“You’re not an outbreak monkey, are you?”
She smiles.
“Uh . . . no. I don’t think so, anyway.”
“Then you’re a big step up from my last set of boarders. Checkout is at eleven. Enjoy your stay.”
9. INTERLUDE
Greetings to my fellow UnAltered. My name is Denise Magliano. You have known me up until now as Princess Blue. If you are reading this message, it is because I failed to upload the code at either 09:00 or 21:00 that would have prevented it from being posted to all of my public and private feeds. The only reason that I would have failed to do that (and the only reason that I would tell you my real name) is that I am now dead.
I am (I was?) a healthy seventeen-year-old girl, with no known genetic defects, no dangerous or unhealthy habits, and no inclination toward violent or dangerous sports or other activities. The current death rate for someone with my demographic, social, and genetic profile is less than two per one hundred thousand per year. If I am dead, there is a very good chance that it is because someone decided to make me that way.
So, what have I done to make someone want to kill me? Something, obviously, or I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of setting up this message with a dead-man switch. I’ve only ever done one thing that might have brought a killer to my door, and that is to exercise my God-given right to free speech. I had the gall to pass on information to all of you that contradicted the official NatSec version of what happened to the good people of Hagerstown. And for that, someone at NatSec decided that I had to die.
If you search for my name now in the Baltimore newsfeeds, I’m sure that you will find a story about a poor young girl who was killed in a car accident, or shot during a mugging, or drowned in the bathtub after passing out drunk. Do not believe whatever slander NatSec has put out about me. I am not a crime victim, or a self-destructive loser, or a poor girl who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I am a casualty of war.
Okay, I’ve seen a half dozen or so of these farewell notes from our UnAltered pals this morning, and they’re starting to get on my nerves. They all claim to have been whacked by NatSec, supposedly because their subversive feeds were deemed to be a Threat to the Republic. You know what? I’ve read some of their feeds. They’re not subversive. They’re sub-literate. All these guys are the same, whining about how the Engineered and the Augmented have lost sight of what it means to be human and blah, blah, blah. Guess what, assholes? Humans in a state of nature have a twenty-five percent infant mortality rate, and a median lifespan of twenty-eight years. They live in the jungle, and eat shit that they pick up off the ground. If that doesn’t describe your life experience, you’re one of the Altered whether you like it or not. My implants are no different than vaccines or blood pressure pills or artificial hips.
So, if there’s not a vast conspiracy to kill every two-digit-IQ UnAltered with access to the networks, what is tripping these idiots’ dead-man switches? Here’s a guess: Maybe they spent last night out looking for Engineered to whale on—like that Pretty who got mauled in Rock Creek Park the other day. A Pretty’s mods are all superficial, but many of ours are not. I’m pretty confident that I personally could take down a dozen UnAltered if I had to, and after the way things have gone the last couple of days, I don’t think I’d be gentle.
I’m not generally one to respond to stupidity, but I do feel like I need to say something to Hobo Joe. First, while I’m sure that he’s a super tough guy and that he has Engineered muscles just popping out all over his body, that kind of thing hasn’t been the deciding factor in human conflict for at least the past fifty thousand years. Gorillas and elephants and lions are super strong too, and have claws and trunks and whatnot to boot. How’s that been working out for them? If one of our UnAltered brothers decides to take him down, it won’t be by challenging him to fisticuffs. It would more likely be by putting a .50 caliber slug between his eyes from a kilometer away.
Second, while I could basically agree that someone with an ocular or even an exoskeleton is still pretty much human, that simply cannot be said for any of the Engineered. A species is defined by its genome. Anyone with germ-line modifications is by definition no longer human. To say that splicing ape genes or Neanderthal genes or cougar genes into the human genome is no different than vaccination is just stupid. You can argue that these sorts of changes are inevitable, or even that they’re a good thing, but you cannot argue that they do not represent the creation of a multitude of new species. This kind of rapid speciation is not something that has ever happened on this planet before, and we have no idea what consequences it will ultimately bring.
Hey NatSec—you might want to consider putting Shark Sandwich on your kill list. I’m pretty sure he just threatened to shoot Hobo Joe in the face.
Really, Agent of Change? You think this is funny? Elements of the government murdered thousands of American citizens on Sunday afternoon. Elements of the government are currently executing American citizens in the streets and in their beds without trial or appeal. Those who would surrender essential liberties in exchange for a little temporary security are deserving of neither, and the most essential right that we have is the right to life. The America we live in today would be absolutely unrecognizable to the founders of this once-great nation. We have tolerated the gradual growth of the panopticon, because it made law enforcement more effective. We have tolerated the tapping of virtually every communications channel available to us by the government, because it has made things marginally more difficult for terrorist organizations. Now we tolerate mass extrajudicial executions because NatSec tells us that they are necessary to stave off a repeat of the horrors of Hagerstown. How much lower can we possibly sink, and still call ourselves Americans?
