The Book of Wanda, Volume Two of the Seventeen Trilogy

by Mark D. Diehl

  “You choose to remain in denial, Wanda, refusing the love and community of the One. Sula showed deference and reverence, and she was rewarded with rank. Now she’s in charge of the whole clinic. I’m glad to see you’re starting to follow her example, but as for your current living conditions, you still have nobody to blame but yourself.” He walked away with his back rigid and his jaw locked, glancing this way and that, crossing the street to oversee the Saved who were moving the mattresses.

  Having been thoroughly conquered by Coach V’s regime, Sula ran the clinic as it had always been run. Sula and the other original “girls,” who had also converted and become Saved, lived in the apartment building across the street where the One himself lived. There were four more new medical practitioners at the clinic who were all devout Saved, and they were living in the apartment building, too. The floor of apartments they shared had formerly housed Horde high officers. It was one of the most luxurious places in the whole Zone, with glass in the windows and even some running water, carried in buckets up to a tank on the top floor.

  Sula made sure they all thanked the One profusely for such gifts, and now nearly everything they said was accompanied with a “thanks be to the One,” or “the One saw fit.” Wanda was forcing herself to copy them. The words were coming more easily to her lately but she could not speak them with much conviction, having seen firsthand how brutal the One actually was.

  Her efforts to conform were being rewarded, however. Sula had decided to let Wanda take two twenty-minute breaks per day, monitoring a site called MediPirates for relevant news. This was as good a time as any, so she sat down at the computer.

  Far more important than the breaks was the fact that Wanda was starting to be allowed doses of bactrostimulants. It didn’t matter that someday soon she’d end up as addicted as Coach had been. She couldn’t do this job anymore without increasing amounts of uppers. She had to thank and praise the One for every dose, but it felt easier to thank him for her own drugs than for things like the clinic’s supply of clean bandages or a stretch of nice weather.

  At present, she could find nothing of interest on MediPirates. In fact, there was hardly any activity at all.

  Wanda’s mind drifted. She had real skills now, skills that were valuable even here in the Zone. She knew how to stitch wounds, sterilize instruments, and even prescribe some bactroherbal meds, if there were any to be found. Some members of the MediPirates community had been solo practices, and she’d fantasized about leaving here and building a practice of her own. Digging a bit deeper, she’d discovered that every last solo practice had stopped posting in the last few weeks.

  She felt the One’s approach instead of seeing or hearing it. So many Saved followed the One around now that their approaching footsteps made the ground vibrate.

  Wanda logged out and hustled to the clinic’s front door with the other practitioners. Empty little displays of devotion like this were worth the easier, more comfortable life that they brought. Near her were the clinic’s Helpers—devout Saved who had proven their fidelity and were being rewarded with safe duties away from combat. They were mostly worthless in the clinic, as they were far more dedicated to spying on Porter’s behalf than to being useful assistants, but they did help with minor tasks. While the Saved as a whole were unarmed, each Helper had been issued a handgun, which Porter claimed was to prevent the clinic from changing hands again.

  The One’s entourage had grown substantially, now comprising a few hundred people. When he visited the clinic they always waited outside, staring through the glass at him, desperate to get closer. Wanda tried to appear as fervent as they were.

  She saw him out there in the street, through random gaps in the crowd. The One still had the look of a criminal, with an uneven keloid gunshot scar on his neck, a nose that had been broken at least once, and the wide ragged scar across his forehead, but already she could tell that today it would be easier to pretend to love him. This was one of those times when the One seemed softer, more like he’d been when she’d first met him, and the difference was obvious even at first glance. Only this version of the One seemed to have any interest in the patients, and when he came into the clinic his presence actually seemed to help them.

  Porter was off somewhere else, fulfilling his role as second-in-command, but the other Disciples surrounded the One as he made his way across the parking lot. They had nearly reached the clinic’s glass door when the One burst into flames.

  Dobo Protein Refinery

  Kym Evans stayed seated at her desk. The pounding on the front gate got louder. The refinery was now increasingly under siege from the enemies Mikk and Furius had made.

  Kym was staying put. The upside of having a psychopath like Mikk or Furius around was that he could usually be counted upon to cancel out other deranged killers.

  It wasn’t a perfect system. Furius had already killed two of the weird new Pink Shit personalities over his ancient political turf wars, wasting two potential soldiers for the General’s army. Still, he was always willing to put himself between Kym and the horrors on the other side of the wall. That counted for a lot, even if he was doing it for his own purposes rather than out of any concern for her safety.

  Besides, it wasn’t like she could stop him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Furius called out, weaving between the roach vacuum and the hopper as he hustled toward the front gate in his red Roman cloak. “Gimme a minute.”

  Kym had moved out of the place she’d shared with Mikk and now slept here, next to Furius, who let her run the refinery and keep all the money. He made his own living, now that he’d listened to Kym and started dealing real drugs instead of just Pink Shit.

  Mikk never would have allowed Kym to keep her own income. She’d learned to appreciate that kind of thing about Furius.

