Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1)

by Jae Hill

  Eventually, the virus evolved in the gastrointestinal tract of mosquitoes. As even the polar regions became more tropical and the temperate regions were reduced to deserts, the mosquitoes ran rampant despite all attempts to abate them. Between famine, disease, and warring over scant water and food resources, more than 95 percent of the planet’s human population perished within a few decades. The only people left were the forefathers of our modern society, and the ancestors of the zombies of the wastelands. Though the climate was slowly returning to equilibrium, the damage would take millennia to heal, so many of our predecessors had chosen a life among the stars instead of staying behind on the wasteland called Earth.

  Our guide turned to show us the video screen of the deep-space freighter port just a few thousand kilometers over our heads. Some massive robotic ships were moving slowly into docking position. Through an overhead window, we caught a flash of light as one ship activated its Roberts drive and jumped into superspace: tunneling through the fabric of space-time to a destination a million light-years away. This trip was designed to get small children excited to one day get their robotic bodies, and it surely worked on me. When I got home, I worked even harder at school and spent more of my free time at Mom’s library than on Dad’s boat. I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I wanted to explore the universe despite how very little I knew about the world I lived on.

  We returned to Valhalla after a few days of playing around in the tropics, sweating in the warm breezy air, and swimming in the ocean. Though I liked the vacation, I missed the cool misty rains and towering trees of home. The trip had given me a purpose though: I studied even harder and spent even more of my free time learning and reading and studying.

  One day, during my advanced astrophysics class, we were discussing the physics of wormholes and how one man had been the first to successfully transit one. The name in the text caught everyone’s attention: Herodotus Faustus. All eyes in the class were trained on me. I’d never known. My dad had simply told me that he’d been an explorer. Not that he held several doctorate degrees. Not that he had been the first to cross the dimensional plane. Not that he’d made huge strides in the field of galactic exploration and optimizing travel routes by skirting the edges of the slipstream tunnels through superspace. I was stunned by the revelations about my father, the fisherman.

  I raced to the docks to find my father tending the boat, having just recently returned from another trip to the halibut fishery a few days away. I stared at him for a minute, realizing I was staring not at a famous explorer or renowned physicist or fisherman, but rather just a man. The man who cared for me and taught me about the world around me with careful and deliberate precision. He was never a man to spend words freely.

  “Dad,” I started, quietly, “I…I read about you in school today.”

  He turned his attention back to the steel mooring line.

  “And what did you read, son?” he asked, tightening the cable against the steel dock.

  “I read that you’re pretty much one of the greatest minds and bravest explorers in the universe. I read that you were the first person to plot a course through a wormhole in a specialized ship that you designed. That you were the first person to ever leave our galaxy.”

  Dad paused for a minute, looked at me, and nodded.

  “That was a while ago. A long while.”

  “Why are you fishing then? Why aren’t you still exploring the stars? Why are you here instead of…well, anywhere?”

  “It was really exciting,” he replied, “to wander the stars and set foot on new worlds. To stare back at our own galaxy from afar and not even be able to pick out our solar system from the window. It was more than I ever hoped for.”

  He jumped back onto the deck of the boat with a thud and motioned for me to follow, which I did.

  “I got lonely out there, Pax,” he continued. “I had friends and colleagues and coworkers but it just wasn’t the same. I was in my fifties then and had spent thirty years without a family or even a girlfriend. I felt that there was so much more to life. So much more life to live. I came home to find something simpler and more rewarding. I was lucky enough to find your mother when I came home from my last expedition.”

  “Did you ever want to go back?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. “I mean sure, since then I’ve taken vacation trips to some far away places, but never really had the bug to wander. I like fishing. I like the calm of the sea and the rolling of the waves. I like the smells of the ocean instead of the sterile odor of the inside of a starship. I feel so much more complete working with my hands and coming home to your mother.”

  I didn’t understand. I couldn’t. Not then, at that point in my life. I thought my father was a fool.

  TEAMMATES AND SQUADS

  My next door neighbor was a little raven-haired brat named Adara Goodman. Adara was very smart and had what we call “an alpha personality,” so she was the leader of our trio. She and I had been intermittent playmates since I was six, but really didn’t start getting along until I was almost ten. She was physically smaller than me, despite the fact that girls are supposed to mature more quickly than boys, and the fact that she was a year older than me. I remember disliking so many things about her—her buck teeth and her stringy hair—but she was a great companion for adventures and usually volunteered to take the blame when we got in trouble.

  Semper and Adara were basically the same age, but since I was in the same tier as Semper, I never felt like I was hanging out with older kids. Adara wasn’t as smart as we were, but she was ambitious and creative. She wanted to be president since the first time she heard what a president was. She spent her fellowship months working down in the capital for various political and administrative leaders. She showed little interest in the natural world around us and focused her energy on people. Our parents all got together often, and my dad always called us Semper the Engineer, Pax the Explorer, and Adara the Great.

