Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-04

by Penny Publications

  Crowder nodded. "Then we can wipe out the rest of the gulls without any objection from Fed central. They really are a nuisance, you know. We can triple production with them out of the way."

  "How wonderful for you," Hugh mumbled. He felt an odd sensation growing in his gut—a strange, burning electricity. Crowder cut through the bonds on his wrists with two quick flips of his knife. Hugh could barely keep his feet.

  Crowder sprung the latch to the steel door and swung it open on silent hinges. "Goodbye, Hugh," he said, real sadness in his voice. "I can't promise this will be an easy way to die, but it's better than what Groper planned for you. And besides, with the pomum in you, you probably won't notice most of the pain." He nodded to his men, and Hugh was shoved roughly through, falling to his knees on dark red clay. The door slammed shut behind him.

  The room was well lit and twenty paces across, with a high, arching ceiling. Hugh saw a dozen or so gulls. Three of them rose immediately to their feet and scurried toward him. He reached for his FCP training. Authority without subjection. Pride without love.

  Hugh shook his head. That wasn't it. The electricity in his gut had spread, and Hugh found himself shaking with energy, unable to think clearly. Had he been hurt before, unable to move?

  That was gone. He had never felt better. He was strong and powerful. The gulls stalking toward him were pathetic and contemptible creatures, swollen and ugly and stupid. He was a federally trained ecologist, damn it. Such creatures wouldn't dare touch him.

  He reached into his bag, looking for some kind of weapon, something to kill these things with. The part of his brain that was still free of the pomum 's inf luence screamed futilely. There was nothing in his bag—just his measuring equipment, his tablet, a little food. He fiddled with his tablet and then drew back, gasping, and felt warm blood running down his injured shoulder.

  One of the insolent creatures had pecked him. Hugh turned his back to them, to show them how little he thought of them, and pushed hard at the door. To his surprise, it did not fly open at his touch, resisting his powerful hands. No matter. He set himself a steady rhythm of blows, knowing the steel would break to his superior strength, his mighty fists.

  Another bolt of pain stabbed like a dagger into his back, and Hugh fell to his knees, gasping.

  For a moment, his mind cleared.

  He was going to die.

  Unless he found a way to use his FCP training, and quickly.

  Hugh stood and turned back to the gulls, pulling his tablet out, assuming as close to the FCP stance as he could.

  Then he began to sing.

  It was an old hymn, a hymn he sang from memory, a memory from long ago, sitting beside his father in the how. The song reverberated across the high-ceiling of the room and echoed back to him. The echoes comforted him, made him feel like he was at home. And all his fear and pain and anger began to shrink, smaller and smaller, bottled up into one small portion of his brain. He could still feel the po-mum, telling him how strong and mighty he was, but it no longer seemed to matter. The voice was like a tiny cricket, chirping to the stars.

  Hugh fell into FCP easily, naturally, like he was putting on an old pair of gloves. He projected strength and power, but a far different power than the insanity of the pomum. Authority without pride. Love without subjection.

  The gulls backed away, hissing and closing ranks. They retreated only a few steps, however, and then they stopped, waiting. Waiting for him to slip.

  Hugh sang on.

  And on and on.

  Blood dripped down his back, mixing with the red of the clay. He held the tablet tightly to his chest.

  He sang every hymn he knew, and then started to sing them again, fighting the weakness that was slowly spreading through him, from fear and pain and loss of blood.

  Then, as if from a great distance, he heard a new sound. The sound of muffled cracking and human shouts, coming from the corridor behind him. And something else, something he couldn't place, as if a great force of wind was blowing outside.

  The new sounds grew louder, soon overwhelming the dim echoes of Hugh's song, until it sounded like there was a hurricane waiting behind the steel door.

  And then the door burst open, swinging wide. Hugh turned, and looked, and saw a strange woman with a white armband stumble through. And behind her, pouring out of the corridor in a gray and white wave, came dozens and dozens of gulls, gulls beyond counting, crying their high calls.

  Hugh passed out.