  The screens mounted on the wall near Kym’s desk showed a haggy woman with empty hands. Kym adjusted the volume to hear what was going on. Furius checked the grainy little screen just inside the gate and shouted, “What do you want?”

  “Someone… someone said I should come here if I’m… not from this time?” The woman’s halting voice was barely audible over the speaker.

  Furius touched the screen, flicking through every other camera angle to be sure it wasn’t a surprise attack. Apparently seeing no potential ambush (Kym didn’t see one, anyway, on her monitors), he cracked open the gate.

  “Who were you?” he asked, his voice coming through clearly on Kym’s speakers.

  There was a pause. They always seemed to have a hard time admitting their craziness.

  “Melkorka,” she said.

  Kym recorded the name in her computer.

  “Nationality?”

  “What?”

  “What country, what nation?”

  “Uh, Irish, slave to Vikings.”

  Kym stored the information. This list, especially when Kym asked the woman for a way to find or contact her, would be essential for the General to have.

  “Damn it!” Furius said. “That’s twenty-two of you who’ve found your way here so far, and not one Roman among you.” He grumbled something to himself and then called out again, “How’d you die?”

  “I was my master’s favorite. He wanted to take me with him to Valhalla when he died.”

  “Could you have said no? Asked him to let you live instead?”

  “I was too well-trained for that. His will was mine. I took a potion and then his men beat and stabbed me.” She tried to peer under his arm. “I haven’t seen him here, yet, though.”

  “Haven’t seen any Vikings so far, but you do fit the pattern,” Furius said. “People like us built this world, through devotion, training and sacrifice. Now we’re back to secure our claim over it.” He opened the gate farther. “Come inside. I’m not yet sure why I’m getting non-Romans, but I’ll fill you in.”

  “Why have we all come to this place?” she asked. “What are we supposed to do, now that we’re here?”

  “I’m here to reassemble t
he Roman Legions and take over this territory. My guess is you’ll probably be a whore, but maybe there’s some other use for you I don’t know about. Remember, even whores are important to the cause of establishing proper rule here.”

  “Oh.”

  He locked the gate, smiling. “Vikings do train slaves well, don’t they? That was the perfect reaction for a whore. It’s going to be more pleasant to work with you than with the cunt from this morning who’d thrown herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.”

  The words faded as the pair moved away from the gate, and Kym turned off the sound again. He’d bring her in and pay her to fuck him now, checking her level of skill like he’d done with all the women who showed up. So far they had all complied, even the funeral pyre one. Kym guessed they’d probably already learned to fuck and suck if they were still alive in the Zone after any time at all.

  Yesterday, some crazy bitch who claimed to have died as a dancing girl sealed alive into her queen’s tomb had seemed thrilled by the idea of surrendering to Furius. Her moaning and screaming had made Kym decide to work at the hopper for a while to escape it.

  So far, the men who had come believed they were soldiers and loyal subjects of all kinds of dead countries, and the majority of them had been instantly hostile to Furius. Most had stormed off, but two had immediately attacked him. Of those, Furius had bludgeoned one to death and shot the other, and now both bodies were stacked in the pile, waiting their turn to be carbon recycled.

  Sure enough, he brought the woman right up to the office. Soon he’d be on top of her on the floor in the back room, where he now kept all the production equipment.

  Sex with Furius wasn’t so bad, really. He sometimes demanded it from Kym, but for the most part it was quick and relatively painless. He didn’t have the love of causing misery Mikk had demonstrated. Being here with Furius scared Kym less than being alone would have, and that was about the best any woman could hope for.

  Furius opened the door and escorted Melkorka through Kym’s workspace. He never bothered to introduce Kym, but usually she could catch the women and get their contact information on their way out. She was sure the General could use every soldier she could call, once they were reunited.

  “Anyway, after I explain the situation,” Furius said as he passed, “we’ll send you back out to find others, the same way somebody found you. We’re starting to get busy now. I think within days we’ll go from twenty-three of us, into the hundreds and then probably thousands.”

  The backlog of aminos at the sterile nute producers had apparently cleared now, or at least they’d temporarily stopped trying to drive down bulk amino prices. Nute companies were again demanding more than the refinery could produce, and though they did randomly test the blocks for purity, so far not a single block from Dobo Protein Refinery had been rejected. Maybe Pink Shit didn’t show up on their tests. Whatever the reason, the stuff was getting through and the money was still coming in.

  “I’ll give you a little bag of Pink Shit so you can create some new soldiers for us, too,” Furius told Melkorka. “Just stay with the ones you find now. Start to form groups out there, and wait for us to find you.” The door to his office closed behind them.

  Amelix Executive Quarters

  Dr. Zabeth Chelsea closed her draft of the report and opened a blank file instead. The report was long overdue by standard protocol, though Dr. Donova hadn’t asked for an update. The Rat Gods were so precious that Chelsea’s superiors had not authorized any new experiments for fear of harming them, so right now there was no official news to report.

  Still, a lack of official news wasn’t the whole story.

  She did feel a bit guilty. All Amelix workers shared a common duty to pass on all pertinent information to superiors, though obviously there were special circumstances that prevented it in this instance. Officially, there was an enforced hiatus on experimentation involving the original four Rat Gods. Unofficially, there were now more than seven hundred new Rat Gods in her new workspace annex.

