by Scott Reeves
The corridor was crowded, with people mindlessly bustling about their futile lives. Business as usual. Millions of habitable worlds in the Galactic Union, plenty of room for everybody to have plenty of room to themselves, but no, he had to live on one of the worlds with nearly a trillion people that were constantly in your way, anywhere you went. And most of them were assholes.
The corridor was lined with stores: restaurants, drug parlors, love houses, grocers. The usual sort of stores one found in the commercial districts of any building.
He stepped to the side of the corridor, out of the way. He touched the side of his neck, thinking to interface the Net and call up Windy. But he felt only bare, cratered skin where his interface should have been, and belatedly remembered that he had hocked his interface to make his rent last week.
He thought about Samala and her Daddy, and Windy and her father. Must be nice to have parents to live with rent free. His own parents had died in a hovercar accident four years ago, when he was thirteen. Good old fucking Mac. Nearly a trillion people on the planet, and his parents had to be the ones to pay for one of Mac’s rare errors. After that, it had been a choice between living in an orphanage, or paying his own way in the cruel world. No choice, really. Parents would have been nice, but not the artificial orphanage parents that would have been mere avatars of the AI that had killed his real parents. Not a choice at all.
He had a room in a seedy hotel a few corridors over, in a rough neighborhood of narrow hallways with foul liquids oozing down the concrete walls and stagnant pools of noxious scum on the floors. Gang members stood outside the thousands of doors that lined the halls, giving the stink eye to anyone that passed and looking for mugging targets. Prostitutes wandered about, looking for a quick buck that would let them return to their chemical nirvanas.
Mal didn’t want to go back to his hotel. Not yet.
He sighed. He couldn’t go back to Samala, and he couldn’t easily get in contact with Windy. Maybe he would go hooking. There were always girls hanging out wherever guys were hooking. He could latch his hook onto a passing hovercar, show off his aerobatic skills as he dangled from the end of his rope. It was a fun game, hooking. Then, if he impressed one of the watching girls, maybe he’d be able to hook his dick into her snatch.
He smiled, settled upon his course of action for the evening. He turned back to the bank of transmat pads, thinking to beam upstairs to the ‘scraper heights, where he could find a hook and show off.
Just as he was reaching out to punch his destination into the control, the transmat pads all along the row began spitting out psychos.
One after another, men and women materialized and immediately leapt off the pads, attacking anyone who happened to be nearby. Anyone like Mal himself, not more than three feet from the pads.
A newly-materialized woman in her thirties growled and jumped off the pad at him. She was gorgeous, the type of perfect beauty that only comes from genetic manipulation. Ordinarily, he would have chatted her up, tried to put his dick into her snatch. Some older women were flattered by the attention of young studs. But this woman wasn’t up for that today, apparently. She bowled him over. They rolled across the corridor floor and broke apart, scattering pedestrians like bowling pins. She got to her hands and knees and gnashed her teeth at him, slobbering all over herself, her eyes burning him with her rage.
He got up and ran, dodging and weaving his way through the crowd, pushing people out of his way. He heard the woman hard on his heels, growling, teeth snapping.
Screams receded into the distance, the screams of other people being attacked. All along the wall as he ran, the transmats continued spitting out people like his pursuer. He saw normal people going down, being bitten into by the psychos.
“What the fuck is going on?” he shouted to no one in particular.
He saw a robocop striding through the crowd up ahead. He raced for the mechanized lawman, thinking it would think a crime was underway and stop the woman pursuing him. But as he drew closer, he realized that the robocop wasn’t doing anything to help anyone. There was chaos all around, people attacking one another all throughout the corridor, but the robocop just stood there, ignoring everything, his shoulder turrets pointed down at the ground, like limp dicks. What was wrong with the damn thing?
He had been a fool to think the robocop would have noticed him in the midst of the chaos, even if the thing had been functioning properly.
He almost tripped on the thing’s enormous foot pad as he raced past, barely managing to catch himself from falling as his foot clipped the metal giant. It hurt his foot like a son of a bitch, but he just kept running.
Finally the woman behind him lost interest in him and went for easier prey: a fat guy he had just passed, plenty of meat, a veritable smorgasbord for his pursuer.
Mal slowed a bit. Now that he wasn’t quite so panicked, a single thought flared in his mind: Samala! Her dad would be beaming home any second, if he hadn’t already.
“Fuck!” He stopped and looked at the wall to his right. Samala was five hundred feet beyond that wall, and slightly behind, back by the transmat pad he had arrived on. There were rows of apartments between him and her, inaccessible by any hallway or corridor. The price of living in the slums; only one way inside.
No, not only one way. Off to his left, near the floor, a ventilation grille beckoned. The air ducts. There was more than one way into apartments like Samala’s. But one entrance, the one no one ever really thought about, was only used by burglars and perverts.
He knew the route to her apartment through the ducts. He had often thought about using them to sneak into her room at night, after her father had locked down their transmat. He had gone so far as mapping the route out once, a few months back. So he would have no problem getting back to her apartment and rescuing her from her father. And he had no doubt that she would need rescuing, if her precious Daddy came through the transmat all psycho like these other poor people.
