Doomware

by Nathan Kuzack

  He walked a little closer to the target and took aim again. This time he tried to counter the effects of his breathing. He squeezed the trigger. Knowing what to expect this time, the gun’s action didn’t startle him, but the bullet still flew way over the Bloxes, ending up somewhere in the grass beyond. He was aiming too high.

  He moved even closer and tried again. Same result.

  “Damn!” he roared.

  How could he miss? Now there was only one test bullet left. He fought to marshal his thoughts, frustration threatening to mushroom out of all control.

  Stop for a moment, he told himself. Check for movement in the vicinity. Turning in a slow circle, squinting into the sunlight, he searched for any sign of approaching zombies. There was nothing.

  For his last attempt he added more Bloxes to the tower, creating a much larger target to aim for. He moved closer too, standing less than four yards away. After taking aim for a long while, certain he couldn’t fail to hit the target this time, he fired.

  The Bloxes remained unscathed.

  He didn’t shout; he went to throw the gun instead, but stopped himself just in time.

  Stupid fucking thing! he raged inside. No, it wasn’t the gun. It wasn’t the gun! It was him. He was the worst shot in history. He couldn’t hit a zombie from ten paces – not to save his life. Why was he so fucking useless? Why?

  At that moment something on the flyover caught his attention. An object was hovering just above the flyover’s wall: a small white face looking in his direction. It had to be a child. Damn. As had been the case in the pre-virus world, there were few of them around, but those he’d encountered had convinced him that zombie children were just as bad as the adults – worse, in fact. They had the same crazed immorality of all of them combined with a child’s persistence and disarming stature. Could he shoot a zombie child without hesitation, without qualm? He had a horrible feeling the answer was yes. If he could aim worth a damn, that was.

  Then he remembered his glasses. He hadn’t worn them before since he’d believed they would have given him a false impression of his shooting skills. What skills? he thought sourly. He slipped the glasses on and turned a dial on the frame, zooming in on the flyover. The kid was gone. Or, more likely, was making its way towards him somewhere out of sight.

  It was time to go. The shots were bound to attract more of them.

  * * *

  He made his way back from the playing fields via a circuitous route that was different to the way he’d come. He felt depressed and defeated. He knew it was possible to fire off more test shots in the hope of improving his technique, but something – some annoying sense of pride or, more likely, just pure bloody-mindedness – forbade it. He’d allowed himself four test bullets and that was what he would stick to. The whole world may have gone to hell, but there were some things he could still hold on to.

  The handgun wasn’t such a great asset after all. What he really needed was a machine gun, something that would make up for his lousy accuracy with a sheer volume of fire. The only thing the pistol would be good for was killing himself, the thought of which was always at the back of his head; sometimes he acknowledged it, but most of the time it was just filed away, waiting for when the time finally came. The pistol was good for that, if nothing else: a quick, painless end. Even he couldn’t miss when the muzzle was pressed right against the target.

  As he turned the corner from Buckingham Road onto Auckland Road, he was brought to a standstill by the sight of a red fox standing in the middle of the road. Its fur was bristling and beautiful in the sunlight and it was carrying something between its jaws – what it was he couldn’t tell. Neither David nor the fox moved a muscle. It couldn’t have been more than 20 feet away. It stared at him intently, no hint of fear in its eyes, as if it understood he wasn’t a threat. He could recall seeing a fox in the city only once before, and on that occasion it had been dark and at a distance. They were nocturnal creatures, weren’t they? It felt odd seeing one so close in broad daylight like this.

  Beyond the fox a white van had come to rest against the trunk of a young tree, its branches sagging over the vehicle’s roof as if attempting to devour it. The van was the kind that extolled its own virtues on every available surface: energy-efficient, non-polluting, environmentally-friendly, and the scene – the combination of the fox and the van and the tree – caused a revelation to hit him, something he’d already known but had never fully acknowledged before, a state of affairs he knew to be true in the same way he knew that night followed day.

  Mankind had been so preoccupied with threats that were natural or environmental in origin – an ice age, an asteroid impact, a runaway greenhouse effect – that an equally formidable danger to the human race had been overlooked. And that danger was the much-vaunted solution to any threat to man’s survival, and the problems of the world in general: technology. The ice would still creep over the earth and the asteroid would still strike and the temperature would still run away, but on a timescale so vast relative to the human experience it was all but irrelevant. Humanity had always been destined to unwittingly devise its own suicide pact long before any of it came to pass. The irony was that it had been while mankind had been standing at the pinnacle of accomplishment – no illness, pain nor famine, hardly any death or war – that it had failed to see its greatest folly: the technological osmosis that was to lead to an unprecedented, inescapable vale of tears. The evolution to cyberneticism had ended up pushing mankind that essential modicum too far, off the edge of the pinnacle and back down the precipitous drop into nothingness, unravelling the complex DNA it had taken countless generations to create like a beautiful bow being untied, rendering everything that DNA had given rise to void in the space of a single day. Brainware had become doomware, the ultimate harbinger of death, the ultimate traitor. Humanity’s greatest gift to itself had been an invisible noose all along, one it had been certain to hang itself with given enough time.

