by Susan May
What sealed our fate was the V Report.
A government scientific research body known as the C.S.I.R.O.—in, of all places, Australia—started the fear mongering in early 2068. What would such a tiny little country know about it? They had hardly chipped at all.
Yet, these scientists speculated Vaters could live past 130 years. Not only that, but might the genetically supercharged Vater 2.0s—the chipped children of Vater parents—possess intellect surpassing even that of the first generation? Who could compete? Longevity and genius in one dangerous package.
In one widely publicized paragraph, the V Report speculated: “Should Intelervate products”—products, they called us—“be permitted to live out their natural lives, they will invariably create a society which can no longer sustain a mutually beneficial balance for all members of the population.”
Wild suppositions were made about our unnatural advantages should we ever “turn” on our “makers.” A flawed formula—the Nons really loved their scientific data—demonstrated our future mutative evolution. Supposedly, in less than a century we Vaters would destroy life as the Nons enjoyed it.
The Nons would become a “permanent underclass” if they didn’t act.
It would have been funny if it weren’t so ridiculous—and dangerous. Throw the words “extinction” and “uncontrollable mutation” in the air long enough and you’ve a recipe for hysteria.
Did they refer to the history books from the last century? History books which were peppered with the catchy phrase “Lest we forget”?
No, they did not. They chose to forget.
They didn’t call it genocide, of course. They called it “Program Delete.” It’s less personal that way. You can sell anything if it’s worded well enough. Once the United Nations pressed the proverbial button, it took only fourteen months for every country to fall in with the plan.
“Program Delete” was a go. Hunt us down. Round us up. Hit the erase button or wave the wand: whatever was good for you. Then they would return us to a life of dependency—on our parents, or the government institutions that had sprung up to house us. Giant box-like buildings to accommodate the newly intellectually disabled sprang up across countries that had once so eagerly embraced the Intelervate chip. Now they were paying for their earlier enthusiasm.
It was against the law to kill us, though. Vigilantism was not permitted. The Nons wouldn’t see themselves as barbarians. Make it look like an accident, and what agency would pursue the offenders?
They found Vaters lying in alleys, in fields, and even in their own homes, their bodies crushed and mutilated, sometimes beyond recognition. Investigations were perfunctory. Nobody was ever charged.
A typical police report might read:
“A fatal injury occurred when the deceased’s Intelervate chip malfunctioned. This caused them to fall from roof of a ten-story building. Resulting multiple trauma caused fatality.”
It was “acceptable” these accidents occurred, and it saved millions, which would otherwise be spent on institutional care.
I don’t blame my parents for sending me away.
By the time I was a teenager, it was obvious we were on opposite sides of the argument; separated by the chip.
Love was a difficult concept. My parents and I couldn’t see eye to eye. It wasn’t a teenage hate-love thing; it was a brain-to-brain disconnect. They had bought and raised an alien. Were still paying the tab, emotionally and financially. Fifteen more years to go on that loan.
Shortly after I left my parents’ home, I met Eastern—beautiful, blond, and tempered like a carefully forged sword. He wasn’t like anyone I had ever met. Vaters included.
Eastern saw beyond our present circumstance.
“There will be a recognition,” he once said.
“Don’t you mean a reckoning?” I suggested.
He smiled as if I were a simple Non. Nobody had ever looked at me like that before. Something in his smile disarmed me, wiped away my feelings of inadequacy, my embarrassing failure of comprehension.
“No, I mean ‘a recognition’—recognition we are the future of this world.”
He turned away, leaving me wondering at his conviction. Most Vaters had given up by then; some had even turned themselves in. The running, the hiding, the subsistence existence is so limiting—until you begin to believe in the inevitability of your fate.
We were so few. they, the Nons, so many. So determined. So very angry.
Eastern did not give in to our emotional defeat. He believed in us. He wouldn’t allow us to surrender our future easily, no matter what that future held.
Slowly, a few of us began to believe. It was just a glimmer at first: a furtive hope that tentatively grew like an unfurling frond. If we survived long enough, would they forget us and allow us to live out our lives peacefully? the most unrealistic of hopes lay there: the hope their bigotry would burn itself out, and they would accept us. Even welcome us back.
We waited years. A decade.
They didn’t forget, and they didn’t stop hunting us. As the Nons’ frantic race to eradicate us increased, so, too, did Eastern’s resolve to end our exile.
He had a plan. He knew things we other Vaters did not. Like the subprogram embedded in our chips. A little innocuous subroutine. Officially, it was a section of code entitled 365X, secretly nicknamed the anger management subroutine. Originally created to stabilize physical and psychological stressors, it assisted in healing and minimized infection after the operation. It created the best-behaved babies and children a parent could dream of.
Once the world saw us as a threat, the program served the Nons well. It was the equivalent of a high-emotion lobotomy. Technically, it prohibited us from the “fight” part of the “fight or flight” response. Just that little bit of attitude you would need to start a revolution. What had begun as a medical advantage now became a social disadvantage. It made us easy prey.
