  “If I were expressing my feelings right now, you’d be in that jar with your squid.”

  Quiet laughter. “You know, I don’t think I would.”

  He dreams of tree roots he has to keep pulling up from his throat and piling on plates that are whisked away in their turn to a dining room hung with pleated fans and banners bright with the mad patriotism of a half-dozen nascent empires. With a final heave and ripple of contraction, he draws up the bulb, that choicest piece, which is served to Jackie Boon. She reclines at the head table, resplendent, attended by his friends from Burden’s Ford, both his children, and the indistinct impression of his wife, who died in childbirth long before the Doctor passed through town.

  There are not enough roots to go around. This is a problem. He’s responsible for ensuring plentiful and equitable distribution of food. Already the favoritism he’s shown Jackie is causing whispers. The St. Louis prostitute shakes her head sadly. “You don’t remember at all, do you?”

  Jackie holds up the bulb, letting its dangling fibers quiver and squirm like the tentacles of a terrestrial jellyfish. “It’s all right,” she says, still cheerful. She reaches for his mouth. “I can wait while we grow more. We’ll just put it back for a bit.”

  He wakes screaming, clawing at his throat, gasping. Reality rushes back in, and he subsides. On the far side of the room, Boon is pretending to sleep. He lies back, shame and anxiety mingling with gratitude.

  From long experience, he knows he will spend the rest of the night awake, thinking.

  They follow the track northwest, assembling a picture of the Doctor’s final destination and intentions from the objects and currencies she takes in payment. Northwest scrip, which makes sense. A random selection of fuses and hydraulic parts, which doesn’t, not until Boon realizes that all the parts belong to a backhoe or similar piece of equipment. From there, the rest is obvious. Li long ago concluded that the Doctor wasn’t procuring her tech from overlooked warehouses, which leaves one other source: graveyards.