by Susan May
Hell, they were annoying. One kept dive-bombing his face, and their buzzing noise seemed even louder now. The other flies bashed relentlessly against the window as if they were kamikaze pilots.
Feeling for the latch, he unhooked the window, pulling it up with a lurch.
“There. Begone, you mutant insects.”
They didn’t go. It was like a signal for them to explore the room. R.P. swatted pointlessly at them as they flew past. Then he gave up.
“I’m taking a shower, and I expect you gone when I’m done,” he said. “The spray is coming.”
Now he was talking to flies. Thank you, Jetlag.
The shower refreshed him. He had turned it on cold for a full minute at the end. The air conditioning in the room wasn’t up to the job. “We’re used to the heat,” he knew Marlene-Maxine would say if he complained. These Australians seemed to truly revel in their harsh climate and dangerous creatures.
They had deadly everything here. There were poisonous spiders that lived in suburban houses. Imagine you’re asleep, and with one bite you’re off to the hospital.
Before his trip, he’d found a website: The Seven Things That Can Kill You in Australia (Not). It was a mythical joke, the site had said, that these native creatures could kill you.
He didn’t believe that website.
He’d Googled and discovered that over four hundred tourists died each year in Australia.
He believed that website.
The news reports of some of these bizarre deaths had reached the U.S. Snakes wrapping themselves around toddlers and suffocating them. Crocodiles attacking and eating German tourists. Sharks coming right into knee-deep water to drag people under. Mosquitoes carrying some horrible disease called Ross River Virus—sounded like something from a laboratory. These poisonous black spiders called redbacks—due to the big red stripe down their back—which hid under chairs. Including toilets.
He believed the news reports.
That’s why he came prepared.
In his bag were a whistle to scare off snakes, a satellite phone in case he became lost in the bush, a hydration pack with extra water, an anti-venom kit for spider and snake bites, and a knife—not as big as that Crocodile Dundee character’s one, but big enough to stick in the eye of any shark or crocodile. No Australian danger would catch him napping.
As R.P. exited the bathroom, he suddenly realized he’d made a terrible mistake. He’d left the window open, and the glowing bedside lamp had attracted Marlene-Maxine’s native wildlife.
Hovering over the bed was a cloud of insects. The flies were gone—that was something—but now there was a whole tea party of creepy crawlies. Some type of big brown ugly beetle with horns sticking out of its head crawled across his pillow. Disgusting.
R.P. grabbed the pillow and shook it violently. The beetle landed on the floor beside the bed and continued its slow crawl to nowhere. Then he attacked the bedspread as if it contained a demon, lifting it up and shaking it until his arms hurt. The native wildlife fluttered up in a humming bustle of legs and wings, then alighted again on the cover as soon as he’d laid it back on the bed.
“Where the hell is the damn spray, Marlene-Maxine?” he muttered, swinging his gaze around the room. He’d hoped she’d brought it while he was in the shower. It wasn’t there.
Now the insects had found him. They crawled on his arms, his shirt, and even his face. He brushed them away in a manic movement that he imagined made him look like a drunken dancer.
Well, isn’t this just great, he thought. He had packed everything they’d suggested on the tourist sites.
They hadn’t said to bring goddamn bug spray. It should be the first thing they tell you. Make that jumbo size, because we breed ’em big Down Under. No, they don’t tell you that, because they think it’s normal. What did Marlene-Maxine say? “You gotta live with the buggers.” She was right about one thing—bug-gers was the perfect name.
Then he heard it.
At first, he thought it was Marlene-Maxine with the bug-ger spray. No, he saw now it was coming from the window. A tapping, scratching, like someone dragging branches across the glass.
Shhert. Shhert.
Then the scraping suddenly grew frantic, as if the thing was falling and the window was the last thing it could grab.
As R.P. looked toward the sound, he realized he still hadn’t closed the bug-ger beacon window. He moved toward it… but was suddenly stopped.
Was that a claw over the windowsill?
No, it must be paint or a stick. Had to be. As he watched, it suddenly moved, curling over the peeling paint of the frame.
It was a claw. A big, black claw. What the hell? Some kind of native animal was there. A dingo? He was on the second floor. Dingoes were like dogs, weren’t they? Could they climb?
R.P. rushed across the room with the fog of insects fluttering behind him. He’d get that window down before whatever it was got in.
Up close, he realized his second big mistake.
It wasn’t a claw. It was a hand—with a claw. Attached to the hand was a horrible thing.
He froze. The black shape seemed to bubble and ripple, and then slip through the gap between the window and the sill. What was he seeing? Had he missed something in his research? The hand with the claw continued to cling to the sill as the slithering black thing rotated around it.
Now it was inside and only a few feet away, R.P. saw it had fangs—long yellow sharp ones. Saliva dripped and frothed down its chin, which was dotted with tiny pointed horns that oozed a nasty, black liquid. Its eyes were red and round, and it blinked with two lids like a lizard.
Then the claw reached out and the thing flew at him with incredible speed. The rotting smell of it rushed over him like a steaming wind. In a split second it was beside him. Just as its slimy fangs burst through the skin of his neck the door to his room opened.