Thomas Pain is absolutely correct to say that the America we live in today would be utterly unrecognizable to the founders. For example, in their America, Thomas Paine had to crank out his screeds on a printing press and distribute them to his fellow citizens by hand, whereas in our America, Thomas Pain can say whatever he wants to a huge number of his fellow citizens with a click or a poke or whatever you idiots who haven’t got oculars yet do. Of course, most would say that this change is a good one, enhancing our right to free speech by making widely distributed speech truly free—not every ignorant eighteenth-century peasant had access to a printing press, after all.
However, there are a few other changes in today’s America that may be less benign. For example, in Thomas Paine’s day, if one of our good citizens took it into his head to do harm to his fellow men, his power to do so was fairly limited. Hard to go on a rampage with a musket, and you can’t even make a really effective bomb with black powder. Today, however, anyone with the inclination to do so can get hold of a high-capacity automatic rifle. If he’s ambitious and has a bit of money, it’s conceivable that he could cobble together an engineered virus that could take down half the North American population in a matter of weeks.
The question, then, is this: Even if we concede that we would not be willing to trade our essential liberties in order to gain a little temporary security, might we be willing to compromise at least a few of them in order to allow our continued survival as a nation?
We still do not know what, exactly, happened in Hagerstown. NatSec says every living person within the secured perimeter died within a matter of minutes. The UnAltered say that no, only ninety percent of them did. Even if they’re right, this was a shot across our bow. Speaking for myself, I’m willing to concede a hell of a lot to NatSec if they ca
n keep it from happening again.
Sorry to contradict you, Lord Fizzlebottom, but there is nothing unique about our age. Fear has always been the best friend of the tyrant. You can fret about the possibility that some lunatic in a basement might cook up a virus that will wipe out half the population. I’m sure our ancestors would be very sympathetic. Ever heard of smallpox? How about the bubonic plague? Those two entirely naturally occurring diseases wiped out 90 percent of the North American population and 60 percent of the European population. You worry that a terrorist might blow up a building—or hey, maybe an entire city? The Mongols wiped out cities by the dozen, and piled their citizens’ skulls outside the gates like cantaloupes.
It’s easy to look at what feels like an existential threat, and to wish for a big strong someone to step in and save you. That’s not unique to our age either. People have been falling in line behind kings and emperors and dictators in the face of external threats at least since Gilgamesh ruled Uruk. But the fact that this urge to self-infantilization seems to be a part of human nature doesn’t make it right, and if we wish to remain—or to become again—a free people, it is something we must resist to our last drop of blood.
You seem to believe that submitting meekly to NatSec’s intrusion into every aspect of our lives is the only way for us to survive. I disagree. But even if you’re right, there’s a difference between surviving and living. It’s worth taking the risk of doing neither, in order to try to do both.
Hear hear, Thomas Pain. Let’s dismantle the security apparatus that NatSec and other government agencies have built up over the last forty years. You know—the one that has averted three known attempted nuclear strikes against American cities, that cut al Qaeda in North America down to the last man, and that has helped America to the lowest rate of violent crime in the world. True, there is no evidence that this apparatus has ever been used to subvert our political freedoms or to so much as harass a single innocent American citizen, but who knows? Maybe someday it might be. Surely a few million deaths here or there is a small price to pay to avert that possibility.
This is boring. Any UnAltered out there? Give us one of your “Genetic Modifications are the Devil’s Tilt-A-Whirl” sermons. Those are always fun to read.
Laugh it up, fuckers. There are more of us than there are of you, and we don’t have kill switches built into us. The hammer’s gonna fall soon, and when it does, Homo sapiens is gonna be the only human species on this planet again.
Homo saps may still be a majority, but NatSec and the military are both forty-plus percent Engineered and one hundred percent Augmented. If and when the hammer falls, I promise you that it’s not gonna fall on us. You can ask your UnAltered friends in Hagerstown about that.
I stand corrected. That wasn’t fun at all.
10. ANDERS
For the second time in three days, I wake up hungover. On the plus side, this time I’m in my own bed, and there’s nobody in it with me. On the minus side, my head hurts worse than it did on Sunday, and there’s a weird, gnawing discomfort in the pit of my stomach that I suspect doesn’t have much to do with how much I had to drink.
Also, I’m pretty sure I watched a NatSec agent kill a guy last night—a NatSec agent who was apparently at my house on Sunday morning looking for me. I make a mental note to have a chat with Terry about that.
I start to sit up, but a knife-twist in my side drops me back with a gasp. I must have horked something doing my Speedy McGreedy routine at the bar. Hopefully it’s just a pull. Tears hurt twice as bad, and they take forever to heal. I roll over slowly onto my side, drop my feet to the floor, and lever myself up into a sitting position. This is exactly why I quit playing ball. I can still remember waking up feeling like this on the mornings after games, and thinking that this must be what it’s like to be really, really old.
