Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1) (5 page)

Semper was now eighteen and eligible for his transformation. He delayed the process by two months so he could finish his semester at the university. This actually required special permission from both the university and the chief surgeon in the capital. I couldn’t understand why a delay would be such a big deal. Everyone eventually underwent the transformation. Everyone. You couldn’t travel the stars or even go to Mars without doing it, and every adult had been to Mars. I thought about it a little harder, and I’d never met a single adult who hadn’t undergone the procedure. It was supposedly voluntary, but had anyone ever declined it? I guess the call of immortality and travelling among the stars was way too appealing.

Semper came to my house the night before he left for the capital and his transformation. We both knew, as we had known since we were kids, that rehabilitation from the surgery would take almost a year, during which time they wouldn’t allow visitors because of the sterile environment needed to ensure the safety of the nerve grafts. Semper said he would miss me, he gave me a hug, and he sobbed just a little bit. I asked if he was scared, to which he replied “isn’t everyone?”

He gathered up his things, stood by the door, and said the last words I’d hear from his human mouth, “I want you to know that I consider you my brother.” And then he left. Got in the waiting car and sped off in the rain. I tried to stifle my tears and be strong. The odds were great that he’d survive the surgery. He’d be home soon enough.

I thought back to our days at the Bionics Research Facility when we played around in the borrowed bodies. Semper had taken so long to get used to the robotic form that I really hoped he’d get out of the hospital on time.

The first few weeks after Semper left were miserably lonely, and so I basically locked myself in my room. I stopped playing
Slayers
too. I was well past my general education classes and taking senior level calculus and astrophysics classes through the summer, trying to keep my mind off of being bored and alone. Adara came by to cheer me up, or so I thought, when she gave me the tightest hug she’d ever mustered. I realized then that I’d missed her eighteenth birthday just a few days before. She was leaving too.

I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. We squeezed each other and shook with fear and sadness and uncertainty. Her lips found mine and before I knew it, we were pressed firmly into each other’s mouths. Her tongue licked my lips and surprised me. I licked her back. Then our tongues danced in the middle as we held our mouths open, pressed against each other. Instinctively, my hands raced up her body. Her hands grasped my biceps. Our society hadn’t “mated” for generations but the desire was still within us, even if we had only the slightest idea of what we were doing. As quickly as we started, caution got the best of us and our emotions gave way to the logic of our people. We slowed our pace until we were just cuddling on the couch, sniffling and chuckling. We sat in the silence for another hour, just staring outside at the stars poking through the silver curtains of clouds that hid the sky from view so much of my life. I said good-bye to my friend and kissed her on the cheek, just to comfort her…one last time, like my parents had done to me my whole life.

During the next few months, I fell into a deep depression. I missed my two best friends. My parents tried to spend more time with me, but I just wanted to be alone and miserable. I threw myself even harder into schoolwork, to the point where my physique and my hygiene started to lapse. Dad ordered me to go on a fishing trip, saying the cool sea air would help raise my spirits.

I hadn’t been on the boat with Dad in nearly two years. I’d been so busy with Semper, fellowships, and university classes that I had somehow forgotten about the joys of getting out on the open ocean. The last glimpse of land slipped behind the horizon behind us to the east as the sun disappeared from view to the west. The stars started coming out. I knew all their names. I knew which ones had colonies. I knew everything about their size and shape and luminosity. But I hadn’t looked at them just for the sake of looking at them in so long.

Dad lay back in a hammock hanging from the bridge wing of the boat and talked to me as the waves gently rocked us back and forth.

“I just want you to know that you have made me so proud,” he stated, his voice pitched slightly higher in the manner that adults had when they were sad.

“Thanks, Dad. What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Well, I just never really say it enough,” he replied. “You’ve exceeded every hope, every expectation we ever had.”

We sat there, staring off the deck into the growing darkness, until he broke the silence again.

“You had an older brother.”

I was stunned. “What?”

