Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  Only the sodden lumps of cellulose that had once been newspapers and magazines and books and solid wood were not immediately salvageable, although they were tossed to one side to dry in the sun. Eventually, the prisoners burned them.

  “Move!” A stick landed on Duncan’s back, poked at his gill slits. He gasped at the pain. He lurched. He looked over his shoulder and saw the furry back of Stanley, Looby’s chief sidekick. The man’s upper arms were naked skin, decorated with a Roachster head, a Warbird, “Mother,” genetic tattoos drawn in lines of melanin. Now he was swinging at a woman not far away. He wore a ferocious scowl, but his lips were quirked as if he enjoyed his role. The woman screamed, drowning for a moment the roar of the machine. Stanley hit her again.

  Duncan did not know her name. He knew only that she was too scrawny to have breasts. Most of the women were, and sex was not part of life in the labor camp, except for Looby and his bullies.

  “Nooo!” Someone else screamed, high and agonized yet unmistakably male. Duncan peered toward the sound. Bess, Looby’s mate, had a prisoner on the ground. He rolled and flailed. She kicked at his crotch and poked at his face with the end of her stick. Spatters of blood suggested that she had stabbed at least one eye.

  “Nooo! Tige! You killed my Mack! Juuli…!”

  There was a sudden crunch. The screaming stopped. Bess struggled to pull the end of her stick from the eye socket.

  Beside Duncan, Berut Amoun began to pant. “Jimmy,” he said. “I knew him.” He moaned, bent to pick up a rock, and began to run toward the murderer. He was staggering with the weakness of his malnutrition, but still he ran.

  Bert’s scream of rage was interrupted by the short, sharp sound of a shot. He crumpled in mid-stride. He fell. And Looby yelled again, “You! And you! And you! Pick ’em up. Put ’em in the pit.” The pit was the hole, not far from the entrance to the camp, where all the bodies went. “The rest of you! Move it! Work! Or you don’t eat!”

  As the prisoners silently resumed their movement toward the working face of the landfill, Duncan bent his gaze upward, toward the edge of the cliff ahead. A guard stood there, above the layers of garbage the prisoners—the slaves—were about to burrow into. He had a rifle in his hands, its butt still against his shoulder, its muzzle sweeping over the scene below.

  Duncan did not even feel shame at the thought that now Bert’s shack would be his, if only he hurried when this shift was done, if only he reached it first. Nor did he feel shame at his lack of shame, though somewhere within his mind a flicker of uneasiness did struggle for life. Far stronger was his intent to survive, to persist. If, he thought, he was very, very lucky, he might someday gain the power to avenge himself, his friends, his civilization.

  * * * *

  It was dusk. The day’s labor was done. Duncan squatted in the doorway of Bert’s hut, held his hands in the light, and stared at them. They were filthy, bleeding from fresh cuts and gashes, stinging where he had let the black liquid that oozed from the ground touch them. There was no way to wash. There hadn’t been since… He thought of the day’s deaths and shuddered and did not feel any safer to know that his back was sheltered by walls and roof that Bert had pieced together. He was, he knew, at the mercy of fate as embodied by Looby and the guards.

  The horn blew again. He peered toward the fence at the mouth of the crater he and the other slave-laborers had carved in the landfill. The gate was open. The guards were pushing into the crater a wheeled bin of the sort the slaves loaded with glass and metal and plastic. It was empty now of garbage but filled with buckets of gruel and water and baskets of potatoes and cabbages and turnips and the fruits of sausage bushes and pie plants and… Most of them would be overripe, soft and moldy. But they were dinner.

  Jeremy Duncan thought the food must come from local farms, where it spoiled in the field for lack of transport to city markets. The Engineers would not be starving, though. They had destroyed the world’s Macks, but they had slaves who could haul wagons toward the city. The substitute transport would be slow, and it could not haul vast tonnages, but it could haul enough to keep the city fed, even if it left as much in the field to rot. It helped that they had killed so many that demand was not what it once had been.