  "Do you mind if I record this conversation?" Hugh asked, sipping hot cider. The nice looking porter had brought them a pair of mugs. Crowder's men had roughed her up a bit, she had a black eye and would need a new incisor, but they certainly hadn't damaged her kindness.

  "By all means," Mayor Herd said. The mayor looked old and worn around the edges, likely exhausted from the last few weeks of work.

  "It will help greatly with my final report," Hugh said, setting his tablet to record. His shoulder twinged a bit, but it was mostly healed now. "First question, how did you know that the bosses were planning on killing me?"

  "I've suspected them of being behind the gull attacks ever since they started. Boss Groper's always been an advocate for killing them off, and Simon is as sneaky as he is fat. And they both hate the Federation passionately."

  "And what about Crowder?"

  Mayor Herd shifted in her seat and looked down. "Crowder provided certain... items for me that made it difficult for me to suspect him."

  Hugh nodded, to show he understood. It wouldn't do to have a ruling mayor admit to a pomum addiction on record.

  "So I had you followed, discretely, by some of my women. Officers Vickers and Crown were on duty the night they attacked you, and when Vickers failed to report in..." Mayor Herd shrugged. "I knew."

  "Did they—?"

  "Vickers is fine," the Mayor reassured him. "Shaken up, I think, and mad at herself for letting them sneak up on her, but not seriously hurt."

  "So Officer Crown followed them to the nesting grounds?"

  "Correct," Mayor Herd nodded. She raised the mug to her lips, but then set it down without taking a sip, her hands shaking badly. Advanced withdrawal. That was another reason she looked worn out. "Crown radioed us, and I gathered as many of my personal guard as I could for an attack."

  "How many was that?"

  "About fifty," the Mayor said. "Not nearly enough, not with all three bosses' security details there. We were losing badly. And then the gulls showed up." The Mayor gave him a piercing look. "And that's where you owe me an explanation, I think."

  Hugh shrugged. "You're aware, of course, that I toured Crowder's mines the day before the attack? Well, while I was there, the gulls' nesting ground was assaulted by a huge pod of ground spiders." Hugh held up the tablet. "I recorded all of the gulls' alarm calls during that attack, intending to analyze them later. Crowder was foolish enough to give the tablet back to me, not knowing it could reproduce sound, I'm guessing."

  "So you sent out an alarm call?" the Mayor asked, the admiration clear in her voice.

  "It was the only thing I could think of," Hugh said.

  "But we didn't hear anything. The gulls almost never make calls, except when they're attacking."

  "It's infrasound," Hugh explained. "Pitched too low for humans to hear, but it travels long distances easily. I just needed one gull within about fifteen kilometers to hear it and pass it along to the others."

  "How were you so sure they would all come?"

  "I wasn't," Hugh admitted, shrugging. "But I was drugged up and bleeding and in pain, and it was the only thing I could think of."

  "Well it certainly worked," the Mayor said, shuddering. "I've never seen so many gulls in my life, swarming over the horizon like a rolling thunderhead. They didn't even attack the guards, just tried to get past them. But there were so many of them..." She shook her head. "I think Groper thought they were coming for him, specifically."

  "Justice from above," Hugh said, smiling at the thought
. The two lapsed into silence, sipping their drinks. Mayor Herd's leg quivered terribly.

  "Well, on the record, the Federation thanks you for your loyalty and service," Hugh said. He flipped the recorder off. "And off the record, how are you getting along?"

  The mayor gave him a tight smile. "I'm on enough sedatives to knock out three grown men. Other than that..." The smile faded, and a haunted look came into her eyes. "I'm not doing so well."

  "Are you a praying person?" Hugh asked.

  "Are you serious?"

  "You might be surprised," Hugh said. "Stop by the Federal aedis sometime. There's a nice, portly overseer there that always has lots of mint. It might help." He stood up, stretching. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm having lunch with a nice woman with a black eye, and you're not invited."

  Mayor Herd chuckled and stood, shaking Hugh's hand. "Good luck to you," she said.

  "Thank you," Hugh said. "Thank you for everything."

  The mayor nodded and strode out, her steps a little shaky. Hugh settled back into the chair, and finished his cider.

