by Apex Authors
"The bugs are mostly made of calcium. When they die, their bodies are all stuck together, and they form a substance not unlike cement. When the ziggurat starts to grow, the bugs further up take apart the bodies of bugs below and more bugs below make replacements. It's fairly complicated, but that's how they can sort of ‘hand up’ material on the ground to the top of a six-hundred-foot ziggurat."
"Okay,” I said. “Assuming that's true, how does that come out as a big tower? You said that the design is not planned centrally, but you knew what you wanted a tower to look like at first."
"That was a result of some clever math on my part. It is a continuation of chaos math research from the 1980s, which allowed someone to take a picture of, say, a fern leaf, and create the formula that would plot points that would make that picture. In this case, the cross section of a ziggurat I showed you earlier was the picture I was working from. A simple nonlinear equation draws that picture, and the same formula governs how the bugs stick together."
"But if the ziggurats were built by tiny machines,” I said, “then who built the machines? You said there was nobody living there."
"Say you were going to colonize a planet, and it will take you a long time to get there. When you do, you aren't only going to need supplies like food; you're going to need air to breathe and places to live in. You can't just get the planet ready when you get there; you would run out of supplies and die first. Wouldn't it be easier if the planet were all ready for you when you got there?
"Some NASA researchers around the turn of the century were thinking the same thing. Nanotech was just catching on, then. A Dr. Nguyen at Stennis Space Center visualized some types of nanos that could be dropped on a planet long before we got there. They would build structures on the planet that we could use and, by working through chemical reactions, change the atmospheric composition to one we could breathe."
"Come on,” I interrupted. “How could some small thing like that change the atmosphere of a whole planet?"
"Already has. In fact, the composition of the ocean has been completely altered by life-forms that take the calcium out of it and die, depositing it on the ocean floor. And the earth's atmosphere has enough oxygen for us to breathe only because of vegetable life, a lot of which is microscopic. Since the industrial revolution, we've been making a few changes of our own. Why else are you guys at RHF trying to shut down all the CO[2]-emitting factories? Remember ‘Don't make Earth into Venus?’ You of all people should believe in that possibility.
"Anyway, the project lost funding even before the RHF could freak out about it, because even the best machines we could make would take tens of thousands of years to do any good, and NASA just wasn't that farsighted. But when we were trying to explain what we were seeing on Babylon, someone dragged out Dr. Nguyen's research, and we knew right away what was going on. Since we had the technology, duplicating the machines just seemed like the logical next step. So I did it.
"Ten years ago I could've gotten a Nobel Prize. Right now, I can't tell anyone because—"
"Because people would shut you down,” I interrupted. “And not just because of the mood right now. Have you thought about how dangerous what you're doing is? What if your ‘bugs’ got loose and started building ziggurats on the mall, or on the Sandia limestone? Cement, plaster, drywall, almost everything in the city is made out of calcium, and there's plenty of iron in the steel bars and girders. The bugs would reproduce like crazy. They would be uncontrollable, and eventually would completely change the planet worse than all the coal factories and incinerators all over the world put together."
I expected for him to argue with me, but instead he just sat down and shook his head.
"Those sculptures sure are popular. I've sold them to galleries in New York and L.A. and five or six other cities. They're all over the place."
"Holy shit,” I said. “Holy shit, they already did get out. You not only let them out, but you distributed them to the biggest cities in the country. You fucking did it on purpose!"
Weakly, he said, “I didn't think about..."
"Yes you did. You made earth into the next Babylon, and I know why, too, because you want them to come here too, don't you? You want them to come here and fix everything all perfect like aliens can. The fucking human race wasn't good enough for you, so you gave the damn planet to another species."
"By the time it happens,” he said, “We'll have fucked up the planet so we couldn't live on it anyway. To tell you the truth, it really didn't occur to me at first what I was doing. But I must have wanted to do this, subconsciously, because even when I did see the implications, I didn't stop, I just kept on selling them. Then I started trying to sell them all over the country. There's just something so pure about it. The ziggurats really obey a universal law. Math works the same everywhere, all the time, and there's nothing anyone can do to fuck with it, you understand? This form, the form the ziggurats take, existed when Christ was born, it existed when Australopithecus came out of the trees, it existed when the universe was nothing but quarks and radiation. It's more like I'm just revealing it."
"How long will it take?” I asked, slumping hopelessly into a chair.
"Thousands of years, for the process to complete. Of course, people will start noticing problems a lot sooner. Like you said, most of the construction in our cities is made of iron and calcium. The bugs will start reorganizing that right away. Buildings and bridges might start collapsing as soon as a decade from now, or it might take a century, I don't really know."
"So then why did you tell me? I can tell everyone now and people will figure out a way to stop it."
"You could certainly do that,” he said, “if you want to try. It sounds like something a lunatic would say, to me. Of course, eventually everyone will realize you were right, but you might be dead by then. And anyway, people will figure out what's happening probably within a century or so. There might be a way to stop them, too, for all I know. I can't think of any way, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Certainly there are ways to slow them down.