Eastern’s grandfather was part of the original Intelervate chip team. He saw this coming—this divisionary war. This “holocaust,” as he called it. Before he died he told Eastern about “365X.” He actually gave him the code and the wireless and programming equipment to locate and erase it.
Then he gave Eastern the virus.
It wasn’t much. Just sixty-three lines of pure genius to slither like a snake into the Nons’ computer software systems. He called it “the AIDS+ virus,” because just like the physical disease, the software could alter its basic composition. So no matter what you threw at it, it kept evolving into something new. It was something you couldn’t destroy. By the time you discovered a cure for one version you were already dealing with a completely new kettle of nasty little fish.
“They won’t even notice it at first,” his grandfather had said. “It will give you time to prepare.”
Prepare we did. We found shelter in an abandoned town that had died when the minerals they’d pulled up from the ground had dried up. The roads to it were potholed and ragged. The only people who drove through it were lost tourists. And we could look like your average Non when we wanted. We stockpiled food, water, and the necessities of life.
Then we took all our computers offline.
It took Eastern three years to find the island in the Pacific, north of New Zealand. Nobody lived there until we came, all two hundred and twenty-eight of us.
This time we chose the exile.
When the virus first reared its head and took hold, the Nons were puzzled by the rebellion of their faithful servant. At first there was no panic. They would simply fix it.
The greatest minds on the planet—well, in the Nons’ world—devoted every waking moment to solving “the Net Disaster.”
After the first year, rewards were offered in the hundreds of trillions to the person or persons who could solve the conundrum. Government-funded corporations sprang up whose only mandate was to find a cure and restore the world to normality.
The realization it wasn’t just the Net came later. The virus had mo
rphed, adapted, and it had invaded their homes and workplaces.
Everything—everything—slowly stopped.
The accusations flew across borders as if the invasion were physical. It would dissolve society, families, and life. The rulers of the planet who for so long had enjoyed an automated, easy lifestyle could not adjust. Without their computers to run their finances, their businesses, their lives, and their food production, civilization collapsed.
Billions starved.
Then the U.S. government used their experimental electromagnetic weapon on Pakistan. They had incorrectly identified that country’s terrorist network as the source of the AIDS+ virus.
In the twenty-first century, their World War began and ended in a span of only forty-three minutes. The survivors were scattered—a few thousand here and there who lived in desolation.
If an extinction threat list still existed, the human race would have ranked highly on it.
After the Net Disaster but before the war, an interesting question was posed here and there in living rooms and cafes around the world: What would have happened if the Vaters had survived? Might they have possessed the intellect to overcome the virus and rebuild the world?
Just before the war, this idea mushroomed. The world became convinced if the Vaters had survived, we would have been the world’s saviors.
The Nons’ favorite mode of information dissemination—the Net—was no longer available to spread this shameful realization. It was communicated instead by word of mouth, or by printed-paper, an extinct and exotic medium long ago faded into history.
Years later, in every corner of the planet, we found scraps of yellowing, tattered paper scrawled with versions of the thought: “Did we destroy our only hope of survival?”
It was an academic regret, if regret it even was.
We were gone.
Eradicated.
We were just as irretrievable as the life the Nons once knew.
Eastern led us from the island thirteen years later. The boats bobbed peacefully in our small sheltered harbor. They waited to take us to our new home: a world left to us by the Nons.
As he stood on the shore, his face lit by the morning sun, tears rolled down his now ragged and worn cheeks. Eastern called to us—the survivors. He pleaded with simple words I carry with me even now. I know he spoke not only of our fallen friends but also of the Nons.
He said, “People of the new world, hear me. There will be no ‘them’ or ‘us.’ We are one people. We have learned the lessons of this world. And from now on, we must remain alert, so we recognize when these moments in history arise again—and remember the lessons of today.”
Hundreds of us moved toward the boats, filled with excitement and anticipation at the idea of beginning our new lives, exploring our potential.
Those were not the words I will forever bear with me, the words for which he will be remembered. Those words came next.
Years later, I still repeat the words to our children as I kiss them goodnight and, again, as I greet them in the morning.
All Vaters do.
The memory of Eastern standing before us is as clear today as if it were yesterday. He stood with his jaw firm and his stance solid as if set against a howling wind. He said: “At the setting of the sun and at its rise every morning, we will remember them.
“Lest we forget.”
© 2011 Susan May
From the Imagination Vault
Program Delete was written for a Cyberpunk short story competition. Yes, I had to look it up as well. According to Wikipedia, “It’s a sub-genre of Science fiction noted for its focus on ‘high tech and low life.’ It features advanced science, such as information technology and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.”
It didn’t score a short listing or place in that competition, and if I’m honest, I don’t think I really nailed the feel of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk has a gritty angry feel to the prose.
For the next two years, I submitted it to various anthologies without success, until finally in April 2013 Kayelle published it in their “Tomorrow” anthology, a collection of post-apocalyptic stories.
