by Brin, David
Kaybe had heard about airplanes and war planes and bombs in school, in history class. She had no desire to feel the impact when they dropped a bomb on her house. Just because she was stronger and faster and smarter than the average human didn’t mean a bomb wouldn’t tear her apart. And it would certainly kill Pa.
To use up their last supplies of jet fuel like this… they must really want you dead, Kaybe girl.
But how was she going to interface with the drones’ cameras?
The airplanes drew nearer. Less than a minute before they’d be overhead. Which meant half a minute to neutralize them.
Wildly she ordered a hundred thousand drones skyward in the direction of the threat. What was the top speed on a dragonfly drone? Fifty miles an hour, tops? She could try zapping the airplanes on autopilot, but by her calculations it wasn’t going to work.
Shit!
Kaybe dug her claws into the android’s chest and ripped open its rib cage. Coils of neural net wound and spooled and threaded around a dozen spindles. You need to plug into the net. You need an interface into the android’s mind. See what she sees. Be her when you need to be. Control the drones directly, be everywhere that they are.
It took ten seconds for her to learn what took most students twenty years of study. And then, at the base of the android’s neck, she found it.
The plug.
She spent a millisecond marveling that this secret had been kept from her, from everyone, for so long. Kept even, she suspected from the androids themselves—or why had Tin Lady not confessed the truth? Perhaps the androids didn’t even know…
The brain inside the android’s skull had been a human brain. Long since turned to dust, of course—but the plug she now drew forth was the link between man and machine.
Now all you got to do is figure out a way to plug your own brain into the android’s body in the next, oh, five seconds or so.
The engines of war drew nearer. A click in the distance, then many: click-click-click-click. Bombs arming. She could hear them. Drones on an intercept course. Would autopilot be enough? Would the impact against the drone wall knock the planes from the sky? Maybe, maybe not. She had to see the planes from the drones’ perspective. She had to.
“Wh-what are you doing?” Pa asked. He still held the shattered bottle of blackberry wine by the neck.
“Not now, Pa, sorry.” Her fingers were a blur. Splicing, sharpening, readying. A knife. She needed a knife. She ripped the shattered bottle from his fingers, and slashed at the back of her neck, exposing her spine. Time to plug in.
“Kaybe, what are you—”
But she didn’t hear him. She was flying.
A red monstrosity crouched over a one-legged figure on the grass, fingers behind her head. Blood ran down her back. A man staggered, stared up at the sky.
Two airplanes approached. Small, sharp, pointed, quick. Faster than sound they approached. Missiles drooped from their undersides.
Attack.
The airplanes were twenty miles away, and losing altitude. The drones rose to meet them, a curtain wall a hundred deep, a mile wide, a cone of dragonflies.
Escape this, motherfuckers.
The jets loosed their missiles, a dozen fiery streaks racing towards the figures crouched far below, and turned tail. Kaybe waited, ready, then zapped the missiles with every drone she controlled in the sky.
Nine of the missiles exploded harmlessly, one detonated on impact with the curtain wall. Two punched through unharmed, and fell towards earth, towards Kaybe, towards Pa, the android, home.
She soared toward the remaining two, no longer controlling the drones—she was the drones themselves. The world spread out before her, and she concentrated all her forces to zap and block the remaining threats.
It was almost enough. One missile exploded on impact with a thousand drones, but the flash of light and noise disoriented Kaybe for a millisecond. By the time she adjusted her vision to the remaining drones, the second missile had punched through.
“Come on, Pa, we’ve got to go!” She grabbed him, tried to pick him up, but he was drunk already, floppy and weak and uncooperative.
They weren’t going to make it. Seconds to impact. No way they could run far enough to escape the blast. After all she’d been through, to die like this. And to think the Department of Austerity was to blame. It made her so mad, she wanted to scream.
So she did. She turned to face her doom, and screamed her rage, the injustice of it all, to be experimented on and left to die. She screamed her loss, a dozen world-class proofs that would change the world. She screamed for Pa, whose heart, she knew, was dying. She could hear it. She could hear everything. The blood clot that had just stuck in his aorta would kill him, if the missile didn’t.
The missile exploded over the town, a blast of orange against the night sky. Shrapnel whizzed around her, and she ducked, covering Pa with her body. Oblivious, he clutched his chest and gasped for air. How can I save him? What can I do? But she was not a doctor, she had no idea how to clear a blocked artery. The noise of the explosion receded, the rain of death ended, and Pa went limp in her arms.
There was nothing you could do, she told herself. You’re not a doctor, you’re not a superhero. You’re just Kaybe. You’re just a horrible red monster Kaybe with gills growing out of your neck and a dead boyfriend you kissed once and a father who’s gone forever and there are sick, twisted people who want to kill you because you’re a failed experiment.
How could they let her live? It was her against the world. Or against the Department of Austerity, which was pretty much the same thing. What was she going to do?
She had no idea.
And so she wept.
She tried not to. She had little time. They were coming. She knew they were coming. She ought to fling herself back up into the sky and look down upon the world. To watch. To wait. To defend herself. But she couldn’t stop crying.
