From Oblivion's Ashes

by Michael E. A. Nyman

  Kumar categorically refused to do any computer work that might benefit Hanson Incorporated. When their so-called property manager, Martin Phillips tried to order him to prioritize Hanson Incorporated clients, then buy him with promises of exorbitant compensation, Kumar laughed at him, and then for good measure unleashed a mild but stubborn virus onto all their personal devices. In response, the lawyer, Alicia Givens, launched a legal complaint through the police department that forced Krissy to reluctantly issue Kumar a warning. Since then, Hanson Incorporated had managed to recruit others to do their programming. While none of these had Kumar’s talent, they were good enough that HI could do without him.

  There was blood in the water, and paddling around in the chum were the people Marshal had left in charge as lifeguards.

  Elizabeth and Krissy felt obliged to defend the rule of law, even as Peter and his cronies used it against them. Eric Vandermeer, whose Winter Bastards could certainly have imposed a compromise, refused to become involved. The entire reason for the Winter Bastards, Eric pointed out, was to punish the sort of ‘might-is-right’ philosophy that had run amok at the slaughterhouse. Crossing that line to deal with social issues was flirting with hypocrisy, and could open up a bigger can of worms than any threat that Peter Hanson represented. The Winter Bastards needed to remain neutral, and would abide by the original mandate to provide organized force only in service to the community.

  As for Valerie, her leadership balanced on the edge of a knife. While she still had strong support, the growing number of dissatisfied citizens chiseled away at her credibility daily. It wasn’t that people were ungrateful for being rescued. Nor did they want to leave the community. But as shortages grew more troubling, as hunger became more widespread, and as the cold autumn winds whipped through the open corridors and still uninsulated window panels, the empty promises of Peter Hanson took on a life of their own. That Valerie was eating and sleeping in the relative comfort of the apartment did not make matters better, and it was now estimated that Peter possessed at least twenty to thirty solid followers willing to try things his way. And all it had all taken was a matter of days.

  And so, Valerie smiled into the cameras, tried to exude serene confidence, and called the meeting to order. In the face of the impending schism, she had wrestled the agenda back to a topic that unified the divided community. The shared cause of the zombie threat trumped everything, and even if that couldn’t heal the rift, it put them all, at least temporarily, on the same side.

  “Thank you, everyone,” she said, her gaze flickering from camera to camera in what she hoped was a welcoming address. “Originally, this meeting was going to be a simple debrief to the department heads. However, I felt that we could all benefit by becoming more informed about who our real adversaries are. We set up connections to several wide screens, and we put out chairs. Thanks to Kumar, this signal is going out to everyone in the community.”

  “I’d like to add,” Peter Hanson added, from the screen that his people had set up for him in his new office on the top floor of First Canadian, “that there are several other people we could thank as well, including some of the intrepid employees at Hanson Incorporated. Doug. Cathy. I want to thank you in particular. My new connection is excellent.”

  He paused to glower with a hint of disapproval.

  “Forgive the interruption, Valerie. I merely wanted to be certain that proper credit be allocated where it’s deserved, and not just to the friends of this administration.”

  “Why don’t you bite me, one percent?” Kumar said. “Doug and Cathy are just piggy-backing on the signals that me and Marshal risked our lives setting up.”

  “Oh?” said a stocky woman, speaking up faintly from a crowd that filled one of the other screens. Valerie had a hard time recognizing her. Camille? She was one of the sick prisoners, recently recovered, that had been rescued from the slaughterhouse. “So because we just got here late, we don’t deserve any recognition for the things we contribute?”

  “Not at all,” Torstein growled from another screen that he now shared with Brian and a few others at the gymnasium. “Contribute away. Every little bit helps. But a little fucking gratitude for everything we’ve already done to get you here wouldn’t hurt either.”

