Strategies Against Nature

by Cody Goodfellow

  “Is this for real?” Ali asks. “Am I really seeing this?”

  “This is real,” I promise.

  Ali cracks a smile. “Cool. . .”

  “The singer didn’t want revenge. . . he made us get up on the stage and do it better. He went into the crowd and got kids who never played before, but the energy of the moment and the anger of the crowd took them over, and made them shine.”

  The emcee drops his arms. All at once, the band, with all their fear and confusion boiling over, begins to make godawful, glorious noise. A scalding wave of red, random feedback rises behind them, gathers force and blows the crowd back on their heels long before reaching its full height. This is where it takes off.

  The emcee picks up a microphone and turns to search the crowd. A final offering comes surfing in, flailing and screaming, and hits the stage on his knees. The emcee captures his whoop of agony with the mic, leaves it in his hands and dives off.

  The crowd encloses the stage like a snake around its lunch. The hysterical terror of the hostage band squeezes through the ugly jumble of sound as a galvanic twitch, a staccato undertone that leaps from one inept player to the next and makes it much more than music.

  Rayray has a blast, mashing keys and twisting knobs like he’s trying to cause a meltdown. His demented noodling catapults flaming beehives of tortured waveforms into the mix.

  The drummer pounds out a sloppy tocsin that pupates and becomes a perfect hummingbird heartbeat as his fear burns away and becomes exaltation.

  The bassist loses herself in the monotonous spanking motion of her untrained hands. Tears stream down her face, but her frigid dollhouse smile says most of her has transcended for good.

  Wet Kid wobbles and has to be pushed back up on his good foot, but his prescient fingers weave fitful bits of structure into the chaos, like glimpses of godlike faces in a forest fire. While Wet Kid struggles to stay upright in the puddle of blood from his foot, his hands are set free to improvise insane chain-lightning stampedes up and down the face of the tsunami still building in our midst.

  The singer screams for an ambulance and tries to push a spear of fractured tibia back into his leg.

  Out of the clash of rigid ceremony and raw hysteria, the sound that emerges is at once utterly new and totally familiar. None who hear only bootlegs of it would ever call it music, but nothing else will ever do for us what this sound does, right here and now.

  I look at Ali and he looks at me. He has lived all his life to see this, and he will live a lifetime before it is over. I envy him, but the undertow of joy pries us apart and sucks energy from us like batteries, draining and feeding it back, a geometrically escalating circuit of worship.

  The aging audience feeds the band its dead dreams and its ulcerated rage. The band, terrified and exhilarated, roars back with the raw, obscenely naive power of youth, so engorged with frustrated desire to express itself all at once that the flow of time loops and stretches, snaps. The sonic maelstrom we’ve created crushes itself when it can rise no higher, but we keep feeding it.

  Until it breaks—

  The ceiling ruptures and comes crashing down in a fountain of black water. It floods the stage and shorts out the monitors, but the music only gets better. That last inhuman peak of ecstatic perfection is bridged as the band is electrocuted, galvanic overdrive raping muscles and nerves and lightning shooting out their eyes and fingertips, screams of such unholy pitch as to shatter the spotlights.

  The shriek of the nameless newborn god conjured up by their suicidal summoning blows the crowd back. Blue arcs leap and stab at one or another of the hardcore pilgrims kneeling to pray with their heads in the bassbins.

  I stand precisely where I stood at that first happening, and at every one since. My posture, my thoughts, my emotions, are exactly the same. In that moment, I am my entire life, and will never, ever die.

  Rayray’s eyes bug out and pop like egg yolks. Smoke belches out of his two new mouths. The drummer’s spastic legs kick out the kit and he bellyflops in the glowing water. The bassist leaps high into the air again and again, bloody fingers strangling melting steel strings, blue hair ablaze. The singer gyrates and humps the stage, splashes of electricity arcing off his scrawny body so gorgeous that some newbie girl tries to mount him as he dies.

