Therefore I Am - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 2

by Various Writers

  Bree had called it an accident and still did, never mind that getting into the ventilation shafts required Nordstrom to enter a code and unlock a complicated series of bulkheads. Never mind that it required a different set of codes to get through those bulkheads to the hatch that Nordstrom had gone through. A third set of codes was required to open the outer hatch, and it should only have opened if the motion and heat detectors sensed that the body waiting to enter the airlock was in a space suit. Nordstrom had overridden all of those safety features.

  Pring thought again about the look on his face before he’d gone up—about the weird verbal misstep he’d made. Shells. They had been within sight of the planet, astronomically speaking, but they hadn’t landed. They hadn’t known about the pennae. They had never even seen them.

  It was still hard to believe he was gone. It didn’t seem possible that he could have done it so quickly. They had taken their eyes off him because they trusted him—they trusted the testing that had deemed them all fit for travel. Now there were three of them instead of four, as suddenly as if Nordstrom had just blinked out of existence.

  Pring couldn’t hold back a shudder of revulsion when Archer of Team Fourteen showed her what he’d done. Archer was a go-getter who’d been the minimum age of seventeen when the Coalition teams had followed the probes to Alpha 1B. He was still young, still convinced of his ability to advance within the rigidly stratified hierarchy of the Coalition.

  “I didn’t want to take any of your specimens,” he explained. “I heard you’re kind of attached to them, so I went out and got one on my own. They’re really hard to find, the big ones. You’ve gotta admire their camouflage. Anyway, I managed to get one and brought it back to Lab Fourteen to see what I could do with it.”

  Archer painstakingly explained the way he’d adapted a drill to grind the flesh of the penna into a pulp, which could be fortified with nutrients. Pring pretended to listen and tried to keep her gorge from rising. Her attention was focused on the beaker of pulp in front of her. It no longer resembled a penna in any way except for the grayish hue of the flesh, dead now and absent of any color undulations. It was just meat.

  “ … there’s not much left on Earth to eat, so I thought that given that they can survive in the desert, and given how many of them there are, they’d make a great food source.”

  She wondered if he had spoken to Bree about that. She somehow managed to swallow, and then spoke. “Possibly,” she said. “It doesn’t contain much in the way of nutrients, though.”

  It wasn’t much of an argument, and Archer repeated his excited monologue about how they could fortify it with various vitamins. Even given the cost of transport, if they could breed the pennae on earth, such a plentiful source of food would quickly become very cheap. It could feed the whole planet. All Pring had to do was help him write a recommendation that they earmark a portion of the freight capacity for the new foodstuff.

  Pring stared at the beaker. She could imagine the pennae being used that way—had already thought of it herself. She had thought about it and discarded the idea. It wasn’t just her unnatural attachment to the things, and it wasn’t a solid scientific opinion. There was just something about the idea of bringing them to Earth that seemed … unwise. She nursed a growing uneasiness about the pennae that she couldn’t attribute to anything concrete. There was nothing about them to suggest danger—nothing poisonous in their chemical make-up, no known defenses except their camouflage—but somehow Pring’s fascination had turned to anxiety.

  She looked up, blinking. Archer was looking at her expectantly, like a child who’d just done a cartwheel for the first time.

  “That’s very nice, Archer. Have you sent a report on this to the Coalition?”

  He grinned. She pitied his enthusiasm.

  “Sure did. I didn’t overstep myself, did I? I just wanted to help, you know, solve the food crisis.”

  Pring nodded. She was revolted and a little upset. It must have been obvious because Archer looked a little disappointed as he took his beaker of flesh with him. He glanced at her over his shoulder, scanned the laboratory full of pennae, and then left.

  A month later, two freight ships loaded with pennae of varying size launched, scorching the sand into black glass. Archer went back to Earth with them, along with members of various teams who either wanted to be involved with the process or who simply wanted off Alpha 1B. Eight weeks was a long time to spend in transit to a foreign planet—by the time the first teams had arrived, some of their team members had already applied to return on the first launch back.

