Scum of the Universe

by Everett, Grant

  Professor Saleh got really, really close to Alistair. He had to get on his tiptoes, but Saleh almost got nose-to-nose with his old friend.

  “I've had my two minutes, Alistair. I'm ready to address the others. This was a courtesy to you, nothing more.”

  Professor Phergo Saleh turned on his heel and stormed out.

  *

  The trouble begun three generations ago when geneticists cured autism. Like cancer, AIDS, diabetes and depression, autism became a thing of the past, joining the ranks of polio and whooping cough and smallpox. Of course, this didn't mean everybody on the planet was immune: only a certain slice of mankind could afford this genetic tweak, so the entire Third World (which actually amounted to well over two thirds of humanity, despite the name) was left out in the dark, as usual.

  For once, those starving masses turned out to be the lucky ones.

  Six decades after the more affluent slabs of mankind had successfully erased autism from their genome, a bizarre new plague ripped its way through the developed world like a box cutter through cardboard. In a matter of eighteen months it was everywhere, and nothing seemed to be able to slow it, let alone stop it. Quarantine procedures achieved nothing, and the medical community couldn't even figure out what was causing it, which kinda made the problem impossible to treat. The core issue was that they couldn't blame the plague on any sort of virus of pathogen or other classic hallmarks of infection, which meant they had no way of figuring out a vaccine. During the early days, this plague was officially known as Involition Syndrome, or IS, but to the average Joe on the street it was known as The Trance.

  Involition Syndrome doesn't make you feverish, or break down the tissues of your body, or cause internal bleeding, or give you so much as a sore throat or a headache. Such symptoms would make it relatively easy to target and cure. No, The Trance went straight for the mind, and it takes less than a day to go from inception to fatal.

  One minute, you're fine. You're a normal person going about your business as a pampered, useless first-world shlub with nothing better to do than live in the sort of obscene luxury that would make Caligula vomit. Then, without warning, you've become a brain-dead, gawking, motionless corpse. It's like a switch has been flicked, and there's no way of unflicking it again.

  When it first kicks in, The Trance robs you of your memory, as well as your capacity to take on any new information. It's often been compared to having a series of massive strokes, but without any physical signs. Not only will you immediately forget what you were doing and why you were doing it, but within a matter of minutes you'll permanently forget who you are. To date, nobody in medical history has ever stopped at Stage One. Progressing to Stage Two is a hundred percent inevitable.

  After wandering about aimlessly for half an hour or so, moaning and rolling your eyes in total idiocy, Stage Two of The Trance will remove all consciousness from its latest victim in one fell whack. You'll just stand there, gaping, drooling and staring into space. If you are told to walk or to perform some other simple instruction, sure, you're still capable of following basic orders (walk over there, sit down there, carry this for me), but you'll be little more than a zombie by this point. Thankfully there's no biting or brain-eating involved, but that's cold comfort, as The Trance gets even worse.

  Stage Three occurs within an hour of inception, and this is where the “Involition” part of “Involition Syndrome” truly comes from. Unless you are discovered quickly enough, you will cease breathing and stop swallowing your saliva, which means you will simultaneously suffocate and drown in your own spit within minutes. So while being a Stage Three means that you'll have a total lack of neurological activity, keeping you, one of the living dead, from expiring is pretty simple and low-tech: somebody will duct-tape headphones to your ears and play a looped sound file that tells you to breathe in and out and to swallow your spit (but not at the same time, obviously). You'll also require a catheter and a stoma to be installed before your bladder explodes and your bowels rupture, but it's hardly nuclear physics. Eating is now out of the question, as having dinner like a normal person involves too many complex components (cutting up your food into the right size, spearing it with a fork, raising it to your mouth, opening your mouth, inserting the food without stabbing your tongue out, chewing the right amount of times, and so on and so on), so this is usually solved with a tube down the nose or a pipe directly into the stomach.

  Nothing slows The Trance. There is no cure.

  Within the space of eighteen dark months, the worst period that the developed world had ever experienced, ninety-eight percent of the population had become Stage Threes. America, Europe, Asia, Australia, you name it. Entire continents were filled with endless fields of drooling zombies. Billions of people just sat there in their decaying homes, breathing in synchronisation to the commands of a sound file fluted through taped-in ear buds, staring at the walls, lifeless silent meat fit for nothing but to rot.

  As soon as it became clear that the Third World was almost entirely unaffected by this pandemic, the scientific community took notice. To begin with, the most popular hypothesis was that a terror cell of bastards from Craplakistan or some other armpit of a country had attacked the Western World with some sort of neurological weapon. But then it was discovered that the only victims of The Trance in the Third World were foreign aid workers descended from much nicer places, and most of them hadn't been to their home countries in years, so it was clear that this was something else entirely.

  By the time the nerds and boffins figured out what had really happened, it was too late. The cure for autism was at fault, and as it had been crafted into the human genome it could not be removed. It was wired in far too permanently, as it had been designed to last forever. One of the greatest medical feats of all time had planted the seeds of disaster in the very genetics of humanity, and now the harvest time had come around there was nothing that could be done. Mankind had engineered itself into a living death.

