by Nick Mamatas
“Probably,” Drew said, not breaking his too-slow stride.
“Why don’t you want me in that warehouse?”
“Maybe we do, but we’re now just trying to find out how much you want to be in that warehouse,” said Drew.
“Ever get the feeling that everyone else in the world has free will, but you are a slave to forces beyond your control?” Alysse asked, as best she could with her nose to the warehouse parking lot. “Or, how about vice-versa?”
“Well, which is it?” said Julia, grinding Alysse’s cheek against the ground. Alysse squeaked defiantly.
“Are you kidding?” asked Drew. “We were hoping you’d know.” He was over her now, though with his pot belly and scruffy peach-fuzz hair he did not impose much of a visual threat. Julia loosened her grip on Alysse, who lifted herself up on one elbow and brushed gravel from the pocks of her face.
“We don’t even agree with one another. I think you are free, Julia.”
“And I think the spiders are calling the tune.”
“How do you know about the spiders?”
“My lawyer’s one of them. After I escaped from prison and helped launch Z-Day, they found me again and brought me here. We’re a lot alike, you and I,” said Drew.
“And how did you end up in Hamilton?” Julia asked Alysse, her Hamilton lacking the crucial burst of enthusiasm at the end.
“Well, uh … I was actually born here,” she said, sheepish. “This is where I grew up. It’s a real town, it’s not just some lame Potemkin Village. It’s just that nobody really wants to be from Hamilton. I mean, would you?”
“I certainly fucking wouldn’t,” said Drew. Julia let Alysse go entirely and stood up.
“Hamilton,” Alysse said, walking off a cramp and dusting off her thick shirt, “used to be notorious. They wouldn’t let army guys come here because High Street was full of speakeasies and whorehouses.” She waved her arms around. “This was a bedroom community for the Chicago mob! Not that I’m in favor of organized crime or anything, but, you know, that’s pretty cool.”
“Maybe when you were a kid, but the town has since been under the lathe of lockstep,” said Drew.
“There weren’t speakeasies when she was a kid, Drew,” Julia said.
“So you agree with her?”
“No.”
Alysse frowned. “I had a real life here.”
“One that you left for Brooklyn, which you wanted to save from gentrification,” Julia said.
“True enough, but that doesn’t make my experiences any less real, or any more of some kind of biochemical cliché. And speaking of …” Alysse gestured toward Drew and studiously looked him up and down. “Who are you supposed to be? The Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons? Even this ridiculous philosophical conundrum is nerdy. Clichés are everywhere.”
“So you’re still a snotty high school bitch, just like you were before the spiders came and took over, huh?” Drew said.
“All right, this is entertaining,” said Julia, “but I’m going in. It doesn’t matter whether I am going in due to my free will or because I’ve been programmed to. What matters is that I am going.”
“I’m coming with you,” said Drew. “This is like the Twilight Zone.” Then he made a sound remarkably like that of a theremin.
“I’m coming too. Of my own free will,” said Alysse.
“Let’s see the strings that control the system.”
We opened the doors for them.
25
IF we were to describe our own philosophical position vis-à-vis the thorny question of free will, we’d identify as compatibilist. It all seems rather self-evident to us. Our webs can only stretch so far; there are limits—cognitive, chemical, temporal—to our collectivity. We’re all finite beings in an infinite universe, and indeed, Hymenoepimescis sp. more or less guarantees that some of our own actions cannot be predicted, even by ourselves.
We consider the issue a solved problem, really. Our species is rather less argumentative than yours.
Drew entered first, his face a twist of fleshy emotions. Julia was right behind him, her arm touching his back. Alysse dawdled behind and stayed in the well of the entrance for several seconds. “Jesus,” she said. A man of indeterminate ethnicity, the same who had just dealt with Hamilton and put him back in his RV, greeted them all.
“Busy day today,” we said with a smile. We tried to keep our skittering along the criss-crossing beams and spheres of our webs to a minimum, as too much activity upsets people, but we were all eager for a look.
“Why are you doing this?” asked Drew. “Revealing yourselves to us.”
