by Toby Weston
While the owner drooled on the scarred wood, dozens of tiny sharp claws skittered along the bar, across the floor, and under the tables. The little army of rodents collected the edible debris. One bright pair of eyes licked at some sticky residue coating a shard of broken glass: sweet beer and rich, red drops of protein.
In its stomach, acids began to digest the food, absorbing sugars and proteins, assimilating what had once been pirate and would soon be mouse—but, before the little mammal’s metabolism had a chance to complete its job, very un-rodent-like enzymes were working at the traces of DNA they had found in the pirate’s blood. They cut it into fragments of easily sequenceable length, ready for the millions of pits studding the surface of a little glass bead meshed beside the mouse’s stomach.
DNA was ingested, analysed, and sequenced. Data was encrypted and broadcast to the mouse’s neighbours, hopping from body to body across the BugNet. Mouse to rat, rat to crow, crow to monkey. It took two days and a hundred hosts before the packets reached the Mesh.
Less than a second later, an alarm vibrated through the Spex which were lying on a table next to Zaki’s bed. Not even half awake, he reached out his hand, fumbling in the dark to check the message.
Chapter 8 – Lost Action Hero
His phantom foot no longer hurt. The psychiatrists told him his brain was doing okay, too. He didn’t really feel like letting anyone know that he was on the mend, though, so he kept himself glued to the screen, watching the bland and repetitive programming the hospital piped to the patients’ rooms.
The place smelt of detergent. The bed had a mattress that could hinge him up into a sitting position, or let him lie flat. He hated it. The motor sound and the feeling of an irresistible force posing his body like a manikin was too familiar, too likely to induce flashbacks of being confined within his hated battlesuit.
The other wrecked young men he shared his days with were mostly too medicated or shell-shocked to be good company. The nurses were bland and repetitive, old and jaded, but he had warmed to their no-nonsense bustling affection. They were unflappable and he had relied on that matter-of-fact attitude on the few occasions when he had lost it for a while, or needed fluids cleaned up.
The blinds were half down. Outside, it would be dark soon. The sun was reflecting in great orange flashes from the windows of the opposite wing. Keith was watching a film. A tray with plastic crockery and the remains of his bland and repetitive meal rested on his lap. It was basically a children’s story, unlikely to tip the viewers into frenzied flashback insanity, but it was vaguely exciting. At least, it had people in it, not just animals. Keith suspected they were trying him out on harder stuff to see if he was getting better. He thought about feigning a screaming rage to make sure they got no ideas about kicking him out, or sending him back to work. A colonel, who had visited early in his stay, had dispelled any ideas of medical discharge when he had cheerily explained that losing a foot was not a major impediment to a soldier in these days of assisted exoskeletons. He had added that, if Keith signed up for another five years, his pension should even cover a real lab-grown foot—his own cartilage and stem cells printed in zero-g in orbital organ factories.
The phone rang.
“Receive call,” said Keith to the room.
The film paused and a dark, blurry shot of a face topped by a big mop of dark hair appeared.
“Keith Wilson?”
“Yes?”
“Err, we would like to offer you a job.”
“A job!?” Keith sniggered at the very idea. “You must have the wrong number!”
Another voice joined the conversation, leaning briefly in front of the cam. “He said your name, bud! How the fuck could it be a wrong number?”
“Shut up! We agreed I should do the talking!”
Keith stared at the display at the end of his bed. “Fuck! Are you kids? Wait… I know you, don’t I?”
“Yeah, you know us,” continued the voice off-screen. “We’re the people who recently saved your life when you were about to be captured and tortured to death by ZKF separatists. And now, it’s your turn. We need your help, okay?”
“We have money,” tried the first voice. “But look, a friend is in trouble, and we need... we really need you to help.”
“Bad luck. You know you are calling me in a looney bin, right? They tell me I’m in no fit state to help anybody.”
“Our friend. She’s been kidnapped by pirates.”
“Pirates?” Keith muttered.
“Yeah, fucking pirates, and not Jolly Roger types looking for buried treasure. These are the psychotic, sadistic, kidnapper types looking for fresh white flesh to traffic.”
“We really need your help.”
Their faces pixelated and froze as connection glitches smeared them into a psychedelic blocky mess. Keith got the warning peel of tinnitus that often announced a PTSD flashback. His vision became a tunnel…
…the grasshopper bounces in front like a karaoke dot leading him onwards. When he rests, or passes out, it waits for him patiently. He limps and then crawls through the day. His foot is numb. He can smell something nasty over the taint of burnt rubber and roasted pork. He sleeps under a tree.
In the morning, the insect is still there, looking at him with its alien slanting eyes. They set off again, the locust hopping on ahead, while he follows at his own pathetic pace. By the middle of the morning, a little group of buildings appears in a small valley between two low hills. The grasshopper pauses dramatically; then, spreading its wings, it flies off towards them. It quickly disappears in the wavering heated air. Keith staggers the remaining five hundred metres, then falls into the dust. Before he passes out for the final time, he notices a woman standing in the shadow of a doorway…
He hadn’t seen much of the family. They had clearly manufactured it that way. The woman, who spoke some English, ignored all questions relating to mysterious insects. The old crone who brought him his meals—foul-tasting teas and delicious bowls of stew—didn’t speak at all.
