From Oblivion's Ashes

by Michael E. A. Nyman

  “The amoeba, however, beats them all. The basic model was so successful, that it exists in every biome, every climate, even as functioning parts of other organisms. Your white blood cells, for example, may have evolved from the humble amoeba. But the one model - two hundred and sixty billion pairs amoeba - that amoeba has continued as a single cell organism since the dawn of life on this world, refining and honing all the potential that this form of life can attain. Almost two billion years of specialization, and we’ve barely explored the capabilities of this magnificent creature-”

  “Excuse me, professor,” interrupted a man, who Valerie recognized to be Dr. Samuels. “I believe you are providing a misleading representation of this... this organism. We are all - every organism on this planet - products of two billion years of development. To single out the amoeba as exceptional because it has existed under the same basic blueprint since creation-”

  “Patience, Barty,” Scratchard said. “This is going somewhere, so hang on to your hat. Everyone? Did you understand Barty’s objection? Well, he’s correct. When the environment pushes life around, life pushes back in the form of mutations. Over two billion years, those mutations have taken radical forms, evolving special adaptations in new models, like warm blood, hibernation, flight, sentience, and higher forms of intelligence. But what I’m trying to point out is that, once mutation opens the door, evolution gets around to exploring every possible adaptation for that ability. Wings evolve, but then environmental conditions promote variation, from kestrels to penguins, and everything in between. Intelligence? An ape breaks the mold by picking up an antelope thighbone, and somewhere down that trail another ape creates the computer. All it takes is time.”

  Bartholomew Samuels didn’t appear satisfied, and looked ready to speak again, but Scratchard rushed to continue.

  “And this is exactly my point,” Scratchard continued. “The amoeba has had almost two billion years to explore its own successful model, evolving into a creature that would embarrass it prehistoric template. We can’t know the full extent of that exploration, or how much of that two hundred and sixty billion pair amoeba genome is true evolutionary excellence.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Peter Hanson exploded. “Honestly, professor, what game are you playing? We are invited to a seminar where, we are lead to believe, we will be educated as to the nature of our undead enemy. Instead, you give us an animal planet episode on the underappreciated life of the noble amoeba. Even your own people seem disturbed by the direction this debacle has taken. If you even have a point to make, Professor Scratchard, I ask that you make it now or simply admit that you are truly as ignorant as the rest of us.”

  Scratchard exhaled smoke, shaking his head as if at some private joke.

  “What if,” he answered, “the amoeba had a chance to evolve in an environment where it remained the sole apex predator of its entire sphere?”

  A cigarette-toting hand shot out and stabbed the keyboard, returned to his mouth for one final puff, then extinguished the butt and went back to fluttering over the keys. A new image filled the screen, all scattered dots, circles, and squiggles against a faintly purple backdrop.

  “Look at this picture,” he said, standing back. “Does it look familiar?”

  No one answered. No one could answer, though Eva and Bartholomew looked grim. It was familiar, but only in the way that a cartoon dog might vaguely resemble the real thing.

  “The purple appears to be natural,” Scratchard commented, as if that would be the first question on everyone’s mind. He tapped his pack, retrieving a fresh cigarette. “The green is some dye we added to provide contrast. It kind of congeals off the ichors like oil over water, making for a nice backdrop. Now, look closely.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Note the plentitude of organelles,” Scratchard continued, “the enlarged nucleus, and the inexplicably, far-reaching pseudopodia?”

  “What are we looking at, professor?” Valerie asked.

  “What you are looking at is an enigma,” Scratchard said, gazing at the screen with reverence. “No one has ever seen anything like this. And there’s more to it the longer you look. This is the zombie virus.”

  “We don’t know that it’s a virus,” Professor Samuels said quickly. “Viruses are typically quite low on the genome size scale.”

  Scratchard nodded faintly as he took his first drag, as if acknowledging that a point had been scored. “Just a term of convenience for now, Professor,” he said.

