dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  It suggested that the noises had been both deliberate and coordinated.

  He dropped to a crouch and tried to work out exactly where the noises had originated. Close enough to worry him, but it was so hard to get a fix on sounds in a forest at the best of times. In an unknown forest, with his adrenaline pumping, and the residual memories of the factory nagging at him, it was impossible.

  He waited, his breathing slowed and quiet, trying to catch a sound.

  Nothing.

  Maybe he had imagined it. Or maybe it has just been falling branches. The silence was a relief, actually, because the noises had sounded coordinated and deliberate.

  And then he thought, nothing?

  He had been making his way through the wood for a while now, and it hadn’t been quiet for a single second of it. Birds had been twittering around him, and he’d heard the flap of wings as he’d disturbed them from their resting places. At no point in his trek had the woods actually been silent.

  But now it was.

  Not even a bird sang.

  His mind flashed back to the wild boar he’d seen when he was approaching the loading bay, and those curved tusks that looked like they could cause severe damage if the animal decided to charge. Joe had no idea if boar did charge at humans. He knew very little about them at all, except that they were hairy pigs. He hadn’t heard of pigs attacking people, so maybe boars were safe … If it was even a boar he’d heard.

  In two locations.

  Once. Each.

  And then silence.

  He felt a cold prickle of fear creep down his neck.

  It wasn’t a boar he had heard.

  Because it wasn’t a boar he was hearing now. To the left and to the right, synchronized and moving toward him. Slowly. In formation. Two pursuers. Confident enough not to need to move quietly. Using their methodical progress to intimidate him into moving.

  Joe threw together a pheromone cocktail of Alpha Male and Hunter-Not-Hunted. He stood up and tried to get a line of sight on either of his pursuers, but they were staying hidden. For now. Egging him into making a hasty move with the noise of their pursuit. Trying to keep him off-balance. Trying to scare him into an error.

  Such errors came from the amygdalae, the primitive parts of the brain responsible for triggering fear reactions to outside stimuli. Controlling fear was a matter of striking a balance between the emotional fury of the primal amygdala and the sophisticated reasoning powers of a more recent addition to the brain: the neocortex. The trick was to use the brain’s own chemistry to defeat one of its own defenses; to stop the body’s fight or flight chemical, adrenaline, from binding to the brain’s receptors.

  The only way Joe knew to do that was through reason. Analysis. Higher brain functions. That’s why the problems he hit up against hadn’t killed him yet. He thought his way past them. Saw the truth behind them. Implemented strategies for dealing with them.

  It was easier when you had a chip that could be used to directly control brain chemistry, but the best way to avoid panic—and the mistakes that would surely flow from it—was to think your way around it.

  So Joe began moving, trying to keep the sounds equal distances away from him, trying to concentrate on every aspect of his progress through the trees, and trying to keep the progress of his pursuers modeled in 3-D in his mind’s eye.

  Visualization. Calculation. Analysis.

  As useful against mental darkness as flashlights were against its physical analogue. Rational thinking could downgrade that unpredictable emotion called fear into a much more useful tool: caution.

  The canopy of leaves above him filtered out enough of the light to take the critical edge off his vision. Either that, or his pursuers were excellent at concealment. Even when he was sure he had their positions fixed, he could see no sign of them. Just hear the sound of them moving, of their slow, deliberate march through undergrowth. When he sped up, the sounds did not, and that gave him a momentary sense of relief. Relief that died the moment he thought, They don’t need to move quicker, because they’re that certain they’ll catch me.

  He wished he knew the terrain, what he was heading toward. He felt he was still moving in the direction of the road, but also that he had been pushed farther from the parallel path he’d intended to follow. Instead of a straight line, he was taking a longer diagonal. And the slope of the land was becoming more and more difficult to negotiate. It seemed to demand more speed of him when what he needed was steadiness.

  Physical and mental steadiness.

  He dodged tree trunks and roots, keeping himself equidistant between the two pursuers. One of the ways that fear, adrenaline, and survival instincts worked was by taking away the non-essential functions and boosting the ones that evolution had proved to be the most useful in dangerous situations. The digestive system pulled a 180-degree turn: instead of storing sugars, it flooded the body with them, preferring their quick release of energy to any long-term gains. Blood vessels contracted, which, with a rapid increase in heart rate, meant that chemicals traveled around the body at a dramatically increased rate.

  There were trade-offs, though. There was the loss of higher reasoning skills, obviously, with a more violence-focused approach to problem solving; a marked narrowing of the human field of vision (in order to concentrate on the danger in front of one it tended to mask out the peripheral extras); and the fight or flight reflex was really only meant for a short-term advantage. Its pulls on the physical body—increased breathing, sweating, heart rate and blood pressure—meant that it wasn’t a state sustainable over long periods of time.

  Visualization. Calculation. Analysis.

  Keep the higher brain in the driver’s seat, but keep the more primal, lower brain functions riding shotgun.

  And when being pursued by unknown pursuers?