  The prisoners moved eagerly toward the dinner cart. The first to reach it, as always, were Looby and his henchmen. They surrounded it, barring access. As each of the rest arrived, they doled out the food, first putting what they wanted for themselves, including any unusual delicacies such as potsters, in the sack Looby’s Amy carried. Some, who had not worked hard enough or found rich enough treasure, got nothing. No one got enough to feel full.

  Like all the rest, Duncan drank his cup of water and wolfed his food as soon as it was in his hands. Unlike the rest, he felt a little more satisfied than usual. The potster the rubble of his shack had earned had been small, and he had shared it with Bert, but it had still made a difference.

  The gate in the fence had been shut as soon as the garbage bin had passed. Now a trio of guards stood before it, their guns over their shoulders. Other guards overlooked the scene from the barracks roof and the rim of the crater.

  The three by the gate were clearly bored. They were passing a small potted plant back and forth, holding it in one hand, stroking it with the other, pressing its leaves to their cheeks, even licking it. Duncan was too far away to make out any detail, but he knew they held a cocaine nettle, as much a product of the gengineering labs as his gills or pumpkin houses or litterbugs. He grunted wryly at the thought that the Engineers were so selective in their condemnations. He grunted again when he saw the sense in that selectivity: They rejected what replaced the machines of their dreams. If it was only another version of something—food or drugs—that had always grown, always been biological, they might accept it. They still rejected pumpkin houses and bots.

  The prisoners dispersed as quickly as they had gathered, returning to their shacks. A few stood or squatted in twos or threes, talking quietly. Most huddled in their doorways, leaning over their small fires, adding fuel, much of it still damp with ground water and toxic chemicals, letting the smoke and fumes obscure their vision of the present and the feeble warmth combat the growing cool of the night, mindlessly awaiting the next day and its renewal of labor, perhaps remembering happier times, when the Engineers had seemed too trivial, too out of step with the reality of the day, ever to be a threat.

  Jeremy Duncan gathered the splinters and fragments of wood that were all that remained of the hut he had built himself. He piled them by what had been Bert’s shack. Then he sifted through the ashes of the fire Bert had had earlier, looking for a tiny coal. When he found it, he added a scrap of carefully dried paper, splinters, larger bits, and blew as gently as he could. If this did not work, he could fetch a coal from someone else’s fire. Even rain rarely extinguished them all; someone always sheltered the flames and kept a supply of fuel dry. Only when the rain lasted for days did all the fires and coals go out. Then all the prisoners shivered until the sun returned and dried more fuel. The trick was rekindling the flame. Some of the prisoners made do with bottles, filled with water, to focus sunlight, but that worked only in the day. Sometimes there were matches, but the guards were stingy even with something so cheap.

  When his fire was finally going, he added chunks of nearly dry pulp. They would dry and burn, smoking, stinking, but also warming. In due time, he would let it die, cover the coals with ashes, retreat into Bert’s—now his—shelter, and curl himself into a ball to sleep. He would be cold, but he had learned to stand that.

  In the meantime, there was memory…

  He had not met anyone who had failed to see the burning of the bots’ apartment building on the veedo. Many had not realized what it meant, but he had. He had thought of returning to his lab, at least long enough to make it impossible for anyone to use his files to track down any of those genimals he had helped to bec
ome human. But he had not. He had told himself that they would be able to take care of themselves. They would have to, as he would have to. And besides, he dared not take the time.

  He had wrapped his torso in painful cloth, wrapped a sleeping bag around his speargun and mask and knife, and packed a small bag with a change of clothes and as much as he could of the food he had had in his cupboards. Then he had gotten into his Armadon and taken the greenway south. He had hoped he could reach the Gulf of Mexico. There, with his gills, he would be safe.