“Your mother and I. Right after we pair-bonded, she was forty-seven and I was fifty-two. I had just come back from a deep-space exploration mission and she was the records custodian for our expedition. We decided almost instantly that we should be joined. We did. And within about three years of that decision, I decided to take up fishing, like my father, and raise a family. We had a son, and we named him Virtus. We raised him for eighteen years.”

He paused to collect himself, but I couldn’t wait.

“What happened to him?” I asked excitedly.

“He died. He made it through the transformation. We visited him a few times in the hospital and then one day he just shut down. The body was fine…his brain just didn’t adjust well to its new surroundings. I guess one out of a few thousand people has a specific metal allergy. They didn’t even know about it until Virtus died. They test for that now, and they use composites to raise the success rates instead of using certain volatile metals.”

I was shocked. “Why haven’t you ever told me this?”

“That surgery is so essential to our way of life. Our whole society’s way of life. The government really wants us to not mention those who haven’t survived the procedure. We are asked to silently mourn. It’s our responsibility to our species. It’s our responsibility to you.”

“But the surgery, Dad,” I countered, “if it’s so dangerous why would we want to do it?”

“Well for starters there’s the opportunities you’ll miss out on if you don’t. You’ll never travel to space. You can’t be a doctor because they don’t want you spreading diseases to organic patients. You miss a lot of chances to evolve.”

“But you die,” I retorted.

“Yes,” he responded, “but without it you’ll die anyway, and in a much less glorious manner. You’ll age. We don’t even study human aging in school anymore because it’s irrelevant. Your hair turns grey and your skin wrinkles and your teeth fall out. You become immobile. Eventually your organs fail. And that’s if you don’t get hit with diseases before then. Without scientific intervention, you’re going to die. So why not take a chance at immortality? A good chance.”

He paused, as if to take a deep breath, though he didn’t breathe, before continuing. “I will tell you though: I miss the taste of food. I miss the smell of the hair of a pretty girl. Those are just memories now. I miss them often, and I wonder what life would have been like if I hadn’t undergone the transformation. I know I would have never mapped whole new galaxies. I know I wouldn’t have found new forms of life on other worlds so far from here that you can’t even see our galaxy from there.”

Dad looked off into the misty gray horizon.

“But maybe, just maybe,” he continued, “I would have married Freya Wynveldt.”

“Huh?” I was confused.

“Marriage was the old way. When a man and a woman fell in love, they got married. Then they mated. It’s different than pair-bonds. It’s hard to explain. They didn’t do it because of good genes or financial success or social status…they felt love. Real love. A connection so powerful you felt like you wanted to die for it. Nobody has done it for centuries.”

“Dad, how old ARE you?”

“I’m about two hundred and fifty-three years old.”

“Whoa.” I had never asked. Asking ages was considered impolite among adults. People were rated socially based on accomplishments, not age, mostly because you couldn’t tell how old someone was without asking. This must have been why my father was so solitary. He was a highly-successful explorer—one of the paragons of our whole society—and he gave that up to be a fisherman almost two hundred years ago. His actions must have been almost seen as eccentric or shameful by our standards.

“I’ve watched the forests regrow from the wastelands that were once this planet. I’ve watched the seas slowly retreat from their highest levels. I’ve watched the mountain peaks become covered with snow again. I’ve even touched worlds that no one ever even imagined could exist—and with my bare hands! But there isn’t a single day that’s gone by that I don’t wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t transformed. If I had just made love to Freya one more time.”

“Made love?”

“Mated, for lack of a better word,” he replied. “Before we each underwent our surgeries, we carried on quite the physical affair. It was glorious. Of course, once you evolve you don’t have the drive or the requisite parts anymore, so it becomes less important. But I miss it, for what it’s worth.”

“What happened to her? To Freya?” I asked.

“She’s off living on some colony somewhere, I suppose. She stayed behind with her expedition instead of returning home. If she’s still alive, that is. Well, as alive as any of us are. I guess when your heart stops beating and you’re only kept alive by pumps and chemicals, you’re not really alive.”

He paused and looked intently at me. “I wouldn’t give up any of it though, because if I changed one single thing, I wouldn’t have you. I may have once been very famous but you’re my greatest accomplishment. I love you, son.”