He dashed over to the wall, bent over, and ripped off the grille, tossed it aside. With a final look at the chaos in the corridor—the carnage, the bloody violence, the savage deaths—he hunkered down and prepared to enter the ventilation duct.
That’s when something astonished occurred that just about literally scared the shit out of him. An obviously dead, fat man lying along the base of the wall nearby, his abdomen ripped open, intestines snaking out of the wound like thick, bloody cables, stirred and got to his hands and knees. The man’s gaze fell on Mal, and the resurrected man licked his lips hungrily.
“That’s fucking impossible!” Mal shouted at the man.
He shivered and fought back a wave of nausea as he scrambled into the narrow black opening that led into the ventilation system.
As he crawled along through the darkness and the screams faded behind him, a sudden thought occurred to him: why had his mind been instantly drawn to concern over Samala’s safety?
Could it be that he had fallen in love?
Samala Vintron
Galactic Year 912, Month 4, Day 12
4:50 PM Planetary Standard Time
Samala screamed as Daddy leapt from the transmat pad and tackled her. He straddled her and glared down at her, his eyes wild and enraged. He gnashed his teeth in her face, his mouth frothing white at the corners. His powerful hands grabbed her wrists and pinned her arms to either side of her head. She smothered under his weight.
“Daddy!” she screamed. But it wasn’t Daddy. There was no trace of Daddy in those horrible, vacant eyes. There was only wild, hungry animal.
He clawed roughly at her clothing, ripping her blouse, his fingers raking a bloody gouge in her skin as her left breast popped out through the jagged rent he’d made in the fabric. Samala screamed at the fiery pain. She wasn’t certain whether this beast that looked like her father was trying to rape her, eat her, or claw her to shreds. Maybe all three.
The matter was decided when he dipped his face toward her neck, his teeth bared, mouth opening wide for a
bite. Definitely trying to eat her.
“Daddy, no!” she screamed.
She wasn’t completely helpless. She had taken a self-defense class every year at school. She just hated to have to use those techniques on Daddy, the only family she had left in this vast, impersonal world. She loved Daddy. She didn’t want to hurt him.
But she slammed her knee up into his crotch. This thing wasn’t Daddy!
The blow didn’t faze him. Whatever he had become, he apparently no longer suffered from the traditional male weakness. Or maybe he was now just too much of an animal to feel pain.
His gnashing teeth drew ever closer to her jugular. She tried to free her arms and press him back away from her. But his grip was too firm, his strength too great. Daddy had always been a physically powerful man, but not like this. He seemed to have an unnatural strength now.
But strength could be used against an opponent.
His was straining against her, trying to get to her jugular. So using his weight on her upper body as a lever, she lifted her waist and legs and shoved him forward, helping him reach his goal. He pitched forward onto her. Taken by surprise, the top of his head bore against her neck and she cried out in pain. His head slid to the side and banged against the floor, and she continued lifting with her legs until he had pitched forward and landed in a heap next to her.
His grip on her arms was drastically loosened due to his awkward position, so that she was able to slip out of his grasp. She wriggled quickly out from beneath his bulk, stood, and raced to her bedroom.
Behind her, Daddy growled, and before she was halfway across the living room, he leapt up and raced after her.
But she reached the door first. She raced through into her bedroom, whacking the button on the wall as she hurtled past. With a pneumatic hiss, the door slid shut behind her, and not a moment too soon. Daddy slammed against the barrier with so much force she feared the door might not hold.
But it did.
She pressed her back against the far wall, facing the door with wide eyes filled with tears.
He banged at the door again. It shook under the assault, but held. Again he threw himself against the door. Again. Again.
“Daddy!” she screamed. “Stop! You’ll hurt yourself!”
But he didn’t stop. He threw himself continuously at the door, mindlessly intent upon battering his way into her bedroom. The door shook, threatening with each blow to jump its track. The metal was actually crumpling, bowing inward.
It was just a matter of time.
Samala’s mind raced furiously. She had to get out of the apartment. The only way out of her bedroom was through the door, and she would never make it past her father. Even if she did manage to make it past him, the only way out of the apartment was through the transmat. Other people had corridor access, but this was the planetary slums. Double access was a convenience she and Daddy couldn’t afford.
She didn’t know what had happened to Daddy, but it must have had something to do with the transmat, so she dared not use it to escape lest she wind up like him. So once past her father, she would merely be trapped in the living room with him, which was definitely not an improvement over her current situation.
She had to get out of the apartment, but how? She cowered against the wall, whimpering, staring at the battered door, wincing each time her father slammed against it. It was hopeless. She was going to die, devoured or raped by Daddy. Neither prospect appealed to her.
“Hey!” a man’s voice suddenly hissed at her. “Over here!”
She looked around, startled. Who had said that? Her wild gaze traveled around the room, searching. “Who—where—are you?” she said with a trembling voice.
“Over here!” the urgent voice repeated.