  Keep moving.

  Forward.

  It only took a few degrees of deviation from a straight course to become a mistake that compounded dramatically over distance. You only had to look at the hypotenuse of triangles to see that. And it was the same cruel geometry that took Joe from parallel to the fence to goodness-only-knew how far from the road.

  It occurred to Joe that his pursuers intended on keeping him away from the road, driving him deeper into the woods. If that was the case, it at least made them human, rather than bears or some other indigenous predator, but even that flash of comfort was a double-edged sword. Sure, Joe would rather fight men than bears, but he’d have no problems outthinking bears. Two men were always capable of nasty surprises.

  And on the subject of nasty surprises, the sky beyond the trees was already starting to darken. Maybe it would make it easier to lose his pursuers, but that had its own trade-offs. He didn’t know what else prowled Transylvanian mountain forests at night, but he was pretty sure that he didn’t want to find out.

  He checked for a phone signal again. A lot of scenes in modern thrillers, he’d noticed, were built upon ways to prevent cellphone signals that would render all the suspense built up null and void. He’d always seen it as a corny plot device, but realized now that it was simply another way of turning the mental screws. The reliance on cellphones was pathological and, when you needed them and they didn’t work, it became utterly demoralizing.

  No signal also meant no maps, of course. Which meant he didn’t know where he was heading. He tried to map his route out in his head, along with what he knew of the countryside, but not even his chip helped work out his location.

  He was just thinking that maybe it was time to stop running—to turn around and face whoever it was that was following him and put an end to the undercurrent of fear that had been informing his movements for too long now, when he noticed three geographical features that gave him a reason to continue on. First up was the leveling off of the slope to flat terrain that was easier to traverse. Second was the forest thinning out around him. And third, but most exciting, was the fact that the ground beneath his feet was becoming well-trodden.

  A path.
>
  And paths led … well, somewhere.

  And anywhere was better than being lost in the woods.

  That was his theory, anyway.

  He hurried to put it to the test.

  The village was blink-and-you-miss-it small, and Joe thought it was completely deserted. A main street that was no more than a dirt track led past some ramshackle houses that looked like they’d been plucked from another decade, or another century—timber houses finished in traditional methods, using dovetail joints rather than nails or screws, with sloping roofs and shuttered windows. There were no lights or signs or life.

  One of the buildings had a higher slope to its roof and some elaborate crucifixes decorating it, which seemed to suggest it was a place of worship, but it too looked empty.

  Joe tried his phone again but, although a couple of bars showed on-screen, it didn’t translate into an actual signal in the real world.

  He walked down the track and began noticing a few modern touches, the most telling of which was the satellite dishes fixed to the sides of some of the buildings. They seemed oddly out of place, but also fitting. No matter how far off the beaten track the village was, it was still patched in to the world’s TV channels.

  And satellite meant telecommunications.

  Which meant contact with the outside world.

  With YETI.

  Joe had just chosen a door to knock upon when he became aware of movement at the end of the street he’d come in on. Two forms were moving out of the twilight murk. They were human height, or maybe a little taller than average, but looked a lot wider than you’d expect, wider … or chunkier … stockier … Whichever adjective fit, did so in a most disconcerting manner.

  He knocked on the door with a little more urgency than he’d intended, watching as the figures moved toward him, their gait slow, lumbering, but determined. There was something about the way they moved that set off alarm bells in Joe’s head—some biomechanical strangeness that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but that made him want to get as far away from them as he could.

  Just as he heard movement inside the house, he worked out the source of his discomfort. It wasn’t that he could suddenly say what it was about the figures’ movements that unsettled him, but that he had seen enough people moving that he recognized what constituted human movement. The … things entering the village did not move like people. He couldn’t identify what they did move like, but it wasn’t anything he knew.

  The door opened inward and a middle-aged woman peered at him. Her face looked kind, but puzzled. She had a brightly-colored scarf wrapped around her head and tied at the neck.

  “Cine esti?” the woman asked.

  Joe made a mental note to ask Abernathy for basic phrases in all languages to be programmed into his hardware to make situations like this a little easier to navigate. For now, he was going to have to do what English speakers often do when they’re abroad: speak louder and try to convey meaning through pantomimed gestures.

  “Er … English?” Joe tried, pointing at the woman, then his mouth. “Anglais? Ingles? Englisch?”

  The woman shook her head.

  “Imi pare rau,” she said, “eu nu vorbesc engleza.”

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out that her words meant: no, she didn’t speak English. And why should she? So Joe made the universal sign for “phone,” holding up his thumb and pinky to his ear and mouth. “Er … telephone?”

  The woman’s face lit up, and she nodded vigorously. “Da,” she said. “Da, avem un telefon!”

  She opened the door wider and gestured for Joe to enter. He hadn’t been expecting such trust and generosity, and was overcome with relief. But he looked down the street to see if the followers were still there. He couldn’t see them. He hoped that he wasn’t putting this woman in jeopardy by accepting her hospitality.