  Her husband Alin wasn’t home yet. Lower-ranking Accepted worked longer hours at the office and fewer hours at home, compared to someone at Chelsea’s level. It was good that he was out. She needed this time to think.

  She manipulated her EI to convert her voice to text, in the hope that speaking out loud might allow her to evaluate her thoughts more objectively. She couldn’t describe even half of what she’d observed in an official memo at this point, but it seemed like a good idea to keep an account of recent events and her interpretation of them, even if only for her own reference.

  “Title, all caps,” she said. Her EI waited. The words appeared in her mind as she spoke: “NOTES ON THE RAT GODS.”

  She cleared her throat. “Should I mention the Thrall?” It was her word, which she used to define the state of being under the rats’ spell, and the EI translated it into text correctly, including her intention to capitalize the “T.”

  “It’s an amazing and wonderful feeling,” she said. “I crave it, now. It’s warm and soft, like being inside a mental cocoon, where my worries and responsibilities cease to exist. Whatever they want is what I want, and I do all I can to make it happen.

  “But why? And how are they able, with their tiny rat brains, to take over my comparatively massive human brain?”

  It was a complex question, one she would not have dared to address in circumstances where her work would be subject to review, but perhaps recording and analyzing her observations in this document would help her figure it out. She felt compelled to push toward an answer, even though she seemed to have an odd mental block against doing so.

  “They don’t look like regular rats,” she said, knowing it was out of context. Her EI moved the text down accordingly, keeping the new idea separate from what she’d been thinking in the sentence above. “Their bodies have never filled out like those of adult rats normally do. They remain lanky and more juvenile-looking, yet they function as fully formed adults, without any disposition toward play.”

  But how do they control me?

  “One thing I believe is clear: Whatever it is they do, it’s not communication in the typical human sense. They don’t share ideas through language, which, as we all know, is imperfect and subject to analog-style breakdowns. Even writing these notes to myself right now, it’s difficult to put into words exactly what I mean, and it will be difficult later to get my own mind to understand this material in exactly the same way I do now. Language is a highly flawed means of communication, through which people often construe ideas much differently than the original speaker or writer intended.”

  Her speech slowed as she carefully selected each word.

  “What the Rat Gods do is more of a shared consciousness. They all seem to understand things exactly the same way, at the same instant. They appear to experience the world as an entirety, shared by all of them simultaneously, existing as a single mind that is distributed among all their physical bodies. I believe this may be due to the fungus living in their tissues. If so, the Rat Gods seem to be controlled by it the same way humans can be controlled by the rats. The fungus could actually be communicating with itself, using the rats merely as its hosts.

  “Brain size, and even intellect, may only be important for autonomous creatures. Humans weighing eighty kilograms used to train and control horses weighing five hundred kilograms, and it’s tempting to say that they were able to do this because humans had larger brains. But really, horses were trained by using information and techniques refined over generations. It was the ability of one human mind to learn from others’ earlier experiences that allowed mastery of those techniques, not any particular individual human’s intellectual prowess. We can imagine the passing on of information this way to be a vertical kind of information sharing, from one generation to the next, although obviously humans can also communicate with each other in real time. Neanderthals were physically stronger than Homo sapiens sapiens, and they also had bigger brains, but they were unable to effectively share m
uch of their acquired knowledge with each other. As autonomous beings they were superior, but the sapiens’ ability to form groups proved an even more powerful evolutionary advantage. Eventually the sapiens, using language to plan coordinated attacks, were able to wipe them out.

  “That kind of horizontal information sharing was tremendously powerful in its day, but the rats’ behavior suggests their mastery of a far more advanced method. Their apparent ability to share perfect or nearly perfect information horizontally, among contemporaries, seems to connect them at a level exponentially deeper than our language does for us. This shared consciousness not only ostensibly gives them the ability to control humans, but also appears to have transformed them into a single superorganism. That is, if they truly think and act as one entity, they are not merely superior to humans in the same way humans are superior to horses. The Rat Gods may legitimately be viewed as our planet’s solitary supreme being.”

  She kept the text suspended there in her mind as she synthesized another glass of cabernet.

  “Perhaps this is why the Thrall feels so good. We humans exist to form groups, to communicate through language. We do what we are told to the best of our ability, but we know that our ability even to understand what we’re told is fundamentally flawed.”

  She sighed and rubbed her eyes, taking the glass from the synthesizer and downing a few sips before finishing the thought.

  “Maybe surrender to the Rat Gods feels natural and gratifying because their shared consciousness makes them superior. I believe the Thrall may result from our minds’ recognition of the fact that they are direct offspring of Amelix. They are creations of the company, and the company gave them the ability to control us. The Rat Gods are the most direct link to the pure will of Amelix Integrations, and therefore they are our rightful masters.”

  Somewhere in the Zone, between Mikk’s home and the refinery

  Kym stepped back from her work. The doorway of this vacant building was sheltered from sun and rain, so the letters she’d written with charcoal might last a while: