by Scott Reeves
So he stopped a few dozen feet from her apartment, and lay in the darkness, considering his next moves. The air duct clutched him like a fist, and he was all too conscious of the weight of the entire city above him. He was beginning to feel a bit smothered.
After a few moments of thinking thusly, he realized that there was light shining in on his face through a grille next to him. He heard movement behind the grille, and a sniffing. The same sort of sniffing Jordan Vintron had done. Then came a low growl, and something began clawing at the grille, trying to get to him.
Just then it occurred to him that he was surrounded by row upon row of apartments just like Samala’s that had no entry or exit other than through the transmat or the air ducts. Billions of people would beam home and find themselves turned into raging monsters trapped in their own homes.
But—and it was a crucial but—how many people had not left their apartments that day, or had gotten home before the transmats had gone screwy? There were slums like this all over the planet. Assuming this catastrophe was world-wide, there could be millions of people trapped in their apartments, all across the planet. Maybe they didn’t know that anything had happened. Maybe they did, but didn’t know how to get out without their transmats.
Right now, half the apartments around him could be full of people needing rescue.
“Fuck,” he sighed. He wormed himself away from the grille and the frustrated thing in the room beyond it. Then he lay there to think some more, sweating profusely all the while.
A million thoughts raced through his mind. What had happened? Was this really a major catastrophe, or did Mac already have it under control? Somehow, he doubted it. His instincts were telling him that something had gone way beyond wrong. In which case, was he himself going to survive this?
Yes, he determined. He was. And so was Samala. He would find her, and then…and then what?
He began crawling again, with no clear destination in mind, only the goal of miraculously stumbling across Samala.
He went more slowly this time, and took a few moments to stare through each of the grilles he passed. The first few, he either heard or glimpsed the transmat monsters bounding around the apartments like trapped animals desperately seeking food or a way out.
But soon he looked out into a living room in which a disgustingly obese man sat in a large chair, staring blankly at one wall of the room. Mal figured there was a Net screen in the wall that had gone dark when this catastrophe had begun.
“Hey,” Mal said.
The obese man twitched, startled, and looked around the room for the source of the voice. “Who’s there?” he said.
“Over here,” Mal said. He punched at the grille until it clattered out into the man’s living room. He poked his head out and waved at the man.
“Who are you?” the man asked. He slowly rose to his feet. His weight was so great that it was a struggle. But eventually he managed to waddle over to stand beneath the grille looking up at Mal. “What are you doing in there?”
Mal didn’t really know what to say. The man obviously wouldn’t be able to climb into the air ducts to escape. The fat fool was going to die in his apartment. His food would eventually run out, and he would starve. Mal really didn’t want to be the one to tell him that.
“I—um,” he said, searching for what to say. “Just…don’t use your transmat, all right? Lock it down.”
“What? Why? Who are you? Why has my Net monitor gone down?”
“Where’s your interface?” Mal asked.
“Had to take it out. It was causing health problems.”
“Look,” Mal said. “There’s been some sort of accident. Just don’t use your transmat, all right?”
“Why not? What sort of accident? Who the hell are you?”
What could Mal say? The transmats are making people go insane, and anyone they attack rises from the dead? The fat fool would think he was insane himself. “You may be in here awhile. Good luck.” Mal started backing away through the duct.
“Hey,” the man said. “Hey. Help me.”
“I’m Sorry,” Mal muttered, and kept on crawling until he was too far away to hear the poor bastard anymore. What could he possibly do for the man? It wasn’t Mal’s fault the idiot hadn’t gotten treatment for his obesity. There was no excuse for being so disgustingly heavy in this day and age. Maybe the guy was one of those perverts who actually liked having a lot of flesh.
A few minutes later he literally bumped into another man crawling through the ducts. It was so dark he couldn’t see anything, and was so lost in his worrisome thoughts that he wasn’t aware of the man’s presence until he came face to face with him.
“Fuck!” Mal hissed. “You scared the holy shit out of me!”
“Who are you?” the man asked with a trace of annoyance in his voice.
Mal’s eyes could barely make out the man’s face in the darkness. “Name’s Mal. I’m looking for my girlfriend. Have you seen a girl crawling around in here?”
“A girl? No, I haven’t seen a girl.”
“Well, what are you doing in here?” Mal asked.
“Escaping,” the man said. “Just like you are, I presume. The wife went bonkers, and I barely got out alive.”
Mal nodded, but doubted the man could see it. He had to admit that he was feeling a tremendous sense of relief to have someone with whom to share the danger. “What’s your name?”
“Bin.” The man’s voice was suddenly shaky with anxiety. “Do you know what’s going on? There are a lot of people in these apartments who are acting like someone shoved thorny sticks up their asses.”
Was it just Mal’s imagination, or was his new companion snickering? “The world has gone to hell,” Mal said. “That’s what’s happened.”
