Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1)

by Jae Hill

  “But that was their solution: destroy everything they held dear, throw the planet into chaos, kill off 90 percent of the species on the planet, flood 70 percent of the world’s biggest cities, set the stage for a disease to wipeout everyone…and then race to the stars with all the wealth they had robbed from the rest of the world. It was disgusting. We’re still cleaning up their mess four hundred years later.”

  “So when I ask you to pay attention, there’s a damn good reason. That wasn’t the first time our species had read that chapter of history and failed to learn its lesson. Not even the second, actually. But you can be better than your forebears.”

  There was only silence. I tried to think back to Slayers but kept seeing those images from the screen. I’d never seen a dead body. I’d never seen destroyed cities. The version of history we normally got was so condensed that it glossed over the harsh realities of the world before.

  EVOLVING YOUR CHARACTER

  Pair-bonding was only allowed for adults in our society and forbidden for children. They reasoned that such attachments were too serious for kids and that we should spend our time studying, playing sports, or taking up hobbies, but I was still always curious about the opposite sex. We had basic anatomy as part of Tier M, but since I was so advanced, in school, I didn’t really care about body parts at the time I studied them. Later, when I was fourteen, I very bluntly asked fifteen-year-old Adara to show me what was under her clothes and agreed to show her what was under mine.

  We found a large, lighted supply closet in the school where she proceeded to undress in a very matter-of-fact manner. There isn’t shame in our society, by the way. There is modesty for civility’s sake, but no embarrassment. In any case, by the time she was completely naked, the school administrator swung the door open wide and I never got to live up to my end of the deal. I was put to hard labor for a week scrubbing floors and cleaning the bathrooms in the school. I still got excited when I saw girls after that, especially the really pretty ones, but I never acted on it. It was forbidden.

  In time, Adara overcame her worries about me getting her in trouble again and we became friends once more. She would hang out with Semper and me after school, and even came out on my dad’s boat a few times. Occasionally, I would feel a spark of electric tingle as her hand brushed mine or I’d feel a strange sensation in my stomach when she’d get close to me, even innocently.

  I didn’t know what to do about those feelings. I knew I liked them, but I’d never seen my father do anything with my mother that was “animalistic” as it was called. They’d occasionally kiss on the cheek or hug, but mostly, they just held hands. I tried holding Adara’s hand one time and she immediately withdrew it, slapping me with the other one. That was for pair-bonded adults to do, she scolded. But we didn’t stop spending time together.

  Semper and I finished all twenty-six tiers at the same time—when I was fifteen and he was sixteen. We graduated and then began taking university classes together, remotely. We didn’t need to travel to the capital, so we spent the days either at his house or my house studying. Even though I wanted to major in astrophysics, and Semper was more interested in mechanical engineering, our general education courses overlapped. For two years we were study buddies and partners in crime. One day he talked to me about something he’d read.

  It was a word he’d found that didn’t make sense: brothers. We’d often seen the word used in some old plays and we always thought it meant comrades. Deeper research into the word revealed that it meant a male sibling. A sibling was another child, born of the same parents as you. We were stunned. I ran to my dad immediately and asked why I didn’t have any siblings and he gave me the long version of the short story we’d been told our whole lives.

  Once upon a time, a long time ago, the planet Earth was in trouble. There were nearly ten billion people on it. The air was polluted, the ice caps were melting, and people fought over water and food and resources. A tiny minority of the people owned almost all the resources. Most of the rest of the people were so poor they couldn’t eat and they placed all their hope that a space god would save them from their misery. But one group of people was smarter than those other two groups. They moved to the Northwest portion of this continent of the Earth and started to build a society that was fair and smart and balanced.

  Of course I knew all this from school. The forerunners of our society built the first space elevator. Perfected matter replication. Built an air exchanger to clean the carbon and soot from the skies. While everyone else fought for the last scraps of a dying world, we strove for something better. Eventually, when the Plague ravaged the planet, billions died. The Northwest quarantined itself from the rest of the world while their leading scientists developed a cure to the rapidly mutating disease. A scientist named Kip Rudinger decided that a vaccine wasn’t sufficient so he began work on a program called the Cybernetic Immortality Project which developed the earliest prototype robotic bodies. Doctor Rudinger’s work led thousands of people to shed their vulnerable flesh for undying cyborg forms. The robots didn’t look pretty and weren’t nearly as powerful as the “enhanced forms” that people get today when they reach physical maturity at age eighteen, but the initial models inspired even more innovation. Though a Plague vaccine was discovered, it came too late for most of the world. Most of the world refused the vaccine, trusting the space god over the science. Those that survived outside of the Northwest refused to trust technology again, and swore it off entirely. They still live in roaming nomadic bands that fight over territory and pride. They have no education. They may have even lost language abilities, but no one knows because they can’t be observed up close without being killed.