  “Okay, Everyone?” Valerie said, raising her voice. “Not constructive. Please try to keep focused on the issues that brought us all here today. I know there have been questions lately regarding matters of property and compensation, and I understand that you all have concerns. All I can tell you is that, one way or another, it is still our intention to make certain that everyone is comfortable. These things take time, but they will happen, I promise you. For the moment, however, I’d like us to set aside those matters so we can address the problem of the undead creatures that are murdering our species. All right?”

  A vague grumbling and grudging acceptance greeted these words.

  Peter Hanson’s eyes flickered with displeasure, but he could see the general shift in mood among his followers and the genuine curiosity that fueled it. On the screen, he leaned back in his expensive chair and folded his hands into a thoughtful pose in front of his mouth.

  “Very well, Ms. Hunter,” he said. “You have our attention. Let us hope that you have some real information to share, and that this is not merely an attempt to distract us from our justifiable protest.”

  “Let’s hope,” Valerie answered with a hint of sarcasm. She gestured towards the man on her left.

  “Many of you already know the person I’m about to introduce,” she said, reading from a handwritten card. “Professor Nicholas Scratchard is a career academician, scholar, and world-class researcher. He holds several different doctorates, including Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Astronomy, Microbiology, and… and English Literature? Seriously? He is considered by many to be one of the greatest minds of our era. At the time of the outbreak, which he managed to anticipate, he was teaching Physics at the University of Toronto and tormenting the Dean of the Faculty of Science. He is an excellent lov..er… Okay. I’m not reading the rest of this. The point is that he’s had nothing to do for several weeks but cobble together all the collected research that could be found before the Internet collapsed, and continue that research as an ongoing study in the U of T laboratories.”

  She stepped aside and Scratchard took her place before a table that had a wireless keyboard, mouse, and a large, 50” screen resting on it. Ignoring the audience, the Professor tapped at a few keys listlessly, took a savage pull from his lit cigarette, and then typed out a flurry.

  A series of blobby images took shape on the screen.

  “Most of you,” Scratchard began, smiling with a wave of his cigarette, “will have been taught to recognize the bare essentials of the human cell. We’re talking grade five education. Others among you will have some vague recollection of terms like ‘nucleus’, ‘membrane wall’, ‘protein strings’, ‘chromosomes’, and ‘organelles’. Most of you, like regular human beings, will have forgotten everything you learned, so today’s lesson will be one part remedial, one part advanced microbiology, and one part X-Files. Be prepared to deduce which is which.”

  He smiled at his audience.

  “Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that this lecture is brought to you by myself and the Administration of New Toronto. Because of this, it is free viewing to all…”

  He stabbed two fingers holding a lit cigarette at Peter Hanson’s screen.

  “… except you. You, Mr. Hanson, are required to pay me fifty million New Toronto dollars, if you want to enjoy this presentation.”

  “Ex… excuse me?” Peter spluttered in surprise.

  “No checks, and I don’t take credit cards,” Scratchard said, grinning. “I will accept a barter value in property – eighty-five cents on the dollar – which I’m assuming is roughly the equivalent of two hundred, fully-furnished habitats in First Canadian Place. The free market is so exciting.”

  “This is outrageous!” Peter exclaimed, his
expression shuddering with rage. “Why should I be the only one to pay?”

  “Mystical, market forces,” Scratchard answered, wiggling the fingers of his free hand like a wizard. He took another drag from his cigarette. “Or more simply put, you’re rich, I’m greedy, and that’s what the market will bear. It’s a bit arbitrary, I’ll admit, but you know how it is. The market will self-correct.”

  “Even if I were inclined to accept your argument, you… you highwayman,” Peter thundered out of his monitor, pointing an accusatory finger, “I would never pay such an astronomical price.”

  “Fair enough,” Scratchard said. “Kumar? Can you disconnect Mr. Hanson’s connection? Apparently, the self-proclaimed richest man in New Toronto values money over the welfare of the community.”

  “Uh… yeah! It would be my pleasure!” Kumar answered, delighted at this turn of events.