“We’re here for the genocide,” said Alysse, suddenly pushing her way up front.
We took the opportunity to practice raising our eyebrows.
“They’re fresh out, I bet,” said Julia.
“We mean no harm.”
“Take us to your leader,” Drew said, then he laughed a miserable little heheheh.
“Take us to yours!” we said.
“Davan’s not here,” said Alysse.
“Davan’s the leader?” Drew said. Alysse stared at him with a look of poisoned disgust.
Julia walked up to us, close and intimate, her breath on her face. “Sorry,” she muttered. “They sort of followed me.”
“We know,” we said. “It’s all right.” Julia slipped her arms around us, her hands sliding between the crooks of our elbows, and she squeezed hard. We responded, wishing we had more limbs.
“What’s going on?” said Alysse. She had her cell phone out again, her thumb poised. We weren’t sure ourselves.
“What is going on is what should go on when intelligence meets intelligence,” Julia said. “Some effort at something. These little guys”—she continued, her eyes up at the canopy of webbing that hung from the catwalks and the girders of the warehouse—“they try. They fail, they ruin lives, but they try.”
“Heh,” said Drew. “You ruined a few lives without trying.”
“And we tried to limit that,” we said, “with our intervention into Julia’s life.”
“That ruined a few lives too,” said Drew.
“So did moving too late,” we said.
“This is fucking ridiculous. Does everybody get to wreak some havoc but me?” Alysse said. “I want to be down with some motherfucking crime for once!” She darted to the wall and before we could stop her yanked on the fire alarm. The bells clangalangaclangalanged and the sprinklers began to fire. Webs fell like sheets from the ceilings and the walls. We fell hard but landed lightly, and some of us swirled down the drains or splashed about in the storming puddles born in cracks and pits on the concrete floors. Our hair got in the eyes of our man of indeterminate ethnicity. Drew threw his hands over his head and tried to duck the rain, but could not. A thick sheet of webbing fell on him, and he tore at it, then swiped his palms at his scalp and ran outside, itching and twitching at the spiders on him.
Alysse whooped and grabbed the axe hanging on the wall by the alarm switch and starting swinging, trying to cut floss as though it were wood. We, with Julia—her arms still around us—shuffled out of the way. Alysse ran into the billowing sails of webs and the rain of falling spiders.
“Are her dreams of mass murder finally coming true?” Julia asked us. Her dreadlocks had unraveled a tiny bit, and dark water spilled from her face. Our feet squished in the puddles in our shoes.
“Not really. She may as well be tearing up old train schedules as far as we’re concerned. We’re mostly all here and we don’t have the same attachment to single little bits of motivation and locomotion that you all do.”
Julia rested her head against our chest. She pressed hard with the side of her face, her ear, likely eager for the rush of breath and the thump of a heart. Our men of indeterminate ethnicity don’t have those sensations on offer, we’re afraid. “You care about me, don’t you? Love me?” Julia must have hoped for a deep sound in the chest when she said that second to last word, but there was no
thing in our man to hear. For a moment, we feared that we would be revealed, so we said what we had to.
“I love you, Julia, very much. More than anything.”
“Why?” He voice cracked.
“If we didn’t, there would have been much more bloodshed. There still could be.”
“Bloodshed.” Julia said, with a snicker. “Little bits of motivation and locomotion suddenly spasming and coming to a stop.” She knew.
Alysse ran by behind us, splashing wildly, her axe swaddled in webbing, a howl of glee on her lips.
“It adds up,” we said. “And it delays the day we can all meet as equals. If Hymenoepimescis sp. oviposits in a human rather than in one of us, we benefit in the short term. But on those rare occasions in which the wasp has been mutated, changed by random bursts of radiation …”
“You lose,” Julia said. The sprinklers tchtchtched to a stop finally, out of water.
“Everyone loses. Homo sapiens sapiens shattered the atom. There’s more radiation now. The ozone layer has been chewed away by the gnashing of industry. We could explain it to you all, at once, so you’d understand, but you may not listen. It’s so hard to know things, Julia. So hard to see the failings, and the flailings, of others—”
“The failings, you mean.”