  Nature was the only winner. And nature had no morals. It would reclaim the streets and the cities and the skies. It would indeed devour the vans and the cars, the bridges and buildings, until there was no trace of the creature Homo cyberneticus, nor the great plague it had brought on itself. No trace except for in the fossil record, preserved there for the next intelligent species to marvel at, in the same way man had marvelled at the dinosaurs. When looked upon in this light, all of the self-congratulatory proclamations on the van’s exterior turned darkly comical. Mankind had closed the barn door long before the horse had bolted, only for the horse to be blown to kingdom come by its own bridle.

  The fox trotted off into a nearby alleyway. David watched it go, feeling an ineffable affection for the animal.

  The world belongs to you now, he thought.

  * * *

  That afternoon he was woken from his nap by the sound of wild shouting and grunting going on outside. Bleary-eyed and foggy-headed, he got up and went over to the window. The first things he noticed were two bare buttocks, the pelvis they were attached to thrusting to and fro, beneath a grubby white T-shirt. The zombie the buttocks belonged to was instantly recognisable: Everard. The creature had bent another zombie – a male – over a hip-height garden wall and was busy having sex with it. Only the other zombie’s pulled-down pyjama bottoms and its arms were clearly visible as it flailed about helplessly.

  David watched in a kind of stupor, feeling vaguely aghast. So Everard was a rapist. He didn’t know why he should be surprised. Everard stomped around with a permanent erection; it stood to reason he’d put to it use. Besides, rape was nothing compared to what they were capable of. As if he’d just read his mind, Everard grabbed a handful of the other zombie’s hair, yanked its head back and bit into the side of its neck. The zombie snarled and cried out, though not in pain. It was curiously like watching two big cats mating. But there it was: the thing that made them so despicable, that had cemented in his mind his view of them as zombies, as “thing” or “it” rather than “he” or “she�
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  Their desire for human flesh.

  He guessed it was a primitive instinct, a residue of their former lives, that drove them to seek out sustenance, and with the morphers out of commission they had turned to a food source that was in such plentiful supply it was unavoidable: the dead. The dead and each other, which were essentially the same thing.

  He’d resisted the notion of calling them zombies at first. They didn’t exactly fit the description of zombies he had in his imagination, and, besides, zombies were for B-moviemakers and superstitious believers in the occult. But what else could you call them? “The undead” called to mind Dracula and countless other vampire tales; “revenants” smacked of a grandeur they didn’t possess and certainly didn’t deserve; “walking corpses” was two syllables too long.

  He went through to the living room and put some music on before making himself a coffee in the kitchen. The cat mewed for food, but was only trying its luck; it wasn’t feeding time yet.

  As he drank, he thought about the zombies. If sexual intercourse was going on between them – rape or otherwise – would they fall pregnant? No child licences were being issued now, but would that make a blind bit of difference anyway? What about women who’d been pregnant when the virus struck, and had gone on to become zombies? It didn’t bear thinking about. He’d yet to see a pregnant zombie and he prayed he never would.

  When he returned to the bedroom window an hour later there was no sign of Everard or the other zombie.

  * * *

  His mind active with thoughts about his failure with the gun, he lay awake in bed that night for a long time.

  Eventually he drifted into sleep that was shallow and restless, waking long before dawn with an erection so persistent and bothersome that he masturbated himself just to be rid of it.

  Afterwards he fell almost at once into a deep and dream-filled slumber.

  CHAPTER 9

  D

  Her eyes somehow managed to look vacant and hate-filled at the same time. He’d never seen such a look on his mother’s face – nor on anybody’s face. He staggered backwards, away from her, grabbing at the hands around his neck. She went with him, her mouth half open to reveal the pristine white enamel of her teeth, her eyes gleaming like two sapphires set in a bloodless face. He tried to prise her hands away, but it was no use; the amount of force he was using was too small. He was trying not to harm her, regardless of the fact that she wouldn’t feel it if he did. Virus or no virus, she still looked like his mother, and he couldn’t harm her. He couldn’t.

  Bracing himself, apologising to her mentally, he pulled forcefully on her arms. They came away, but instantly they latched onto his tie and pulled downwards, cinching the silk tightly around his neck like a hangman’s noose, her strength aided by gravity and the weight of her body. For a second he was too stunned to do anything. Then he grasped her hands. They were hard and cold like windblown stone, and clung to his tie as if it were a lifeline, her purchase on it the only thing separating her from an imminent demise. Subconsciously he cursed himself for opting to wear a tie this morning.

  He tried to move away from her again, and at the same moment she barged into him, the momentum sending them plunging backwards into the mirrored wardrobes. A crunch told him the mirror had broken, and the back of his head screamed in agony. Her limpet-like hold on the tie was unrelenting; it tightened further, its knot pushing against his Adam’s apple. She was choking him. Trying to kill him. With his own tie.

  My own mother!

  The woman who’d given him life was trying to take it away again, like a dreadful mistake she was desperate to correct.