  All the greatest minds that hadn't turned to porridge yet were gathered up, snap frozen and put to work curing The Trance in a virtual reality construct. Tests had shown that being refrigerated was the only sure-fire way of delaying The Trance from inevitably activating and zombifying the lot of them, but there were a lot of other factors they had to deal with beyond just finding a cure. For instance, there was a good chance everyone would be dead by the time the core problem was fixed a couple of decades from now, and anybody that was still alive out there would be well beyond the age where they could reproduce. Another issue was that the freezing process was irreversible, and the shock of being defrosted would probably kill every single scientist on the spot.

  They dealt with these major issues in a simple way: they just didn't think about them.

  *

  Professor Phergo Saleh had their attention. The diminutive Egyptian stood at the head of the golden table with Alistair, a man who had once been his best friend, a man he'd changed the world with on several notable occasions, and took a breath.

  “I know you have no interest in listening to me,” Saleh announced, his eyes panning over the assortment of creatures and characters. “My words mean nothing to you. They have no impact. No worth. No matter how much sense I make, no matter how beautifully I phrase it, my views are unwelcome. Nothing I can say will sway any of you.”

  Saleh indicated Alistair, who was smiling at him beatifically. The High Elf was overjoyed that Professor Saleh had finally realised that he had been wasting his time, that there was so much to do and experience in this place, things that were beyond words...

  Saleh breathed out deeply. His face betrayed pain.

  “Professor Dunston Alistair has been my closest friend for decades. I respect him more than any other man I have ever met, and I look up to him in total awe. Compared to him, I am a crude hack.”

  There were a few chuckles from around the table. Everybody knew that Professor Saleh's pay grade was near the bottom of the pile. Compared to the other masters he was an am
ateur, somebody you'd humour and send to get the coffee.

  Saleh turned to Alistair, looking up.

  “Alistair, I need you to know that I respect you more than anyone. You need to understand that. Please.”

  Alistair felt awkward. What was this? Was Saleh about to kiss him or something?

  “I...”

  Saleh's expression hardened, and he reached up to clench his fingers around Alistair's delicate throat before the High Elf could say a word. Alistair's fingers latched over Saleh's in surprise. He went to ask what the fool was playing at, but then it started.

  The pain.

  A million barbed needles slid into Alistair's skin, points of concentrated cold that went far beyond discomfort. He wrestled with Saleh's clenched hand, but it was like trying to bend concrete. Alistair's mouth opened much further than his programming allowed, and he could feel his teeth glitching and fragmenting away from his gums. His eyes liquefied and began to dribble out of his head. His skin pulled apart into clumps of pixels and changed colour. He went from green to red and back again.

  As the shocked council simply watched, Professor Saleh calmly explained.

  “My work with the TRANCE virus has allowed me to infect the cryogenic pods. In case you aren't aware of it yet – but I doubt that, because all of you are far, far smarter than I am – I have infected Alistair's life support with the virus. I've bypassed his sensory relay, and that means he's finding out what it feels like to have his skin temperature drop sixty degrees below freezing. There's a good chance that he's already gone into shock, so for his sake I hope he's not consciously experiencing all of this.”

  Alistair managed to tilt his head down towards his old friend, his jaw scissoring open and shut. His eye sockets were empty voids.

  “Kill...kill...me...”

  Professor Balver got to his clawed werewolf paws in shock. It had taken the better part of fifteen seconds of total, utter stillness before anybody managed to respond to what they were witnessing.

  “Stop that!” Balver demanded. He tried to speak again, but his jaw bounced stupidly a few times. There were no words. “You! Let him go!”

  Alistair's skin was sloughing off. His pointed ears dribbled like candles and plopped onto the floor, one after another. The muscles and the ligaments in his face were exposed through the mess.

  “Phergo...please...”

  “I need you to look at him!” Saleh demanded, brandishing the dissolving body like a weapon. Some of the council were looking away, crying, or both. Beyond Balver getting to his feet, however, nobody had moved an inch. “I love this man like a brother, and I would do almost anything for him. But my loyalty is to humanity! There is nothing I won't do to preserve it, no matter how awful and hateful.” Saleh looked into a face that was more bone than flesh now. “I'm sorry, Alistair. This is the only way they'll understand.”

  Saleh clenched his hand, snapping Alistair's neck so thoroughly that his molten head plopped off. As his mutilated body crumpled, the entire simulation shook and flashed as an unknown alarm sounded. It bellowed like the end of the world.

  “ATTENTION: PROFESSOR DUNSTON ALISTAIR HAS SUFFERED A LIFE SUPPORT FAILURE. HE HAS GONE INTO CARDIAC ARREST. CARDIO-STIMULATION REQUIRED. WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO APPLY CARDIO-STIMULATION?”

  Balver flapped his jaw stupidly before managing more words.

  “Yes, approve! Approve!”

  The alarm continued for a few seconds, then stopped. The silence stretched on for a time, but then there were those terrible, terrible words at top volume again.