I check my phone. It’s a little after nine. No alerts, so at least the world hasn’t fallen apart any more than it already had while I was sleeping. Also on the plus side, my room is cooler than it has been in a week or so. Looks like the heat has finally broken. The sky outside the window is low and gray, with darker black streaks and swirls off to the south. The weather matches my mood.
I stand slowly. The pain is centered on my right side, between my pelvis and my ribs, but I think I might have done something to my chest as well. I try to stretch it out a little, but the muscles give me just enough of a warning jolt to convince me to leave them alone. I pick up the pants I left on the floor last night and pull them on, then take a shirt from the top of my dresser and carefully pull it over my head. This definitely reminds me of my playing days. I shuffle out into the hallway, and pull the door closed behind me.
I’m a little surprised to find Gary already awake, leaning back with his fingers knitted behind his head in one of the recliners in the living room. He’s got one eye open, while the other twitches its way through a download.
“Morning,” he says. “Coffee and doughnuts are in the kitchen. I meant to grab something for the chlamydia you probably picked up yesterday afternoon, but I forgot. Sorry.”
“Thanks for the doughnuts. Also, bite me. Also, What’s got you up so early? I didn’t expect to see you before noon.”
He opens both eyes now, sits up and stretches.
“Big doings,” he says. “I’m monitoring the early stages of the RAHOWA.”
“The what?”
He rolls his head around in a slow circle. I can hear his vertebrae cracking.
“RAHOWA,” he says. “Racial holy war. The term was popularized by white supremacist groups at the end of the twentieth century. They used it to refer to the coming apocalyptic clash between the genetically pure and morally upright Aryans and the mixed-blood degenerates. Those guys were butt-munches, obviously, but as an acronym it’s got a nice ring to it, so I thought I’d revive it to describe the current foofaraw.”
Now I’m confused.
“The Aryans?” I ask. “Weren’t they from India?”
He grins, and levers himself to his feet.
“We’re talking about white supremacists, Anders. They didn’t make it through tenth-grade social studies. Don’t try to apply too much critical thinking to their worldview.”
“Right,” I say. “Speaking of genetic purity, where’s Charity? Did she end up heading home after all?”
He shakes his head.
“I figured she would, once she realized that you’re obviously sexually confused,” he says. “But she wound up sleeping on the couch.”
“Great. And now she’s . . .”
“In the bathroom, I think.”
“Uh-huh. So how are things going, RAHOWA-wise?”
He shrugs.
“Pretty much all show, no go at the moment. There are a lot of threatening feeds floating around on both sides, but actual violence at this point is still small-scale and sporadic. Pretties look to be taking the worst of it on the Engineered side, probably because they’re easy to spot and easy to beat up. There’s also some indication that NatSec did some housecleaning last night. The UnAltered feed distribution network seems to be pretty heavily compromised.”
“Housecleaning?”
“Oh yeah. I’ve seen eleven dead-man-switch messages from UnAltered network repeaters. They all claim to have been whacked by NatSec, and the two locals I followed up on definitely had bad things happen to them last night. One was a high-school girl who died of a heroin overdose—a drug that she had no history of ever using, by t
he way—and the other one was a middle-aged chino-wearing guy named Christopher Cai, who supposedly died in the street of an aneurism after he got his head smashed in by some jerk with a beer glass at the Green Goose.”
“Again, bite me, Gary.”
“No,” he says. “I’m serious. The guy you busted up last night was apparently a big name with the UnAltered. He put out a daily feed with over a million paid subscribers. Kind of explains why he was such a douche-nozzle, doesn’t it? He’s definitely dead, so I doubt he’ll be coming after you anytime soon, but you might want to keep an eye out for his fans. Your name showed up in the feeds, and it seems like a lot of them are pretty mad.”
Fantastic. This week just gets better and better.
So Charity spent the night on our couch. Her and Gary? No, I’m not gonna think about that before breakfast. She comes out of the downstairs bathroom when I’m halfway through my third Jolly Pirate. Gary follows her into the kitchen, and they join me at the breakfast table. Charity lifts the lid on the box and pulls out a doughnut, holding it between her thumb and forefinger like a dead mouse. She looks it over, wrinkles her nose, and takes a nibble.
“Let me guess,” I say. “You’re a doughnut hater?”
“Honestly,” she says, “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten one.” She takes another, slightly bigger bite. “It’s not bad. Just a big wad of fat and sugar, right? Is this really how you guys eat?”
“Pretty much,” says Gary. He reaches into the cupboard against the wall and pulls out three coffee mugs, fills them from the box on the table, and hands them around.
“So,” Charity says. “How in the world are you still alive?”
“An excellent question.” Gary pulls a doughnut from the box and tears half of it off in one bite. “Anders here has a very high metabolism. He needs about five thousand calories a day just to keep from wasting away.” He chases the doughnut with coffee, then jams the rest into his mouth. “I, on the other hand, don’t actually eat very much. It’s a life of constant discipline, which I maintain by making sure that everything I do eat is as disgusting as possible.”
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