“No, the flailings. As in a web, each jerk and yank leading to further enmeshment. But we have to look, we cannot turn away. It’s—”
Julia was a head shorter than us, and our man’s musculature was contrived. She didn’t notice till we spiders started falling on our head that we’d stopped speaking because Alysse had run by and lopped off our head with her axe. She gasped, then jerked away. The body, headless except for elements of the jaw, stayed upright and rocked slightly as we evacuated it. Julia scooped up a handful of us and mouthed empty words, then gently put us on the floor and waited as we scuttled away before stepping up to Alysse.
“Having fun?” Julia asked.
Alysse’s breath was ragged, her arms lip, the hatchet blade’s corner nearly on the floor.
“He wasn’t real. Obviously,” said Alysse. “So it doesn’t matter. That’s the whole point, right? None of this shit is real. That’s what the whole thing with Fishman was about?”
“Oh, he was real.”
“Until he wasn’t anymore. And the money Drew sent to Iraq wasn’t real, it was just a matter of mutual agreement. And the whole Internet going down showed just how much time everyone spends being unreal—playing at being hot, or at being a dragon, or being smart or having money,” Alysse said. “Picking and choosing, that’s the power you had.” “It’s not power. It was chemicals. Wasp larvae, looking at me to design a world more amenable to them.”
“How?”
Julia raised her arms. “More spiders out in the open, I guess, for the wasps to infect? More international trade, or at least multinational thrashing about by rich assholes, so they can spread. Maybe it was just an evolutionary mistake. The spiders just spin a different sort of web when they’re infected. None of this was supposed to happen.”
“What was supposed to happen?” said Alysse. She raised the axe again, huffing as she did.
“I don’t know, I think we should just all back away from this,” said Julia. “There is a whole other world, half a world, anyway. You know—towns like Hamilton!”—she stopped to chuckle because the exclamation point was still funny to her—“that they built or maybe just found. I’ve been there. It’s not bad.”
“Heh,” said Alysse. “I just want your half. Is it real?”
“As real as anything else.”
Alysse threw the axe away and winced when it clattered as it bounced off the floor twice before settling. “I want things to mean things. I want things to be real. I want to be an agent, you know, a social agent.” She smiled. “A secret social agent. Doing stuff that matters.”
Julia made a point of stepping between Alysse and the axe. “Well, you can tell the world if you want, about the spiders and the wasps. How much more important and widespread these two little species are. I’m done. I’m going to go see Raymond.”
“Where is he?”
“The Simulacrum.”
“Do you want to go, or are you being pushed to go,” Alysse asked, “pulled to go.”
“All of the above,” Julia said. “They can’t hold me there, even if they can get me there. You know?”
“Okay. I’m taking some of these spiders and webbing, and then I’m going to the newspaper. Not the local one, a real one.”
“Well, good luck with that,” said Julia, and she left the warehouse.
Deadly Dance of Wasps and Spiders May Lead To Rewriting of History Books, Lone Scientist Says
By Donna Barringer, New York Times October 30, 20__
Scientists have been enamored with the Hymenoepimescis sp. since 2000, when it was discovered that the wasp was capable of changing the behavior of the Plesiometa argyra spider via the implantation of its eggs into the arachnid. The wasp sting temporarily paralyzes the spider and allows for the laying of eggs, which in turn feeds on the spider’s fluid as they grow into larvae. The spider is “reprogrammed” by the larvae to create a unique cocoon-like web that can bear the weight of the wasps after they pupate and consume their host.
“There are many parasites that have developed the ability to neuromodulate,” writes Elizabeth Slankard of the Miami University of Ohio’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in a letter to the editor of the latest issue of American Scientist, “and humans are not beyond having their own behavior modulated by parasites.” Dr. Slankard believes that Hymenoepimecis sp. and similar species may be responsible for much of the evolution of human societies.