Andy Watson
Galactic Year 912, Month 4, Day 12
5:20 PM Planetary Standard Time
Andy didn’t know how long he had been pushing against the door, leaning his full weight against it. He just felt that if he let go, one of the psychopaths might push the door open and come in after him. Or maybe one of the robocops. Could robocops open doors? He didn’t know.
So he pushed against it with all his might until his arm grew shaky and his shoulder hurt from the pressure. There was a peephole in the center of the door, and he kept his eye pressed to it constantly. Still a swarm of activity outside: psychopaths on the prowl, robocops blasting away at anything that moved.
Every few minutes, the building shook, rocked by explosions both nearby and distant. Occasionally, he heard the muffled thudding footsteps of a robocop striding past the building. It frightened him to picture the machine-man just a few feet away, separated from him only by a concrete wall. Of course, the concrete wall had stood up quite well to the barrage from the robocop that had recently pursued him. But that didn’t comfort his fears much.
After a good long while during which no one had tried the door, he thought maybe he could relax a bit. Maybe have a look around his new shelter. So he pulled back from the door, rubbing at his shoulder.
It wasn’t quite pitch black in the room, but it was close. A meager bit of light was shining in through the narrow, narrow gap between the door and the frame. Just enough that he could make out shapes in the darkness, if he squinted long enough.
There was some sort of workbench that ran the length of the wall to the right of the door, cluttered with various types of tools. Some nails, screws, stem bolts, brushes. It reminded him of the family tool shed back home on the farm. He couldn’t really see the items too well; he merely knew what they were by touch. Pretty standard stuff, a handyman’s dream. He even found a crowbar which he set on the edge of the workbench next to the door, to keep it within easy reach if someone came through the door.
To the left of the door was a desk whose work surface was cluttered with papers. He tugged at the desk to see if it was bolted to the floor. It wasn’t. Perfect. He went to the side of the desk and pushed, gritting his teeth as it scraped loudly across t
he floor, sounding like someone raking their fingernails down a chalkboard. He idly wondered if they even had chalkboards on Caldor. Probably not. Too low-tech.
He stopped pushing when the desk was wedged good and tight in front of the door. Now someone would have a difficult time getting inside. He would at least have a decent amount of warning and time to mount a defense. The peephole was easily accessible too, so he could keep an eye on things on the rooftop spaceport.
Figuring he was relatively safe for the moment, he turned to explore the building. First, he looked for a light switch. He felt along the wall starting to the right of the door. He didn’t find any switches around the workbench, and he continued past the bench until he reached the start of the wall which ran parallel to the edge of the rooftop. There, he found a single large plastic button. He pressed it.
There was a loud grating sound. A crack of light appeared along the entire length of the wall, and widened as some sort of segmented shutter retracted up toward the ceiling, revealing a single long window that looked out over the city.
Andy squinted out into the painful brightness, seeing little until his eyes adjusted from being in the dark for so long. What he saw when he had adjusted sent a wave of vertigo-induced nausea rippling through his stomach.
The building was perched on a precipice. Below his feet was a drop of untold miles, a narrow canyon between his skyscraper and the one directly across the way. The canyon stretched to left and right beyond his field of vision, a chasm so deep that when he looked down he couldn’t see the ground, just a convergence of straight lines into a haze of shadow, a dizzying demonstration of the concept of vanishing points.
The horizon was a jagged sea of rooftops. In the distance, columns of black smoke roiled upward, marking the location of crashed ships or hovertraffic. Even as he watched, new explosions bloomed in half a dozen places along the horizon, adding to the smoke.
Speaking of hovertraffic, the sides of the skyscrapers in his immediate vicinity bore numerous streaks of red and black where runaway air cars had impacted, smearing their occupants across the concrete facades. A few cars and buses still raced through the canyons, somehow lucky enough to have thus far avoided crashing. Perhaps it wasn’t luck; perhaps Mac was still in control of them. If so, Andy thanked God he wasn’t a passenger in them, at the mercy of a malfunctioning AI.
Immediately outside the long window was a railed platform attached to cables and pulleys. The platform could apparently be raised and lowered along the side of the skyscraper, to carry people or cargo. Perhaps a platform for window washers, or a way for maintenance men to make repairs to the side of the building.
There was a control console at the center of the windowed wall. Andy found a switch on the console that caused the window to retract up into the ceiling; apparently the window wasn’t glass but rather some sort of transparent, highly flexible plastic. He also found a series of buttons that raised and lowered the platform.
He did a few tests. He hit a button, and the platform gave a rough lurch before slowly moving downward. Hitting the button again caused the platform to lurch to a halt. He hit a second button and the platform lurched upward until it was in its original position.
Hanging on the wall to the right of the window was a racy calendar with a picture of a beautiful nude women staring lasciviously out at Andy. Embarrassed, he took the calendar down, closed it, and took it back to the desk where he tucked it away in a drawer. He was single and didn’t think single men should see such sights until they were married.
Inside the drawer where he placed the calendar, he found a fatline phone. It was like finding an old friend. The fatline was the main method of communication on Molon. Here, he knew, it was a relic; back home, it was current technology.