  For several, long seconds, nobody spoke. The image on the screen looked more like Van Gogh star chart than anything that could be alive, with bursts of hazy circles, blobs, swirls and streaks filling up the screen. Parts of the image seemed to undulate eerily, like free-floating, human hearts suspended in the purple firmament.

  “How... how did you get a hold of it?” Brian asked in horror.

  Scratchard frowned, as if annoyed that this would be the first question. He seemed to think about it for a second, however, and answered.

  “The dust,” he answered, waving a hand vaguely. “In their continuous pulverizing of the McClelland square, microscopic bits and pieces of their material would get caught on the shrapnel. It is, at the same time, both terrifying and fascinating that the vast majority of lost material finds its way back to a main body somehow. Even a parcel as small as a... a grape seed?... retains the self-awareness to crawl back or call out to the collective. We’re still not sure how, though we have some ideas. But the tiniest morsels, microscopic samples, were retrievable from the dust cloud reaching up to our rooftop. It took us a week before we had a sampling large enough for study. Of course, it helped that even the microscopic bits would congeal together if brought close enough.”

  “What are... all those little bits?” Kumar asked, pointing at the screen. “Are they all individual cells?”

  “No. This is one cell we’re looking at. Those are the various organelles and chloroplasts. Apparently, the organism draws the majority of its energy from a mixture of sunlight, human fat storage cells, and water. May I add that the complexity of this organism’s inner structure is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  “What’s that piece?” Torstein asked, from his digital feed. “The... the biggest one. It looks like it’s a... I mean, it looks like it has small parts of its own. How’s a single-cell organism do something like that?”

  Scratchard exchanged a pained look with his two colleagues, and waved at Eva to provide the answer with the expression of a man with a mouthful of lemons.

  “It’s a human cell,” Eva said, her voice neutral.

  A lot of confused looks greeted this remark.

  “It’s a what?” Torsten scowled. “Human? Are you saying this thing is based on humans? That it comes from us?”

  Scratchard barked a laugh, and Eva glared at him.

  “No… Torstein, is it?” she said. “No, Torstein. The human cell has been engulfed by the zombie organism, like an amoeba engulfing its prey. This is, I can only assume, at the root of Professor Scratchard’s digression into the evolution of the amoeba-”

  “Oh, come on, Eva!” Scratchard snapped. “You know it’s more than that.”

  He turned to face Torstein’s screen.

  “This... organism isn’t an amoeba, but it shares some astonishing similarities. It engulfs its prey. The ichors aren’t an effusion; they are an extension of the organism’s ectoplasmic pseudopodia that are, in some cases, thousands of times stronger and more far-reaching than that of the amoeba. This is the source of the purplish slime that coats all zombies. The apparent intelligence of our undead oppressors is, in fact, the collective sentience of our organism... a slime mold to exceed all slime molds.”

  He reached forward with his cigarette-toting hand, and tapped the part of the screen where the captured human cell was plain to see.

  “Skin cell,” he said. “Mine, in fact, and perfectly preserved and intact. The purple ichor that is, in truth, all part of the single-cell organism, is so
mehow able to preserve the cell in perfect stasis, intact and inviolate. Other than fat storage cells, which the organism seems to recognize as stored bio-fuel, not a single molecule of my skin cell is disturbed. Its bio functions are, in fact, still functioning, albeit at a hyper-somnolent rate.”

  He paused, turning to face his audience, as if trying to gauge if they were understanding the implications. Blank faces gazed back at him.

  “In other words,” he sighed, raising his smoke for another drag, “my skin cell - despite being separate from my body and its complex, system of nourishment - is still alive. It’s not active, per say, but it’s still a living, breathing cell.”

  Absolute silence greeted him. Nobody moved. Scratchard waited, seemingly enjoying his cigarette. Occasionally, his eyes would flicker from face to face, as if laying bets on who would be the first to speak.

  “Um,” Valerie said at last, her gaze fixed on the nightmarish image.

  “Yes, my dear,” Scratchard smiled. “Take your time. It’ll come to you.”

  “What you’re implying,” she said, blushing with uncertainty.

  “Good,” he said. “Just let it surface.”