They treated him well, despite his babbling and the occasional night-time screaming fit, when sanity was cast aside by the pain in his festering leg. Unsurprisingly, the damaged flesh had continued to get worse. They had given him antibiotics, which cleared his fever, but did little against the incinerated, rotting lump of flesh hanging off the bottom of his shin.
After about a week, they took him on a bus. By then, he was feverish and incoherent again. They drove for what seemed like days, each pothole or bump in the road sending agonising shocks up his leg and, through his bones, into his brain. When they arrived, they had bundled him into a taxi and given the driver a wad of paper. The taxi driver half-carried him into the British consulate in Ankara and dumped him unceremoniously in the middle of a large, crowded hall. Hundreds of people jostled between queues that seemed to form and dissolve spontaneously. The crowd, gaining a new direction, recoiled from his smell and ravings, leaving a clear space around him.
He had spent the next few weeks in a Caliphate hospital outside Ankara. Despite only having a hazy memory of the entire episode, he recalled clearly the experience of no longer having a foot. He remembered them changing his bandage. The mess was not a pretty sight; thick black stitches closed off the flesh of his lower leg like a trussed joint of meat, and the whole area was sticky with a bright orange gel he assumed kept the ghastly wound germ-free.
The British army flew him home. Later, they confirmed he had been the only survivor from the terrorist attack on his squad. Until he had miraculously shown up again, he had been assumed vaporised in the crash, or dragged off and eaten by wild animals.
His miracle survival had been paraded briefly in front of an attention-deficit media, and then he was sent to the sanatorium to convalesce.
He had nearly forgotten the two teenage boys he had watched from his window as they came and went, chattering together in what sounded like Prussian. His saviours had obviously not wanted anybody to know they had been involved in the rescue of
an enemy soldier. He didn’t mention them, claiming amnesia instead, and jabbering from time to time about a grasshopper.
Keith rubbed his eyes. The two boys had disappeared from the screen and had been replaced by a picture that took him a couple of seconds to figure out. Once the perspective clicked, it resolved as a boat seen from above. The sun was shining brightly on the white V of its wake, and glinting from metal objects in its superstructure. The picture shimmered like a desert mirage, hazy and unsteady. He reasoned that he was most likely watching video from a satellite. Then, the view unexpectedly zoomed, until the ship took up the whole screen. It was blocky and often out of focus, but Keith could make out men walking around the deck, holding black objects. From the way they were carried, it was clear they were weapons.
“This is live,” came the voice of one of the boys. “Our friend is on that boat with at least eight other kidnapped girls. The bastards took her from her home, murdered her friends, and God knows what they have been doing to her on that ship!”
Keith was suddenly sober: this was real. In a world full of scams and phishing and relentless media spin, this was real. An abducted girl was on that boat—the boat he was looking at.
“Kids, that’s tough. But there is nothing I can do. I am in your debt, and I’ll make it up any way I can, but I’m locked away in here. I’m not even allowed calls. I had an episode once I got back to England. I made a scene. They call this place a military hospital, but it’s more like a mental asylum. Just talking to you like this will bring down a ton of trouble any second. I don’t know what’s taking them so long actually...”
“We’ve got this, bro. The nurses think you’re asleep. It’s all cool. We fixed it!” Then, the other boy pushed back onto the screen. “We know you. You have the skills. Please?”
“Guys! I’m locked up. If those pics are recent, then you need someone half a fucking world away!”
The younger kid, still in front of the camera, continued speaking to Keith.
“If you’re in, we’ve got this. We can fix all of that.”
***
Keith closed his eyes. The plane was finally moving, taxiing from the terminal, taking a complex route through the maze of tarmac towards the runway. He was sitting in First Class, which took up over half of the double-decker plane. Tax and carbon offset credits made air travel so astronomically expensive these days that it made little difference to the airline’s running costs if the chairs were made of leather or plastic, or if the forks were disposable or silver-plated. There were probably something like twelve coach class seats squashed up next to the toilets, whose only purpose was to allow the first and business travellers to feel superior to someone. These would have been heavily marketed at an attainable price and had, almost certainly, been gobbled up only minutes after becoming bookable.
Keith felt moderately calm for the first time since the boys had hung up the call sixteen hours ago.
The door to his room in the hospital had been inexplicably unlocked, and the orderly had been nowhere in sight. As instructed, Keith had pulled on his recently issued high-tech rubber foot and simply walked out through the deserted kitchen. It was 11.45 pm; no food would be prepared until the next morning. The delivery door at the back was also unlocked. He was not challenged as he pushed it open and climbed the stained concrete steps. At the wall that surrounded the grounds, he had needed to improvise for the first and last time, but managed to scramble up a tree and drop safely down the other side, nearly spraining his organic ankle.