  Dad continued with his story. When humans lived only a few decades, the key to survival was to have as many offspring as possible. Some parents had dozens of children. Now that every single human can live forever in an enhanced form, population control is vital, to prevent the overcrowding and overconsumption of resources that nearly destroyed the world centuries ago. With humans expanding across the stars, however, the human race still needs to grow in numbers, so every pair-bonded couple is allowed to have a single child. Pair-bonds were established to give legal custody of a child to one man and one woman who provided the genetic material to create it. They were obligated to raise it, educate it, and care for it until age eighteen, when it underwent the transformation. It was important that there be one male and one female present to raise the child, so pair-bonds and child-rearing was reserved for heterosexual couples. Homosexuals could still “couple” but because child-rearing was so tightly controlled, they were not allowed to have children.

  There haven’t been siblings for three or four generations, at least, since sexual intercourse was outlawed. Males had mandatory vasectomies performed at infancy. Cybernetic female bodies were unable to bear children, despite countless attempts at upgrades over the years. It was deemed too risky to allow natural mating under age eighteen because of the emotional distress it would cause when you later underwent the cybernetic transformation.

  With all of the books I had read, I never heard anything about mating or birth of humans; there was simply too much other material to read to even consider it. Clearly I knew animals did it, but never really thought about humans and reproduction in an animal sense. Such things never even dawned on me. I was astounded to learn that there were things about the universe I’d never considered. When I asked Dad why they never told us these things in school, he replied that they didn’t want us to experiment with mating. It’s dangerous, he warned. I asked him if he ever did. He shook his head and muttered that he hadn’t, but I somehow didn’t believe him.

  I started to research more about how children were born. I had just always taken for granted that I’d come from my mother, but never really put it together that she had long abandoned her necessary biological equipment to rear me. As smart as I was, how could I have missed this? I suppose there was so much to learn about the universe that I never had time to c
ontemplate such things. I knew all about the animal process of mating, but human males were sterilized at birth to prevent unwanted pregnancies, so how did our species continue?

  Well, the answer astonished me: I was grown in a lab. My father’s sperm and my mother’s eggs were cryogenically frozen at the time they underwent their transformations. Decades later, when they pair-bonded, they had their gametes selected for optimal genetic desirability and grew me in an artificial womb for six months. Normal human fetuses would take nine or more months to reach viability but with perfect doses of hormones and vitamins, babies were ready for “birth” in much less time. And if that wasn’t shocking enough, I had segments inserted into my genetic code for Plague-resistance and hyper-intelligence. I was created. Designed. Perfected in the eyes of science and my parents. How “human” could I really be?

  TRANSFORMATIONS

  Semper was now eighteen and eligible for his transformation. He delayed the process by two months so he could finish his semester at the university. This actually required special permission from both the university and the chief surgeon in the capital. I couldn’t understand why a delay would be such a big deal. Everyone eventually underwent the transformation. Everyone. You couldn’t travel the stars or even go to Mars without doing it, and every adult had been to Mars. I thought about it a little harder, and I’d never met a single adult who hadn’t undergone the procedure. It was supposedly voluntary, but had anyone ever declined it? I guess the call of immortality and travelling among the stars was way too appealing.

  Semper came to my house the night before he left for the capital and his transformation. We both knew, as we had known since we were kids, that rehabilitation from the surgery would take almost a year, during which time they wouldn’t allow visitors because of the sterile environment needed to ensure the safety of the nerve grafts. Semper said he would miss me, he gave me a hug, and he sobbed just a little bit. I asked if he was scared, to which he replied “isn’t everyone?”

  He gathered up his things, stood by the door, and said the last words I’d hear from his human mouth, “I want you to know that I consider you my brother.” And then he left. Got in the waiting car and sped off in the rain. I tried to stifle my tears and be strong. The odds were great that he’d survive the surgery. He’d be home soon enough.

  I thought back to our days at the Bionics Research Facility when we played around in the borrowed bodies. Semper had taken so long to get used to the robotic form that I really hoped he’d get out of the hospital on time.

  The first few weeks after Semper left were miserably lonely, and so I basically locked myself in my room. I stopped playing Slayers too. I was well past my general education classes and taking senior level calculus and astrophysics classes through the summer, trying to keep my mind off of being bored and alone. Adara came by to cheer me up, or so I thought, when she gave me the tightest hug she’d ever mustered. I realized then that I’d missed her eighteenth birthday just a few days before. She was leaving too.

  I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. We squeezed each other and shook with fear and sadness and uncertainty. Her lips found mine and before I knew it, we were pressed firmly into each other’s mouths. Her tongue licked my lips and surprised me. I licked her back. Then our tongues danced in the middle as we held our mouths open, pressed against each other. Instinctively, my hands raced up her body. Her hands grasped my biceps. Our society hadn’t “mated” for generations but the desire was still within us, even if we had only the slightest idea of what we were doing. As quickly as we started, caution got the best of us and our emotions gave way to the logic of our people. We slowed our pace until we were just cuddling on the couch, sniffling and chuckling. We sat in the silence for another hour, just staring outside at the stars poking through the silver curtains of clouds that hid the sky from view so much of my life. I said good-bye to my friend and kissed her on the cheek, just to comfort her…one last time, like my parents had done to me my whole life.