  Wet Kid wails out a solo too high and wild for human ears as steam leaks out the swelling fissures of his pressure-cooker skull. His hyperactive hands, so instinctually brilliant, make me regret that I didn’t get to know him better. But he tells me everything he’s ever had to say in that instant, far better than he ever could with words.

  The circuit blows out. The stage lights go brown, then black. The strings are cut. With a final resounding cannon blast, the amps explode, hurling their cones across the stage.

  In the dark, perfect stillness reigns for about five seconds. Then the crowd erupts, pounding the floor, their hands, each other, screaming out more joyously than any religious fanatics; for this moment, glimpsed for the first or the fifteenth time, is a window into infinity.

  I look at Ali, who looks at me, and gives me a thumb’s up. The generation gap is bridged. I feel neither old nor young, but ageless. In this kid, I think I have finally found someone who gets it.

  NATURE'S MOTHER

  Harvey Screwbloom was troubleshooting on yesterday’s project when the ‘mones in the air drove his team to attack the Diceleafs in the adjacent cubicle warren, just as they secreted their critical analysis of the same project.

  He didn’t know why it always took everyone by surprise. You could tell, when the office walls pulsated and spewed sweat, the gurgling arteries throbbing with contradictory rhythms, and the couriers rutting against the furniture, that the department was gearing up for a purge.

  It was tiresome, tedious work, and wasteful, but if his clan’s superiority was indisputable, it still had flab of its own that wanted flensing, and the few casualties were even less of a surprise than the outcome.

  After, he came back to his cubicle to eat, but he couldn’t sit still, let alone get on with his project. The Diceleaf clerks he’d killed had some kind of contact poison in their flesh that burned under his fingernails like hot grease. When blinking red berries sprouted on his workstation, he gobbled the growths up in hopes it might be an antidote. His jaws locked up and his muscles went dead as he plunged into a dream.

  He saw a bird circle down and land in its nest on a branch, and he groaned. The bird was the dumb fucking project. He knew the bird’s chemistry, behavioral subroutines and neuronal network better than his own, even better than the rival Diceleaf analyst he’d stabbed to death with a stylus. As he drank her blood, he’d had a seizure of total preconscious access, and discovered a few techniques his clan might profitably adapt to their own approach. A bloody, wasteful policy, but still more efficient than meetings and memos.

  The project was the propagation of nesting songbirds, one of a hundred million such projects that had fueled the last great economic boom, when the biosphere died.

  Harvey had never seen a real bird, or a tree, or any of the sundry other products he’d worked on since he’d come down out of the ductwork to apply for a job, sixty-four pay cycles ago. Sometimes, he wondered if there really were any birds or trees outside—if indeed, there was any outside left to support life. The Ecology Maintenance Department was all the world he’d ever known, and it was surrounded on all sides by an alkaline sea. Bridges and blimps and pneumatic and maser tubes carried their work away to the other departments, but Harvey had only seen natural products through camera feeds or dry dreams. Maybe the Invisible Hand had failed long ago, and their great mission was only recycled busy work, to keep the real product, the human employee population, busy and happy.

  Trying to think the big thinks was always good for a laugh. It was not the Invisible Hand’s job to make anyone happy. The Invisible Hand had only one job: to keep the world alive.

  The Invisible Hand was a stupid name, Harvey had always secretly thought, for
a skyscraper made of brains. You couldn’t exactly miss the fucker, could you? However, for a gargantuan tree of gray matter, it sure could push when it wanted something.

  Up here, in the leafless medial canopy of the memory tree, the cellular structure percolated like boiling mercury, generating such penetrating forecasts and analysis as only one single, superbly-honed mind could render, if only nature had made one large enough. Nature didn’t make much of anything, lately, but it still threw a wrench into the Hand’s operations whenever it could.

  It took a rather amazing amount of energy to keep the world’s last great wetware computer from getting cancer. Every coding error that stacked up in the vat-grown synapses, every mismatched protein file or mangled enzyme designate, resulted in cellular anarchy. At the stem of the cerebral arcology, the neural floor was as stable as any Sequoia sempervirens, mediating the affairs of a corporation of three billion employees and a controlling share in the managed biospheres of earth and nearly all of her colonies as serenely as a redwood manages water, soil and sunlight.

