by A. R. Daun
Richard moved closer, but Haley held him back, and looked up at his weather-beaten face.
“We don't know what they are,” she said. “And until we know for sure it's best not to touch them. They could bite or sting.”
He nodded, and she took out her Motorola android phone and started taking pictures of the plant from different angles.
“I'll send the pics to researchers I know over at the University of Texas,” she continued. “Then come back later with vials of 90% ethanol to take some samples of those insect-like things.”
They stared in silence at the hive like activity on the strange plant, then got on their horses and made their way back towards the ranch. They talked animatedly as they rode, and failed to notice the tracks of a third animal that had followed them earlier.
The chatter of small animals resumed, as the noontime sun beat down hard on the denizens of the high country from a cloudless blue sky.
CHAPTER 30
Year 2 A.R.
Extract from the journals of Ammara Lewis
We may never know what really happened that first day. Someone forgot to decontaminate perhaps, or maybe it was a simple breaking of test tubes or beakers or a defective centrifuge that leaked.
It doesn't matter now. The genie came out of the bottle.
Maybe they were working on nanobots, these faceless researchers. Tiny medibots on the nanometer scale that could be injected into a human body to repair damaged tissue, as well as prevent the rise of infections by actively seeking out and destroying malignant cells and invading viruses and bacteria.
They made two mistakes though.
The first by itself was already a biggie, but perhaps one that could have been contained. The putative medibots were constructed to be autonomous agents bound together by ad hoc wireless networks. These meant that each individual medibot was not directly controlled by people. Instead they were programmed to follow simple rules that were invoked as information between the bots was exchanged in real time through the sensor network, with the resulting swarm exhibiting collective emergent behaviors that could accomplish the goals set forth by their creators.
That's somewhat of a mouthful, but have you ever wondered how creatures who are individually very simple like ants and bees and termites could build complex structures such as nests, or engage in foraging that manages to maximize results even without a headquarters to give orders? Each individual ant or bee in a colony is a creature that by itself would not be capable of very complicated tasks, but by following simple rules ingrained into it, and by continuously modifying its actions based on the behavior of other individuals around it, the colony as a whole is capable of performing amazing feats of construction and community regulation.
Do you see the problem here? I'll bet you do, and I'll bet someone at the time did as well, but either shrugged it off or was over-ruled by the higher-ups. By de-linking the actions of the bots to direct human control, they inadvertently lost all control of their creation.
Well, perhaps I'm being too harsh. Perhaps they had some backup plan, or some emergency communications channel to the bots, but we all know what happened. What happened was that they never managed to halt the spread of the bots once containment was breached. What happened was the biggest fuckup in the history of mankind, and perhaps of the entire history of life on earth.
Perhaps...perhaps...
Where was I now? I had to shake my head and clear it. Too much of Denzel's fantastic homebrewed beer yesterday night, and the activities after that weren't too shabby either ha ha.
Oh yes, the second mistake.
These researchers made their medibots self-replicating. They gave certain special types of bots the ability to gather the necessary materials from their surroundings and construct duplicates of themselves and the other bot types.
Oh, the stupidity in that one decision. Our hubris was in thinking that we somehow occupied a special place on this earth, that our intellect made us immune from the ravages of evolution, and that we would stand a chance against simple but swarming collectives that could out reproduce us.
But then again, and here I am writing as I think it....maybe something more sinister is at play here?
I have started to see new forms showing up in our reconnaissance. These new types of creatures seem to have evolved out of nowhere and following no earth bound rules that I can imagine, and the word that has crept into my consciousness has started to give me bad dreams.
Terraforming.
Alien invasion. All those War of the World scenarios trumpeted by Hollywood brought into stark reality, with alien nanoware modifying the existing biosphere into something more amiable to their extraterrestrial temperament.
Perhaps...perhaps...
The most useless word in the English language.
I'm sorry. I tend to ramble sometimes Dear Constant Reader, and I hope you don't mind that I've been calling you, the generic you, by that name. I realize that after years of doing so, I've never actually explained the origin of the term. It was an affectation by a writer named Stephen King a long long time ago. I used to get a guilty pleasure from reading his books, in between bouts of wallowing in the the more mainstream acceptable fiction, mainly Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler, although the last also tended to dabble in the realms frequented by the aforementioned King.
All we can do is carry on and keep hoping that the small settlements we have started, here in Miami and in Savannah, will be the seeds of a new and more lasting human civilization.
We received word yesterday that Marco would be visiting our settlements come the next week. This caused a lot of excitement and perhaps some trepidation among the populace, because it has been two years since our parting.
I talked to Diwi earlier today, and she was quite sanguine about it all. She's never been a talkative sort, and I once jokingly told her she loved fulfilling the old inscrutable Asian stereotype. But I do know that she loathes Marco, and not only because she used to hear such horrendous things about him when she was staff at the Coral Odyssey. She still does not trust him and his motives for breaking away from the group and taking with him the bulk of the survivors.