  During the next few months, I fell into a deep depression. I missed my two best friends. My parents tried to spend more time with me, but I just wanted to be alone and miserable. I threw myself even harder into schoolwork, to the point where my physique and my hygiene started to lapse. Dad ordered me to go on a fishing trip, saying the cool sea air would help raise my spirits.

  I hadn’t been on the boat with Dad in nearly two years. I’d been so busy with Semper, fellowships, and university classes that I had somehow forgotten about the joys of getting out on the open ocean. The last glimpse of land slipped behind the horizon behind us to the east as the sun disappeared from view to the west. The stars started coming out. I knew all their names. I knew which ones had colonies. I knew everything about their size and shape and luminosity. But I hadn’t looked at them just for the sake of looking at them in so long.

  Dad lay back in a hammock hanging from the bridge wing of the boat and talked to me as the waves gently rocked us back and forth.

  “I just want you to know that you have made me so proud,” he stated, his voice pitched slightly higher in the manner that adults had when they were sad.

  “Thanks, Dad. What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Well, I just never really say it enough,” he replied. “You’ve exceeded every hope, every expectation we ever had.”

  We sat there, staring off the deck into the growing darkness, until he broke the silence again.

  “You had an older brother.”

  I was stunned. “What?”

  “Your mother and I. Right after we pair-bonded, she was forty-seven and I was fifty-two. I had just come back from a deep-space exploration mission and she was the records custodian for our expedition. We decided almost instantly that we should be joined. We did. And within about three years of that decision, I decided to take up fishing, like my father, and raise a family. We had a son, and we named him Virtus. We raised him for eighteen years.”

  He paused to collect himself, but I couldn’t wait.

  “What happened to him?” I asked excitedly.

  “He died. He made it through the transformation. We visited him a few times in the hospital and then one day he just shut down. The body was fine…his brain just didn’t adjust well to its new surroundings. I guess one out of a few thousand people has a specific metal allergy. They didn’t even know about it until Virtus died. They test for that now, and they use composites to raise the success rates instead of using certain volatile metals.”

  I was shocked. “Why haven’t you ever told me this?”

  “That surgery is so essential to our way of life. Our whole society’s way of life. The government really wants us to not mention those who haven’t survived the procedure. We are asked to silently mourn. It’s our responsibility to our species. It’s our responsibility to you.”

  “But the surgery, Dad,” I countered, “if it’s so dangerous why would we want to do it?”

  “Well for starters there’s the opportunities you’ll miss out on if you don’t. You’ll never travel to space. You can’t be a doctor because they don’t want you spreading diseases to organic patients. You miss a lot of chances to evolve.”

  “But you die,” I retorted.

  “Yes,” he responded, “but without it you’ll die anyway, and in a much less glorious manner. You’ll age. We don’t even study human aging in school anymore because it’s irrelevant. Your hair turns grey and your skin wrinkles and your teeth fall out. You become immobile. Eventually your organs fail. And that’s if you don’t get hit with diseases before then. Without scientific intervention, you’re going to die. So why not take a chance at immortality? A good chance.”

  He paused, as if to take a deep breath, though he didn’t breathe, before continuing. “I will tell you though: I miss the taste of food. I miss the smell of the hair of a pretty girl. Those are just memories now. I miss them often, and I wonder what life would have been like if I hadn’t undergone the transformation. I know I would have never mapped whole new galaxies
. I know I wouldn’t have found new forms of life on other worlds so far from here that you can’t even see our galaxy from there.”

  Dad looked off into the misty gray horizon.

  “But maybe, just maybe,” he continued, “I would have married Freya Wynveldt.”

  “Huh?” I was confused.

  “Marriage was the old way. When a man and a woman fell in love, they got married. Then they mated. It’s different than pair-bonds. It’s hard to explain. They didn’t do it because of good genes or financial success or social status…they felt love. Real love. A connection so powerful you felt like you wanted to die for it. Nobody has done it for centuries.”

  “Dad, how old ARE you?”

  “I’m about two hundred and fifty-three years old.”

  “Whoa.” I had never asked. Asking ages was considered impolite among adults. People were rated socially based on accomplishments, not age, mostly because you couldn’t tell how old someone was without asking. This must have been why my father was so solitary. He was a highly-successful explorer—one of the paragons of our whole society—and he gave that up to be a fisherman almost two hundred years ago. His actions must have been almost seen as eccentric or shameful by our standards.

  “I’ve watched the forests regrow from the wastelands that were once this planet. I’ve watched the seas slowly retreat from their highest levels. I’ve watched the mountain peaks become covered with snow again. I’ve even touched worlds that no one ever even imagined could exist—and with my bare hands! But there isn’t a single day that’s gone by that I don’t wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t transformed. If I had just made love to Freya one more time.”

  “Made love?”

  “Mated, for lack of a better word,” he replied. “Before we each underwent our surgeries, we carried on quite the physical affair. It was glorious. Of course, once you evolve you don’t have the drive or the requisite parts anymore, so it becomes less important. But I miss it, for what it’s worth.”