Then she saw. Up near the ceiling. The ventilation duct. She had always realized, at the back of her mind, that the air ducts must have been almost large enough to crawl through. But she had never really considered the ducts as a way out of the apartment. They had always been just a creepy, shadowy recess with unimaginable arachnid horrors lurking in the darkness.
Behind the grille, she saw a pair of eyes staring out at her.
Then the grille popped off and clattered to the ground. A man’s head popped out. An older man, maybe ten years older than Daddy. Pale, creepy. Like one of the things she had always imagined must be lurking in the darkness of the ducts.
He reached an arm out from the darkness of the duct, holding out his hand. “Come on! Hurry, sweetie!”
She took a step back. Behind her, the door thumped once again as Daddy threw himself against it. The metal groaned, and the top left corner of the door popped the track.
She leapt for the ventilation duct, grabbed the man’s hand. He yanked her upward, helped her scramble up the wall and into the shadows of the duct. He crawled to the right, receding into the darkness, away from the square of light cast into the duct by her bedroom light.
Sliding along on her stomach like a worm, Samala wriggled into the darkness after him, fleeing the monster Daddy about to break into her bedroom. She didn’t know it, but as she passed, her right leg slid through the fresh ejaculate oozing down the side wall of the air duct, coating her pants with an oily dark spot.
Edoard Dogon
Galactic Year 912, Month 4, Day 12
4:52 PM Planetary Standard Time
Ed still knelt in the middle of the empty control room. Empty, that is, save for the corpse of Chris Donu, slumped before his console. He listened to the distant screams from the lobby. He thought about picking up the pistol that lay near his knees, and vaporizing his own head.
This day was a disaster. An utter, fucking disaster. And judging by those screams out there, it would only get worse. Everyone who had been beaming at the time they’d opened the new subspace channel must have come out of the matter stream just like Sherm.
That thought bit through Ed’s shock. People were still using the transmats! He had to shut down the matter stream! Hell, he had to shut down the whole damn system!
He got to his feet and looked at Chris Donu’s readouts. The system was still wide open. Mac hadn’t shut it down. Why hadn’t Mac shut it down?
“Mac!” he shouted. “Shut down the matter stream! Fuck, I mean, shut down the transmat system. The whole damn thing, take it down!”
A moan issued from the nowhere in particular. A garbled syllable was uttered, maybe a word, maybe just another moan. It was hard to tell.
“Mac?” Ed asked. “Mac? Are you there? Are you all right?”
The moan again, a deep bass rumbling that seemed to issue from the air itself. Mac, trying to respond. Or Mac, moaning in pain?
Sudden realization struck Ed. Mac’s consciousness was housed in Caldor’s primary subspace channel. Mac lived in subspace. If Mac was malfunctioning, that meant whatever was in the subspace channel they’d just opened had spilled over into the other subspace channels. It wasn’t just people who had been infected. Mac was infected too.
“Fuck!” Ed shouted, and then winced at his own idiocy. He didn’t want to draw the attention of whoever was out in the lobby wreaking havoc.
Fuck. Mac ran everything on the planet. Everything. The ships, the transmat system, the banks, the atmosphere generators, the Net…
The fucking Net! Ed snapped his fingers. The Net was connected to subspace, and a great many people’s brains were physically connected to the Net through their interfaces. How would that affect them?
Ed felt the cold metal of his own interface implant against his neck with a sudden, painful clarity. His interface had gone on the fritz yesterday, and he hadn’t yet gotten around to taking it in for repair. Thank all the gods of the universe for small favors. He fought the urge to rip the thing out of his neck and dash it against the ground. He felt like he had a dangerously poisonous spider squatting on his neck.
Suddenly, Ed heard a distant, muffled boom. The control room vibrated and shook violently. Plaster and dust rained from the ceiling. Pens rolled off de
sks and a clipboard clattered to the ground.
Ed’s heart caught in his throat. There was a spaceport on the top of this building, fifty floors up. Surely only a crashing starship could have shaken the building like that. With Mac out of commission, there would undoubtedly be more such crashes, all across the planet. Mac assumed automatic control of all spacecraft from the time they entered orbit until the time they left.
With Mac out of commission, Ed didn’t think it was too big an exaggeration to say that Caldorian civilization was going to collapse. Hell, it was collapsing even as he stood there indecisively.
No, he wasn’t indecisive. He knew exactly what had to be done. He had to get down to the local transmat subspace interface and shut down the matter stream, fuck up the whole transmat system so badly that it went offline.
Then he had to somehow get out a planetary distress call. If Mac hadn’t already. If the Prime Minister hadn’t already. He couldn’t count on either possibility.
At that moment, he could count on nothing but himself. At the moment, as far as he knew, everything was up to him.
He barked a laugh. Caldor was doomed.
Two seconds after Ed had decided upon his course of action, Chris Donu got to his feet and growled at Ed, his teeth bared. Veins, arteries, skin and muscle dangled from the huge hole in his neck where Sherm had been feasting.
Ed’s eyes widened. “You know, I really didn’t see this one coming,” he muttered. Of all the dooms he envisioned coming to Caldor on this day, the dead rising had not been one of them.