It was Charlene (that was her name; he’d finally remembered), and she was holding the spray out toward him. As the pain of the creature’s bite traveled through his body like a fiery fuse, R.P. thought to himself, She’ll know what to do. Charlene’s an Australian. They know this stuff.
As he entered the blackness, and realized he was never again going to write another blog, he heard her voice, as if from a distance.
“Mr. Kroil, you shouldn’t leave windows open. Fug-got to tell you. They’re real buggers, the bloody Aussie vampires. Give ’em half a chance and they’re inside like a flash.”
Then she chuckled. “They sure do love you Uh-meric’ns.”
© 2012 Susan May
From the Imagination Vault
In 2011, I joined the Twitter and blogging world. They’re fun places and, also, international, and I quickly made friends with many Americans.
What struck me during my 140-character conversations with Americans is their absolute fear of our spiders and snakes. Their disbelief we just take it for granted that underneath an outdoor chair we may find a poisonous spider and yet we simply brush it away was just too amusing.
Unfortunately, in Perth, Western Australia (where I live), during the 2012 summer, there was a series of shark attacks off our coast. Several tourists, including an American, lost their lives, and others were injured badly. In Australia, shark attacks occur every year and we have, sadly, become accustomed to seeing it on the news. That summer, though, was worse than normal.
Many of my American Twitter friends were mortified to hear about the attacks, along with a story of a toddler being squeezed by a snake, and a photo I posted of a poisonous redback spider I found under my favorite writing chair. Yes, you do just brush it away and squash it quickly.
My dark little mind gleefully embraced the idea of writing a story about an American who thought he had come prepared for everything, only to find he was mistaken.
There actually is a blog post called “Australian Outback Dangers: 7 Things That Can Kill You (Not!)” which I found while researching this story. Read it to assure yourself it’s perfectly safe
to visit Australia.
I apologize to the Australian Tourist Bureau if I have now dissuaded any tourists from visiting our beautiful shores. Australians, though, are a friendly bunch, and Australia is a wonderful place to holiday. So please come on down.
Should you find yourself in holiday accommodation in the Aussie outback, and you meet a pear-shaped proprietor named Charlene, perhaps it’s best you don’t open the window.
Program Delete
The Intelervate Chip repaired brain-damaged babies, good as new. In fact, better than new: they were superior in so many ways. As the children matured, the differences between chipped children and normal children became the focus of a fearful world. If the children were allowed to survive, would they forever change the balance in society? Could the world tolerate those who were different? Or would history repeat itself?
I was born July 27, 2051.
Two days later, they inserted the Intelervate Chip into my brain and switched on my program.
My parents were thrilled. The chip and its code transformed me into their perfect baby girl. Now I was the child for which they had spent the past nine months planning.
Why chip me?
Only hours after I’d made my entrance into the world, doctors informed my parents I had incurred major brain damage. The umbilical cord, life-giving for nine months, had turned on me in the last few seconds of my birth. It had determinedly wrapped itself around my neck.
Perhaps it had seen into my future, and in some perverse way this was its final act of protection. In hindsight, if I’d had the power, I may have wrapped it around my neck myself.
They had developed the technology to repair babies, hadn’t they? They would use it, even though they hadn’t considered the downside.
It began decades ago with an old movie-star couple with a media-created merged name like Brangelitti or something. One of their nine kids was born brain-damaged. Brangelitti and their Hollywood pals threw a lot of money at it. Funding was a priority for something so emotive. Within a decade the clever scientists had done it.
Providing you had the cash, the Intelervate Chip was an easy choice. God gives you a disabled baby? Chip them. Take that, God, you son of a bitch. Voila, healthy baby! Ready to go.
I didn’t understand I was different.
It takes a comparison to normal children before that concept enters your reality. My parents kept me away from other kids until the very last moment. Maybe it was to protect me, or maybe it was the social stigma of admitting your baby was born less than perfect.
They both needed to work to pay for the program upgrades, or else they would have home-schooled me, never let me mingle. Intelervate babies aren’t cheap. When the Company has you—baby, they have you.
They didn’t read the fine print before the chipping. Who would? Their precious baby was lying there, her life ebbing away. There weren’t enough brain cells left to tell her tiny lungs what to do or command her heart to beat in time.
It’s in these simple things controlled by organic bits of gray matter where a chip really comes in handy. You can control the useless things like burping and farting, but you can’t consciously press the bio-button that says, “Heart, please beat at eighty-five beats per minute, thank you.”
They had one hour to decide and scramble for the money.
There is always an Intelervate Chip financing company standing by that will come through in your hour of need. Will that be the forty-five-year plan, with no deposit? Or a third down, and in only twenty-five years, you’re done?
It was a miracle.
I didn’t just live—I thrived.
By six months I could talk in small sentences. By age two, my vocabulary was that of a six-year-old. My physical development was unaltered. Chips don’t run your body, just your brain. Hormones control growth and emotions and mine worked naturally.