  This part of the world was one of the few places with old-growth trees still standing. Because of the cool California Current coming down from the Gulf of Alaska, the moisture kept the forests from scorching when the rest of the planet burned. We climbed up the monstrous trees and built forts and tree houses among their girthy branches. We had rope swings from tree to tree and swinging bridges between treehouses. Semper, ever the engineering phenom, devised all manners of pulley-driven elevators and water systems. I mapped them and named them and scoured the area for new locations to build. Adara always tried the ropes and pulleys before any of us. She was fearless, quick, and strong. Our society didn’t have masculine or feminine roles like the societies of old. I’m sure if we had, we’d have felt embarrassed that a girl could best us at all things physical.

  When Semper and Adara were thirteen, they were invited to “the Viewing”: the experience that finally introduces most children to life in an enhanced form. I insisted that I go along with them, despite being a year younger and technically too young to attend. I made such a fuss that my parents got special permission from the administrator of the program to go early.

  We rode the train to the capital with other children our age, even if they were in different academy tiers. We arrived at a monolithic concrete building with no windows and entered the cavernous lobby which stretched five floors above our heads. This was the Bionics Research Facility. There was no décor upon the blank grey walls except a tile mosaic of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders above the doors to the visitors’ level.

  We were led by a tour guide around the facility and saw new bodies being created by robotic arms and welders. We saw scientists wearing lab coats, tinkering with gadgets. The guide rambled on and on and no one was listening. We were all amazed at the spectacle. I think everyone there was imagining that the metal and composite bodies we watched being crafted were our own future tickets to the stars.

  We were led to the next level of the building, which was a series of rooms, each with seven black tube-like pods arranged in a semi-
circle. We disrobed as a group and put on white bodysuits with attached wiring harnesses. Then these odd metal headbands were fastened over our eyes, nose, and ears. I couldn’t see a thing. We were then guided into the tube, which was tilted backwards, to rest in a thirty-degree incline.

  These were sensory deprivation chambers with a neutral air temperature, no light, no smell, and no sound. Pure absence of all sensations. Everything was black, and then after a minute long pause, there was light. It was blinding at first but the machine calibrated for my perception. I was outdoors in a walled courtyard with cars and large crates and an obstacle course. A half-dozen identical adults stood next to me; the only difference was the armbands of varying colors on their arms and legs. I looked around. Was this virtual reality? No—this was actual reality beamed into my own brain.

  The smells were intense. The colors were vivid. Anything that was drab or boring in the world had new meaning and definition. I could zoom in with my eyes to the fibrous wings of a fly buzzing around in the air. I could hear each beat of its wings.

  Our guide suddenly entered the courtyard from a doorway behind us. He instructed us to move around. Lift things. Run. Jump. Experience life in the body of an enhanced form.

  Even though the robotic bodies all looked the same—generic, hairless, and genderless—the voice modulators identified who was who. Semper wore the violet armband, Adara wore red, and I wore blue. The other four bodies were inhabited by students from our group, and their armbands rounded out the colors of the spectrum.

  It took about a half-hour to figure things out, and even then I wasn’t very adept. Every miniscule move on my part resulted in a grand move on the part of the robot body I was virtually inhabiting. Raising my arm meant flailing it. Taking a step forward meant leaping. I laughed. I learned to jump. I was ungainly but I could move around. A few times I fell trying to climb over the obstacles.

  Semper just couldn’t figure it out. He kept tripping. Kicking his legs together when he walked. Reaching out for something and falling over. I heard his breath coming in ragged little gasps through his voice modulator.

  “Calm down, buddy,” I tried reassuring him.

  “This isn’t all that fun,” he groaned.

  I spent the next few minutes walking him through very simple steps. One foot in front of the other. Balance. Gentle precision. Pinching fingers together. He finally at least reached a point of proficiency where I could leave him to his own task while I clumsily ran off to try other obstacles and games.

  Adara had no such limitations. Within the first few minutes, she was jumping into the air, lifting cars off the ground, and running with agility instead of the clumsy gait that we had all adopted. She was a natural. She leapt four meters into the air and did somersaults before landing. She karate-chopped steel beam and bent it slightly. She climbed up a flagpole. While I was amusing myself with easily stacking two-ton metal crates, I noticed a group of scientists atop the wall watching Adara’s movements and taking notes with their digibooks.

  The guide instructed us all to circle back up around him. We each took our place on the appropriately colored circle on the ground and then suddenly everything went black again. There were no sounds or smells or lights. Just darkness. This must have been what true death felt like if humans could still experience such a thing.

  I started to get a little nervous. Though I’d been one of the last children put into the deprivation chambers, now I was the last to be pulled out. I started getting claustrophobic. My heart was racing. I shouted for someone to come let me out. Finally, the guide opened the door and I jumped out excitedly, panting, much to the amusement of the scientists in the room who disconnected me from the harnesses.