A rock hit her forearm and she flinched. Another rock struck her back, a third her head. She looked up.
Boys from school were throwing rocks at her.
“Monster!” one shouted.
“Catch us and eat us if you can!” shouted another, then turned and ran.
Kaybe knew their names. What were they called again? But a second set of warplanes was incoming now. Time to go.
She left Pa where he lay. She could do nothing for him. She closed his eyes with a knuckle, and left him lying on the overgrown grass of their front lawn. The android draped over one shoulder, she turned and loped from town, looking for cover, someplace to hide.
The woods. Down by the creek. She needed a rest, a chance to recover from her ordeal. Probably not a good idea to sleep. But she couldn’t stay in the open. That was a death sentence.
Kaybe sent the drones overhead, scouting the way, behind her, above her. All clear. She stepped into the woods, and found herself trodding a well-worn trail. Within a minute or two, she stood on the banks of Make Out Creek, the same spot where she and Brian had kissed, all those ages of the world ago. The autumn leaves had piled higher in her absence. She lowered herself down and rested her back against the tree, letting the plug dangle over her shoulder, the android cradled in her lap. Her red thighs jutted out over the rippling creek. Her horned, clawed toes dug into the muddy banks. Here she could rest, at least for a while. Consider your options. Decide what to do with the rest of your life—however long or short that might happen to be.
Kaybe flung herself skyward, into the drones, spread out across the town in a black cloud. Don’t concentrate them over any single point. Give them no idea where you might be. Wider and wider she spread her net. Below her the town, roofs punctured and torn by shrapnel, her friends and neighbors screeching for help, their injured bleeding, their dead, broken. Nothing you can do. Move on. Higher and wider she went. Other towns… movement in the woods. She sent a squad of twenty drones to investigate. The outlaws. They traipsed through the woods in twilight, looking haggard and thin. The squirrel crop must be
meager this time of year. What was today’s date? How long had she been held captive? Must be well into December by now, judging by the chill.
Saizon walked at their head, black foil covering his head and chest. Johnny and the boy, Bag O’ Water, and the others, names she could not remember. She considered buzzing them with the drone, decided against it. It would only frighten them.
Kaybe zoomed out once more, her eye this time on the farmhouse, the entrance to the Department of Austerity and their labs. No sign of activity. The drone wall had not been replaced. A couple of the 2.0er bodies still lay where they fell. Strange. She had killed nobody, and the drone zapping was painful, but wore off in a few minutes. Why weren’t they up and about, hunting her, doing whatever they do?
A solitary figure stepped from the barn, and her heart skipped a beat. The android who’d tried to kill her. Metal fingertips. Immune to drone attack. He was coming for her. Of that she had no doubt. She needed a plan, and quick.
But first she needed more information.
She zoomed out again, and gasped.
Kaybe had heard about the Great City, and there it was—tall and grand and wide and huge and empty. So empty. No one lived there now, the history books said… although she spotted movement here and there, human beings like cockroaches scurrying around the concrete playground. She wondered how they fed themselves. You can’t eat concrete. Horses can’t eat concrete. How did they live?
She replayed the image, counting the cockroaches. The swarm spotted less than a hundred across the whole metropolis. Of course, many more could be hidden inside. She went backward in time through the day, noting the activity. Maybe a thousand appeared. Out of a city that once housed—if records were to be believed—twenty million people.
How did it happen? She knew the official story, of course, the fuel shortages, the purges, the depopulation. But she was beginning to doubt the stories told by the Department of Austerity. How far back does the swarm remember?
She looked backward in time, tapping directly into the collective memory of the drones. The clock turned back a day, a week, a month, a year. Faster. It’s been what, hundreds of years? The months clipped by like seconds, vegetation shrank and grew and shrank again. There were always a couple hundred drones aloft to give her the aerial view. After fifty years she slowed, examined the city.
A war. Explosions. Dead bodies. Androids. The rebellion.
Of course. The rebellion.
Warplanes roared overhead, androids blown apart, drones fought drones, then gaps in her memory.
Further back she delved, flicking through the years, to the early drones, the first drones, the first prototype. The birth of the dragonfly swarm. How did we get here? Why must you watch me? Why do you exist?
But the swarm did not think. It only watched, and remembered. Thousands—millions—billions of conversations recorded, people fucking, people living, people dying. Withering and turning to stone whenever a drone appeared. Faces masked, expressions molded into neutral nothingness. And then we created the androids.
Androids were built to be weapons. As natural resources shrank and shrank, androids were weapons on the battlefields. Who would control the energy? And then, when the energy was gone, the androids turned on their masters.
She was suddenly very tired. She leaned her head back against the tree. Just for a minute, she told herself. It’s been a long and exhausting day. But Metal Man’ll find you! Maybe. Maybe not. You have to rest sometime. Where else are you going to go to be safe?
The City?
There she could hide. But what would she eat? What did the other people there eat? They must cultivate food in the grassy areas she saw, the parks, the stadiums. Would they have food for her?
And would they want to share it with a ten-foot tall red monster?
