Seeds of Change

by John Joseph Adams

  The spillage collected into a large dark pink pool that swiftly flowed toward the elementary school, gathering on the playground. The fumes hit me even before I got within sight of the school. My eyes watered and my nose started running. I held my shirt over my nose and mouth. This barely helped.

  People came in cars, motorcycles, buses, on foot. Everyone was messaging on their cell phones, further spreading the word. It had been a while since people who did not make a career out of fuel theft had gotten a sip of free fuel.

  There were children everywhere. They ran up and down, sent on errands by their parents or just hanging around to be a part of the excitement. They’d probably never seen people able to go near a pipeline without getting killed. Hip-hop and highlife blasted from cars and SUVs with enhanced sound systems. The baseline vibrations were almost as stifling as the fumes. I had not a doubt that the Zombies knew this was going on.

  I spotted my husband. He was heading toward the fountain of fuel with a large red bucket. Five men started arguing amongst each other. Two of them started pushing and shoving, almost falling into the fountain.

  “Andrew!” I called over all the noise.

  He turned. When he saw me, he narrowed his eyes.

  “Please!” I said. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

  He spat and started walking away.

  “You have to get out of here!” I said. “They will come!”

  He whirled around and strode up to me. “How the hell are you so sure? Did you bring them yourself?”

  As if in response, people suddenly started screaming and running. I cursed. The Zombies were coming from the street, forcing people to run toward the pool of fuel. I cursed, again. My husband was glaring at me. He pointed into my face with a look of disgust. I couldn’t hear what he said over all the noise. He turned and ran off.

  I tried to spot Udide amongst the Zombies. All of their eyes were still red. Was Udide even amongst them? I stared at their legs, searching for the butterfly sticker. There it was. Closest to me, to the left. “Udide!” I called.

  As the name came out of my mouth, I saw two of the Zombies in the center each raise two front legs. My smile went to an “O” of shock. I dropped to the ground and threw my hands over my head. People were still splashing across the pool of fuel, trying to get into the school. Their cars continued blasting hip-hop and highlife, the headlights still on, lighting the madness.

  The two Zombies clicked their legs together, producing two large sparks. Ting!

  WHOOOOOOOOSH!

  * * * *

  I REMEMBER LIGHT, heat, the smell of burning hair and flesh and screams that melted to guttural gurgles. The noise was muffled. The stench was awful. My head to my lap, I remained in this hellish limbo for a long long time.

  * * * *

  I’LL NEVER TEACH music at the elementary school. It was incinerated along with many of the children who went to it. My husband was killed, too. He died thinking I was some sort of spy fraternizing with the enemy . . . or something like that. Everyone died. Except me. Just before the explosion happened, Udide ran to me. It protected me with its force field.

  So I lived.

  And so did the baby inside me. The baby that my body allowed to happen because of Udide’s lovely soothing music. Udide tells me it is a girl. How can a robot know this? Udide and I play for her every day. I can only imagine how content she is. But what kind of world will I be bringing her into? Where only her mother and Udide stand between a flat-out war between the Zombies and the human beings who created them?

  Pray that Udide and I can convince man and droid to call a truce, otherwise the delta will keep rolling in blood, metal and flames. You know what else? You should also pray that these Zombies don’t build themselves some fins and travel across the ocean.

  * * *

  Afterword

  The summer I wrote this was a summer of spiders. They seemed to be lurking all over my house. I’m terrified of spiders. Irrationally terrified. Alan Dean Foster and I are always talking back and forth via email and one day he said, something like, “You should write a story about them.” So I got to thinking. Then I saw the film Transformers. There was a moment where one of the Transformers got its head knocked off and the main character kicked it some feet away. The head sprouted legs and scrambled away like a spider. That image was the genesis of the Zombies in “Spider the Artist.”

  This story is personal to me because as a Nigerian and a human being, I find what is happening in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta (and in the country as a whole) when it comes to the extraction/distribution of oil and the misuse of profits disgusting. The Nigerian Civil War of the late 60s and early 70s which resulted in the death of over a million Igbos—a Nigerian ethnic group I am a member of—and hundreds of thousands of Nigerian soldiers and citizens was one of the world’s first wars over oil. My parents immigrated because of this war. They had not intended to stay in the US when they initially came here for medical and post-grad school.

  Nigeria is one of the top oil producing countries in the world. Yet this fact has been more a curse than a blessing. The Niger Delta has one of the highest concentrations of biodiversity on earth, yet it is an environmental, political and social mess. Oil spills, gas flares, pipeline explosions, poor land management, human rights abuses, the oil companies and the Nigerian government couldn’t care less about the land or people. Mind you, Nigeria is the United States’ fifth largest oil supplier. So I’m interested in this issue for many reasons.

  I think the idea that the Nigerian government and foreign industries would create murderous robots to protect their money-making endeavors at the expense of Nigerian civilians is very believable. And the idea that such a plan would backfire in some unsuspected way, well, that’s believable, too.