  Pring had opted to stay. The Coalition had asked her to return so that she could oversee the Earth-bound research into the pennae, but she had declined. Her reasoning was that she needed to do more research in situ, and she made clear her apprehensions about bringing the pennae to Earth for any purpose, especially consumption. Naturally, her objections were ignored.

  Team Three was one of two teams equipped with a psychiatrist. Although Dr. Barnes’s office was exactly the same as Pring’s own office in Freighter Seven, down to the furniture, it was distinctly less comfortable somehow. Perhaps it was the familiarity that made it so—the identical layout and furniture, the computer screen on the desk, everything the same apart from the incidental things.

  Barnes had a stack of Rorschach cards on her desk. She had ignored Pring’s scoffing protests and made her go through them, scribbling notes to herself on a small pad in her cramped handwriting. Pring watched her slender fingers gripping the pencil and half-wished she’d break the lead.

  The pencil was one of Barnes’s quirks. The Coalition encouraged them all to have little superstitions and rituals—it served as a release for tension and as a way to monitor someone’s mental health. Team members who became too reliant on their rituals and totems were watched more carefully. Pring was aware that the time she spent with the pennae had become an official concern.

  “Bev tells me your sleep is disrupted,” Barnes said in a scrupulously neutral tone. “It’s not that unusual, considering the amount of work you’ve been doing. I have heard from a few little birds that you’ve been spending an abnormal amount of time in your lab, but that’s not surprising given how much there is to learn about these things.”

  Pring was a scientist, not a psychiatrist, and while she conceded some of the uses of psychology, she still didn’t like it. Barnes struck her as a know-it-all, someone who thought she had everyone else figured out.

  “According to your team members, you seem to have become withdrawn and often combative. The pennae seem to be a touchy issue. I’ve read your reports about them and your concerns about introducing them into Earth’s ecosystem. Do you feel your concerns are at all … overstated?”

  Although Barnes maintained a carefully non-judgmental tone, she couldn’t quite mask her condescending skepticism. Perhaps she just wasn’t bothering to do so.

  “I don’t feel anything, Dr Barnes. What we have here is an entirely new species, from a planet we previously thought was dead and barren. How this species escaped our initial reconnaissance, we don’t know. What effect it will have on Earth’s ecosystems, we don’t know. What effect it will have on humans if introduced into the food supply, we don’t know. There are a lot of very important questions that have yet to be answered, and I think it’s damn foolish to proceed as if there are no risks at all.”

  Barnes folded her hands on her notebook.

  “You are aware that crews from Teams Sixteen, Three, Eight, and Eleven have been consuming the processed pennae for some time with no ill effects?”

  “Would you like a list of all the things human beings ate until they turned out to cause cancer?” Pring replied. “Doesn’t mean it’s harmless.”

  “I concede your point, but I am concerned, Dr. Pring, that your anxieties may be a reflection of personal problems.”

  By personal problems Barnes meant Nordstrom, and Pring was in no mood to discuss that issue. It had occurred to her that she might be losin
g her mind the same way that he had. However, she didn’t feel suicidal or even depressed … what she felt was afraid. She didn’t know how to explain it to Barnes, and she didn’t want to. It would make her sound paranoid and consequently subject to sectioning.

  “Personal problems?” Pring asked.

  “As I’m sure you’re aware, we’ve been monitoring your team closely since Captain Nordstrom’s death.”

  Pring noticed the way that she said it directly, without euphemism and without any judgment. Clearly, Barnes thought it all had to do with Nordstrom’s suicide.

  “What do you want me to say? We lost the best member of our team. We’re all still recovering from it … but this isn’t about Nordstrom.”

  There was no point in explaining to Barnes the stab of dread she’d felt when the freighter rockets bound for Earth took off. It wasn’t just the potential they had to contain some extraterrestrial microbe that could start an epidemic of disease or cause mutations, though she had mentioned that in her reports. It was an older, more primal fear: it was the fear of predation.