Then a few weeks later—on one cold, dark, and particularly rainy evening—I found Semper sitting on my bed, soaking wet from the cold. I learned of all the horrors of the transformation procedure and the lies spun to keep the children in line with the expectations of their society. Even though the procedure was technically voluntary, the Republic’s immense social and political pressure made it necessary for all practical purposes.

My world was turned upside down in the course of conversation with Semper. I’d never really felt scared or confused before; we were insulated from such emotions by the advanced technology and complex social structure of our society. I could only listen and not really process the terrifying story coming from my best friend’s robotic mouth.

I remember thinking that without a heartbeat, Semper was actually undead—more of a zombie than the zombies from over the mountains. The whole “Robots versus Zombies” games we’d played as children made a lot less sense.

As quickly as that strange night began, it was over. Adara—the only girl I’d really ever befriended—was dead. My brother, Semper, had run away, with the police in hot pursuit. I couldn’t believe that a legal adult leaving the hospital of his own free will could be a crime. There had to be more to the story…and the story would eventually come to find me.

Not many kids get a personal invitation to meet the president, but I suppose it’s not really a big deal. With only a few million humans left on Earth, he’s actually a pretty accessible guy and you often see him shopping or whatever in the capital. He’s been president for something like forty years now. Terms of office were increased to twenty years as soon as people stopped getting old or dying and as soon as interstellar missions needed a government with longer tenure. When messages take forty light-years to reach Earth from the deepest space, the whole time span of a human life seems really small. President Sandstrom is close to two hundred years old, but with his smooth, pale synthetic skin and jet-black hair, he doesn’t look a day over twenty.

I didn’t know why I was summoned to the Garden for tea. I could only suspect it had something to do with Semper’s escape. I wandered through the wrought-iron gate, past the hedgerows and rose bushes, where I saw the president sitting at a black wrought-iron table with matching chairs. He motioned for me to come sit down with him.

The president was holding a cup of steaming tea, and a plate of biscuits was waiting on the table, which, since he had no need to eat, were clearly for me. I’d heard of people in the capital preparing tea and biscuits for social affairs even if the tea wasn’t consumed. Apparently the smell was soothing, though it didn’t conjure the same feelings of hunger for adults that it did in me.

He didn’t waste any time with small talk and just jumped right in to the conversation about Semper. He wanted to know how much Semper had told me. I told him everything. He had a look of concern on his face.

“I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “It’s true. All of it. We can’t share this story with the other children or they’ll never want to go through the surgery. And we
need
them to want to go through it. Society depends on it.”

“I thought it was a choice,” I countered. “I thought it was voluntary.”

“It is, technically speaking,” the president said. “But our whole society is based on the premise that you never die, never need to eat or drink, never want for anything. We are so advanced beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors because we evolved beyond simple flesh and chemical impulses. We can touch the stars. We can bend the fabric of space and time itself. We are immortals with a purpose instead of corporeal beings just trying to beat the clock. So we give people a choice, but they only logically have once choice to make.”

I felt angry. “How many people really die during the surgery?” I interrogated him. “It’s not one out of ten thousand, is it?”

Sandstrom shook his head. “No. It’s more like one out of every five hundred, seventy-three individuals, on average, that doesn’t take the surgery well. Sometimes the neurons don’t pair right. Maybe the brain chemicals can’t be balanced properly with the new circulation fluid. The mortality rate is sadly high despite hundreds of years of research.”

I felt tears welling up behind my eyes. “What about Adara? What did you do with her body?”

He looked puzzled. “I don’t know who you’re talking about specifically, but I’ll say that their bodies are buried in accordance with a practice established long ago. There’s a large cemetery outside of town. More people know about it than not.”

“What are you going to do with Semper?”