Ever since I wrote Program Delete, my husband has hounded me to write a book based on it. He keeps insisting he wants to know more about the characters and how they live and survive.
Since I have revisited the story in preparing it for this collection, I’m definitely leaning toward revisiting the world of the Vaters, the Nons, Eastern, and the narrator (did you notice she doesn’t have a name?) sometime in the future.
If you agree with my husband, please feel free to email me at [email protected]
Back Again
A tragic accident takes Dawn’s only child right before her eyes. The following surreal days are filled with soul-destroying grief and moments she never wants to live again—until, inexplicably, she finds herself back again, living that day.
It’s a second chance to save her son. Changing fate is not as simple as it first appears. Time is not Dawn’s ally.
Movement 1
4:29PM
4 MINUTES TO THEN
Fourteen seconds.
Dawn counted them down in her mind. On any other day, what difference would fourteen seconds make?
Today, they would be the difference between life and death.
Tommy would leave his music lesson any minute now. No, too vague. She knew the time. He would leave his music lesson at 4:33 and fourteen seconds. The seconds were what mattered. Fourteen increments of time could—and would—change everything.
She checked the car clock. Dawn always glanced at it—she couldn’t help herself—though there was no need to note the time. She knew it.
4:29
Her hands twisted together in her lap before pausing to pull at a stray thread on her skirt. She wrapped it around her finger and pulled. The thread was always there. It came away from the material, but she kept it twisted on her finger like a ring, as if she were married to the moment.
Married. That was a few years ago. She didn’t think about Richard so much anymore. She used to, but there wasn’t the time to care and fuss about inconsequential things like a broken marriage since this.
How many times had she checked that clock? How many seconds had she counted down? Still, the beat echoed in her head as if she herself were a ticking time bomb.
Her mouth felt dry, not a normal dry but the draining thirst no amount of water can quench. Without looking down at it, she pawed at the drink bottle sitting in the center console. Flicking the lid open, she raised it to her lips and sipped. As she did, the digital clock changed numbers.
4.33
She lowered the bottle, her fingers gripping the cylinder, as if it were the last rung of a ladder hovering over a long drop. The metal felt as cold as her heart in those times when it all seemed pointless.
The door of the music studio flew open. Tommy’s guitar, a large black case that seemed too big for his ten-year-old body, preceded him through the doorway. He paused and looked across the cars parked outside.
Catching sight of her, a smile erupted across his face and he waved. It was a small wave, one of those waves where you barely lift your hand. A wave that simply said I see you—you’re there. Not a wave to say I love you, you’re special or I am so happy to see you. Certainly, it wasn’t a wave to say goodbye.
Internally, she coughed back a sob as her hand raised to wave back. Her wave said more. It said I love you. I’m sorry. I will find a way to get you back.
Fourteen seconds to go.
Movement 2
Kylie had worked at this dump of a supermarket for two months. Although she was planning to leave, there was no way she’d expected her lame-ass boss, Mr. Ramello, to be the one who sent her packing. Ridiculous, she being the one fired from the lamest job on earth. She was the one who should be telling him to shove it.
The asshole just didn’t understand a thing. He’d pegged her for someone she wasn’t. She’d be
en doing pretty well on the register and, as far as she knew, no customer had complained. Occasionally her till had even balanced. Sure, she’d been spending a lot of time on her phone, but that wasn’t really her fault. It was stupid Andrew, her very ex-boyfriend.
She’d told Andrew she wanted to end it a week ago, but he just wouldn’t accept it, constantly texting and calling her every few hours. Last night he even had the gall to show up at her house—unannounced, for Christ’s sake.
Anyway, she wasn’t going to feel bad about losing this job. What’s so great about a job where the most challenging duty was working out whether to put the tomatoes in a bag on top of, or below, the eggs?
Repeating “have a nice day” fifty times an hour gets pretty old, too. Like she really cared what the never-ending stream of shoppers did with their day. They could have a shit day, for all she cared. She’d quickly mastered the side-lip raise that gave the effect of a smile. Whatever used the least amount of energy.
If that shitty creep, Ramello, wanted to fire her for the sucky reason she was on her phone occasionally at work, then screw him. Maybe he had told her a dozen times to stay off the phone. So what? Hadn’t she worked overtime the other night when he’d asked?
His loss, too, because she’d just mastered the deli-slicer. What was he going to do when Marcus went on vacation? Anyway, after two months, she was sick of his constant standing over her shoulder and checking the till and what she was doing.
His latest comments on her hair had gone beyond a joke, too. What was wrong with pink and purple strand hair weaves, anyway? It wasn’t like they were permanent.
The way he’d fired her was crap. Three minutes of telling her what he thought of her, and then he’d told her to get out. Seriously ignorant. No listening to her defense; he didn’t even want to know about psycho Andrew. He just put his hand up like he was a traffic cop and told her to get out.