  The Hand’s nurse-bees were extracting a tumor the size of a rhinoceros from the central mnemonic tank when Harvey emerged through the wall in his amniotic sac, and was deposited on a lily pad on a sea of electrified brain matter. Solo, he noted with alarm—not part of a team or focus group.

  Gigantic packets of electrochemical data were rammed into Harvey until obvious organic distress forced them to recess for sixty seconds, before rebooting him. During the interval while he was technically dead, packets of sentient data unzipped in his midbrain and commenced reconfiguring synapses to accommodate the otherwise-lethal bolt of information still flowing in to rewrite his mind.

  He was beleaguered by the fading residues of old interdepartmental hates until, by painful degrees, the greedy artificial larvae devoured Harvey’s lower-grade wetware, pupated and hatched a shiny new personnel file out of the fuzzy husk of Harvey’s previous self.

  The newly formatted employee would, hopefully, be able to handle the news better than his predecessors.

  There were as many who rejoiced, as despaired, when Nature cataclysmically failed. Those who saw in the collapse of the insects and the oceans as the orderly shutting down of God’s creation gleefully raptured themselves away. As these broken links in the food chain triggered cascading extinctions, famine and war, the big picture was all but forgotten by all but a prophetic few.

  Where order had not completely dissolved, the First World debated the ethics of institutionalized cannibalism, looking to rationally redraw the line between themselves and their food, and waited for the lights to go out.

  But there were others who had studied the late queen’s reign in minute detail, who had cracked her secret codes, and stood ready to seize her crown before the bitch’s corpse had grown cold. With bold resolve, the biotech corporations rebuilt nature from scratch, introducing first improved and novel proprietary crops, then flowering plants, insects, birds, fish and farm animals, into the hostile, depleted environment. Last of all, they took in the fifteen percent of humanity that had survived the upheaval, and made them employees.

  When humanity reached peak population, after which no distribution of global resources could sustain the urban arcologies, most of the corporation’s employees were already bonded indentures under the New Freedom Debt Resolution Act. The human assets on the corporate payrolls were debt slaves or their legally invisible heirs, born into limbo and branded as property when the last impotent remnants of world government were absorbed into corporate hegemony. When there was no more profit to be harvested from war and plague, the dominant corporation became the nanny state it had always despised.

  Out of the flames of the earth’s greatest die-out since the Cambrian era, the world emerged anew with a retooled and far more efficient biosphere, fueled by the boundless optimism and innovation of the private sector.

  Of course, there were competitors.

  The corporation thrived on real competition. It couldn’t get enough of it. Most rivals were radical dead-enders, like the headhunter tribes, Quebecois decomposers and freejack submarine arcologies on Earth, and the moon and outer gas giants were filthy with human and AI pirates. Every day, teams like Harvey’s chewed away their withered legs in the open market.

  But there was another, of whom even employees of Harvey’s new midlevel caste were not allowed to know. Out beyond the struggling, nearly extinct Martian assets, the asteroid belt was the most readily accessible source of heavy metal ore and sub-organic deposits, but no probe beyond the Phobos repeater had pinged back since shortly after Event 6.

  The Asteroid Belt was hers.

  When the biosphere collapsed, there were some who thought to send earth’s endangered treasures to fertilize neighboring star systems. The corporation was farsighted enough to see this as a threat to future market expansion, and moved to stop them. All but one of the seedships was recalled or shot down, and the lone vessel to escape earth’s atmosphere, Nature’s Mother, crashed in the asteroid belt. The void miners, pioneers in human engineering as well as deep space habitation, had renounced earth and humanity generations ago, and were the most likely culprits. Nobody mourned, then, when they were wiped out by a biological holocaust.

  The official story the Invisible Hand told its executives was that the irradiated cargo of earth seeds and frozen specimens had developed a “goo bloom” plague, nanomech varieties of slime mold and other decomposers that spread through the asteroid belt colonies, leaving a holocaust of unchecked devolution.