He set the phone on the workbench next to the crowbar, thinking that both might come in handy sometime soon.
The desk had had a chair in front of it, and he was just about to sit down in it to consider what the future held for him when suddenly there was a knock on the door. It seemed so out of place with his expectations that he gave a manic laugh. Who would be knocking so politely in the midst of such chaos? He had expected the first sound at the door would be a savage thump as someone tried to batter it down. Not a knock. Who could possibly be knocking at a time like this?
He pressed his eye to the peephole.
The beautiful woman he had killed upon his arrival stood outside the door, waiting patiently for him to answer, looking for all the world like a neighbor making an evening social call. The side of her head was bloody, and her left arm hung at a strange angle.
He scrambled away from the door. He had been trying not to think of her. The fellow Christian who had attacked him, forcing him to defend himself. Oh, God, his first few minutes upon his new home world, and he had killed a sister in Christ!
She knocked again. Apparently she wasn’t going to go away. At least she was knocking, rather than trying to batter the door down.
He pushed the desk aside enough to open the door, and she shuffled slowly inside.
Prime Minister Shadro Nelsar
Galactic Year 912, Month 4, Day 12
5:20 PM Planetary Standard Time
Shadro Nelsar, Prime Minister of Caldor, strode into the Situation Room of a secret government bunker at an undisclosed location near the core of the planet. He carried a briefcase that was mostly for show. It contained only a folder with a few papers in it, and an old-fashioned fatline phone that was now the only working form of long-distance communication on the entire planet.
The members of his cabinet sat in postures of tense readiness at the small round table in the cramped room. All two of them. Since most planetary functions, including governmental tasks, were performed by Mac, the planetary artificial intelligence, there was really no need for a large bureaucracy. The Prime Minister and his two functionaries were mostly just a backup in case something went wrong with Mac.
Which had finally happened, in a catastrophic way.
Shadro had always thought they had entrusted too much of their responsibilities to Mac, and this just proved it. No one being, artificial or otherwise, should have had so much depending on him/her/it.
“Report,” Shadro said as he seated himself across from his two juniors.
The older of the two men, an elderly, half-bald gentleman named Rodor Batsalam, pointed at a monitor on the wall. The monitor flared to life, displaying a succession of video feeds taken from all around the world in the few minutes before Mac had gone, for lack of a better term, nuts.
The videos showed people on a rampage of violence, preying on each other, tearing each other apart. The videos showed entire rooms and corridors full of people suddenly clutching at their necks in eerie synchrony before collapsing to the ground. The videos showed small starcruisers and larger starships suddenly veering off course and smashing into the city, collapsing dozens of skyscrapers and leaving huge, smoking craters in the midst of the towering buildings. The videos showed hovervehicles smashing into one another in gloriously violent collisions, spraying passengers through the air in a shower of torn-off limbs and blood. The videos showed a continual stream of people materializing on transmat pads who immediately went leaping after human prey. The videos showed people who were lying dead on the floor suddenly climb to their feet and go shambling about, seeking out living beings on which to feed.
The videos were followed by a steady stream of numbers: statistics on casualties, financial damage, etc.
“Preliminary estimates are that roughly a quarter of the planetary population was using a transmat at the time the new subspace channel was opened,” Rodor said.
“Then we’re certain it’s the new channel that caused all this?” Shadro asked.
The second of the two men, Timmon Smith, nodded. “Yes. Believe it or not, a few of our best doctors have actually had time to analyze the transmat data of the matter stream passing through the new channel. They say there’s some sort of matter down there, in the dept
hs of subspace, and the matter stream passed through it. Some sort of biological matter. Like a virus.”
“In subspace?” Shadro asked incredulously. He shook his head. Every competent physicist in the galaxy had sworn for hundreds of years that matter couldn’t exist permanently in subspace. Yet no one had ever tapped into this new subspace channel before, so the matter—the virus—had to have already been there, waiting. “You’re telling me 200 billion people were—what? Infected? Is that what we’re calling it?”
Rodor nodded. “Our doctors say it’s an infection, and they have absolutely no idea what the cure is. Of course, they’ve only had about fifteen minutes to look at raw data. I’m surprised they’ve even come up with what they have in such a short time. They’ll need a while to study the actual virus, to develop a way to fight it.”
Shadro looked to Timmon. “They’re not going to have the time, are they, Tim?”
Timmon shook his head. He threw the videos back onto the monitors, and they watched the infected people feasting on the uninfected. “Those initial 200 billion that came out of the matter stream? They’re passing on the virus when they bite into the others.” The video of the dead people rising from the floor and shambling away came up on the monitor, and Timmon locked it into a loop. “The virus somehow reanimates dead flesh. So those 200 billion fast-moving predators have already spread the virus to an estimated 100 billion, who are now rising from the dead. Those numbers are going to spiral exponentially within the next few minutes. Within the hour, there won’t be anyone on the planet who isn’t infected.”