The rest of me—program.
The result: I could converse intelligently before I could walk. That kind of incongruity really screws with your head.
I grew, and my parents watched.
They held their breath and spoke in whispers I couldn’t hear. My mother would look at me with tears and a wringing of her hands. That sometimes told me more than words. My father simply avoided me, his eyes downcast, absently brushing my head when he passed.
It was as if they were too afraid to connect with me. They watched from a distance while I played. They stopped hugging and kissing me and telling me I was their “beautiful baby.”
Later I understood this was the behavior of frightened adults. To put it simply, I freaked them out.
Who could blame them? Here was a twelve-month-old, with only four teeth, asking: “Why do I go to bed now? Why can’t I sleep with you? Why are you staring at me funny? Why is Daddy shouting? Why is Mummy crying? Am I bad?”
At age five I went to school.
By then I had the IQ of a thirteen-year-old. To me the teachers were unintelligent. My fellow classmates… more so. I wouldn’t participate in the crafts or other ridiculous, time-wasting pursuits. Painting with your fingers, measuring things with blocks, repeating the days of the week by rote. It was demeaning and pointless.
I ached from the boredom.
Around the time of my initiation to school—while I was still coming to terms with the concept of Play-Doh and the uselessness of it—the bad press began. First, the criticism of us came from a few small blogs and talk-show panel discussions.
A few of us had entered adulthood, and it suddenly dawned on the world there were more of us than they had realized. Unbeknown to the populace, the Intelervate Chip had saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of babies. There were now dozens of über-rich medical companies offering all manner of chip “extras.” You could order up a musical or artistic genius, a math prodigy, a writer, or even a philosopher. You name the skill, they’d created it.
In less than two decades we had morphed from medical miracles, to curiosity factor, to alien race. Like most things, once a herd starts to run in one direction, before you know it you’ve got a stampede. you’re left with one option. Run. Once they start, that herd isn’t stopping.
I was just a cute, curly-brown-haired five-year-old. I looked like every other kid. I wasn’t an alien creature. I was someone’s child.
It took two days for the school to realize I was a “Vater.”
Oh yes… they have a name for us. “Vaters.” Inteler-vate Chip… get it? It’s so clever, right? When they spit it at you, it rolls off their tongues like the word “hater.” Pretty soon hate was all I heard, until my parents took me out of school and placed me in an educational facility created especially for us.
Then an evolution of kindred thinkers began—if you can call what they did thinking—and it manifested into clubs of a sort. “Vater Haters,” they were called. Join a chapter anywhere.
“Outrageous,” the media cried. Behind closed doors, the idea was comforting.
Apparently, it echoed a similar era over a century ago.
They were likened to a group called the “Ku Klux Klan”—catchy—who had a problem with, mostly, African-Americans. The same sentiment was present across the world in different countries, too.
They actually thought the color of someone’s skin made a difference. Bashings, hangings, and even house-burnings were hobbies these people embraced. It took decades of fighting for equality for that era to end, and it dribbled on for decades after that. Apparently the countries involved felt shame for decades, and so they should.
“Couldn’t happen again,” they’d said. Not in the super-evolved information age.
The Vater Haters’ physical and verbal attacks tapered off quickly when new laws were put in place for our protection. For a short time, we did feel protected; safe. As it turned out, they’d discovered something more efficient.
All you needed was a wand. Not the magical kind—the magnetic kind. Wave it within twenty centimeters of a Vater’s ear, and in less time than it takes to say “Surprise, l
ife as you know it is over,” your chip is fried, your program scrambled.
You reverted to whatever capabilities and defects you were born with. For most of us, life after wanding became one of intellectual impairment.
Just put in another chip, you say? Works with computers.
Technology can’t overcome one physiological problem: fully-formed brains don’t like foreign things inserted into them. A little concept in the medical game known as “implant rejection.”
What began as isolated incidents—“Vater wanding,” they called it—grew, until mobs roaming the streets became the norm. The Vater Haters were often seen walking along, holding their wands in the air, and waving them above the heads of passers-by.
The older set complained—not because of the damage to us. No. They saw it as disrespectful to “normal” people. Originally, there was a public outcry against the violence and the wanding. After all, we were still people. We were sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, and, as time passed, parents.
The outcry diminished to a small sob when, with the successive Vater generations, it became clear the life-giving chips bestowed upon their recipients an unfair advantage in education and careers. Ultimately, they had created a super race within the population. The intellectual prowess of the Vaters overshadowed the abilities of even the geniuses among the Nons.
Oh, yes. We had a name for them, too.
The non-chipped, the inferior of intellect, the people whose seeds of hatred had taken root in our society, surreptitiously, became our enemies. The Nons embarked on a path that slowly divided the world.
What to do with us?
Hysteria and emotional discourse raged as governments passed the first laws banning further use of the Intelervate chip. If you didn’t bear the misfortune of needing a chip, then the banning of its use seemed a reasonable course of action. What of the already chipped, and those poor families whose child wouldn’t survive without one? The horse had already bolted for us.