  “Does this mean that... the human victims... they’re...”

  “Yes! That’s exactly what it means.”

  He gazed at the screen, shaking his head with wonder.

  “Barring a few changes,” he finished cheerfully, looking at the screen, “the victims are technically still alive. Of course, their individual cells have all been ruthlessly isolated from each other. Whether they are, in fact, conscious of this circumstance, or still in any way sentient or self-aware, seems rather unlikely. Being isolated, they cannot communicate with each other so… well? What is a soul, anyway? I’ve never believed in them, but if they exist, can they go insane?”

  He turned back around to bask in the horrified reactions of his audience.

  Angie clenched her eyes shut and cursed her stupidity. In her excitement, she’d gotten careless. Arrogant might have been a better word. In her eagerness to find Marshal and Luca, she’d allowed overconfidence to displace her usual level of caution and patience. Caution was for other people, lesser beings who did not possess her talent.

  The trail had reached a thin strip of urban parkland between neighbourhoods, heading at a steady path down the incline that angled towards the more heavily forested ravine that was the Don River Valley. Angie had never been down there, but she remembered some of the other kids from school telling her stories about the place. Other than the raised Don Valley Expressway that coursed through the ravine like a floating concrete river, the valley was thick trees, bushes, and bridal paths. Before the outbreak, it routinely accommodated joggers, urban nature lovers, and a large population of homeless people.

  In other words, it was the perfect place for four refugees to find a temporary hiding place. And in the dirt of the park, Angie had found four sets of prints... and a fifth! Somebody must have spotted and offered them help, or so Angie imagined.

  If she hurried, she’d told herself, she would see Marshal and Luca within the hour.

  And then, in her reckless excitement, watching the ground for more prints, she stepped out of the park and directly into the line of sight of one of them.

  Right away, she knew she was caught. Nevertheless, with a rustling clatter, she collapsed into her little, camouflaged garbage pile, and went limp.

  This time, however, it was different. This time, the undead had seen her turn into the pile of trash. This time it went straight into Hunting mode. Out of the corner of her blank gaze, she could see it stalking towards her, still uncertain, so effective was her disguise. It had been a woman in her thirties once, five foot ten, her wiry brown hair a tangled, ooze-coated bird’s nest. She still half wore the remnants of a Wal-Mart uniform and weathered running shoes with the toes on one foot showing. The vacant-eyed stare fixed on Angie as it swept close.

  Angie tried not to whimper as the creature reached out and took a firm grip of her disguise and lifted her from the ground. Stillness. Unlife. Becoming an inanimate thing was her only hope now. Struggling wouldn’t help. Running would be futile. Only the long hope of trying to appear as just another piece of trash...

  And yet, even as the undead hands lifted her up, the dead fish gaze peered through the trash and found Angie’s own eyes, she knew she was dead. Recognition flashed between them. With a groan that might as well have been a crow of triumph, the creature ripped away the trash carapace that Angie had so carefully created, exposing her skinny body to the mid-day sun.

  Before her eyes, like a great snake, the woman’s jaws rippled open wide enough to take Angie’s head in one gulp, and the spiky bone teeth, sharp as razors, shone white in the sun.

  Now, Angie really did scream, twisting desperately in the monstrous woman’s grasp, to no avail. Helpless in a grip of iron, she couldn’t look away from the blackness of the gullet that was rising up beneath her.

  The horror show continued. The audience, once dubious, watched recorded footage as tiny samples of the zombie super-organism in a petrie dish engulfed human tissue and broke it down into preserved, living, single cells.

  “We never let it get too much human material,” Scratchard explained in accompaniment to the show. “We think that would be very unwise. For whatever reason, this organism propagates itself with the nutrient stores of human tissue, mostly fat, but also sweat, calories, and excess proteins. Added to water and whatever sunlight its chloroplasts can get a hold of, its growth rate is incredible. The same filament strands that enable pseudopods are capable of infiltrating the space between cell walls like piano wire. Once isolated, the cell can be moved about with relative ease.”