  She led him through into a small, cozy room that proudly displayed hangings and garments with floral motifs on just about every available surface. The woman gestured for Joe to sit by a table and he obliged, looking around for the ancient Bakelite rotary-dial-phone that he expected Romanian peasant villagers would use. She handed him a touchscreen smartphone with a Romanian brand name, Allview.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  The screen said three bars, the phone said no. His phone showing signal but receiving none had been suspicious. Two phones doing the same thing: confirmation that something was not right.

  He simply didn’t have enough pieces of the puzzle. He’d come to Romania thinking he’d catch a thief, not to have his entire world sent through a bloody looking glass until it stopped making sense altogether.

  He tried to gesture that the phone wasn’t working and it was just good enough that the woman gave it a try. The woman looked perplexed and stabbed at the screen with a no-nonsense finger. Still nothing. She offered him a shrug as a kind of apology along with a string of words he didn’t understand. She gestured for him to get up and follow her, so he did, and she led him back to the front door, out through it, onto the street and to the house next door.

  She knocked and called out and the door was opened by a younger woman, a couple of toddlers peeping out from behind her skirts. The two women spoke quickly and seriously, and then the younger woman pulled out a cellphone of her own and tried calling someone on it. When the call didn’t connect, she shouted over her shoulder and a man about her age popped his head out, tried a phone of his own, then shook his head.

  When he was about ten, Joe’s mother had given him a copy of Goldfinger by Ian Fleming. He’d loved the story, sure, and the fact that it contained a map of the US gold depository of Fort Knox had been cool beyond belief, but there was a line that had stayed with him, a line that the villain had said to James Bond: “That the first meeting between Bond and Goldfinger had been happenstance. The second time was coincidence. The third meeting, however, was enemy action.” Joe had, unconsciously at first, later with knowing, adopted the line into his own method of operating. It was a good rule of thumb.

  One cellphone out: happenstance. Two: coincidence. Three: enemy action.

  And cellphone four?

  Bad news.

  But how did any of this tie together? The factory, the chips, the weirdness of the workers, the supercomputer, the booths, the things that had followed him through the woods, the cellphone dead zone?

  The woman led him to another door where they discovered another dead cellphone. The villagers’ frustration was becoming a little louder. Unfortunately, their surprise and agitation at their loss of cell signal only ratcheted up Joe’s enemy action feeling. One of the villagers, a stocky male with a deeply lined face, pointed at Joe and started asking questions—“Cine este el? Ce face aici?”—and people obviously started putting together two pieces of information—stranger arrives + phone signal dies—to draw their own conclusions.

  The problem was, they were probably right. He had no idea what kind of tech the Dorian factory would need to kill cell signals over a few miles’ radius, but tech was something they had in abundance. So maybe his arrival here had caused their phones to go off-line. The group, however, was coming around to this way of thinking. There was a cautious distance being maintained, and the faces were looking slightly less friendly. And, of course, that could just have been Joe’s paranoia, and inability to read another culture’s verbal and non-verbal cues.

  It didn’t matter. Joe felt on the outside now. The possibility of calling for help was growing more and more remote. And somewhere out there in the gathering darkness were the things that had pursued him into the village. He needed to warn these people. He was trying to figure out how he might mime the appearance of the creatures when a shrill scream tore through the night.

  The villagers grabbed torches and pitchforks and went in search of the creature. Okay, the torches were Maglite-style flashlights and cellphone apps, but the parallels with a 1930s horror movie weren’t lost on Joe.

  The scream had died out, but had originated from th
e farthest, darkest part of the village. A crowd of nearly a dozen people made swift progress to its source.

  A woman was sitting on the road, spilled sticks and small logs around her, as two … creatures … prowled around her. The villagers’ lights illuminated the things that had been following Joe pretty much all the way from the factory, and he got his first good look at them.

  Now he could see why they didn’t move like human beings.

  They weren’t human beings.

  They were large, bulky, creatures, and their legs seemed jointed differently than human leg joints, or rather were jointed lower down on the leg, making for a much shorter lower leg that terminated in a large, thick, almost cloven foot. The arms, however, seemed to reverse that pattern—shorter upper arms and much elongated lower ones. The hands were chubby with only three fat, rectangular fingers on each. The body was a thick lump that gave way to a head with almost no neck, and the head itself was hairless, bulky and gave an impression of being unformed; as if these creatures were incredibly primitive and unevolved.

  “Unformed” was, Joe decided, the closest he could come to a word that described the things. They had a grayish pallor that looked sickly in the torchlight, and their eyes looked like afterthoughts, little more than dark pits with a shiny surface at their bases.

  The creatures were circling the woman, but weren’t attacking. Yet.

  She looked absolutely terrified.

  As the villagers arrived, the creatures stopped their circling and turned their attentions to the crowd. The woman saw a window of opportunity and she took it, crawling—then scampering—away, until she reached the group of villagers, who helped her to her feet.