  He should, he thought, have gone to the nearest river. The news reports on his vehicle’s radio should have told him that. The Engineers were massacring all who embodied what they hated: bots and gengineers and Macks and Buggies and more. But he had only leaned over his tiller, straining to hasten his Armadon along the road to safety. He had never once thought of the streams and rivers that passed beneath his wheels every few kilometers as what they truly were: other, safer paths. The water would have been colder, but it would have let him swim invisibly toward his goal. The trip would have taken longer. But…

  He had had a map. He had planned a route that would avoid all the cities between his home and the Gulf. It would even avoid most small towns, and the few he could not avoid he had planned to pass at night.

  He had not expected to find a roadblock. The Armadon’s legs had been running tirelessly atop its wheels, driving it steadily southward toward the border between Indiana and Kentucky. He had rounded a curve, and the Engineers had been waiting for him behind a windrow of dead Macks and Tortoises and Buggies. They had opened fire immediately, and when his vehicle was dead too, they had taken his bags and patted him down. When they felt the irregularities on the sides of his chest, they had stripped him. They had called him genny then. They had beaten him. They had tied his hands and beaten him again and forced him to march and beaten him once more.

  When he came to, he was lying on the hardwood floor of what could only be a high-school gymnasium. The wood was stained with blood, much of it too dry and crusted to have come from his own wounds. Around him lay perhaps a hundred others, all of them genetically modified. There were ornamented faces and green skins and furry scalps and altered limbs. There were normals who, he later learned, had sold or owned gengineered products or worked in gengineering labs or objected to the Engineers’ tactics or beliefs. There were those who, like Bert, had worked for public agencies and been involved in regulating or inspecting or licensing the gengineering industry. There were even police officers, guilty of no more than using Sparrowhawks and Roachsters in their work.

  Day by day their numbers grew. So did their filth and their stink. They waited in that gymnasium for weeks, helpless beneath the guns of their guards, with no soap or water for washing, with only plastic buckets for toilets, with just barely enough food to remain alive. Eventually they were herded into antique livestock trucks and driven north and east to an abandoned landfill.

  How long ago was that? He did not know. But it had been long enough to enlarge by half the crater in which they lived and labored. More weeks. Months. Long enough for slaves to be worked and neglected to death. Long enough for more prisoners to be delivered, for the camp to grow, for a barracks to be built for the guards, for hope to vanish.

  Yet thought remained, and the very disasters that had stricken Jeremy Duncan and his fellow slaves told him something of the troubles the Engineers must be having as well. At the beginning of the revolution, the cry had been, “No quarter!” The Engineers had taken no prisoners when they attacked the bots in their dormitory in the park and later in their building. They had killed them all.

  But he had been taken prisoner. He had not been butchered. Nor had his fellow prisoners.

  He thought he knew what that meant. Someone, someone high in the Engineers’ councils, had realized the difficulties they faced. They wanted the Machine Age back again. But they had no machines other than museum pieces and junkyard wrecks. They had none of the raw materials needed to make new ones, nor the factories, nor the skills, and it would be many years before they could possibly rebuild the necessary infrastructure. Worse yet, the ores that had once been plentiful had been exhausted by the Machine Age that had been. There were none but poor, low-grade ores, usable only with the application of large amounts of energy and labor, for its reincarnation. And the fossil fuels that had powered the Machine Age, either directly as fuels for engines or indirectly as fuels for electric power plants, were gone. Coal remained, but it could be mined and transported only with the aid of the machines they did not have.

  The answers must have seemed obvious. The people of the Machine Age had been notoriously wasteful. Their dumps were full of metals that could be retrieved and melted down with no expenditure but labor. Of plastics that could be burned for fuel or converted back to something like the petroleum from which they had been made and then used for fuel again or as the raw material for new plastics, fabrics, pharmaceuticals. And if gengineering was anathema, its sentient products and proponents could still be exploited. Theirs could be the labor that mined the dumps for raw materials. Theirs could be the animal energy needed to process and build. And when they were worn out, dead as surely if more slowly, they would have atoned in part for the sin of their existence.

