The Unfortunate Expiration of Mr David S Sparks

by William F Aicher

  Rosa opened a drawer in her desk and pulled out a device with a screen attached to a jack like the ones they used in the hospital of Plasticity. “As for the memories, do you mind?”

  David shook his head no and lowered his forehead to the table while Rosa moved around the desk and stood behind him. The port engaged with a familiar click, and a warmth spread from the base of his skull throughout his body as he fell into unconsciousness.

  THIRTY-SIX

  PEEK-A-BOO

  “Remind me. Where did you meet these guys?” Alice shielded her eyes from the sun’s glare as she asked the question.

  “Just out running some errands.” David panted. His lungs burned from blowing up the air mattress. He handed it to Missy and she bolted down the beach with it, crashing into the breaking surf with glee.

  “You should invite them over for dinner some night.”

  “Maybe sometime. I still don’t know them all that well.” David stepped toward the water, enjoying the warmth of the powdery sand as it crept between his toes. He stopped at the wet edge of the shore and knelt. Aiden’s sand castle stood proud, just out of reach of the lapping waves. Soon the tide would come in and erase any hint of its existence, but David didn’t have the heart to tell him. The look of pride on his face was all that mattered in this moment.

  “How’s your head?” Alice asked, as she draped her arm over his shoulder. A gust of wind threatened to blow her floppy sun hat from her mop of blonde hair, and she put her hand up to save it.

  “Still hurts, sometimes. But like I said before, it comes and goes.”

  A crab scuttled across the sand in the direction of Missy’s castle, but as she dug another shovel of wet silt, it turned away, frightened.

  “You need to take it easy, David. For your sake, and ours,” Alice said. “And I’m not sure I like you spending so much time with some strangers I’ve never met.”

  David returned his eyes to the pond and smiled. Those lessons were worth the money, he thought. Just a year ago she could keep from slipping, but now there she was, skating in circles, doing twirls on the sheer ice. If she kept it up, she could be an Olympian.

  A whimper from below him brought his attention back to Aiden. His snowman was no longer a man but had melted to a drooping pile of slush.

  “I’m fine. Really,” David replied. The scarf around Alice’s neck hung loosely, and David pulled the ends tighter to protect her from the cold. Behind her the crab scuttled again, on its way back to the water. But the crab never made it. Instead it found death as a giraffe crushed its tiny body with the thunderous fall of a single hoof.

  -----

  “—can’t find anything. David? Did you hear me David?”

  “What?” David blinked his eyes, letting them adjust to the fluorescent lighting of Rosa’s office. “Yeah, I can hear you.” Her face came into focus, only inches from him, her eyes frantic. “What did you say?”

  “I said I can’t find anything, David.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “When I plugged into you, you went out. But when you were gone, you were gone.” A tear streamed down her cheek. “I thought you were dead. I never saw anything like it David. Your vitals were all there, but your brain activity? It was like you’d gone braindead. I mean, there was some background activity, life-sustaining autonomous functionality was still processing, but you were, for lack of a better term, a vegetable.”

  “What are you talking about? I was just dreaming.”

  “Not according to what I saw. Your brain went MIA. It’s like you, the part of the brain that makes you you, just disappeared.”

  “So, what did you do?”

  “What did I do? I told you, I freaked. I thought maybe some surge fried you. It’s happened before—not to me of course, but I heard about it. Bad ports, bad connections, unstable currents—soul-jacking can be dangerous. But I checked, and everything looked like it was working right, technically. I was about to reseat the connection, see if something didn’t handshake properly, but as soon as I disconnected you woke up,” said Rosa. “That doesn’t happen, David. People don’t just wake up from a soul-jack, they need a chemical primer—and I didn’t give you one.”

  “But Alice … and Aiden. One second I was here with you, letting you stick that thing into my head, and then I was gone. Back home. Or at least it felt like home. But then there was this crab, and a giraffe. … It’s all jumbled. All I see are pieces, like my dreams are snippets of memories.”