"Of course, I could also be a lunatic who carves stone pretty well that just made this whole thing up. Then you'd look like a real dumb shit, wouldn't you? I mean, what reason do you really have to think I was telling the truth?"
"Are you?” I asked.
"Yes,” he said. “Good night, I'm really tired and I have to go to bed."
* * * *
I haven't left Albuquerque yet, but I just don't know what to do. I've been walking around breaking off little pieces of cement, but I don't really know what I'm looking for. I don't know if I'm going to try to publish this account of what I saw yet, or keep it around to explain things if what Bishop said starts happening, so you may be reading this next month, or in a hundred years.
I don't know if whoever reads this has yet seen evidence of what Bishop was talking about. If so, then now you know why. If not, then maybe someone with scientific background could tell me if it could be true, because I'm having a hard time looking at the city.
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PostFlesh
by Paul Jessup
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Paul Jessup has been published in many magazines, including Fantasy Magazine, Farrago's Wainscoat, Post Scripts, Electric Velocipede, Pseudopod, and more. In 2009, PS Publishing will publish his collection of short stories titled Glass Coffin Girls as part of the PS Showcase series.
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1. Captain Found Us a Ghost World.
Shadrim. It was a grave of space, a planet of bones. It was the endless all and everything. Shadrim. When we discovered it, we found it full of ruins and corpses. Shadrim. When it discovered us, it was thinking. Shadrim. It had sepulchral thoughts. Thoughts that only the dead could or would want to think. Filtering through the entire planet.
When we found it we were lost. It sent out beacons, psychic signals across the radio waves. Old Gray Mack thought it was perverse. We all laughed at his thoughts. Mack could fly the darkness like n
o one else. But he didn't know anything about the human mind—the world between the waves.
When we landed we saw the big bronze skull city-states; we saw the machines that they had left behind. Large spider beasts. Evolved, transfigured. Machines with alien skin stuck to the grindbones, scuttling through those ruins and making the corpses dance. First time we saw that sight we wanted to leave. Big alien bones with zombie skin still stuck on them, prancing around in nightmare waltzes. We ran like hell away from them. They didn't follow. They stayed behind, dancing and staring with ghost eyes.
When we got back to the ship it was dead. Buried in the ground with a grave on top. All that was left was ash and skeleton. A breathing thing that had sustained us now gone and deceased. Like manhome itself.
Carit wept, and Sunday Jay said a prayer in Pascal. It was the way Sunday Jay talked to the onboard systems. Sure, it was an old language, but we are an old people, wandering the restless void of space and searching for ourselves in the reflection of the cosmos.
The next day we found that dog that did our ship in. Giant machine thing that kept piecing itself together out of the ruins of the world around us. He was a sea of corpses and machinery. He looked at us with alien eyes, and Good Day just smiled at him and offered him a smoke.
Carit cursed it. Claimed it killed the ship and kept us trapped here. We couldn't look at that alien thing, covered in ship blood and the strings of organic machinery. It kept trying to talk to us, talk to us over the radio sounds of the dead. It was so lonely.
But we couldn't. Not now. Even though it promised us so much. Faster than light travel. Becoming transhuman. Existing beyond the realm of mortality. We couldn't let it know how we felt. How it hurt us and stranded us in the depth of space. The captain even went out and got the zox box and shocked it around. This machine seemed to love it. It squealed with delight and then asked us if we had eaten anything yet for dinner.
Good Day stepped forward and told it we were all starving. The creature had a few nanokin whip us up some good stuff. It tasted all right for alien metal food. And we thought, this giant postflesh spacecat couldn't be all that bad. Sure he killed our ship, but that space trawler was dying anyway, maybe it was a mercy killing.
Later that night we slept under the frozen purple light of fourteen distant suns. They were moon-sized in the distance, spread across the sky and shouting out the light of the stars. The pull of this world was dizzying and complex; it weaved through the orbits of so many planets and suns. It was like a drunk fractal nightmare of astronomical physics.
When we dreamed, we dreamed in ghost voices. We dreamed of ghost algebra in a ghost planet. This world, it spoke in our sleep and screamed in our waking hours through the radio towers broadcasting around us. The bones are restless, dancing. When the last hour of sleep washed away, we were greeted with the beating of techno drums and the dancing of the alien corpses.
And this time, they sang.
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2. We Discuss Ghost Dreams
Spillgal was the first to do it. She just sat up like a white cat with black eyes, stretched out her tail and started talking. Her voice meandered at first, wandering over our heads. But then we realized what she was talking about, and we leaned in and listened.
Even that big A.I., that giant shipkiller corpse monster, it bent the massive head down, dripping with columns and garbage and rotting alien flesh, and listened. We had to filter out the screams of the dead in order to hear her properly.
Her voice was like static, noise in the broadcast of Shadrim. “I dreamt of endless space, and vacuum tubes. I dreamt of a doll without eyes and a lady without teeth. I dreamt that I licked the feet of secrets, and they gave me bones to pay for a ship. I think I dreamed memories, but I can't be sure. So many voices, lost in my head. Even as I am awake now, I am almost certain I am still dreaming."
