Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1) (2 page)

The police knocked on the door. I heard muffled voices and knew they must be coming for Semper. Semper knew it too. He hugged me one last time—his robotic strength crushing me a bit—and then he leapt out my second story window, landing on his two feet on the lawn. He took off running faster than I’d ever seen anyone run. He disappeared into the night.

There was a knock on my bedroom door. Mom opened it slightly and asked if I could come downstairs. Semper had left the taser on my bed. I wadded it up in my soaked bedsheets and threw the pile between the bed and the wall where she wouldn’t see them. Quietly, I stood up and shuffled down the stairs with her to where the police waited in the living room.

They looked at me sternly and asked if Semper had been here. I paused, not knowing what to say. The lead officer stood up abruptly and said:

“I can smell him on you.”

I was shocked. I knew the olfactory replacement sensors were sensitive but that was just unbelievable. He asked when Semper had left. I stammered, not knowing what to say. Then the officer coldly told me he could smell my fear and I shuddered.

They both darted out of the house, the lead officer racing away on foot and the other officer starting up the car, which dashed away. I stood there, with my slightly damp shirt clinging to my body. My parents looked at me, dumbfounded, as I tried to process everything that had just happened.

Was running away from the hospital a crime? Worthy of the police? Worthy of a chase?

My dad came over to where I was standing and put his arm around me. I could sense his concern, and I don’t think it was for Semper.

That, Mr. President, is what started all of this.

Eighteen years before that fateful, rainy night, I was born in the capital and then raised in that small fishing town of Valhalla. My hometown is a beautiful, quiet place where tree-covered mountains stand right up out of the foggy Pacific Ocean. It rains almost every day and sometimes the sun shines long enough for the snow-capped peaks surrounding us to glisten with blinding white. The seabirds squawk from their perches on white-streaked rocks or wheel overhead in the sky.

Our family’s house looks down on the shimmering harbor where I could watch my father’s boat return after a long day at sea. There are only a few fishermen in our nation. The technology used to operate our boats is so efficient that just a few people can provide for millions. Mostly that’s because, where I come from, none of the adults need to eat. I was always told that I needed to eat to be big and strong, and one day, when I grew up, I wouldn’t have to eat anymore. My parents cooked me food that was bland and flavorless but full of essential nutrients, enhanced with amino acids and vitamins and supplemental chemicals of all types to help me grow free of defects and diseases. I saw doctors regularly and had all sorts of tests run to make sure I was as “perfect” as my parents expected I would be.

Like most little kids growing up on the Pacific coast, we stared up at the stars whenever we could see them. Dad taught me how to point out constellations and navigate our boat by the stars before I was five. The boat drove itself, based on buoys and satellites and a lot more interesting technology than just sparkles of light, but I thought my dad was amazing for all of his knowledge and power. He made the boat move. He brought fish home. He loved me. I never doubted his word on anything and in times of trouble I always reassured myself by the soft smell of the sea soaked deep into his hands.

I spent whatever time I wasn’t in school out on the boat with Dad. The smell of the sea air was incredible and rich. Salty-sweet and musky. Liberating. When I would talk about the smells, Dad would smile and tell me how much he loved the smells when he was a boy too, but everything smelled different when he grew up. His sense of smell was so much more powerful than mine. He could smell the fish and steer the boat right over the top of the halibut or ling cod or whatever else he knew was down there. He’d press a few buttons and let the mechanical rods and reels of the boat set to baiting, casting, and reeling hooks. The boat hauled in tons of fish, processed them, and then froze them on the spot before heading back to port. Every once in a while, Dad and I would set out some “old-fashioned lines” and do it the hard way…just for a while. Just him and me. I looked so much like him, even as a little boy, and I always hoped I’d grow up to have his strong jawline, striking blue eyes, and strong hands.

Mom is a different sort of person. She is a librarian, a keeper of all the knowledge of our society. Expeditions from all over the galaxy would report their findings to the central library in the capital where the head librarians would analyze, compile, and index the documents, photos, and videos. My mother, as a branch librarian, is a collector and distributor of the vast sums of information and a consultant to the political leaders and schools on the happenings of the universe. She is immeasurably smart. Bookish. Beautiful. Her blonde hair drapes over her shoulders and her eyes shine like gemstones in a rich green color I’d never seen an adult’s eyes gleam. I was more like my dad in so many ways, but I admired her for being everything I wasn’t.

Our government, as far as we know, is the only human government left in the universe. It’s called the Cascadia Republic, due to its location in the northwest corner of the North American continent—home to the Cascade Mountains and the Cascadia tectonic subduction zone. When referring to our government and ways of life, most people just use the eponymous term “society,” because we’re the only one.

Our home is typical of those in our society. It’s large, bright, with lots of open spaces. All of our homes are sparsely decorated: most of the walls are simply windows looking out onto the water or the mountains. The wood-paneled interior keeps itself clean with an army of small robotic janitors that scrub the floors and toilets and windows. All of our society’s buildings are smart buildings—computerized controls automatically open and close blinds to optimize light, privacy, and ventilation. Most buildings are self-sufficient for generating their own power and recycling their own water. Because our buildings take care of themselves, we’re left with more free time for our own desires and pursuits. Art. Music. Learning. Occasionally, we went camping in the forests in tents, just to remind us of the ancient ways before man finally gained dominion over all of nature. As far back as I remembered, I loved spending time out in the woods, away from the clean lines of our modern homes. I loved learning about the natural world.