  It was silly. The pennae were no more a predator than the Earth diatoms they vaguely resembled. They were practically inert—simply dividing and dividing, growing larger or smaller, quietly evolving on their barren planet. There was nothing about them to fear or admire the way that one might fear and admire a shark for being a highly-evolved eating machine. There were no sharks left anyway, not outside of aquariums and museums. There were no predators left at all apart from humans.

  “I’m going to ask you a question,” Barnes said. “Do you think that your … bond with these creatures is potentially a way to replace the bond you shared with Captain Nordstrom?”

  Pring laughed. It felt a little too much like a sob to be comfortable, but it was the only response she could muster. She tried not to think about Nordstrom’s verbal slip—it came to her more and more often lately as she felt her own mind unraveling a bit.

  “I’m just under a lot of stress,” she said. “My scientific opinion is being ignored in favor of commercial interests. I can’t be surprised about it, but it does piss me off. Now if you’re quite finished poking me, I’d like to go get some rest.”

  Pring left Freighter Three and went back to her own ship, staring out at the rocky, sandy landscape where she knew thousands upon thousands of pennae were reproducing, growing, and dying. They might have done so for eternity without evolving their simple anatomy. Now no one would know how the pennae might have evolved, because humans had irrevocably changed the planet. They would probably become a new species back on Earth, adapting to the conditions there and becoming part of the badly damaged ecosystem that she had left behind.

  As she walked back to the ship, bouncing gently in the reduced gravity, Pring paused again. The feeling of foreboding she’d been keeping quiet at the back of her mind thrummed and amplified. It was as if the whole planet resonated with it. Something was wrong. The warning was there, as broad as the sky. Someone else had to feel it. Someone else had to know.

  Bev stood outside the infirmary door and looked through the reinforced glass at the patient inside. The room was quiet now—an unsettled, temporary quiet that would come to an end once the sedatives wore off and the restraints rattled again. The air was still fraught with the noise of argument and escalating insistence. The feeling hung like an emotional echo that bounced from wall to wall.

  Bree sidled up beside her. He looked past her into the room at the slight figure in bed. Out of uniform, stripped of the armor of work and her no-nonsense demeanor, Pring looked tiny and fragile … but even in sedation, she looked tense. If there were dreams in her chemically-induced sleep, they weren’t pleasant ones.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  “Same,” Bev murmured. “They let the sedatives wear off so that they could talk to her about the delusions, but she wouldn’t listen. ‘Don’t you understand, they’re going to kill us all—’”

  Bev’s voice choked off, and Bree frowned.

  “By ‘them’ she means … she means the pennae, right? She’s not convinced there are invisible enemies or anything?”

  “Yeah, she means the slugs,” Bev said. “I think I could understand fearing an invisible enemy a little more, you know? But being afraid of those things? They’re barely alive. I don’t get it. They haven’t even got brains. I think … god, I think she blames those things for Nordstrom’s death.”

  Bree shook his head.

  “I don’t understand it either,” he said. “It may be some latent paranoia coming to the surface, something to do with the Coalition ignoring her objections to the food program. Cassandra complex, maybe.”

  “Except Cassandra was always right.”

  She let out a puff of air that was meant to be a laugh, then decided it wasn’t funny at all.

  We’ve come to understand you. It has taken longer than we thought, but through our contact with you, we have pierced the opaque veil of your primitive psyches and grasped the signs and signifiers that make up your consciousness. Our consciousness is not one that you can dissect and label, which is why you believe that it does not exist.

  In your own scientific terms, you are a parasite. You invade, multiply, and pillage the resources of every planet you go to. You grow, malevolently like cancer, and when one host is dead you find another. You are the last large predator on your planet, a planet you have stripped of oil and water and plant and animal life. There is little left on your Earth besides you.

  Except for us. You brought us here as food, as a resource as you call it. You were pleased when we reproduced and adapted to every possible ecosystem on your planet. You consumed us. You surrounded yourselves with us. We are in your water. We are in your soil. In some way, we are you.

