Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  He stared at the tree-trunk columns and wished that he could pray. If he could, he would ask that his father’s death had been quick.

  Beside him, Sheila squeezed his hand as if she were sharing his thoughts, remembering the same things, wishing the same wishes, and as unable as he to talk about it all. He turned his head toward her. The feathers that covered her scalp were not as sleek as they once had been. The decorative inserts over her cheek and jaw bones were faded. Malnutrition did that, he thought. They could not, like the bots, sink roots into soil for the minerals they needed, nor use sunlight for more than a marginal gain of calories. Nor could they manufacture the vitamins plants could take for granted. They needed food, fresh vegetables and fruits, and there simply hadn’t been enough of that. They—and the bots—had been hungry ever since the apartment building had fallen and they had gone into hiding.

  His mouth watered. He stared at the edge of the fire, not far from his feet. They had food now, all they could use, and some of it was cooking now, under coals and ashes heaped in a dike-like ring around the flames. It would be ready soon.

  He blinked and looked toward Jackie Thyme. She stood on his other side, rooted in the forest soil, smiling as she enjoyed the luxurious sensation of being embedded in the world to the full depth of her roots, as she had not been for so long. There had been more soil than food in the shelter, but there had not been much of either. And she too would be happy to eat.

  Past Jackie Thyme he could make out Narcissus Joy, Cindy Blue, Garnet Okra, Lemon Margaret, more. All the bots who had survived the assault on their home and the months in the shelter and the long trek to this forest, over 300 kilometers from the city. And there, further from the fire, stood the Eldest, oldest of these bots, representative of an earlier generation in their development. The moths the fire had drawn hovered over the heads of all the bots but were thickest around her.

  The bots thought their Eldest more knowledgeable, more wise, better fit to cope with the catastrophes of history. They did not recognize, Sam thought, that this catastrophe was unique. Similar tragedies had stricken humanity in the past, but not recently enough for any bot to remember. For them, it was unique indeed. The Eldest might really be the wisest bot of all, but she could have no relevant experience.

  Or could she? Sam had heard a little of their beginnings. There had, after all, been little else to do but talk and listen while they hid in the shelter. The bots had been the product of illegal gengineering, unlicensed, illicit. They had felt obliged to hide, to protect themselves as best they could. And they had succeeded. Perhaps the Eldest was not irrelevant.

  He sighed. The bots, half plant, had not thought of the fire. He had, and when he had it going, they had withdrawn their roots from the duff and moved closer. Once they had been used to working during the day, going rootless about their tasks in a civilization dominated by humans. They had rested, embedded in soil beneath bright artificial lighting, at night. The memory of that time had drawn them toward the light of the flames. Perhaps their more human half had also played a role, giving them a tropism for dancing flames, for a circle of illumination to bar the surrounding dark.

  He sighed again. That dark was not just physical. They were surrounded by a night of the spirit as well, a night of savagery, of barbarism, of threat as vicious as anything that had ever darkened a Neanderthal’s or Cro-Magnon’s dreams. He wished, as his ancestral Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons must have wished, that the fire would indeed mean safety. Yet he had shed all his optimism many weeks before.

  A fragrance rode toward him on an eddy of nighttime breeze. From the shadows beyond the Eldest, Eldest’s Speaker spoke. “We are safe,” she said. “Alone. No Engineers above our heads, behind our backs, seeking us. Now we can hide, stay hidden, live.”

  Cindy Blue stirred in a bot’s shrug, the tips of her leaves unfurling just a little from her chest. “They will find us,” she murmured, just loudly enough to be heard. “They are everywhere. They are many. We are few.”