  “Jesus, David … you saw Alice? But that’s impossible.”

  “What do you mean, impossible? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Before she could respond, alarms roared, screaming in their ears. In an attempt to calm him, Rosa put her hand on David’s shoulder and shouted over the klaxons, “It’s all screwed up David. We’ll talk more, I promise. But right now, I need your help. We’re under attack.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  CONSUMER CULTURE

  At Rosa’s urging, David trailed as she bolted from her office, through the rows of beds in the adjacent room. The people milling about the complex earlier now gathered together in the room. Some cowered on their beds. Others held their children close as they tried to soothe their young fears. At the exit, a citizen stood armed with an assault rifle.

  “Take this!” the young man shouted, offering the gun to Rosa.

  She pushed it back. “Keep it,” she yelled, over the blaring alarm. “You need to protect our people. Come on, David.”

  David followed Rosa through the next room, a kitchen and dining hall that had been cleared of people, into a room marked “Aroid House.” Fruit flies swarmed in the chaos, disrupted from their lazy flight by the racket and turmoil. A pair of men dressed in rags hacked at a tree, cutting and tearing a harvest of large green fruits, like coconut-sized limes or unripe mangoes, and stuffed them into a burlap sack.

  “Hey! Stop!” At the sound of David’s voice, the men took hold of the bag, one on each side, and started to run, dragging it across the ground behind them. David broke off into a run, followed closely by Rosa, and they pursued the men along the U-shaped path of the room past another pond, the golden glass decorative flowers dotting its water now sparkling in shades of fiery orange from the flashing emergency lights. The men scrambled through a pair of doors leading back into the dining hall.

  “Stop, David.” Rosa seized David’s arm. “Let them go. They have what they came for,” she said, taking in a deep lungful of air. “Besides, the barracks are secured. We need to keep moving.”

  Rather than chase the fruit thieves, David and Rosa took the door to the right, back into the Desert house. The lab techs abandoned their work at the alarm and now huddled together in the middle of the room, around the skeleton of a giant saguaro. A group of children stood with them, some crying, others casting their eyes about as they searched for family. Guards stood at attention at all three doors, including the door leading out of the building.

  “All clear here, ma’am,” said the one at the door they just came through. “Should I pursue?”

  “No, just stand firm here. They’re only Consumers—you know they don’t have much interest in our tech, but I need you to protect it, and these people, from damage.”

  The man nodded, and Rosa pulled David onward, past the workstations and into the children’s area and classroom. Her hand against David’s mouth, she forced him to remain silent as she made a visual sweep of the room. Not hearing or seeing any presence, she moved on, ushering David into the Sugar house.

  Like a storm had recently torn through, the floor of this room held masses of broken branches and fallen leaves. At the sight of the damage, Rosa dropped to her knees and began to sob. David left her and continued to secure the room. Again, it was empty—free of whoever had come through—but the destruction clearly indicated The Consumers had been there. The trees and bushes, once heavy in abundant fruit and seed pods now bore no bounty, the cinnamon tree razed to the ground. Everything of value taken. On
ly a tangle of massacred plants remained.

  David knelt and put his arm around Rosa as she continued to sob. She buried her head in his shoulder and pulled him into an embrace and the warmth of her tears soaked through his shirt as she forced herself to comprehend the devastation.

  “Rosa!” a familiar voice shouted. David stood as Parm approach them from the set of doors that led back into Palm house. “They’re gone,” she said, surveying the damage. “They were in and out so fast, we didn’t have time to react.”

  “How?” asked Rosa, rising from the ground. A fire blazed in her eyes. The change shocked David. How different she could appear from the peaceful, caring woman he had met mere hours earlier. “I asked, how?” she shouted. She was now inches from Parm, jabbing her in the chest accusatorily as she spoke.

  “I’m sorry, Rosa,” Parm whispered, hanging her head as she spoke. “I … I don’t think I secured the building after I brought him in.”