We talked about her dream for a bit, discussing its contents but coming to no conclusion. Whisper Kid went next, talking about smoke and a guy named Kagaratz. Each of us went in turn, and each dream was discussed but without any answers. Finally, at the end, the captain sat up and proclaimed that he would build us a new space ship, one to take us home.
The dead aliens scuttled away screaming. Our dreams were a gift. They felt insulted that the captain would not stay and experience more of them. The giant machine that was our host ticked his head to the side and sighed, getting the nanokin to make us a meal of tin and scrapskin. It tasted worse than it looked, but we ate it.
After that, we were less welcome on the planet of the dead. Our host kept ignoring us, and the broadcast screams of the lost world got so loud we became just static and noise in the background. It was hard to think like that, but we had to. It was a learning process, a way of filtering ourselves out from the void that tried to swallow us.
* * * *
3. Skullchic Finds Material
We scavenged the world for parts and pieces, but of course we couldn't go too far. There were a lot of alien machines, but we couldn't make sense out of any of it. And our host wasn't talking to us anymore. He kept towering over us, watching and recording us with thousands of nanocams. We could seem them scuttle about his massive body like living dust.
And the corpses—they were mad. They hung out on the edge of our vision, running through the ruined city and howling in a dead tongue, their voices projected just barely above that loud broadcast of ghost voices and ghost memories.
And we starved. Hunger laced through our veins, spilling over into our thoughts. All we dwelled on was the memory of food. Of great things like pancakes and waffles and syrup and strawberries and tomatoes. No vegetation was on this planet, nor any living meat we could kill and fry up.
In the hour of our greatest hunger, Skullgirl found some parts. At first we weren't sure what she had—it looked like some skeleton from an alien body with a glowing orange heart. But metallic and carved with cold foreign pictographs.
The captain knew what it was, knew what to do with it.
He kissed her in joy and we all screamed. The voices got louder, and that A.I. started to crumble into smaller pieces around us. We fitted each part in and assembled it right and proper. The captain got Old Grey Mack to study the controls, and then to figure out a way for us to interface with it.
Old Grey Mack was great at that sort of thing. He was a xenoarcheologist, a regular alien retrofitter. He could sew these things into the right pieces of his mind, find out exactly how their propulsion system differed from our ion drives. He was used to this sort of thing—rearranging his mind into alien shapes and geometry.
Soon we had a working model up and running. Time for a test drive and then off to freedom.
* * * *
4. We Gasp, We Sigh, We Say Goodbye
It was a rough-looking space vessel, made from the alien boneparts we found and some old stuff from our ship, strapped on so that Old Grey Mack could pilot it without a problem. More like a shambling half-dead animal than a cruiser, it spun around the atmosphere and screamed as it flew in chaotic messy lines. Our host watched, his body slinking into sludge parts, the air filtered with his nanodust. He tried to get the alien corpses to dance a goodbye dance, but he could not get them to come near us.
On the moment of the test departure, those dancing corpses came out again, screaming and running toward us. Mack was flying low in the sky, looking down. The machine worked, leaving trails of blue light behind it in whirling vapors. Mack smiled and gave us the thumbs up to say that everything was okay. He flew a little lower, getting ready to find some open ground to land on.
Our host collapsed into thousands of tiny bodies, trying to restrain the living dead's nanosystems. They surged and came forward, crying out and scurrying across the floors of the world with many thin and angular limbs. Like undead spiders with big bulging eyes and tiny puckered lips.
The planet shook; the radio systems picked up. It was all one voice now: the voice of Shadrim, that zombie planet that wanted us to stay and be assim
ilated into its nightmarish ecosystem. The voice of the planet spoke in strange tongues, and the nanomachines obeyed. We tried to get Mack to land, to drop down something we could cling onto and escape. He only hovered low, a look of shock and horror on his face.
The dust of the world poured into us. Living things, tiny A.I., pieces of that host that had kept us here for so long. Mack just circled about and watched as we were dissembled, our parts and pieces connected to the ruins now. They strung up our bodies like art, our intestines and bones collected with bacterial computers and nanomachines that somehow preserved us and made us do what the world told us to do.
In our mind we could hear it all the time. The thought running through our veins like the whispers of space. Commanding us. Telling us what to do. Our we had gotten bigger, engulfed us. We had one mind now, the mind of the world. The mind of the ghost planet. It sung in our skin, set our nerves on fire.
And now we danced. We danced, and our voices broadcast from those old radio waves. This was the radio song, the voice of planet Shadrim. This was us and who we were. Mack sped off, and we would have, too. But now we were dancing, our corpseskin cold. Soon we would transcend. Transcend and be like our host, postflesh.
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Covenant
by Lavie Tidhar
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Lavie Tidhar writes weird fiction. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and can say “the dictatorship of the proletariat” without blinking. He also has lived in South Africa, the UK, and the remote islands of Vanuatu. His short stories have appeared in Sci Fiction, Salon Fatastique, The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best New Fantasy 2, Horror: The Best of the Year 2007, and many others. Lave's website is www.lavietidhar.co.uk.
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