  “But there are fewer of them every day,” said Narcissus Joy. “My roots touch the honeysuckle, and I know. They starve. They sicken. They die. They even kill each other. What they want they cannot have. The day of their sacred machines is past, and without that…”

  Sam got to his feet and stepped away from the fire to gather an armful of fallen branches. They had spoken like this before, he thought. As if the honeysuckle had senses of its own. As if it could see what happened wherever it grew. He sighed quietly. And it grew everywhere. There could be no secrets in a world that held such a thing, and with it people—bots—who could use it as if it were a corps of secret agents. If the Engineers only knew, they would be three times as eager to destroy the bots. They might even try to destroy the honeysuckle. He chuckled slightly, sourly. On the other hand, many of them did like the wine.

  When he returned, he dropped the wood he had gathered beside his place and chose a stick to add to the fire. It caught with a crackle, bursting into flames and pungent smoke and bright sparks that soared into the air above them all.

  “It’s like it was soaked in oil,” said Sheila. Her knees were drawn up before her, her arms wrapped around them, her eyes staring into the fire.

  Someone said, “It would be even worse if that branch was fresh.”

  “Oil trees,” said Tansy Dill, a bot with faded green blossoms on her scalp. “The originals came from Brazil. Then, when the petroleum ran out, the gengineers adjusted them to live in cooler places.”

  “The Greenhouse Effect,” said Sam. “Things warmed up a little too. That must have helped.”

  Tansy Dill nodded. “I worked for a while on a plantation. We tapped the trees and shipped the oil to airports, for jet fuel.”

  “Every pore in the living wood is filled with oil,” said Narcissus Joy. “It evaporates, but even long-dead branches still have enough to…”

  “Do you think the Engineers still use them?” interrupted Jackie Thyme.

  “They must,” said Sheila. “It must be the only fuel there is for the few old trucks and cars and motorcycles they have.”

  “Are they that pragmatic?” asked Sam.

  “If they didn’t destroy the plantations,” said Tansy Dill. “They had to realize they needed them, eventually.”

  “And what if they did destroy them?” asked Sam.

  “Then they’ll be looking for the wild trees. Plantations that were abandoned when the demand declined. Trees that seeded themselves in the forest, like these.” Tansy Dill gestured at the forest that surrounded them. Most of the trees were not oil trees. Their wood burned normally, slowly, not explosively. Only a few were so soaked with hydrocarbons that they could make the fire flare.

  “It’s a wonder they survive,” said Sheila. She was still staring at the flames. “A forest fire…”

  A shudder ran through the gathering of bots as her words reminded them of what they had survived once already.

  * * * *

  Only a few of the bots, fighters like Shasta Lou, had died in the ruins of their apartment building. All the rest—nearly 300, counting the children—had been safely hidden in the shelter of a subbasement that had once served as a parking garage. The ramps that had led to the outside had long ago been sealed off. For a time, its cavernous, pillar-studded space had been used for storage. But when the bots had acquired the building, they had left it empty except for a few piles of surplus soil and whatever mildewing cartons happened to remain. Only later, when the Engineers had begun to gain strength, had they reinforced the pillars, added more supports for the ceiling, and begun to move in more soil, lights, and tools.

  When the building fell, the pillars shook. The injured, lying still on thin pads of fabric or even on bare dirt, cried out. The lights went out as electrical lines were severed. The roof creaked and groaned and cracked. In one spot, near the elevator, it had actually
broken, and scorched bits of masonry, glowing coals, baked soil had tumbled through. More rubble had poured down the stairwell, and smoke and fumes had begun to poison their air.

  But that had been all. The pillars, the ceiling, they held. Flashlight beams came on. Someone cried, “Water! Put that out!”

  Someone else tried a heavy valve on one wall, a cabinet above it holding the rotten shreds of a fire hose. Water gushed, buckets were brought and filled and emptied, and soon the coals beneath the gap in the ceiling and in the opening of the stairwell were dark.

  Smoke, heavy in the air, began to drift toward the stairwell and elevator, where cracks in the rubble let it rise, too slowly. Sam and Sheila crouched, their heads near the floor where the air was cleaner. Beside them was a manhole cover; a musty draft issued from the crack around its rim.