  * * *

  Pollution

  Don Webb | 4360 words

  For centuries, Nagoya has been known for its mechanized puppets or karakuri ningyô. It is no surprise that Nagoya leads the world with both roboto and kyonshi technologies.

  —Nagoya Handbook, 2035 edition

  Billy Parsons had never seen an American kyonshi. He had been living in Nagoya for four months as an English teacher. It was an unsteady job; employment mavens were predicting English would soon be on the way out, replaced by the winner's language in the Chinese-Brazilian War. Billy didn't care—he was a Nippophile of the first water. He was living in Japan, damn it, Japan, and every step was a movement toward some Rising Sun moment. Every sushi roll, every cup of matcha, every recording of a mournful samisen brought him that much closer to what he wanted to be.

  The kyonshi ( Billy would never use the cruder term zombi) pushed a broom down the school's corridor. The winking lights of his headgear were as Japanese as could be. Billy knew his school had money, but a job like this was commonly done by a roboto. Billy pulled out a phone and snapped a picture. All of his friends back in Paterson would be jealous. He wondered from whom the school had bought the kyonshi. In life, he would have been middle aged. His white skin was tanned and leathery, disfigured with several hairy moles, and the robotic eyes had been made to look blue. The shambling figure reminded him of a businessman, partly because he was dressed in a pinstriped western business suit (albeit if a much stronger/thicker fabric) and partially because it resembled Billy's dad. A kyonshi! A real live kyonshi! Well, maybe "live" is not the best choice of terms. Billy was something of a klutz in the sciences. He thought of the zombies as undead. Something his mom would have liked, like vampire novels or hip-hop. He remembered his great disappointment when Mom had given him the George Romero film collection for his thirteenth birthday. "You're a boy aren't you? Boys love zombies!" she had said. Billy did not understand that his lack of love for American horror might somehow indicate a taste for other boys in his mom's eyes. She was so relieved later when she found that his manga focused on tentacle rape. Thank Jesus he's normal.

  Billy's dad had passed last year. Weeks of sitting in the hospital in Patterson, watching the nurses stripping the brown clotted blood from the drainage tubes on his chest, smelling the fake pine forest smell of the air freshener, listening to the old man lapse into diatribes against the government's failure to prevent Texan succession, hate-filled rants against his mother's adultery, tasteless jokes about the Great Wall of Canada. Billy had been so glad and so guilty that day Dad had tried to stand without warning and began the pouring out of the last of his tired and toxic blood. As the dangerous chemical splashed on the tiles, Billy thought of the red rays of the Rising Sun. His dreams had come at last, as his family conveniently left the stage. It was a great and Shakespearean moment. Of course had he lived anywhere else—any civilized place—even Texas, he could have sold Dad's dying body to the zombie makers. He could have left that day for his spiritual homeland and lived like the Mikado. Seeing the kyonshi was a sign—his father's ghost had joined him in Japan. All was well. All was good. Everything was tending toward its kami state.

  The class bell broke this anti-Hamlet reverie, and he hurried to his class to teach English to students who were doing what their parents had done for six generations since Pearl Harbor, learning the language of power. Today's lesson: an infinitive can be used just like a noun in all cases save for the possessive. To err is human. Mr. Parsons loves to read.

  Three hours later Billy knelt on his tatami mats practicing sitting Zen. His computer screen simulated the meditation master. His randomly selected Koan: "Hogen pointed to the bamboo blinds with his hand. At that moment, two monks who were there went over to the blinds and rolled them up. Hogen said, 'One has gained, one has lost.' " Billy had no idea what that meant, but it was so damn Japanese! He focused his mind attentively on the koan, and attended to his breath. Fifteen minutes later he began to nod off, and as his head bent toward the f loor, the computer made a booming noise awakening him. His neighbors pounded his wall and yelled in Japanese. Billy did not know if he was closer to enlightenment. He would have to buy better software to detect that, and such modern (or was it postmodern) touches seemed to Billy to be cheating. Enlightenment should come the old fashioned way.

  Later he updated his status on the social networks. His old friends in the Patterson Ottaku Club were suitably impressed. Nothing said Japan more than a kyonshi.

