How to Beat Tomorrow

by J Foster Ward

  “Fine. Chucklehead, you’re up,” he ordered.

  Bitchmurder seemed to know he meant her because the clone lazily moved out, wading into the swamp.

  Despite his story, Jake’s goggles were fine. Moving into the monochrome grey vision of the image-enhancement goggles he drew the long-barrelled revolver from its holster and kept one eye on the sub-officer. But at least for the time being the clone commander seemed more afraid of what was ahead than he was of Jake.

  The gun was wide-barrelled, had five shots and a square, bulky design unlike anything Jake had ever seen. It fired shotgun shells of corrosive ammunition and he’d gladly traded it with Bitchmurder for the full-auto plasma weapon that had almost killed him. He had another pistol that looked and worked more or less like any automatic pistol he’d ever seen but despite the Imprinted weapon skills he wasn’t confident he would be able to hit anything he shot at. The pistol shotgun felt like it would have some real authority if another mutant giant bug tried to scissor him in half at the lungs.

  “Anything out there?” Whiteman asked.

  “Can’t tell,” Americano said, studying the device that looked like a cordless vacuum.

  “What do you mean? Isn’t it working?”

  “It’s working too well. Life meter’s going crazy. Everything is one big blob.”

  The sloshed their way through the knee-high water. It was filled with sludge and weird plant life. In some places little humps of muck rose above the surface and grew patches of weeds or grass. After taking a series of turns, passing doors frozen shut, they arrived at a cross-corridor.

  “Okay, hold up,” Whiteman said. “We go this way.”

  “That’s… not where the water cycling systems are…” Milan said.

  The sub-officer jabbed a finger at the pink-clad clone. “You afraid to get your dress dirty, Sally?” he snapped.

  “Yes,” she replied, like he was an idiot.

  “We’re not going to the water plant. New mission; we need to find the medical center.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so! Now move out! This way!” he made a forceful gesture down one of the corridors.

  Maybe fifteen minutes later they found a big double-pressure doors marked

  MEDLABB

  Whiteman seemed happy for the first time Jake could remember and the sub-officer gave him an unsettling smile, like he knew something Jake didn’t.

  “Get to work. If we’re lucky it’s still sealed on the other side.”

  But after manually opening the bolts and prying apart the heavy doors they found it was just more of the same. Medlabs were mostly ruined. In the wards they found skeletal frames of beds with fabric and mattresses rotted away in the tropical environment. A supply locker they broke open had one intact cabinet of medical supplies and they raided the tiny pharmacy for more of the pen-shaped autoinjectors.

  The others overlooked a single injector pen of anti-virals and Jacob hung back to roll up his sleeve and give himself a preventative dose. He hadn’t much liked the AI’s talk about mutagenics. and injected it but wished he hadn’t. He had to stop three times to remove his mask and puke. Little sea creatures darted in to the yellow, protein-rich cloud.

  It was only when he’d removed his mask and goggles that he was left standing in pitch black and noticed a faint glow of illumination up the corridor. The other clones were already moving in the opposite direction but Jacob was just as happy getting a break from their nonsensical banter.

  Waiting for the clones to move a bit further, Jake took out a flashlight that fit inside his palm but when he turned it on threw more lumens than a car headlight. Picking his way through the murk he found one well-lit section of corridor.

  It was a circular hallway surrounding a single round room with long observation windows that ran the entire circumference. It was the inner chamber that still had functioning power and plant life had flourished basking in its glow, forcing Jake to force his way through a swamp of grass and bushes. Too bad he hadn’t brought a machete.

  In moments he had made a path through the growth up to the window. Using a gloved hand he scraped mold and algae to make a palm-sized clear patch. Gazing into the room Jake saw four distinct work areas and a central holographic pillar console. Each of the work areas was a glass-walled containment cube with waldo-operated robot arms inside. There was something in the sealed areas but he couldn’t make out more detail. Jacob pushed through the undergrowth and circled the hallway until he found the marked door to the interior.