  Someone said, “We need power for the lights,” and Narcissus Joy began to shout orders. Two bots knelt beside Sam and Sheila to lift the manhole cover. Clear air blew the smoke aside, but brought a stench of sewage that made the humans gag. The bots did not seem to be bothered. Several promptly slipped into the tunnels that ran everywhere beneath the city.

  By the end of the day, the bots had found and tapped several of the city’s underground electrical cables. Their lights were on. A small bioform Bellows drew air from the tunnels, not fresh but still bearing the oxygen the refugees needed. The air found its own way out through the rubble overhead.

  “Won’t they notice the stink?” Sheila had asked. She was breathing through her mouth.

  Sam had shaken his head. “If they do, they’ll think it’s us, rotting. And we’ll get used to it.”

  Over the next few days, they had prepared their shelter as if they intended to stay for a long time, perhaps until the Engineers had vanished into history. They spread the small amount of dirt they had available into a layer just thick enough to give the bots a taste of root-ease. They positioned the bioform computers and the few snackbushes they had brought with them beneath the brightest lights. They began to dredge muck from the sewage tunnels and add it to the soil. They pulled honeysuckle vines along the tunnels until they reached their refuge, where the stems could be buried in soil to produce new roots.

  The honeysuckle stretched over entire continents, its roots passing under rivers and canals and straits. In principle it could inform them of events wherever it reached. Yet its very pervasiveness was its greatest problem: The further away one wished to see, the more different things were going on, the more information was being funneled toward the observer. Only within a range of a thousand kilometers or so was there any practical hope of sorting out the signals and making sense of the wide, wide world. Within that range, through the senses of the honeysuckle, and through the eyes of those root-linked bots still at large in the world above, the hidden refugees could watch what happened as the Engineers established their dominance.

  Unfortunately, the honeysuckle was not intelligent. It could not tell what was important and what was not. Bots had to link to its roots and filter the reports of its senses, looking for significance. Best of all, bots could use it to tell their fellows what they themselves had seen, and when there were many bots, the vines functioned much like a telephone network, passing messages instead of simple sense reports. Now that the number of bots was shrinking, the flow of information slowed.

  The refugees mourned for the slaughter, and when their probes of the root network found their numbers dwindled from millions to thousands, hiding alone or in small groups, a few succumbed to black depression and killed themselves. Most, however, remained intent on survival.

  The injured healed quickly, far more quickly than pure-animal humans. Within days, they were up and working beside the rest, though slowly. Within two weeks, there were few signs that any of the refugees had ever been damaged.

  Only a few were not surprised when the power flickered and the lights faded. The rest soon learned that much of the world’s electricity had long come from orbiting power satellites that converted sunlight to microwaves they could beam to Earthly antennas, and that the Orbitals had found other uses for the power. The refugees despaired, and then they rejoiced when the Engineers turned off streetlights and forbade all but official, essential uses of electricity. What was left depended on the flows of water and wind and tide and sun, not the gengineered technology that had replaced the old machines and that the Engineers therefore hated and destroyed. Power was still there for the refugees to steal. They could still survive.

  They did their best to pretend that they could hope for more than mere survival. Bot teachers, led by Mary Gold and Sam, used the bioform computers and the honeysuckle roots to hold classes for the children. Bot gengineers planted seeds and cultivated weapons. Groups met, drew maps, and planned.

  Yet they did not forget that their time was limited. Even those benignly natural sources of electricity, unpolluted by human arrogance, renewable, eternal, even water, wind, tide, and sun, could be exploited only with the aid of machines. The machines themselves needed maintenance, repairs, expert personnel. And those personnel, those engineers, were suddenly scarce. A few, perhaps, had escaped to orbit. Most had been purged by the Engineers for their neophilic tendencies, for owning biopliances or bioform houses, vehicles, computers, for being polluted by genetic modifications.