  “CARDIO-STIMULATION HAS BEEN DISABLED. PROFESSOR DUNSTON ALISTAIR HAS FLATLINED.”

  What little was left of Alistair withered into rags of cloth and scraps of chainmail, and was quickly absorbed into the marble floor like milk into a sponge. Suddenly, Balver lived up to his choice of avatar by sprinting for his fellow Professor with ten claws extended and his muzzle wide open. The fury on his face was beyond something as mild as anger.

  “Bastard! You killed him!”

  Balver slammed into Saleh at top speed and bounced off. It was like a Styrofoam cup being crunched against brick. Saleh stormed towards the fallen werewolf, gripped him by his shredded suit, and lifted him without an ounce of effort. Saleh got nose-to-muzzle with the werewolf.

  “Unlike Alistair, Balver, I don't like you one bit.”

  With a flick of his wrist Saleh bashed Balver into the golden table so hard that it bent like a hot spoon. The werewolf breathed raggedly, ribs and other bones poking through his skin. He had a stunned look on his lupine face, as though astonished by the fact that being pounded into a lump of metal had, well, hurt like hell.

  A twitch of Professor Saleh's hand sent the werewolf through a window. Glass shot everywhere as though a pipe-bomb had gone off and heavy red velvet flapped about in a blizzard of snow. Nobody actually saw it happen, but they were all pretty sure that Balver had fallen all the way down the two-kilometre-high tower, bounced off of Mount Everest and pinballed off every single rock. The booming system alarm confirmed their fears.

  “PROFESSOR KENNETH BALVER HAS FLATLINED.”

  “Please!” the Terminator begged.

  “Stop killing us!” Crocodile Dundee sobbed.

  All the candles guttered out in the whipping gale. The hall was plunged into darkness. All of the masters could clearly see Professor Saleh's pupils burning like cigars in the gloom. Everybody shrank a little as he stepped forward, his voice hissing over the blizzard.

  “I will not tolerate apathy. We do not have the luxury of giving up.” Saleh picked up the curved white visor that Alistair had left on the table. He considered the SCUM OF THE UNIVERSE label for a moment before tossing it away. “We will accomplish our task, or we will die. Whatever comes first. Before we get to work, we are going to purge this...this playground from the simulation. You have enjoyed yourselves long enough.”

  On the marble floor, the SCUM OF THE UNIVERSE visor glitched out a few times. The phrase “YOU ARE DEAD! REPLAY?” finally appeared fifteen minutes too late. After waiting thirty seconds, the YES option selected itself automatically.

  Damaged and infected, the Interactive did its best to refresh itself from the last saved point.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  LOOPING

  There was only white. There was no sound. No life. Nothing.

  And then, after a while of nothing, Tuesday's broken body appeared on what could be considered to be the floor. His head was still facing half a revolution in the wrong direction, and he was very, very dead. A few metres away, the squashed meat pancake once known as Jeeves Butler also appeared. He was equally dead. Finally, a layer of ashes that had once been Ernest Fell's body scattered all over the place.

  All was still.

  The smear that had once been Jeeves shook and splattered in reverse, his bones reforming and his pulped flesh solidifying into muscles and organs. Soon, it was as though he hadn't been ruined by dozens of cars, and he stood there in the whiteness, a stupid expression on his reformed face.

  Tuesday's corpse fell away from the floor in reverse, getting to its feet, and Jeeves reached out to unsnap the scumbag's neck. His head revolved back to its correct configuration. Jeeves unwhacked Tuesday's badly broken wrist, the pistol flew up into his hand, and Tuesday unshot Ernest Fell. The scattered ashes reformed into the crimelord's body, but then the entire simulation shook and rattled and the graphics that composed Ernest glitched, covered by the word TRANCE, and he disappeared again.

  The two resurrected characters were totally still. Then, after a bit more nothing, there was…something else. It was a noise, almost as loud as the Big Bang and twice as catchy: a song.

  To their immense surprise, Tuesday and Jeeves started breathing and thinking again, and they immediately realised that they were both alive (or as far as they could tell without the aid of a trained medical professional). They were alone in a total void, an absence of everything, but soon a ghostly grey smear began to work its way around the nothing
ness, erasing it with something more and more solid. So instead of nothing, there would soon be something, which could technically be considered an improvement.

  Apparently untouched by the traumas of just a few seconds ago, Jeeves and Tuesday, two very different men, looked at each other in distaste. They still didn’t like each other, so that much remained unchanged. Neither of them had any idea what was happening, so further violence could wait for now. Tuesday was still dressed in a messy tee-shirt totally ruined by a MacDeath meal, while Jeeves was attired in a nice suit and an understated red tie typical of most mobsters. Their injuries, including Jeeves’ broken fingers and torn up face, had mysteriously healed without so much as a scab.

  Shining a dull shoe on the back of his black trousers, Jeeves bared his teeth as people - or at least a close approximation - appeared. That horrible, discordant, ear-splitting noise, the sort of racket that makes stupid teenagers go and get their genitals tattooed with band-names like Cannibal Clowns or Excrement Explosion, only got louder.