  JENETIKS LABB

  The entrance was an air-lock type arrangement with what he guessed was a decontamination chamber in the middle. Peering through the glass again Jacob tried to spot what was inside each of the containment cubes. The closest looked like a big dog or sleek panther laying on its side.

  “I said, stick together,” the black-clad form of Whiteman suddenly appeared at his shoulder, peering through the glass.

  “I thought you said you like stiff leather,” Jacob said.

  Whiteman punched him in the ear and Jacob banged his forehead off the clear glass of the window. His re-enforced skeleton made the blow an annoyance instead of concussive and Jake shoved the officer so hard he tangled in the undergrowth and went over on his back in a splash. Whiteman went for his gun and Jake jumped to step on his arm, pinning it in the muck. When Whiteman went for a knife Jake planted a boot on his face and pushed it under the mucky water.

  Only when the sub-officer’s thrashing limbs began to lose their strength did Jake regret his decision to drown the man and he relented. As Whiteman thrashed out of the mud ripping off his mask and goggles to puke brown water did Jacob grab him by the shoulder harness and lift him to a sitting position against the wall.

  “Had enough?” Jake asked.

  It took three tries for the man to get his breath back.

  “I’ll have your… your shares revoked for that!”

  “What shares?”

  “You’ll l-lose your co-corporate citizen status! You’ll get kicked into the dirt!”

  “How would that be different than this?”

  “You’ll be a dead man!”

  “I’m already dead! Listen, Whiteman, you can’t scare me. You want to keep doing this every day? I say we call a truce.”

  “Never!” the man gave a look of pure fury.

  Jake nodded, took the man’s sidearm and threw it into the corridor muck, followed by his knife and all his other equipment.

  “Good luck, Whiteman.”

  He left the sub-officer there and backtracked to follow the sound of the clones until he caught up to them. He slogged through more of the swampy corridors and through a security checkpoint with an inert robotic dome covered in sensors and gun barrels fixed to the ceiling. Past that was a set of heavy double-doors with text printed across them:

  WITE RAY BOMBARDMENT KLINIK

  The clones had already done their sledgehammer and prybar calisthenics to pry the doors open and entered the room. Jake followed them in. It was another six meter-tall dome and was dominated by two raised platforms. The larger one was a huge nest of machinery with a coffin-shaped bed sunk in the middle. The other, smaller platform was a row of three spin chairs behind a flat black desk that he’d decided were computer holographic interfaces. The swamp had found its way in here too, probably through ventilation tubes, but because they were raised above the water level both the machine and the control desk didn’t seem ruined by the moisture.

  “Hey, look who showed up,” Americano said. “The pervert cave-man.”

  “Don’t listen to them,” Owem Gee said. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “Thanks,” Jake said cautiously.

  “Even godless revenant cavemen like you can be reborn in the light of the Red Buddha! Martian theologians have long accounted for the status of those who lived good and worthy lives but died before they could be baptized in the red sand of the buddha.

  Oh great, a bible thumper. �
�No thanks.”

  “But for the first time an actual soul from the pre-colonization has been revived! Think of it, dirtworm! You could be among the first saved! I have in my possession a few actual grains of Martian sand!” Owem held up an ornate gilded necklace with that weird blank face on it, and a round bubble of glass with invisible grains of sand inside. For the first time Jake realized the blank face looked a bit like the ‘face on Mars’; a geologic feature that vaguely resembled a human face through a telescope.

  “This holy reliquary passed onto me by church elders that I might continue our work into the future and survive the apocalypse!”

  “Hard pass,” Jake said.

  “But…”

  “You keep talking to me and I will eat your sand and shit it out. You get me?”

  Owem Gee recoiled in terror, stumbling away and clutching his necklace.

  “Hey, where’s Whiteman?” Jones stepped between them to ask Jake.

  “Oh. He’s probably fucking a mermaid.” Jake shrugged.

  The room went quiet.

  “He what?”