  “Better disconnect his three flying monkeys also,” Scratchard advised. “We don’t want to have to sue them for passing on my intellectual property to their boss.”

  “All right, that’s enough,” Valerie interrupted. “Nobody’s getting disconnected.”

  “Did she put you up to this?” Peter demanded, still furious.

  “Not at all,” Scratchard said. “If she had, then I wouldn’t have done it. I just saw a good business opportunity and took it. I thought you’d approve.”

  Valerie sighed.

  “Whatever point you were trying to make, Professor,” she said, “you’ve made it. Mr. Hanson is a part of this community, and therefore he needs to hear what you have to say. Can we please just get on with the presentation?”

  “Fine,” Scratchard grumbled. “But you owe me fifty million dollars.”

  “He’s, uh… he’s always like this,” Eva explained, meeting Valerie’s gaze with a look of apology. “Imagine spending seven weeks cooped up in that building with him. Is it any wonder we spread out into as many groups as we did?”

  “Et tu, Eva?” Scratchard said, extinguishing his smoke. “Fine. Let’s just get started, then. Open question: has anyone ever heard of a little thing called the Human Genome Project?”

  A silence greeted this question, uncertain if it was rhetorical.

  “Help me along with this, Eva,” Scratchard said, “or we’ll be here all day.”

  “The Human Genome Project,” the lady professor explained, “was an international effort to map the roughly three billion base pairs that make up the human genetic code. Essentially, it was an attempt to catalogue the genetic blueprints used to design a human being. It began during the nineties and was declared complete in 2003.”

  “Was it successful?”

  “Successful?” Eva seemed to consider this. “I suppose. In as much as it achieved its goals, yes, it was successful. Were those goals the final blueprint that scientists had hoped for? Not even close. There are still a lot of questions that remain unanswered, and new questions have emerged from the answers we received. While the effort expanded our knowledge base in leaps and bounds, it also revealed hidden levels of complexity to the science of genetics. Regardless, it is still considered one of the great achievements of science and may yet open the doors to whole new worlds of technology, research, and discovery.”

  “Thank you, Eva. Now, tell me this. Are human beings the most complex creatures on the planet? Genetically speaking.”

  Eva seemed to hesitate.

  “This isn’t really my area of expertise,” she answered after a few seconds. “My understanding, however, is that the question is up for debate. There is still so much that we don’t know. Recent studies have suggested that issues such as RNA folding, protein shaping, gene complexity, strand structure can all influence the complexity of an organism’s DNA. Much of what researchers used to call ‘Junk DNA’ – that is, portions of the strand that were deemed obsolete or vestigial leftovers from past mutations – are, in fact, now believed to be regulatory, performing vital tasks in shaping design. The bottom line is that there was still so much to learn, and that new information and theories were emerging almost every day.”

  “Excellent answer, Eva,” Scratchard said, beaming. “Do you know, by the way, if evolution is in any way tied to the size of the genome in any given organism.”

  Again, Eva hesitated.

  “I… we don’t really know for certain,” she answered carefully. “It does seem to be at least partly related, with plenty of anomalies that are still difficult to explain. From a Darwinian standpoint, evolutionary status is hard to assess, and certainly need not be tied to the number of genes an organism possesses. Size isn’t everything, but in general, an argument can be made that the larger the genome, the more information it stores. Even that simple rule, however, is conditional.”

  “Tricky answer, Eva,” Scratchard said.

  “Well, like I said,” she answered. “It’s not my specialty. Nor is all the data in. You have to understand, the human DNA in inconceivably huge, and that’s before you add in all the potential variants that they only just started to see as influential”

  “Fair point. One final question: is the human genome the largest genome on our world?”

  “Oh no. Not by a long shot.”

  “Do you know which organism possesses the largest genome?”

  Eva pursed her lips.

  “The amoeba.”

  Mild surprise swept the audience.

  “How much larger is the amoeba’s genome than the human’s?”