“The wasp’s neuromodulation of the spider is very finely directed toward certain ends. It is interesting that the indigenous cultures of the areas of Latin America where the wasp is found never developed wheel technology, though they were advanced in other ways.” Civilizations related to the Olmec had made many discoveries in astronomy, built irrigation canals, and had developed an impressive pharmacopeia based on native plants, but had never invented the wheel or established regular trade relationships with neighboring tribes.
“The wasp retarded the growth of these civilizations, to keep competition from invasive species to a minimum, and to keep their own habitat from expanding past the habitat of their prey species, Plesiometa argyra.” Lankard, in her letter, notes the architectural similarities between the unique cocoon-shaped web created by these spiders under the direction of the wasp, and the homes built by these tribes.
Researchers have long speculated as to the extent to which cultural evolution is shaped by exogenous forces. “Did hallucinogenic fungi in rye bread cause the hysteria that sparked the Salem Witch Trials? Did Saint John eat the wrong mushroom before writing the book of Revelations?” Dr. Jonathan K. Wolf, professor of history at New York University asks. “Was Caligula’s horse really smarter than the average senator once the amount of retardation caused by drinking water from lead pipes is taken into account? These are rhetorical questions. Ultimately, the answer doesn’t really matter. Philosophers like to talk about a universe without free will, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty, hard determinism renders the study of history incoherent. I don’t think naturalists are going to find many social scientists willing to make themselves redundant for the sake of competing research programs.”
That, according to Dr. Lankard, is the problem. “Research into neuromodulation represents a paradigm shift, and it takes massive amounts of evidence to shift a paradigm. And massive amounts of evidence,” she said during a telephone interview, “requires massive amounts of funding.” To that end, she has taken the unusual step of appealing directly to the public, asking for donations on a website called WebOfHumanHistory.org.
“I’ve been threatened with having my tenure revoked, I cannot get my work published,” Dr. Lankard says. “But this is important research and it must go forward.” Lankard says she became in
terested in neuromodulators after the so-called Z-Day event when over 95 percent of the World Wide Web was rendered inaccessible by hackers. “It just struck me, a real ‘eureka’ moment, about how tenuous everything is and how those webs of connection between us are so fragile. Pluck one string, and everything follows.”
Myrin Sollazzo, chair of the department in which Dr. Lankard works at Miami University, would not comment on claims of tenure revocation, saying that “human resources matters are necessarily confidential,” but did express satisfaction with Lankard’s teaching of introductory biology and ecology courses.
About Lankard’s fundraising website, Dr Sollazzo simply said, “Intriguing concept. I’m reminded of that bumper sticker, ‘One day we’ll have all the money we need for education, and the Air Force will have to hold bake sales to buy fighter jets.’“
26
RAYMOND found his mother’s body behind a shrub on the border between her property and that of her neighbor Irma. The police and medics assured him that Lynn Hernandez had died of natural causes, and the death certificate declared that the cause of death was virulent and undetected lung cancer, likely due to extended exposure to radon. After the interference from Z-Day subsided and Raymond was able to make regular contact with his colleagues, he requested a sabbatical to write his book on penis panic and latah. It was granted easily enough, as the economy was in such poor shape that CUNY was cutting lines and retrenching entire departments. Luckily, Raymond’s mother’s home was paid off and there were enough gold and silver knick-knacks on the mantelpieces and in the hutches to pay for several years’ property tax and home heating oil.
Raymond didn’t write his book. He wrote to Liz and asked her to join him on Long Island. It took two weeks and a follow-up email for Liz to answer. She wrote:
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Re: Please Come
Raymond,
Jesus Christ, I am about three seconds away from coming down there to “be with you” only so long to slap you across the face. Who on Earth asks someone to shack up with him, as a lover, via email?! And then doesn’t even bother making afollow-up call? Z-Day’s over. If you wanted me, you could have contacted me. It’s perfectly obvious that you are still mooning over your ex, and that, my friend Raymond, is actually the least of your problems. I am sorry your mother passed, and that you are experiencing various issues related to your career, but I cannot help you. I am not a substitute for everything else that is missing in your life, and you are not a lab rat with a gambling problem who lives in a Skinner Box so you are beyond my professional expertise, though honestly I believe I would like to electrify the floor under your feet.