  Much of what I write tends to have an environmental theme and be politically charged in some way. The current situation in Nigeria is still volatile. There are militants in the delta region who are kidnapping and sometimes killing oil workers, they are blowing up pipelines and assassinating officials. The latest form of attack has been piracy, where militants hijack ships and kidnap oil workers and sailors. Nigeria is now the second (only behind Somalia) most pirated nation in Africa. When things heat up in Nigeria’s oil regions, gas prices go up here in the US. This brand of instability cannot last long. Change is inevitable.

  RESISTANCE

  Tobias S. Buckell

  FOUR DAYS AFTER the coup Stanuel was ordered to fake an airlock pass. The next day he waited inside a cramped equipment locker large enough to hold two people while an armed rover the size and shape of a helmet wafted around the room, twisting and counter-rotating pieces of itself as it scanned the room briefly. Stanuel held his breath and willed himself not to move or make a sound. He just floated in place, thankful for the lack of gravity that might have betrayed him had he needed to depend on locked, nervous muscles.

  The rover gave up and returned to the corridor, the airlock door closing behind it. Stanuel slipped back out. The rover had missed him because he’d been fully suited- up for vacuum. No heat signature.

  Behind the rover’s lenses had been the eyes of Pan. And since the coup, anyone knew better than to get noticed by Pan. Even the airlock pass cut it too close. He would disappear when Pan’s distributed networks noticed what he’d done.

  By then, Pan would not be a problem.

  Stanuel checked his suit over again, then cycled the airlock out. The outer door split in two and pulled apart.

  But where was the man Stanuel was supposed to bring in?

  He realized there was an inky blackness in the space just outside the ring of the lock. A blotch that grew larger, and then tumbled in. The suit flickered, and turned a dull gray to match the general interior color of the airlock.

  The person stood up, and Stanuel repressurized the airlock.

  They waited as Stanuel snapped seals and took his own helmet off. He hung the suit up in the locker he’d just been hiding in. “We have to hurry
, we only have about ten minutes before the next rover patrol.”

  Behind him, Stanuel heard crinkling and crunching. When he turned around the spacesuit had disappeared. He now faced a tall man with dark skin and long dreadlocks past his shoulders, and eyes as gray as the bench behind him. The spacesuit had turned into a long, black trench-coat. “Rovers?” the man asked.

  Stanuel held his hand up and glyphed a 3-D picture in the air above his palm. The man looked at the rover spin and twist and shoot. “Originally they were station maintenance bots. Semi-autonomous remote operated vehicles. Now they’re armed.”

  “I see.” The man pulled a large backpack off his shoulders and unzipped it.

  “So . . . what now?” Stanuel asked.

  The gray eyes flicked up from the pack. “You don’t know?”

  “I’m part of a cell. But we run distributed tasks, only checking it with people who assign them. It keeps us insulated. I was only told to open this airlock and let you in. You would know what comes next. Is the attack tonight? Should I get armed? Are you helping the attack?”

  The man opened the pack all the way to reveal a small arsenal of guns, grenades, explosives, and—oddly—knives. Very large knives. He looked up at Stanuel. “I am the attack. I’ve been asked to shut Pan down.”

  “But you’re not a programmer . . . ”

  “I can do all things through explosives, who destroy for me.” The man began moving the contents of the pack inside the pockets and straps of the trenchcoat, clipped more to his belt and thigh, as well as to holsters under each arm, and then added pieces to his ankles.

  He was now a walking arsenal.

  But only half the pack had been emptied. The mysterious mercenary tossed it at Stanuel. “Besides, you’re going to help.”

  Stanuel coughed. “Me?”

  “According to the resistance message, you’re a maintenance manager, recently promoted. You still know all the sewer lines, access ducts, and holes required to get me to the tower. How long do you guess we have before it notices your unauthorized use of an airlock?”

  “An hour,” Stanuel said. The last time he’d accidentally gone somewhere Pan didn’t like, rovers had been in his office within an hour.

  “And can we get to the tower within an hour, Stanuel, without being noticed?”

  Stanuel nodded.

  The large, well-armed man pointed at the airlock door into the corridor. “Well, let’s not dally.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Stanuel asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Your name. You know mine. I don’t know yours.”

  “Pepper,” said the mercenary. “Now can we leave?”

  * * * *

  A SINGLE TINY sound ended the secrecy of their venture: the buzz of wings. Pepper’s head snapped in the direction of the sound, locks spinning out from his head.

  He slapped his palm against the side of the wall, crushing a butterfly-like machine perfectly flat.

  “A bug,” Stanuel said.

  Pepper launched down the corridor, bouncing off the walls until he hit the bulkhead at the far end. He glanced around the corner. “Clear.”

  “Pan knows you’re in Haven now.” Stanuel felt fear bloom, an instant explosion of paralysis that left him hanging in the air. “It will mobilize.”

  “Then get me into the tower, quick. Let’s go, Stanuel, we’re not engaged in something that rewards the slow.”

  But Stanuel remained in place. “They chose me because I had no family,” he said. “I had less to lose. I would help them against Pan. But . . . ”

  Pepper folded his arms. “It’s already seen you. You’re already dead.”

  That sunk in. Stanuel had handled emergencies. Breaches, where vacuum flooded in, sucking the air out. He’d survived explosions, dumb mistakes, and even being speared by a piece of rebar. All by keeping cool and doing what needed to be done.