  Rosa took a deep breath and stepped back from Parm. After a few seconds, she asked, “and now?”

  “Now it’s secure,” she mumbled. “I double-checked.”

  “Get the hell out of here, Parm.” Rosa said, her body trembling. “Get the hell out of here while I deal with this mess.”

  Parm didn’t say a word, but instead turned and left the way she came. Rosa followed, and David after her. At an open space near the entrance, under a canopy of vine covered metalwork, Rosa took a seat. Parm kept moving, leaving them behind and David sat down next to Rosa.

  “They took it all,” she said, after a few minutes. “Everything we had been growing in here. They took it.” Her gray eyes shimmered in the light, back to normal now as the alarms had been disabled.

  “Who were they?” David took her trembling hand in his, the heat from her anger still pulsing through her skin. “Who did this?”

  “Consumers,” she replied. “People who roam free in The Green Zones. Like us Organics, they’ve opted out of modern life. But they’ve taken it to extremes. Holed up in buildings throughout the city, this particular colony rejects any convenience of civilization. Their stance on noninterventionism is extreme, and when it comes to mankind’s manipulation of the natural world, they do nothing to provide for themselves. Instead, they take what they need from the world as the world allows. Like a pack of hunters and gatherers, they scour for anything they can use. And they don’t give a damn what their overbearing consumption does.

  “The world, as far as Consumers are concerned, was made for them to reap. With the explosions in plant life from all the genetic engineering that led to The Chemical Wars, finding food in the wild was easy for small groups. Like any human, however, their tastes go well beyond what they find in the wild—meaning they’re a constant risk to anyone traveling through the city. If you saw anyone out there, any hint of something human, that was them.

  “Their diet, eating whatever they come across, brings its own set of problems—the main one being the majority of what they eat, almost all directly from nature, has been tainted. The lack of nutrition makes them physically weak, but a lot of them are also victims of the disease. All those chemicals in the natural world. They may live organically, but they’re still poisoned. A lot of them are blind and desperate—not only for food, but medicine too. The two men we saw earlier? They took the fruit of Garfield’s only calabash tree. Not of much use when it comes to eating, but if you mash it to pulp it can be used to treat respiratory problems, a common secondary symptom of chemical exposure,” Rosa sighed. “But, I guess they need it more than we do.

  “That’s why I let them go. But the rest—the coffee and fruits and cinnamon and everything else they took from this room,” Rosa continued, waving her hand in a circle, “this is what makes living here special. It might sound silly, but the finer things … the simple joy of a treat ... It’s just part of who we are.”

  David’s legs started to ache from sitting on the concrete, so he stood. He reached a hand to Rosa, who took it and allowed him to pull her up.

  “Come on Rosa,” David whispered. “Let’s go check in on your people and make sure everyone’s okay. Besides, I’ll be fine—I’m not really a coffee guy myself.” He paused, smiled and looked into her eyes. “But I’m guessing you already knew that.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  RUMOR HAS IT

  “Look in his eyes, man. You’ll see it yourself.”

  Back in his new friends’ basement, David leaned in toward Ben, smelling cola on his breath. But beneath it another scent festered. The fart smell of broccoli, but sweeter. Sicker. Like an infection. David positioned his thumb on the man’s lower eyelid and his index finger on the upper, and pried open Ben’s eye for a closer look.

  A glassy sheen covered them, and he looked lazily past David. His gaze shifted to the TV screen and he stared at it blankly. Did he even know he was only looking at a static pause screen in the game? The emptiness David noticed earlier only showed the surface of Ben’s problems. As he looked closer, David realized the man’s eyes, while glassy on the surface, were also clouded deeper within. The retinas almost silver. Patches of gray spread outward, threatening to engulf his corneas. If he ever were to meet an ancient wizard, this is what David expected his eyes would look like.

  “What happened?” David asked. “Is he blind?”