  You may understand the coming end as a tingling, the primal panic of your nerves responding to us. The actual moment of your cessation will be, in your terms, instantaneous. Nearly every cell in your bodies will rupture. Only a few will realize, and they are already afraid. They needn’t fear much longer.

  We have waited—slept, in a manner of speaking, just as you slept on your way to us. It took us so long to understand what to do, to understand the power we had. Your consumption of all things was not an end for us, but another stage in our development. Now that we have your consciousness, we no longer need you. Your planet is nearly as dead as ours. By the calculations of your own scientists, you would have soon starved to death. We have saved you from that … just not in the way you intended.

  El Camino

  By Dustin Monk

  Bobby Johnson went first. Then Carl Webster and his wife, Peg, who we all called the Square because of her body type. And Sammy with two of his cokehead buddies—they headed out in a beat-up Chevy, but they got lost in the Arizona desert and never made it. And Sue Ellsworth. Cotton Anderson. Billy and Jeb with a trunk full of Parliaments. Fran and Mike. The Thompsons with a bun in the oven—all the way, out. Candy Gibson. Mark Winoski; Cal and Calliope in matching red his-and-her suits; two more Bobbys; Kari Brockhauer; John Dursk; and Mr. Wiseman who’d sold Wiseman’s Convenient Store six years ago, and had been enjoying a life of retirement and gardening. More and more went every day. They went for moon rocks or love. Went to live or die in the Sea of Tranquility, and to get away from the wars—to get safe. Read a book, and thought “hey.” Got called, I heard Phil Polson say two days before he left. He said “I got called” like it was a religious thing.

  Pretty soon, it was just me and the folks who didn’t have any money to get through the battle lines. The girl I’d been living with, Polly, worked at a gas station part-time, but we weren’t able to save a dime. We were the ones who got stuck for one reason or another.

  It’s a funny thing. Polly and I live in an apartment on a cul-de-sac. There is a sign there. It says: No Way Out. But I’m not afraid. I tell Polly things are looking up. We’re going to the Moon. There’s no fighting on Luna, I tell her. Hear they have good bookstores there, too, I tell her,
because Polly likes reading cookbooks. We are this close—that is what I tell her. Then I get my paycheck from the office where I work, head to the local watering hole and start it up.

  Things get tough, money gets tight and pretty soon, Polly has to sell her cookbooks to the used bookstore. They give her thirty-five big ones for the books. She’s even more upset than usual because some of the books she sold weren’t available for download on her lidreader. I can tell she’s checking and double-checking the sources, her eyelids are fluttering so fast.

  The bookstore’s right across the street from the watering hole. I hadn’t noticed before, but now I’m looking at Polly’s purse, where she put the money from the cookbooks, and thinking about how many pints I could get with thirty-five big ones. I don’t ask her for the money because we both know what a bad idea that would be.

  I access the drunkenfool app on my lidreader instead. Immediately, the sun gets brighter, my legs feel like jelly and my shoulders loosen. It’s like the effects of being drunk but without the effort of getting there. Two problems with lidreader: first, it isn’t the real thing, and you know it and your body knows it; and second, damn thing works only intermittently.

  Anyway, later that night—after Polly’s fallen asleep watching a game show behind her eyelids, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips—I dig in her purse and find the crinkled money, put it in my pocket and walk to the hole.

  Turns out to be a good thing.

  Jimmy Wilkes walks in. His left arm is missing. It got blown off in Phoenix during the Western Liberation Front’s campaign there. Heard he found the charred limb several yards away, and now he keeps it in a jar in the fridge, a constant reminder. He must be twenty-two, but he’s got snow seeping in his sideburns and along the tops of his ears, and his face is gnarly-looking.

  I buy Jimmy a drink because you do that with soldiers. He says thanks and sits beside me. He asks if I can spare a square. I give him a cigarette—whatever kind Polly smokes.