He had been told confidently not to worry about the usually omniscient gaze of the security cameras that perched, like an enormous flock of starlings, on every compatible surface of the hospital’s walls and roofs. According to plan, a cab should be waiting at a church a few minutes’ walk away.
His years in the military had prepared him for the inevitability of every apparently foolproof plan failing almost immediately, usually leaving chaos and inconvenient piles of dead bodies. His respect for these two kids was approaching reverence as he easily picked out the steeple towering above the other buildings and navigated towards it.
The cab was there as promised. Its lights flicked on as he approached, and it chirped cheerfully as he placed his thumb on the little bio-pad on the passenger door. The destination was already programmed and, without complaint, it drove him the three hours it took to reach the airport hotel. The drive was uneventful, and the cab’s entertainment system provided adequate company.
He didn’t even need to remember a room number; another thumb scanner on the lobby door, ignorant of its error, recognised him as one Nathan Nicol and popped open the main door. A breadcrumb trail of little green lights appeared in the centre of the carpet, dancing off towards room 183. Another biometric exchange at the room door and he was in, surrounded by luxuries such as towels, fruit, and a television that could probably be instructed to display content more explicit than Gruffle Puffle re-runs.
He had woken up nine hours later, clad in a hotel bathrobe, surrounded by miniature bottles of vodka and whisky. The television was still on and endlessly looping. Keith became momentarily distracted from his headache by the action on the screen. The film—in the spirit of plausible deniability, stretching commonly accepted definitions to breaking point—might be described as a fly-on-the-wall documentary set in a nurses’ school, its loose narrative following the unexpectedly exciting lives of a local pizza delivery man and a window cleaner...
The door’s chime had woken him. He hastily cleared away the evidence of his solo party before opening it to a smiling bellboy holding a large AladdinsCaveTM emblazoned cardboard box. The box had been stuffed full of goodies, including a complete set of clothes, underwear, hiking boots, a new tablet Companion, a pair of Spex, a wallet (dismayingly empty), an umbrella, a rain jacket and a nice rucksack.
Keith had showered and dressed in his new clothes, stuffing his white mental asylum pyjamas into the rucksack for later disposal, then opened the door of his room to face the world.
***
The plane finished its taxiing and stopped at the end of the runway, waiting for a small, blended-wing luxury jet in front to roar into the sky. Keith took his new wallet and passport out of the seat pocket and cast his incredulous gaze over them once more. The documents and the other contents of his bulging wallet had been hand-delivered by an Otaku bicycle messenger as he waited at the big, automatic doors of check-in zone five.
In the hotel room, he had used his new Companion to enter the Mesh address that his teenage operators had forced him to memorise back at the hospital.
Tapton04111998.mesh
They were obviously not very impressed with his mental abilities. The URL had simply been the town where he had lived as a child, followed by his date of birth. He had been greeted with an idiot-proof set of instructions for downloading a custom OS onto both Spex and Companion. Once this was accomplished, the tablet auto-connected and two grinning faces, obviously massively pleased with themselves, had appeared on the screen. Secure communication channel established, he had become little more than a marionette following the instructions or arrows that his Spex caused to appear in his field of vision, listening to hyperenergetic explanations of how cool and almost impossibly difficult all this had been.
Keith gathered that they’d had some help, at least financially—which had made things like having a shrink-wrapped envelope stuffed with fresh credit cards and a passport pressed into his hands by a green-haired elf in a miniskirt—seem less like the delusions of a crazy, shell-shocked veteran. Even so, Keith wasn’t 100% convinced of the integrity of his mind. He wouldn’t have been surprised to wake up, still in his hospital crib, with his arms firmly secured to the metal bars.
The whining of the engines rose to a distant roar and he was pressed back into his seat as the big old whale began lumbering down the runway, starting its long journey towards Hawaiʻi.
Chapter 9 – Cyborg Narwhal
A behemoth swallowed down the ocean. Eddies
span sedately within its vast, barnacle-encrusted jaws. Occasionally, excited fish would dart out, escaping the relentless flow, spooked by unusual electrical gradients and an unpleasant alkali tang. The little silver flashes of light left the gullet through conveniently placed gill slits two metres tall.
The tattered body of a sea turtle hung from the corner of the mouth, bumping along the monster’s cheek as currents pulled at the tangled fuzz-ball of nylon netting and seaweed that had eventually drowned the exhausted creature. Several seagulls perched on the brow, hopping around, jostling for position. They craned heads to stare with intent little eyes at the ribbons of flesh trailing the unfortunate, churning reptile.
The sun glinted from a rusted metal head and from the shield-sized solar scales cresting the back of the mechanical leviathan. Air moving within its network of bladders and tubes farted and hissed. Sequentially pressurised air sacks sent peristaltic waves undulating along the great iron spine.