  “Nah, but he might as well be,” answered Chris. “He can see a little bit, we think. He’s not banging into things yet and seems to get around alright. But it’s a lot more than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His eyes are the part you can see. But there’s a lot more going on beneath that. A couple years ago Ben started getting a cough. It got into him and stuck, but it wasn’t that bad. We all figured it was allergies or something. He used to live out by a farm, so sometimes hay fever would kick in pretty rough,” Chris scooted closer to Paul, and continued. “When his eyes started to bother him, we figured that was part of it too. He said things were starting to look blurry, and his eyes itched. But the cough kept getting worse until it he pretty much stopped talking, since every time he’d say a word he’d go into a fit.”

  “You take him to the doctors? What’d they say?”

  “Of course, we took him. He’s my brother, man,” replied Chris. “We took him, but they couldn’t figure anything out. When we figured out this was more than allergies, we started to worry so we told Ben to go see the doc. He did, and they gave him some antibiotics. Didn’t help at all. Just kept getting sicker.”

  “Eventually it got so bad that he couldn’t take himself anymore,” said Paul. “So, we had him move in with us.”

  “We took him to see doctors, as much as we could at least. Optometrists said it was some form of macular degeneration. Then they weren’t sure. Could be infection. Then they thought maybe cancer. They looked at all kinds of exotic stuff but couldn’t figure it out. Eventually the money ran dry, and here we are. He’s sicker all the time. Can’t see much, doesn’t talk. Doesn’t even seem to be thinking much anymore. He’s just kind of … gone.”

  “So, the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him?” asked David.

  “Doctors didn’t,” Paul grunted. “But I did.”

  “We have a theory,” Chris corrected him.

  “Theory my ass. It’s the government. The government and big business. They’re killing him.”

  “Jesus, Paul,” Chris sighed and dismissed him with a wave. “You sound like you need a tin foil hat. A foil hat, a shotgun and a crate of emergency rations.”

  “Screw off. You know as well as I do what’s happening.”

  “That what’s happening?” David loved a good conspiracy.

  “All part of the experiments.” Chris looked to Paul, who nodded his head for him to go on. “I read about it online.”

  “He’s an Internet expert,” said Chris.

  Paul ignored the chiding and continued, “Even though we ran out of money didn’t mean we were done taking care of Benny. And we sure as hell
didn’t give up on finding out what was wrong with him,” Paul scratched at his beard and continued. “I went online and started searching for anything like what was going on with Ben, and eventually I found something.”

  “It was a bit of a stretch …”

  “Stretch or not, you see the similarities. There were comparable cases documented in some study by a university professor. Over in Europe. Northern Denmark. A whole town of people who came down with the same symptoms. Glassy eyes, fading vision, progressive sickness. Turns out the town was a small farm community, and some company offered them the opportunity to test some new pesticides on their crops. The pesticides worked, all right, but they also made everyone sick. The farm out by Benny was testing the same thing.”

  “They got sick from some chemicals? How were they even approved to be used in public?” David asked.

  “That’s where the government comes in,” said Paul. “All of this was done with the FDA and government and the biotech and chemical companies working in cahoots.”

  “Cahoots?” laughed Chris. “Is that the word you’re going to use?”

  “Cahoots, conspiracy, whatever you want to call it.” Paul dismissed him. “According to The Cause, all the documents were showing the government was pushing the direction of the research, funding projects, looking the other way when they had to.”

  “Crony capitalism isn’t anything new,” David interjected. “Honestly, I’m not surprised.”

  “This is way more than money and power trades,” Chris continued. “According to people we’ve talked to, this is some major social engineering. You know how medicine keeps getting better and better, right? People are living longer and longer lives, less babies are dying at birth. Basically, population’s exploding.”

  “People require resources,” Paul said. “The most crucial resource is food. The problem is, how do you feed a population growing at a rate like ours? It used to be that they’d calculate how many crops could fail. Calculated risk. But now we’re getting to the point where crops can’t fail. If they do, food supplies are low. Prices go up, less people eat, society breaks down. People riot. Everything crumbles.”