  He hadn’t expected, when told that he’d need to let in an assassin, that he’d become this involved. But what did he expect? That he could be part of the resistance and not ever risk his life? He’d risked it the moment one of his co-workers had started whispering to him, talking about overthrowing Pan, and he’d only stood there and listened.

  Stanuel took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  The space station Haven was a classic wheel, rotating slowly to provide some degree of gravity for its inhabitants so that they did not have to lose bone mass and muscle, the price of living in no gravity.

  At Haven’s center lay the hub. Here lay an atrium, the extraordinary no-gravity gardens and play areas for Haven’s citizens. Auditoriums and pools and labs and tourist areas and fields, the heart of the community. Dripping down from the hub, docking ports, airlocks, antennae, and spare mass from the original asteroid Haven had taken its metals. This was where they floated now.

  But on the other side of the hub hung a long and spindly structure that had once housed the central command for the station. A bridge, of sorts, with a view of all of Haven, sat at the very tip of the tower. The bridge was duplicated just below in the form of an observation deck and restaurant for visitors and proud citizens and school trips.

  All things the tower existed for in that more innocent time before.

  Now Pan sat in the bridge, looking out at all of them, both through the large portal-like windows up there, and through the network of rovers and insect cams scattered throughout Haven.

  One of which Pepper had just flattened.

  Stanuel knew they no longer had an hour now.

  * * * *

  PEPPER SQUATTED IN front of the hatch. “It’s good I’m not claustrophobic.”

  “This runs all the way to the restaurant at the tower. It’s the fastest way there.”

  “If we don’t choke on fumes and grease first.” Pepper scraped grease off the inside.

  Stanuel handed him a mask with filters from the tiny utility closet underneath the pipe. He also found a set of headlamps. “Get in, I’ll follow, we need to hurry.”

  Pepper hauled himself into the tube and Stanuel followed, worming his way in. When he closed the hatch after them the darkness seemed infinite until Pepper clicked a tiny penlight on.

  Moving down the tube was simple enough. They were in the hub. They were weightless. They could use their fingertips to slowly move their way along.

  After several minutes Pepper asked, voice muffled by the filter, “So how did it happen? Haven was one of the most committed to the idea of techno-democracy.”

  There were hundreds of little bubbles of life scattered all throughout the asteroid belt, hidden away from the mess of Earth and her orbit by distance and anonymity. Each one a petri dish of politics and culture. Each a pearl formed around a bit of asteroid dirt that birthed it.

  “There are problems with a techno-democracy,” muttered Stanuel. “If you’re a purist, like we were, you had to have the citizenry decide on everything.” The sheer amount of things that a society needed decided had almost crushed them.

  Every minute everyone had to decide something. Pass a new law. Agree to send delegates to another station. Accept taxes. Divvy out taxes. Pay a bill. The stream of decisions became overwhelming, constantly popping up and requiring an electronic yes or no. And research was needed for each decision.

  “The artificial intelligence modelers came up with our solution. They created intelligences that would vote just as you would if you had the time to do nothing but focus on voting.” They weren’t real artificial intelligences. The modelers took your voting record, and paired it to your buying habits, social habits, and all the other aspects of your life that were tracked in modern life to model your habits. After all, if a bank could use a financial profile to figure out if an unusual purchase didn’t reflect the buyer’s habits and freeze an account for safety reasons, why couldn’t the same black box logic be applied to a voter’s patterns?

  Pepper snorted. “You turned over your voting to machines.”

  Stanuel shook
his head, making the headlamp’s light dart from side to side. “Not machines. Us. The profiles were incredible. They modeled what votes were important enough—or that the profilers were uncertain to get right—so that they only passed on the important ones to us. They were like spam filters for voting. They freed us from the incredible flood of meaningless minutiae that the daily running of a government needed.”

  “But they failed,” Pepper grunted.

  “Yes and no . . . ”

  “Quiet.” Pepper pointed his penlight down. “I hear something. Clinking around back the way we came from.”

  “Someone chasing us?”

  “No. It’s mechanical.”

  Stanuel thought about it for a moment. He couldn’t think of anything. “Rover?”

  Pepper stopped and Stanuel collided with his boots. “So our time has run out.”

  “I don’t know.”

  A faint clang echoed around them. “Back up,” Pepper said, pushing him away with a quick shove of the boot to the top of his head.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We’ve come far enough.” Four extremely loud bangs filled the tube with absurdly bright flashes of light. Pepper moved out through the ragged rip in the pipe.

  Another large wall blocked him. “What is this?”

  Stanuel, still blinking, looked at it from still inside the pipe. “You’ll want the other side. Nothing but vacuum on the other side.” Had Pepper used more explosive they might have just been blown right out the side of Haven.

  “Right.” Pepper twisted further out, and another explosion rocked the pipe.

  When Stanuel wriggled out and around the tube he saw trees. They’d blown a hole in the lawn of the gardens. They carefully climbed out, pushing past dirt, and the tubes and support equipment that monitored and maintained the gardens and soaked the roots with water.