Sometimes I wonder how things would have worked out if Annika had not elected to stay behind. Out of the four of us, she had seemed to be the most competent, and she was the only one who intimidated Marco and possibly could have kept him under control. I think of her now and imagine her living in the abandoned hulk of what used to be our cruise ship. How lonely she must be, how utterly alone, with no one but her memories to accompany her...that, and...well...the something that used to be Staff Captain Uwais.
What kind of God would leave the fate of the world on the shoulders of those who don't seem to deserve it, or in fact even want it? Did the Raggedy Man know that only four out of the thousands of people on what he called the “First Ark” had the right combination of genetics to host his charges? Diwi would have made the most sense, although she is a retiring matriarchal figure who seldom wants to be in the spotlight, hardly the type who can spontaneously rise to become the natural leader of a populace under siege. I'm a self-confessed geek and bookworm, not to mention young, black, and some would say “pretty”, all of which are knocks on my perceived ability to lead the group, a role that would have fit the super-competent Annika to the T, except for the fact that she cast everyone aside to wallow in her grief and self-pity. Then there's Marco, who after discussions with Diwi I am coming to believe is not only a lecherous womanizer, but an actual psychopath and sadist.
I can only imagine what the effect of being given such power would have on such a person, now that he is given full rein to make his darkest fantasies come true. Perhaps that is one reason why neither me nor Diwi protested too much when Marco insisted on settling in Georgia, several hundred miles away from our initial plan of making our home in sunny Florida. I'm sure that Marco, being the devious bastard that he is, knew full well that separating himself from us would be the best deal for
him as well.
But Miami Beach is our home now. There are two hundred fifty of us in the group, about evenly divided between men and women, and we've already elected our first governing council, with both Diwi and myself as permanent members. It's warm all year round here, and nearby Miami is a vast storehouse that we've been using to support our colony until we get something going on the agricultural front. Florida used to be one of the main exporters of vegetables in the nation, and the soil here, and especially around the area of Lake Okeechobee about 50 miles north, is particularly rich due to drainage from the Everglades.
I can see it all now in my mind's eye. We'll have small farms dotting the urban and suburban landscape, and we'll be harvesting tomatoes, beans, potatoes, and various other vegetables, while fishing boats trawl the sea for fish and crabs and shrimp. I can already see the beginnings of a nascent market economy in our little community as people barter and exchange services for goods that they either have built themselves or have scavenged from the nearby suburban areas, but we will continue to promote a community-oriented approach to sharing resources in order to make sure no one is left wanting or is left behind. We will learn from the past and hopefully not make the same mistakes again.
Already our community is starting to seem more like the bad old days. We've seen family disputes, and domestic violence is on the rise, with one ending in an amicable divorce and the other in a restraining order issued by the committee. Drinking, fighting, even petty theft are rearing their ugly heads, though thankfully we haven't had any homicides so far.
I admit that before this I never knew how fragile a society could be, nor did I realize the complexity of the interconnections of the parts needed to form a stable whole. The entire structure is like a house of cards, held in place by arbitrary laws and rules that need to be rigorously enforced.
Thank God for Denzel. He deputized Edmund and one other man last Spring after we had a rash of drunken brawls, and they now comprise the whole of the Miami Beach Police. They even discovered some old uniforms at a nearby police station, and I remember how people watched with some awe as they stood all spiffed up and polished at the next community meeting when I announced the formation of the new department. There was even some applause from a few scattered spectators, though I believe most were just too stunned to react at the time.
I found a book of poems at an old town library recently. I was never big on poetry, but after perusing through a few of the pages I discovered a fondness for the musings of one of the authors. He was a Lebanese philosopher and poet from the early 20th century named Khalil Gibran, and one poem that he called simply “Children” struck a chord in me yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
It ends with those words. I read it and tears came to my eyes, because not only does it speak to me of my own personal relationship with my son Alexander, but in another way it also mirrors the challenges we face as a society. The structures we put in place today - the laws and rules that we use to govern ourselves, the economic systems we promulgate, the agricultural frameworks we set up – all these are the stable foundations for building a community that will persist in time.
There is so much that rides on our decisions and actions in the weeks and months and years ahead. Will the human race ultimately succumb to this extinction event, one that was clearly of its own making? Or will we triumph over adversity and rise again, our arrogance replaced by humility given the ephemeral nature of our species?
It's time to find out.
Yours in Time,
Ammara Lewis,
Miami Beach, FL,
May 10, 2022
CHAPTER 31
Year 150 A.R.
Dade City, Florida
700 km north of Key West Conch Settlements
Oni are Class 3 macrostructures who manifest as bipedal mammals living in matriarchal social groups. Males are 3 meters tall and mostly solitary, while the smaller females seldom reach 2 meters but form the backbone of the society.