  We all gathered together again in the lobby and relayed our experiences. Three other groups of seven had also been operating in different training grounds, so almost thirty of us were excitedly jabbering on and on about the things we’d been able to do in our robotic selves. Everyone except Semper, who barely smiled and looked a little bit frightened.

  What was meant to get us excited for our enhanced futures was really a clever way for the researchers to run tests on our agility and our ability to adapt to the robotic forms. They kept meticulous records of our activities and used them to calibrate the bodies they began building for us. Of course, we wouldn’t take ownership of our own bodies until our nervous systems were transplanted, but the field trips secretly began building the immense dataset required to create the body that would last us for eternity.

  Every year, we’d come back to the facility for a three-day reorientation. Every year, our tasks would get a little more challenging and more would be expected of us, like being able to jump the sixty-foot gap between two buildings. Every year, we all got a little more proficient at bizarre tasks like painting with feathers or building ships in bottles. This was always exciting and even Semper got to the point where he could throw the football through a tire at a kilometer away almost as well as Adara could.

  Almost.

  GAME PLAY

  As small children, we always played the primitive version of “Robots versus Zombies” out in the fields and forests of our hometown. Our digibooks were issued when we started school, but we were forbidden from taking them out to play until we were older. An unofficial “coming-of-age” ritual in our society is when our parents bought us our first EagleVision sets. These see-through face visors had inlaid light-emitting-fiber displays which displayed information about whatever we focused on. They functioned as sunglasses, binoculars, and a wearable computer screen. When connected to our digibooks by wireless connection, this allowed us to play augmented reality games.

  Though I was usually busy studying in my spare time, I still needed to relax and play with the neighbor kids. There were a lot of augmented reality games, but our favorite game was Slayers. When the game activated, the glasses completely replaced the world around us with an augmented world. The alabaster buildings became crumbled ruins. The trees turned to smoldering stumps. Zombies wandered the streets and parks. We teamed up in groups to take down digital zombie enemies and compete against other teams of adults and kids around the universe. Just like the other multiplayer console games, you had to level up your character to get new abilities and weapons and quests. Some of the quests took us to other cities, like the capital and Okanagan Valley. The game was addictive, and we were really good at it. Well specifically, Adara was really good at it, and her scores carried our local team to victory in the annual tournament—twice.

  I wondered, occasionally, how accurate the depictions of the zombies were. The main storyline of the game was supposed to have taken place during the 2100’s as the world collapsed from the old ways to the new society. Did the zombies still look like that? Had they evolved? And if the Plague was so fatal and so punishing…how come they hadn’t disappeared entirely?

  We sat in history class one day while Instructor Sanders went on and on about the earliest days of the Republic. We’d all heard the stories before about the early formation of the Republic; how Washington and Oregon, previously part of the United States, had joined with the former Canadian province of British Columbia. How the State of California had launched a war to obtain badly needed freshwater supplies from the Columbia River. How the US government sided with California. How the war for independence was cut short by the zombie infestation.

  And since it was old news, I quietly tapped the glassy screen of the digibook on my desk and opened a secret Cortex window. I couldn’t have cared less about history. If wasn’t science or Slayers, at this point in my life, I didn’t care at all. I started reading about the national tournament up in Whistler and got really excited. Everyone who would play in the tournament would get early access to play the new “Dinosaur Hunter” EagleVision game. I was reading more about the tournament rules when suddenly my screen froze. I looked up, and noticed everyone else was looking up too.

  Instructor Sanders had locked us out. It was an annoying feature of school-age
children’s digibooks, that instructors could force feed your screen whatever they liked. A quote populated the screen:

  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~ Jorge Santayana

  “I know,” the instructor chided, “that most of you don’t care about social sciences. I know your parents are scientists and politicians and champions of industry, and that they haven’t raised you with a desire to learn about these sorts of things. But the Republic has you attend this course because they want you to know the past in an attempt not to repeat it.”

  He paused to let that sink in. “Greed. Ignorance. Pride. Hubris. These human conditions destroyed our way of life in the twenty-first century. The water and air became too polluted to drink or breathe. The cities became overcrowded and reeked of filth. People were dying everywhere. In the streets. Bodies rotting on the side of a freeway overpass. Preventable diseases killed infants before they could walk. We had become such consumers that we had peed in our own pool. You’ve never seen things like this in real life, but you will right now.”

  He started flashing images on the main screen at the front of the room, and on each of our digibooks, as he spoke. War. Famine. Floods. Disasters. Zombies. Dead bodies. Rotting corpses. Burning cities. Riots. Murders. Crucifixions. Beheadings. Rape. They were both fascinating and sickening.

  “During the early 22nd century, the very people who had destroyed our world in the name of profit escaped the planet in worldships: massive primitive starships without faster-than-light capabilities. They set out in stasis on five-hundred-year journeys across the universe. They’re still traveling today, unaware of what we’ve repaired since their betrayal.”