  “Creepy,” Kumar murmured.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Scratchard said. “We are ninety-nine percent convinced...”

  He paused, then shrugged.

  “The hell with it. There is no chance that this organism evolved on Earth.”

  “Nicolas,” Eva objected.

  “Really, Scratchard,” Samuels agreed with disapproval. “You can’t possibly-”

  “Yes, I can!” Scratchard looked angry. “There’s no point keeping an open mind on this subject anymore. Remember the part about the amoeba?”

  “Enough with the amoeba,” Eva exclaimed.

  “Two hundred and sixty billion pairings, Eva,” Scratchard said. “That’s what the earth-born amoeba possesses, dwarfing anything else in the game. And how many did these samples produce? They numbered into the trillions, didn’t they? That wasn’t even measuring the diversity of the genes themselves, which we estimated were well into the thousands, the folds, the positioning… And then there was the footage we recovered from the Eighth Wonder.”

  “Excuse me?” Valerie said, tearing her gaze away from the screen. “What footage?”

  Scratchard turned the direction of his contempt from his associates and focused on her, almost as if he’d forgotten there were others in the room. Blinking once or twice, he reached down and tapped out a flurry of commands on the keyboard.

  “The earliest accounts of the outbreak came out of Bangor, Maine, somewhere around eight in the morning,” he explained. “I was lucky enough to be at my own computer when it did, which is how I was able to assess the situation in time to save myself, these two inferior minds, and a horde of even less valuable students and peons from being eaten. Police stations in Bangor were all non-responsive by ten AM, and now we all know why. After we got treed up in the McClelland building, there were a couple of days before the power grids and the Internet collapsed. Out of curiosity, I took the time to hack into the Bangor police network, where I found an early morning call to go and check a disturbance at the Eighth Wonder Emporium. They were a curio shop, making a small fortune by selling new age crap to a gullible public. This appeared to be the very first report, the ground zero, if you will, for the global outbreak.

  “It took more time, but I was able to write a program to hack
into the store’s security footage. This is what it recorded that morning.”

  The screen flashed, and suddenly the audience was gazing through a downward-angled camera view that encompassed a spread of several glass cabinets, display tables, and assorted oddities. A long-haired gentleman with a wizard-like goatee and numerous tattoos was doing paperwork next to the register, while two pert, young women in store T-shirts and jeans busied themselves stocking shelves and organizing displays. In the middle of setting up a display of thunder eggs and raw gemstones, one of the young women accidentally backed into a glass table that held a large chunk of blackened rock as its centerpiece.

  Everyone watched as the young woman whirled around too late to prevent the rock from sliding off the table. It slipped through flailing fingers, toppled over the edge, and landed on the tip of a two-foot high stone pyramid that sat just below the table top.

  Unexpectedly, the rock cracked open and an explosion of purplish powder filled the room. In seconds, the occupants were writhing on the floor. More shelves fell over. Dinosaur bones rattled to the ground. Dream catchers dangling from the ceiling jiggled and shook in testament to the violence.

  It took only a couple of minutes. When it was over, the three people who had been spasming on the floor left three open holes in the walls with the urgency of their departure.

  In the silence that followed, Scratchard turned off the screen.

  “It’s just that... it’s so...” Eva protested weakly.

  “I envision a gas giant,” Scratchard said, ignoring her. “Most likely it’s orbiting in between the heavy gravity of a binary star. This would generate extreme but sporadic tidal forces and particle storms capable of ripping Earth-sized planets to dust. On this hypothetical world, up in the tornado clouds and hurricane force mists, the chemical storm is acceptable for the formation of single-cellular life. And why not? There would be plenty of energy, water vapor, and virtually any mineral or nutrient you could wish would go swirling past you. Learn to surf the titanic forces, and the world is your buffet. However, those gravitational forces, the storms, the vortexes, are so hostile, so unpredictably destructive, that multi-cellular life, if it forms at all, is at a severe competitive disadvantage. As a result, it never has the opportunity to develop, and therefore, in this world, an amoeba-like life form is king.”