- Lady Ammara
Jaq Vega stalked the pack of oni. She peered from behind an old stucco building at the open clearing and watched as they milled around the town square.
There were seven of them in the group. An old matriarch with grotesque breasts that drooped freely and very nearly touched the ground held court under a large banyan tree, whose main trunk sprouted from the base of a crumbling statue at the center of the square. The branches of the tree soared to nearly 20 meters, with the large leathery leaves providing ample shade for the oni underneath. A few of the tree's aerial roots had grown in girth and sprouted secondary branches and leaves to become trunks themselves.
Two adult females hovered close to the matriarch and supervised the children, who squealed and played tag around them, their piping cries echoing hollowly in the otherwise silent town. The youngsters were rotund little things, their flesh saddled with rolls of stored fat, and Jaq's belly rumbled in hunger as she salivated and licked her dry lips.
The two females would be a challenge. One had a few wisps of strawberry blonde hair clinging to her scalp. She was unusually tall even for a female oni and had finely-chiseled features that gave her an ethereal beauty even in the bright light of day, though this was marred by her lack of a mouth, which was replaced by flat unmarked flesh that rippled and throbbed. The other was a brunette, squat and muscular and completely bald, her breasts reduced to small apple-sized knobs above the ridged plane of her abdomen. Her tiny pig's eyes continuously scanned the environment in search of potential enemies, and Jaq decided that this one would pose the most problems, though she really had no choice but to make an attempt on the pack.
She had been traveling for days on an empty stomach, gorging herself on the occasional low overhanging fruit. The empty highway stretched before her, the crumbling asphalt more a suggestion of a path than an actual road, the gaps between its fragments covered with green grass and low bushes, as well as the occasional tree shoot.
Game was few and far between. So far she had not had any luck cornering any of the small furry rat-like creatures that scurried among the debris of the long-deserted towns that she had passed. Nor did she relish tackling some of the larger horned quadrupeds that sometimes crossed the highway, their heavily armored hides crawling with tiny midges that roamed the crevices and folds of skin in search of sustenance.
She pulled an arrow by its shaft from her quiver. She did this carefully, almost reverently. Arrows from the Long Ago were a scarce resource in the settlements. Jaq had hoarded her small collection like a miser protecting his gold, and had spent hours browsing through the old brochures and catalogs in search of arcane knowledge about the forgotten art of bow-hunting.
She held the arrow and quickly inspected it for any imperfections. The black shaft ended in green and yellow vanes and a nock on one end, and held a wicked three bladed broadhead at its front. It weighed remarkably light in her hand, and was made from something called “carbon”. Jaq often wondered how a civilization that could make such wonderful things as this carbon arrow and the intricately complex compound bow that she now readied could have disappeared so easily and quickly.
She tensed as the blond female made a gruff mewling sound. One of the youngsters had strayed too far from the pack and was being warned to get back. The small cub shambled back to his playmates, who started hooting at the miscreant and hopping up and down on their short chubby legs.
Jaq nocked the arrow into the compound bow and drew cleanly and silently using a mechanical release. Her bow was a marvel of engineering, an intricate framework the color of midnight anchored by a forged aluminum riser that was flanked by curved fiberglass limbs and cams
. She had set it to a peak draw weight of 25 kg, which was at the limit of her strength, but the elaborate mechanisms of the bow allowed a “let off” of 70%, and she held it comfortably fully drawn at a holding weight of only 7 kg.
She breathed evenly and slowly as her world narrowed into a singularity of utter calmness. Form was everything when it came to shooting a bow, and her subconscious would decide when to let the arrow fly. A small twitch of her back muscles and her elbow would move backward, pulling her hand back slightly and causing her finger to trigger the mechanical release. A fragile chain of events that would culminate in a perfect shot.
“Lady Ammara,” Jaq thought as her mind dropped into a glacial slowness, and the moment stretched into infinity. “Let my heart be still, my mind clear, and my aim true. Amen.”
The arrow flew. It cleaved the still air at nearly 90 meters per second, and the chisel tip of the 350 grain arrow punched through the keratinized forehead of the blond with an impact force that was strong enough to kill a bear or cape bison. It blew the oni backwards and onto the wizened matriarch, who shrieked as the arrow continued its forward momentum and pinned her by the chest onto the banyan trunk.
Jaq acted without thought or extraneous motion. In one fluid movement she nocked another arrow in her bow and released it into flight. The brunette had darted forwards, her face a snarling mask of rage, and the second arrow drilled into her chest. The sharp blades that followed the tip carved a bloody path into her chest cavity, slicing organs and rending tissues into bleeding chunks of meat before embedding itself in her still-beating heart. The brunette screamed, and a jet black stream of blood erupted from her chest as she toppled face down onto the hard ground.