  He’d meant it as a joke, but saw an opportunity to embarrass the racist pig of a commander. “Yeah, he saw some sort of creature in the corridor – half fish and half woman. So then he throws all his gear in the water and takes off his clothes and says he has to mate with it.”

  “No juice!”

  “Ganz, that is disgusting!”

  “Yeah,” Jake said, deadpan. “I thought it was weird but he was all like, I need to express carnal desires with this mutant and inseminate her. Does that seem weird to you?”

  “Well… now that you mention it, he has been acting odd lately,” Jones mused.

  “Anyway, what are you idiots doing in here?” Jake asked the others.

  “Getting her in the machine,” Americano pointed at the recessed bed on the raised platform.

  “Her who?”

  “Who do you think? Her,” Americano jabbed a hand at a bloody bundle of equipment and shredded blue coveralls that used to be a person. “Bitchmurder.”

  “What the hell?”

  “That’s not a ‘her’ anymore,” Milan said standing in the water in her pink outfit. “That’s an ‘it’. Or maybe a ‘them’ if you count all the bits.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, we don’t know. Something dragged her under the water and when we got her out, she was sliced up pretty bad.”

  They were all startled by the shout from the door of the room. Soaked and splattered in mud was sub-officer Whiteman.

  “You insubordinate, primitive ape-fucker! Jones! Give me your gun!” he demanded.

  “See what I mean?” Jake said. “Threw all his gear away and dived right in after it.”

  “Ewwww,” Jones said.

  Americano snickered.

  “What are you standing there for? Shoot that dirtworm!” Whiteman screamed.

  “Yeah, whatever, piscinephiliac,” Americano turned back to the holographic controls.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Americano snickered.

  “I demand to know what you are laughing at!”

  “Nothing, sir. Sir, where did your gun go? And the rest of your gear?”

  “Lost! When I was assaulted by-“

  “By a fish-lady?” Milan suggested.

  “What? No! By this… this…”

  But the tone of the room had clearly changed even if Whiteman couldn’t read it. The marginal amount of authority the sub-officer had was now gone.

  Too late Whiteman understood Jacob had got there first and he had lost the public relations battle. If he’d been angry before, Jake saw the sub-officer was nearly purple with rage now. Only when he saw the mutilated corpse of Bitchmurder and the operational machine on the raised platform did Whiteman pull his attention from Jake.

  “I want a test run on the machine. Now.”

  “We don’t have the autodoc online,” Americano said.

  “Where’s the nurse?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Just run the revivication protocol anyway,” Whiteman snapped.

  “Lend me a hand, caveman,” Jones said, grabbing Bitchmurder’s corpse by one boot.

  Jacob and Jones struggled up the ramp to the machine, dragging the corpse of the chucklehead. They were about to dump the dissolving remains inside when Milan yelled.

  “It’s moving!”

  Jacob jumped away from the gushy corpse, expecting some horrible re-animated toxic avenger to explode from her chest. But Bitchmurder’s corpse remained just that. Then he followed what Milan was pointing at.

  At the base of the opposite platform where a set of steps led up to the top, a vaguely humanoid figure was stirring, covered in gunk and stained in a greenish camouflage of algae and moss. It lifted one arm. There was a snap of superheated air, a glow tracing the beam, and a laser sliced deep into the shoulder joint of the camouflaged figure.

  Americano had drawn his ray gun and blasted the thing almost too fast to see. The heat beam had sheared down to reveal a metal joint beneath the mossy covering.

  “Hold your fire!” Whiteman shouted and shouldered Americano aside.

  Americano snarled but pointed his pistol at the ceiling. With the sub-officer’s help they lifted the slowly twitching creature up and dragged it out of the water with effort. Plant matter had grown over it and it had to be torn loose from the dead matter and roots. What emerged was a vaguely humanoid mechanical shape.

  It was an android. Or what was left of one. The skin had rotted or been eaten away until it looked like a waterlogged, busted-ass robot skeleton. They scraped gunk and moss from the face and revealed dimly lit eye sensors. It wore the remains of a white suit of some kind with a yellow line-and-triangle emblem printed across the chest. Krisis bot. Jacob translated it mentally: autodoc, medical android.