  He slid down the shattered door, barely noticing the shards of mirror falling to the floor on either side of him, horrified by the look on her white, wraithlike face as much as anything else. On the floor, their hands locked in a struggle for possession of the tie, he brought one leg up and placed the sole of his foot against her chest. Slowly, he pushed her away with his foot, but her grip on the tie remained steady, and he only succeeded in increasing the tension on it. Now he was choking in earnest, and strange starbursts started appearing in his field of vision. If this went on much longer he would lose consciousness. There was nothing else for it, no other option.

  Acting half on instinct, he brought his leg back as far as he could, readying it like a piston, before releasing it, kicking her hard in the chest. She gave a little grunt as the air was knocked from her lungs and went reeling backwards, losing her grip on the tie. The kick had been more forceful than he’d anticipated and he wondered if he’d broken any of her ribs, straight away feeling a bolt of remorse, but the relief when she’d let go of the tie had been just as instantaneous. He grabbed at it frantically, trying to undo it, but its knot was now so incredibly small and tight the only way he’d get the damn thing off would be by cutting it.

  Distracted, thinking she couldn’t possibly recover that fast, he almost didn’t notice in time when she came at him again. She’d picked up a large shard of mirror the shape of a scalene triangle, and by the time he managed to grab her its pointed tip was only inches from his face. Her strength astonished him now; it seemed to take every ounce of energy he had to stop her driving the improvised weapon into his face, a face he knew she – his real mother – adored.

  Then her eyes started to change. He noticed the whites darkening first, followed closely by the hazel colour draining from the irises. Finally, the cataract-like stains erupted in each pupil, completing a transformation so hypnotically terrifying he almost forgot about the glass shard she was trying to plunge into his face. The centres of her eyes looked as if they were glowing from deep within cylindrical hollows, as bright and hard and lifeless as diamonds, each one outward evidence of the corrupted technology it was bound to.

  This isn’t my mum, he thought. She’s dead. She’s gone. He hadn’t fully accepted it before, but now he had no option but to let the fact in, to welcome it even, in the face of what was to come. The quasi-robotic thing that was no longer his mother couldn’t be reasoned with, and there was no question it was doing everything in its power to try and kill him. Only one of them could possibly walk out of there.

  He was thinking the unthinkable.

  CHAPTER 10

  D - 4,731

  He hated the Tube. The questioning looks, the suspicion, the sometimes open hostility. These ten-times-a-week necessities barely given a second thought by the vast majority of people were like mini public trials for him. Trials at which the verdict was always the same: guilty. A long time ago the Tube might have been a safe haven, a relaxing place where he could have become the same as everyone else, but the advent of underground transmitters had put an end to that idea. There was virtually nowhere you could go where ordinary people’s global positioning capabilities didn’t work, allowing them to expose him for what he was. Cybernetics were able to – they called it a human right now – scan their immediate surroundings for other brainware signals. The scan took the form of a readout that materialised in their field of vision, summoned with a thought. It had been intended to be a seldom-used security measure, but a surprisingly large number of paranoiacs kept the readout in view at all times. Of course he, as an acybernetic, didn’t appear on such scans, provoking reactions that ranged from mild curiosity and confusion to outright fear and a flight away from him that was as ungainly as it was unnecessary.

  On a chain around his neck he wore a disk announcing that he was a registered non-mon, a term that had its roots in police work and was a contraction of “non-monitorable”. Since brainware recorded everything a person saw, heard and did, once the appropriate search warrant had been obtained anybody could be checked to see if they had committed a crime. They were “monitorable”, and could be “caught red-headed”, as the saying went. Non-mon had originated as a straightforward policing term, but had since become a derogatory label, courtesy of the fact that it lent itself to being said with the tongue rammed into the lower lip, giving the impression of someone
who was mentally defective. Depending on how it was pronounced, non-mon joined the long list of insulting names for those with his condition: deadhead, lamebrain, no-brainer, numbskull, brain-dead, a-head, sap (from Homo sapiens).

  The monitorial capabilities of brainware had proved to be a boon to crime-fighting, and had been met with a suitably radical solution: tampering with brainware to, in effect, switch it off. The procedure itself – some dubbed it “self-lobotomy”, though more often it was called “going offline” – was fraught with danger, rendered a person susceptible to pain, and was irreversible, meaning it was undertaken only by those who were either desperate to be beyond the law, or who were simply beyond desperate. Brainware gifted a person with far too many benefits to be given up lightly. Elective non-mons were generally hardened criminals, whose crimes were so serious they would have gotten the death penalty if exposed by brainware, or the marginalised on the peripheral tips of society, who felt they had nothing to lose by not conforming to societal norms. As a consequence of all this, people who didn’t know him often presumed he was some sort of criminal, this presumption unaffected by his usual working dress of a suit and tie. Even crims attend funerals, as somebody had once told him.

  If it wasn’t the criminal connotations of acyberneticism that scared them it was the perceived link with disease. Cybernetics were so accustomed to the control over illness and infection and pain their brainware afforded them they couldn’t conceive of how a person survived without it. It didn’t matter that he’d never suffered more than a severe cold and a mild case of tonsillitis his entire life; the perception was there, firmly rooted.