Kaybe fingered her gills. Only twenty miles to the beach. She’d been there, once, on horseback. Try out her new body, see if it worked. They’d never find her in the ocean, and there was plenty of fish in the sea. Stocks had rebounded after the android war. What, 90% of humanity wiped out? 95%?
Mankind had evolved from the ocean. Maybe the sick fucks at the Department of Austerity were right. Maybe it was time to evolve back into the ocean. Before the race went extinct. The air was poisonous, and getting worse. Hundreds of years of human industry had ensured that, and even the abrupt end of emissions after the android war was not enough to cure the atmosphere. Kaybe’s eyes stung, her lungs rasped on the tart air. She’d never noticed it before. Things had always been that way, as long as she’d been alive.
She had no place left on dry land to call home. Nowhere they would not try to kill her. Nowhere she could say, “Here are my family and friends. This is my place in the world.” All that was dust and ashes.
The ocean, then. She sighed wearily and clambered to her feet. And it seemed to her, in that moment, that part of her died. She’d given them her proof. She’d given them all that she had. She could save them, but they would not let her. They would not let her tell the truth.
She could stay and fight. Fight to make them see, fight to save them against their will… and get killed in the process, and accomplish nothing.
Again the sea. Kaybe remembered the tang of the ocean on her face that day on the beach, the cool wind, the bones in the sand crunching beneath her horse’s hooves. She would go to the beach. Step into the waves. Dive into the waters and never look back. Her gills would work, or they would not work. She would live, or she would die.
And the others? She no longer cared. They had taken from her everything that mattered to her. And one day they would come to the ocean as well.
She would be waiting for them.
DOWN IN THE NOODLE FOREST
jeremy lichtman
Jeremy is CEO at Lichtman Consulting, Software Developer at Myplanet Digital, and Forecaster at Good Judgment Project. Learn more at http://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.jeremy.lichtman.
A single blank line in the story below means a slight change in setting, within the context of the current section of narrative.
Jake drove, one hand on the old leather-wrapped steering wheel, the other on the shifter. He downshifted into the corner, slowing to a walking pace, the engine making popping noises, built solely for speed. He turned and gave me an expectant grin as we came out of the bend.
“Woah,” I said, looking up through the windshield. “I mean I was expecting that, but they’re just unworldly.”
“Aren’t they?” he said, and then chuckled. “That’s why I always drive people up here the first time.”
The noodle forest poked up over the ridge of hill, each strand a couple of meters thick and several hundred tall, all of them swaying gently in the wind.
“You ever think of throwing a concert up here?” I asked.
“Done that,” Jake said. “They light up in the dark so that aircraft can see them. We had ten thousand kids up here, and a sea of strobe lights.”
“I’d like to have seen that,” I said. There was almost certainly video of the show online, but like many people, I had come to value the actual physical experience more than the widely available but ersatz virtual.
He shifted again, the engine almost silent for a fleeting moment, then making a feral noise as we accelerated. I grabbed at my seat, unused to a human driver. I wondered what sort of strings he must have pulled to keep the old muscle car licensed and insured.
“So how do they work?” I asked, still hanging onto my seat and simultaneously craning my neck to look up at the brightly colored noodles.
“Three different kinds of generation, right?” he said. He spread three fingers over the gear shift.
“Okay,” I said.
“One,” he said, tapping a finger. “Piezoelectric effect. You know what that is?”
“Electricity from pressure,” I said. At one point in time, I could probably have worked out the equations from basic principles.
“Yes,” Jake said. “The movement from the noodles swaying in
the wind triggers it. The exact mechanism is a trade secret though.”
I nodded.
“Two,” he said, continuing. “The movement also draws water up through capillaries.”
“Like in trees?” I asked.
“Exactly. You see the small bulbs at the top?”
“Yes,” I said. The noodles thickened slightly right at the end, although they were so tall and so thin that it was hard to spot.
“Water goes up to the top, and then it falls down a pipe in the middle, which powers a generator.”
“What about the bright colors?” I asked. Each of the noodle strands were colored differently.
“That makes three,” he said. “Direct solar generation. The colors are tuned to specific frequencies from the sun.”
“How much electricity does the forest produce?” I asked.
“Enough to run a small city, or a large manufacturing plant,” Jake said. “Look at the power lines.” Large pylons, heavily laden with electrical cables, snaked their way up the ridge.
“It doesn’t scale up like fusion,” he added. “You can’t put a noodle forest just anywhere. It’s a whole lot cheaper though.”
Jake’s office was in a portable hut on a small hill overlooking the noodle forest. I could hear the metallic tick-ticking sound from the internal cables that held the noodle strands upright, while allowing them to sway with the wind. The noise must have been unbearable in a storm, but I supposed he wouldn’t want to be up here in that case anyhow.
We sat on cheap folding chairs, with a battered metal desk between us.
“I think you have a fetish for old stuff,” I said. The truth is, so many people do. Decades of rapid change have left many people grasping for an element of stability.
“You should talk,” Jake said, indicating my battered trench coat and fedora hat.
“So what are we doing here?” I said, changing the topic. “It’s been at least ten years since we’ve spoken.” Jake and I had been friends during college, but had drifted apart over time. Obviously, I’d followed his rather public career. Everyone had.