  The leaders of the Engineers must, he thought, have regretted the initial purges. Human labor, slave labor, was slow and inefficient. But enough of it could do the job. It had built the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, after all. And as it made possible the construction and operation of machines, of bulldozers and trucks and factories, it could be replaced. As it was replaced, the pace of reconstruction could accelerate. Eventually, it would no longer be necessary. Nor would the slaves.

  Jeremy Duncan thought they were fools. They did not realize how pervasive the products of gengineering had become, or how much machinery would be necessary to maintain civilization, or how much fuel. They would struggle for a while. They would make him labor for them, and he would be a slave for as long as he lived, which he did not think would be very long.

  He wished he could live. He wished he dared to hope that he might someday be in a position to bring vengeance upon his tormentors, the murderers of the technology he loved and served, the destroyers of his world. But he knew better. He himself had no hope of bringing the Engineers down. And though they must inevitably fail, he had no hope of seeing that failure. He would not see their dreams founder, the cities they now owned die, the world return to the poverty of subsistence farming without tractors or fertilizer or pesticides.

  He wished he could laugh at what he saw for the future. But it was too bleak for that. Too bleak for him. Too bleak for all his species.

  The fire was almost out. Using a fragment of broken glass, he scraped ashes over the last flames, hoping the coals would last until the morning. Then he backed into his small shack, his burrow, his hide, to sleep.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Donna Rose had turned her back to the keyboard and array of small screens at which she worked as Frederick Suida’s assistant. Bolted to the deck beneath her was a trough of soil much like that in her and Frederick’s Station quarters. Its surface was covered with a porous membrane that kept the dirt in place despite the lack of gravity; the pores were large enough to let her roots penetrate to the soil.

  “Why can’t we? Why? The tests were successful. The drive worked perfectly. It didn’t scramble Lois’s genes. It didn’t hurt Renny. The physicists say there shouldn’t be any problem handling heavy loads or flying close to stations. And there they are!” With the hand that did not wear a mouse-glove, Donna Rose gestured furiously at the larger wall screen that showed the skeletons of six new Q-ships being built outside the construction shack. They drifted in vacuum, tethered to the shack’s hull with cables, while suited workers crawled over their frames, welding and fitting and slowly bringing them toward completion. They would be much larger than the Q
uoi, which would be able to fit inside just one of their reaction-mass tanks. They were designed not just to test whether the drive would work, but to carry passengers and cargo.

  “Why can’t we save them, Freddy?” she added.

  The object of her fury hovered near one wall, not far from a handhold, and shrugged helplessly. “You know why,” he said.

  “But they’re killing them all!” Donna Rose slumped as if she were indeed a plant, wilting beneath a desert sun. While they lasted, the newscasts from Earth had been a constant litany of murder. More buildings had been attacked and destroyed. Outdoor dormitories had been laid waste. Those bots and genetically modified humans who had survived the initial massacres had gone into hiding but the Engineers had searched them out, imprisoned them, enslaved them in labor camps, and slaughtered them mercilessly. There was no hope of escape, for by now most of the world’s spaceports and airports had been wrecked, and nearly all of the world’s spaceplanes were scrap.

  Worst of all, the tone of the newscasts had changed. At first, some newscasters had been appalled. They had called the destruction folly and madness and error. Some had tried to sound more neutral, but within days, even they, as voices of the old order, had been replaced by people who could echo the dogmas of the Engineers: Machines were better than genes, more in tune with human needs, less of a challenge to the natural way of things. The gengineers and all their works must go, and if it was unfortunate that blood must be spilled, it was nevertheless necessary.

  In time, even those half apologetic reservations had been silenced. Now there were no newscasts at all. Veedo and radio were dominated by entertainment programs and official exhortations.