  “About two hundred times. The human genome has about three billion pairs, while the amoeba tops out at over two hundred and sixty billion.”

  “Two hundred and sixty... billion,” Scratchard repeated, addressing the audience.

  “Professor,” Peter Hanson interrupted, impatient and still looking angry, “is there a point to this line of questioning? Do amoebas have anything to do at all with the creatures that are destroying us, or are you just overindulging your moment in the spotlight?”

  “Are amoebas directly related?” Scratchard asked, flicking out his pack of cigarettes and lighting another one up. “No. Does their existence shed possible light on our situation? Yes, they very well might.”

  Puff, puff.

  “Consider the problems inherent to studying these undead. We seek scientific answers to questions that appear to defy all science. How do the dead procure the bio-energy required to move dead muscle tissue, crush stone walls, dismember cars, and consume human flesh? Why do they eat at all? The processes in maintaining an expired digestive system, let alone the inefficiencies of the human blood stream, olfactory system, or any of the five senses, defy logic. They appear to produce no waste material. They adapt to all environments and habitats. Barring the vestigial, unnourished, grey matter of their human victims, they possess no brains, yet they demonstrate a collective intelligence and problem solving capability thought solely to be the province of higher life forms. They prey on humans exclusively, yet show no signs of diminished bio-energy now that their food supply has drastically diminished. WHY?”

  Surrounded by a nimbus of smoke, his eyes searched the faces and the monitors that encircled him. Nobody answered.

  He grinned through his halo of smoke.

  “Let’s get back to the amoeba,” he said. “It’s a single-cell organism that hunts, attacks, digests, and processes other single-cell organisms. We have found petrified giant amoebas, the size of your hand, and indications that they existed as far back as 1.8 billion years ago. Now that is a whole lot of evolution to accumulate on one’s plate.

  “Consider the impossibility of it. As a single cell, it doesn’t possess a brain as we understand such things, but it somehow displays the rudimentary intelligence to hunt. Not that it’s very bright, but the complexity required for a single-celled anything to adaptively shape-change its way through the astronomically-huge, microscopic world that serves as its hunting ground boggles the imagination. Even more intriguing are reports that certain types of amoeba, in times of duress and food shortage
, can form communities called slime molds and exist as a collective. This collective can function as a multi-cellular organism, even sacrificing huge swaths of individual amoebas in the interests of this collective consciousness. They don’t communicate with each other, or at least, not like we do. They don’t have brains, language, or the proper machinery. Rather, think of a brain where the neurons are each isolated, individual, single-cell organisms, joining together to form a thinking machine.”

  Scratchard tapped a key, and the screen flashed to an image of an amoeba. He stared at it for a second, sucking smoke, then exhaling before turning back to his audience.

  “You have to understand, this was life’s first, great, evolutionary leap forward: the formation of multi-cellular life forms. From there, we observe more permanent collectives, with specialized cells evolving to form symbiotic relationships with other specialized cells. These collectives became grist for the great mill of evolution, growing into parasites, trilobites, fish, dinosaurs, mammals, humans, sports teams, and finally, at the top, university professors.”

  He turned an amused gaze onto Peter Hanson.

  “And then back into parasites,” he added. “Circle of life, I suppose.”

  You could have fried an egg on planet Hanson at that moment, but the financier maintained both his silence and his dignity.

  “Now,” Scratchard continued, glancing up at the amoeba on the screen, “there’s a funny thing about evolution. Sometimes, the process settles on a successful archetype that reaches the apex of perfection within it’s environment, at which point, the organism ceases to transform beyond a permanent sort of refining process. Humans and apes, for example, are relative newcomers to the planet. Sharks, on the other hand, date back to before the dinosaurs. As a successful model, they’ve survived all that time with only slight variations on the original blueprint. Scorpions, certain types of insect, alligators... these creatures survived ice ages, meteor strikes, droughts, repeated Darwinian challengers, and did so without needing to change very much. They diversified, of course, and specialized, but they never died out or were out-competed.