  “Well, now we know where the docbot went,” Milan sniffed as she climbed the steps out of the water.

  Sitting at the control chair she broke the seal of her thigh boots with a thumb and they split open with a spray of water and a couple small fish. She stripped off her tall pink boots, sitting on the edge of the raised control platform. Jake tried not to notice how nice it made her bare legs look.

  “Get it working,” Whiteman ordered Americano. “Or I’m gonna have a quiet riot on your ass.”

  “What? This skinjob? It’s craphound!”

  “Well if you can’t fix the droid, work the machine yourself.”

  “What you think I can just like, uh ganz, like make this whole thing work,” Americano twitched under one eyelid involuntarily, gesturing in a motion that took in the entire huge bulk of the machine. “I don’t even know what a white ray is, ganz.”

  “Just do it.” Whiteman said bluntly.

  “No ganz, not do it. Some bot with computers fixes all our shitty commands. It’s, like, designed to have a human-cyborg relations unit interfacing for us. ALL this shit is. You’re lucky I can make it go at all.”

  “No you’re lucky you can make it go, I get through with you,” Whiteman said. His veneer of impartial authority was wearing thin.

  “Move, bitch, get out the way,” Americano said, climbing the steps and shoving Milan out of his way.

  “Scuse me, how bout a special delivery for that request,” Milan goggled at him, affronted he would give her that kind of order.

  “Oh,” Dean said, mock sincere. “Did those words hurt. Like popping your cherry?”

  “Switch off, bitch!” Milan snarled, deliberately using the same derogatory term. “That’s disgusting!”

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  For a moment it looked like all four of them were about to draw down on each other until Whiteman stepped up. “Enough of this ganz! Bring the other android, from NuYu. It can make the white ray work.”

  American made a ‘who me?’ look and rolled his eyes at Whiteman’s nod. Still muttering a nonstop stream of babble to himself the tech geek stormed down the s
teps and towards the corridor.

  For a moment Jake was undecided. Should he go and make sure the clone didn’t mistreat her again? He didn’t trust Americano alone with Synthetica. But he knew Whiteman was up to something down here, and whatever it was wouldn’t be good.

  “Hey Dean, remember our little chat!” Jake called at the clone and the man ducked his head guiltily and nodded before going on his way.

  Whiteman waited until Americano was gone and climbed the steps to the control panel. Claiming the chair, he began waving his hands through the glowing controls that sprang up over the surface of the holocontrols.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Milan asked.

  “Shut your muppet hole,” Whiteman said without looking up.

  “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

  “How hard can it be?” the sub-officer growled. “Gangway bitches,” he yelled and made a final pass at the controls.

  The machinery next to Jacob came to life with a high-pitched whine. Various control and meter lights coming alive and a turbine warmed up somewhere in the depths of the pile. Jacob and Jones scrambled down off the platform as a plastec clamshell folded around Bitchmurder’s squishy remains. The tone and frequency of the machinery rose. Bits of mechanics were folded into place and a pair of huge metal globes rose, with arcs of electrical power bouncing off them to strike an antenna in between. It was like a faraday cage performance-art show he’d seen once.

  With a rising crescendo of machine orchestration the entire thing discharged a blast of white light into the clamshell. It immediately wound down, slowly going inert and in the silence that followed the room of clones stared at the machine. With a last dramatic whine of hydraulics the clamshell opened to reveal what had happened to their comrade with a cloud of escaping steam. Unconsciously they all leaned forward, looking to see what had happened.

  Bitchmurder’s semi-dissolved corpse sat bolt upright in the clamshell bed. The eyelids and lips had been dissolved off, leaving the face an exposed skull with mad, staring eyes and a death grin of white teeth. The ruined revenant thrashed its wrecked limbs, staring down at itself and let out a horrifying scream of pain and terror before the entire thing dissolved into a sludge of corruption and burst organs, shooting little squirts of bodily fluids onto the machinery.