“Semper needs to be returned to the hospital,” Sandstrom announced, “before he hurts himself or someone else. His neurons haven’t fully completed the pairing process and he’s a threat to the way we do business. Our
entire
way of life is based on children undergoing this procedure at adulthood. If they hear all the perils of the process, or that some people are dissatisfied with the results, then we’re going to have a breakdown in the way things are. Crime. Disease. Overcrowding. Famine. Pains that you’ve never experienced and perils you’ve never witnessed are going to befall our entire existence. We’ll be no better than the zombies on the other side of the mountains.”

He paused, took a whiff of his tea, and then put the cup down. Staring right into my eyes, he calmly stated, “I need to know everywhere your friend might be. I’m asking for your help, as an adult, because this is important. I’m telling you the truth because I want you to know that having an enhanced form is not required to be an equal among us. I know you’ll do the right thing.”

I stared back at him, coldly. “I don’t know where he went. The police chased him from my house.”

“Do you know where he could have gone to?”

I shook my head.

“Well,” he said, lifting the tea to his nose to catch another whiff, “I’m sure that when he tries to make contact with you again, you’ll let us know where he is so we can help him.”

My parents and I had an hour-long train ride back to Valhalla that might as well have lasted a month. They were silent in the front seat of the compartment while I lay across the bench in the rear. Mom tried to break the silence with a few snippets of news from work, but I wasn’t interested in small talk. I had a lot on my mind. I wouldn’t give Semper up to the authorities. I couldn’t turn in my best friend to have him decommissioned or brainwashed or whatever else they planned to do with him.

I had an idea of where Semper might have gone.

Unless he had taken extra chemical energy packs, he’d never have made the trip on foot. The three-to-six months of energy assumed normal activity—not running across country. I don’t know if he knew that yet, but he was probably still thinking like an organic boy and not an adult with an enhanced form. If he had left for Yellowstone, he had to have snuck aboard a train. And with the government looking for him, I’d have to do the same—sneak aboard the next service train to the research outpost.

In a world where food is for kids and consumer goods are generally seen as superfluous, there’s not a lot of transportation. One train a week left for the outposts. I had to wait over four days for the next one.

I slowly said good-bye to my world over those four days. I know my parents could sense something had changed within me. I had longed to reach the stars since the first moment I had laid eyes on them. I had anxiously anticipated my transformation since the first time I looked down on our planet from the space station. I had spent my whole life pursuing astrophysics to explore the universe. I knew that walking away from my transformation meant walking away from all of that.

But I had never really known how out of control I was over my own life. The surgery was a lie. Our humanity had been whittled away to a point where every decision was about logic and reason. Dad spoke of love and love-making and marriage. These are things I was never supposed to know—that none of us was ever supposed to know—because of the emotions that might invariably be sparked within us. Similar to those animal emotions I was feeling now.

I had no idea what I would do when I came back—if I ever came back. I knew nothing about surviving in the wilds. I only knew that I needed to find Semper and help him. Somehow.

I needed to help my brother. My mind raced to the old texts. Stories of brothers-in-arms and brotherly love. I knew now that this wasn’t just some metaphor or romantic ideal. It had real meaning and a real loyalty that came with it.

After three days had passed, I dug my camping backpack out of the storage closet and filled it with all manner of gadgets my parents had bought for me to use while roaming the forests as a child. Tent. Sleeping bag. Water purifier. Lanterns. Solar chargers for the lanterns and my digibook. Some warm clothes. When I was satisfied I had enough for at least a week-long excursion, I told my Dad I was headed to the capital for the weekend to take care of some things for school. Losing his internal organs didn’t make him lose his intuition, however, and he sensed my lie.

“You know where Semper is,” he stated.

“No, Dad, I just have an idea,” I countered.

“You should just tell the police. You don’t know how dangerous this is, Pax. The government is happy to leave you alone as long as you leave them alone. When they find Semper, they’ll find you with him and you’re going to be in trouble.”

He sighed and continued, “That being said, you’re an adult now, regardless of what body you’re in. You alone have to live with your decisions.”

“Dad, can they find him?”