  Four best-selling manga were devoted to kyonshi: Kyonshi Love, Reverend Deadman, Kynoshi Girl, and Air Raid Siren. Kyonshi Love featured Katsumi, who intentionally exposed himself to the virus so that he could track his childhood sweetheart Kasumi—it was a retelling of the Robert Silverberg novella "Born with the Dead." Reverend Deadman was a zombie Lutheran minister that had broken free from his controller and ran a church in Tokyo by day and fought alien sex fiends by night. His "undead" status gave him limitless energy and immunity from the aliens' sex rays. Kyonshi Girl was a school girl, who despite the fact her family had sold her as a kyonshi, sought the love of a demon prince and kept losing her underwear in interesting and creative ways. Air Raid Siren paid homage to a popular conspiracy theory that the virus was not man-made at all but had appeared at the Hiroshima blast. Billy loved them all. Of course they had nothing to do with the actual biology and economics of kyonshis.

  When Billy was in high school, Dr. Kenta Sasaki developed the "zombie virus." He had been working with artificial viruses that slow down and stabilize human metabolic functions. His initial work drew from the same reasoning as Western cryonics. If you give a terminal patient a few more years, a cure might be found. Dr. Sasaki's own brother had died a few years before the AIDS cure. The virus stabilized tissue, but like other filioviruses, say Ebola and Marburg, it showed a great affinity for the cells of the brain, eyes, and reproductive organs. Dr. Sasaki had been very careful in his design, the zombie virus did not share its sisters ability to infect rapidly. In fact the virus only infected one in ten people it was tried on in the best of circumstances. It was easy to cure, that is to eliminate it from the system—but the damage it did (especially to the brain) proved irreversible.

  Some wealthy people underwent the infection as their only hope. Maybe their rare cancer, maybe their unidentifiable disease would be cured and a cure found for the zombie virus. Their shambling state, their pale skin might be ended in some happy future. But given their looks and the years of zombie mythology in popular culture—they were seen as grade A George Romero living dead. Although their tasteless food was made by baby food manufacturers, any number of brain-eating jokes came into being in the early years.

  Soon there were rest homes in Japan, Canada, Dubai, and Italy full of the blind mindless exhumans that seemed happy to live forever— as long as they didn't wander in front of a speeding car or disappear into an open elevator shaft. There were human rig
hts debates, tired old clichés about the dignity of human life were traded by both sides. Then Capeksen, a Japanese robotic firm, came up with a solution. Scoop out the eyes and upper brain and put a few dedicated microprocessors in to take care of things. The robotic eyes saw, and looked better than blackened pustules. The computers used the remaining nervous system to move the "dead" man around. Suddenly the zombies could care for themselves. They could shower, they could fix food, they seemed more human.

  At first no one had thought of them as slaves.

  The next day Billy wanted to shoot a film of the kyonshi washing toilets in his school. He remained after class. The kyonshi paid no heed to him as he knelt in front of each toilet and washed it clean. Billy thought this guy would get more out of Zen training than he was. He squirted some blue fluid into each bowl, methodically swished its white porcelain interior, then flushed. Billy shot him processing three bowls in a row and was about to leave when the kyonshi tripped on a small pencil stub dropped by a careless student. It pitched forward and dunked its head into the water. Billy winced at the cracking sound of the control unit hitting the bowl, and thought about getting swirlies in the eight grade. Emergency programs went into play and it pulled itself out. The crownlike controller on its head blinked on and off and on and off. The zombie sat with its back against the stall. It looked at Billy and said in toneless Japanese, "An accident has occurred. Please call a Capeksen technician. An accident has occurred, please call a Capeksen technician. Thank you for your aid in maintaining this expensive Kyonshi Mark VI." The kyonshi cradled its head in its pale hands like a human with a bad headache. All of the lights went out. Billy's instinctive programming as a human being took over, and he, forgetting that he was watching a zombie, ran to what seemed to be a dying man. The kyonshi breathed slowly and evenly. It must be in some sort of sleep mode, thought Billy. He ran to the headmaster's office.