  It was only weeks before the power they tapped began to weaken again. Their lights dimmed, brightened when the Engineers cut even some official demands for electricity, dimmed again, and finally stabilized at a level that barely let the refugees see each other in the murk. By then it was clearly time to leave their shelter.

  They harvested what food and weapons they had been able to grow. They put the smallest of the bioform computers, loaded with Sam’s programs and recordings, in a sack to carry with them. Then, one by one, they entered the sewers. The adults waded through slime and stench, carrying the youngest in their arms and on their shoulders, until they came to a gap in the masonry that let them enter a drier tunnel that had once carried underground trains. The tracks were still in place. They hiked on, and when this tunnel opened to daylight and the rails disappeared, leaving only the gravel roadbed, they stopped to rest.

  After dark had fallen and the streets outside their hiding place had quieted, Narcissus Joy released a single botbird from the one plant they still had. Only when the picture it transmitted down its long fiber-optic umbilical revealed that no Engineers lay in wait for them did they begin to follow the long mound of gravel, still marked with rotting wooden ties, toward the suburbs. When dawn began to light the eastern sky, they saw that they were surrounded by stained brick walls, broken windows, ancient warehouses, tenements. They took refuge for the day in a burned-out hulk, and continued their journey when night came again.

  They were lucky. No one saw them, or if anyone did, they did not recognize the straggling line of weary refugees for what they were. They, on the other hand, did see Engineers. Their first day out of the tunnels, hidden in the charred ruins of an ancient tenement, they watched as an equally ancient truck grumbled down the street, its stake-sided back filled with bound prisoners. A few showed signs of genetic modification—splashes of nonhuman color, nonhuman lines of arm and leg and even neck. Most did not. There were no signs of green.

  On their second night, they could not travel. They huddled in their hiding place while gunfire raked the cityscape they had to cross. There were explosions, sirens, screams. The fear was palpable, a matter of odor, tension, vibration. Sam almost shrieked when a small figure appeared in the doorless opening that overlooked the roadbed.

  The quick “Shhh!” was Jackie Thyme’s. “I’ve been out there,” she said. “Scouting. And they’re all Engineers. Fighting each other.”

  They used the last of their botbirds long before they were out of the city and among the suburbs. Then they had nothing but their own senses and scouts like Jackie Thyme to
warn them of the small bands of blue-coveralled Engineers that roamed the area, torching the few bioform homes that still remained. They watched from the shelter of a small copse of trees thickened by honeysuckle vines as one such band flushed a young girl from hiding in a pumpkin shell—perhaps, once, when her parents had been alive, or when they had been there, it had been her home—and ran her down. Only Sam had watched what happened then, wishing that he dared to interrupt the grisly proceedings, knowing that if he did more than one would surely die. He had not slept much, or well, that afternoon.

  Eventually they reached the hillier country that rose toward the still distant mountains. The forest clearing in which they were now gathered was a kilometer or so from the greenway they had followed, and the forest ran on over the hills, pausing only occasionally where humans had interrupted its growth for their own purposes. They were a hundred meters or so from the weedy fields of an abandoned farm. Beyond the fields, visible from the edge of the trees, was a farmhouse, its paint all neatly white, its windows still showing the streaks of a springtime washing. It was empty of life though the cupboards held dishes and staples, and the closets clothes. The fields held potsters and carrots and squash and corn. Manure in the weed-grown barnyard spoke of horses and cows that had vanished with the people. The bones of a small Mack lay on the overgrown lawn. Honeysuckle vines, colorful with laden blossoms, thickened the fencerows and the borders of the forest and climbed upon the barn.

  * * * *

  “Can we use the house?” asked Sam. He added another stick to the fire.

  “They’re gone,” said Sheila. “They’re dead, or they’re slaves, and the Engineers stole their animals.” She picked up a stick and poked at the ashes that covered their dinner. Wisps of steam rose into the air. She raked into view potato-like potsters, baked in their skins, and ears of corn in their husks. The odor of lobster brought saliva to their mouths. “They’re done,” she said.