“They
will
find him. The authorities have infinite resources. As soon as he doesn’t pose a threat, one way or another, it’ll be over. Let me tell you something: adults are all connected into the neural web. It’s something that’s restricted information for children to know about. We can communicate with each other—without speaking—as long as we’re in range of the communications network, which involves a series of ground repeater towers and satellites. No one can read your mind or control you, but it is basically like answering the phone in your mind. Very few people use it, because it feels so invasive and odd, but it’s very real. If he hasn’t disabled his neural web uplink, they can still track him.”

“Can you call him?”

Dad shook his head. “I don’t know his identifier. I’d have to program it.”

“But they know his identifier, right? So they’re probably calling him nonstop.”

“Yes,” Dad nodded, “but that’s one of the very last functions of your enhanced form they teach you when you’re in the hospital. He likely didn’t learn to use it yet. He probably just keeps hearing a soft humming in his head and it’s likely driving him crazy.”

“I’m coming back, Dad. I love you and Mom. I’ll be home soon and we’ll talk later about the procedure.”

“There may not be a ‘later’, Pax. I can’t protect you from whatever happens. They might not grant you the surgery.”

“What happens then?”

“Well,” he continued slowly, “there’s no place in our society for someone who doesn’t undergo the surgery, so you’re basically exiled to the Plaguelands.”

“That happens?” I asked.

“Not in a long time,” he murmured. “Long time. There are some dwindling villages on the east side of the Cascades with organic adults. They still receive the services and protections of the Republic but they don’t like the government.”

I hugged him tight. He squeezed me back, his robotic body slightly crushing me. I felt the butterflies in my stomach that told me this was a terrible idea. Leaving might be permanent.

“I’ll be back, Dad. I promise.”

With that, I grabbed my backpack and left for the train station.

A trip to the capital was usually an uneventful affair. An hour to the city. Milling about the skyscrapers and shops and throngs of bustling people. I’d done it dozens of times in my life. But this trip was different: ever since Dad’s revelation about the neural uplink, I spent the whole hour trying to figure out how to disable it.

Now despite the adults having perfect forms free from chemical desires, they still had organic brains. They still had whatever thought processes and memories they developed before the surgery—in fact, that was why the first eighteen years of life were so vital. We had to develop our brains and our nervous systems to their full potential because someday it would be the only thing we had left.

But not all brains are created equal. Some adults still fell victim to greed and corruption; for them, it wasn’t animalistic desires for wealth but a logical desire to occupy a niche in a world that still demanded animalistic things. A few of these individuals ran a sort of underground market where they traded outlawed items. The government knew it existed just south of the city limits of the capital, but never acted on removing it. A necessary evil, perhaps? Or maybe the government folks occasionally needed the services of the less scrupulous? I didn’t know. All I knew was that the rumors and stories of my world said it operated in Old Vancouver.

Vancouver had been drowned by the rising seas several hundred years ago, and though some of the waters had receded, the old city was a modern Venice of skyscrapers poking above the waves with makeshift bridges connecting the buildings just above the waterline. A few hundred organic adults supposedly lived out there, homesteading in the rotting skyscrapers, buying and selling contraband from around the known universe.

I found out, through some research online, that people who had been medically denied the surgery often ended up here because they had a hard time fitting into society without a perfect form. No one in the capital seemed to know how to get out there or who to contact if you made it that far. “Pirates” is all that they always warned me about. I had visions of ancient swashbucklers and sword-fights but knew that the reality was probably much different.

I made my way to the bustling waterfront in the capital. A series of shops dotted the boardwalk. Some fishing boats and tourist day-cruise boats were docked alongside the piers. I asked some of them if I could charter a boat to Old Vancouver and I was met with guffaws and scolding. I hadn’t realized that asking around might get me in trouble, but now figured that my inquiries might be reported to the police.

I caught a glimpse of a man in a beige topcoat who started following me as I asked a few other boat captains if I could just rent their boats. Though I was well-qualified to operate the vessels, I couldn’t really answer why I needed to borrow one, however, and was turned away repeatedly. Lying was not a strength of mine. Finally, the man in the beige coat hurried alongside me.

“What do you need in Old Vancouver?” he asked.