Despite my love for learning and exploring, I didn’t enjoy school. Our education is organized into twenty-six tiers, one for every five months of education from our fifth year of life through our seventeenth year. There are very high expectations that we’ll excel from the first moment in Tier A. Most kids could learn the material they needed just in time to pass the exams and progress to the next tier with their age cohort. I passed my first three tiers in the same time my original cohort passed only one. The administrator of the academy always beamed about me when sending home my quarterly reports and my parents were so proud. I was now in classes with kids more than a year older than me, and while I liked the challenge, the bigger kids seemed jealous of my success. They teased me when the teacher wasn’t looking and did all the horrid things that big kids do when they feel threatened.

I started to dumb myself down in the hopes that my cohort would catch back up to me. I let one tier slide and my parents knew what was happening. They talked with the administrator and found that one other child from the school was also an exceptional student, so they put the two of us in a special class together every afternoon with a part-time teacher.

Semper Graham was a pale-skinned, dimple-cheeked goofball who was only eleven months older than me but also very bright and needed to work at his own pace. It was a small town, so our “gifted program” was all the administration could do to accommodate. My parents talked of moving to the capital to be closer to universities for me to attend if I graduated the academy early. I was excited about the thought but didn’t want to leave my best and only friend in town, so Semper and I made do with our afternoon special learning sessions. I was at the academy from 0800 to 1700 with only a few breaks for lunch or snacks. At night, after dinner, I spent most of my time reading or building models or playing whatever instrument my parents sought to assign that week. Learning to play various instruments is considered essential in our civilization. Building fine motor skills is essential to the transformations we undertake later in our lives, and the glorious sounds of the symphonies satisfy one of the few senses of the adults that still bring them pleasure.

After academy, and between extracurricular activities, we’d go play “Robots versus Zombies” with the other neighborhood kids who didn’t ostracize us. Let me explain that, growing up, we always were led to fear the zombies. Our parents told us of these supposedly-real creatures that lived far beyond the mountains. They were human once, but had given up all their science and medicine and education to become mindless, wandering animals who were ravaged by the Plague. They snarled instead of spoke. They oozed blood and pus from every pore and wound. They attacked without warning, killed without provocation, and believed in space gods who were all powerful. They had no regard for the environment. They had no care for anything but themselves. They were murdering, plundering, savage, degenerates. When we played our games, no one ever wanted to be the zombies. Usually the biggest kids got to be the humans and we were forced to be the zombies, if we wanted to play at all. I never minded…it meant that at least I was allowed to play. We’d chase the big kids and pretend to eat their brains or hearts if we caught them. They’d pretend to blow us up.

I was never envious of the bigger kids though; I was jealous of the sick kids. A long time ago, illness meant suffering and a physical handicap. Now it was a glimpse at the future glory of the enhanced form of adulthood. Once a girl had her eye pierced by a stick when falling out of a tree, and she received bionic eyes superior to anything we other kids had. One boy shattered his legs in a rock-climbing accident up in the mountains and he received robotic prostheses. Even the girl who caught a bizarre bacterial illness received an injection of nanobots that hunted down and destroyed every pathogen in her body. The sick and wounded, who historically were pitied for being less able than their peers, were the recipients of some of the most advanced technology of our time. I was sorely punished when Mom once caught me trying to break my own arm so I could get a stronger throwing arm installed.

Despite our advances in medicine, we couldn’t prevent disease, but we sure could heal any affliction. Cancer was screened quarterly and a host of drugs could cleanse your body of the disease in days. Organ failures, like diabetes, simply required the lab manufacture of an organ, from stem cells harvested at birth, and a quick surgery to install the new part. Repairing the boat wasn’t as simple as the doctors made medicine look.

The original cybernetic enhancements were simple affairs. Replacing damaged eyeballs and eardrums and legs with barely functional equivalents was standard practice in the early 2000’s. By 2050, humans had begun elective surgeries to replace weak and failing organ systems with new ones. Telepathic devices were invented and installed in a greater number of the population. Over time, the wealthy—who underwent elective surgeries, and the sick—who needed life-saving improvements, essentially gave rise to a race of cyborgs. Still having mostly natural bodies, they were as susceptible to any disease or trauma that a normal human could endure. Eventually, some humans became more machine than flesh and blood, which led a few scientists to embark on the greatest advancement in human evolution since our monkey ancestors first used tools: enhanced forms.

These robotic bodies had the owner’s original organic brain, fed by pumping maintenance fluids and chemical packs instead of blood and organs. Every replicated organ system was made efficient and triply-redundant. The first few pioneers didn’t survive the process for long afterwards, but their sacrifices had long-lasting effects that survive to this day. Eventually people stopped having elective surgeries to replace limbs or organs and simply bought a new body.

Somewhere around the year 2097, as the Plague ravaged the world, the government of the United States collapsed under the weight of the catastrophe. The former American states of Washington and Oregon became the Cascadia Republic, and soon welcomed Alaska and the Canadian province of British Columbia to join. The capital was cited in the recently-formed city of New Vancouver—the metropolitan area that remained above sea level.

After first accepting any outsiders who exhibited no Plague symptoms, the population of the region became unsustainable. The government eventually closed the borders to outsiders in 2103 at the height of the Plague outbreak, brutally massacring Plague-stricken refugees who arrived from across the continent, simply seeking a new life in the stable and mostly Plague-free Cascadia region. The Plague effects were not as severe in the Republic due to the government’s quarantine, but remorse by the government for its actions has long been documented in the annals of Republic history.

Eventually, the Plague peaked. Refugees came fewer and farther between until they stopped arriving entirely. Venturing east of the Cascades meant running into road gangs and Plague fiends. The strict isolationist policy protected the people for a century until the Plague had run its course on the colder, drier West Coast. It persisted in the humid Southeast portion of the continent. And only later would we know it had evolved.