  The truth the Invisible Hand feared was far more upsetting: Nature’s Mother did not crash. The seedship’s AI ditched its mission, docked and deployed at Novokiev Arcology and incorporated the void miner colony in some way that stupefied the corporation’s best spin artists. From Novokiev, the plague spread within days to engulf the entire belt, encircling the inner system in a semipermeable barrier that let the Jovian lunar colonies come in to trade, but never let anything from Earth—or the corporation—out.

  This was the mess the Invisible Hand had inherited. And it was sick of it.

  Presumably, it was the deranged seedship AI, still ticking away in the midst of her perverse freefall apocalypse, that requested a meeting. The message left the Invisible Hand stunned, as no communication had emanated from the belt for almost a century (twelve generations of your caste, it helpfully explained).

  But now, she—most emphatically a she—had blasted the Invisible Hand’s downlinks with an ear-splitting demand for an emissary to meet at one of the corporation’s oxygen plantations on Mars.

  The question Harvey never thought to ask, but which the Invisible Hand answered as it seeded his head with a mentoring copy of itself, was: why him? A suitable temp could be grown in a vat and fed an orientation implant on Mars, and negotiating within hours.

  Nature’s Mother had demanded, in her oblique way, an optimal earthborn specimen, free of augmentation and genetweaks. . . and spawned of a woman.

  She has requested a sturdy specimen to bear the terms of our proposal, which you will have digested en route. She also demanded that the emissary be a freeborn mongrel. . . and a pattern among the contraband serially flagged in your cubicle suggested that you might want to go.

  •

  When Harvey was a boy, growing up in the ductwork with a tiny clan of feral defectors, he never dreamed of working for the corporation. His people were six generations quit from the company, and retained only enough code to hack the vending machines and mute the alarms that brought rats and courier hornets into their traps. He listened to the preaching about the old green world and took part in the vandalism rituals, but the vending machines in their wing of the department dispensed only poison, and the mold crops were failing, because the wastewater pipes that fed their farms were corroded and leaking.

  Harvey was out hunting on his own before his balls dropped, and looking to fatten up his mother, in hopes she would soon make him a wife. The slim pickings among his cousins were such t
hat she had already warmed to the idea. Her babies were turning simple and apt to go blood-crazy, but they had more brains and fewer superfluous limbs than her sisters’ litters.

  As early as he could remember, he was unhappy with his lot in life. He figured it was all the bookworms he ate. When he stumbled upon the vats, he’d been looking for the post-recycled sewage lines that fed the fingerling employees; but the fat little maggots wriggling in a sauce of neuro-enhancing enzymes could not be resisted. Left to ripen and hatch, the limbless bookworms would be processed into accounting machines. They would never know love, or the joy of siring babies. And they were delicious.

  Harvey fished one out of the vats and ate it, raw. Then, licking his fingers, he hauled another of the mewling fetuses into his net, and dragged it back into the labyrinth of ducts that his clan called home.

  He expected to be welcomed as a hero. Just the enormous, onion-dome head alone would feed his family for a pay cycle. But his mother recoiled in horror from his bounty, and his siblings drove him out, after failing to kill and eat him.

  A feral rogue, he reveled in a golden age of plenty. Living in a cozy den of asbestos insulation atop a heating coil in the superstructure of the vat hatchery, with the endless feast of bookworms in easy reach, he grew fat and dreamy. He was not lonely, for his brain buzzed with voices in a half-dead tongue, quizzing him and probing him until he answered them aloud.

  At first, the voices were a comfort in his solitude, but when the first fever struck, he was too delirious and weak even to feed on the vat-born. He could not flee when the courier hornets stung him into paralysis and carried him in a fury of silicon wings to Central Processing.

  It was not as an employee that Harvey was first interviewed, but as Obtained Biomass, and the initial interviewer thriftily recommended that Harvey be processed as bookworm food. When Harvey awakened from his paralysis long enough to demonstrate a working knowledge of the corporation’s unfathomably elaborate data systems, the interviewer sampled his spinal fluid with its chrome proboscis, and the hire was ratified.