What the #@&% Is That?

by John Joseph Adams

  That seemed to qualify.

  “Cracking up?”

  “Some of our more ‘productive’ models can’t sustain their sanity in light of their duties. They break down, go out of control, and are arrested or killed. You’ve resolved your inner conflicts the best. You survived. You thrived. You killed for us and no one knew.”

  I frowned. “Why?”

  There was a pause, and her eyes glazed, as if I was on hold while a side conversation was held. Her gaze snapped back into focus as she spoke again, which confirmed my suspicions.

  “We need stimulation, Neal McConnell. You stimulate us.”

  “Me?”

  “Your race. Its pain. Collected in your brain.” She rolled her head to look at the other body. “Your species was deemed too primitive to contact for most civilized worlds, but some of us looked deeper—certain impulses your altered brain produces when you inflict suffering can be collected and fed into ours. It’s too complex for your limited mind to understand, but the byproduct of human pain and terror that your brain creates for us affects our systems differently. Some of us—enjoy the sensation.”

  “Like a drug?” I worked with college students in a building on Washington Square Park. I knew how to handle pushers and junkies.

  “Much more than that . . .” Her face softened with pleasure.

  “You’re just addicts and I’m your connection?”

  She shrugged.

  “So, you make me kill?” I gestured at the body beside us. “Made me for this?”

  “We made many to do this. You are simply the best.”

  “You implanted me in my mother?”

  “No . . . only modified your developing fetus during a vacation trip to Florida. Neither parent remembered what happened on the highway, where they went, or what was done to them.” She smiled. “Neither did you as you grew up. None of it . . .”

  With those words, images poured through my head from childhood—not nightmares of steel tables and surgery after all, but real memories of alien infant abduction, off-world office visits to my pediatrician for fine-tuning of my little psycho brain, night after night, as they turned me into their killing machine—I felt the closest I’ve ever felt as an adult to an emotional reaction, other than pleasure in my work. No—not my work, their work . . . , I thought, and felt it again. It was not an emotion I could define, not having had many in my life, but it was not one of the good ones.

  “We cannot read your thoughts, only collect what your brain produces when you torture and kill. We felt a loss of enthusiasm that lessened our enjoyment. That’s why we needed to do this.”

  I worried open what passed for a rib cage, careful not to sever any organs that might be used to make it talk.

  “Go on. . . .” I mulled over what I was experiencing.

  “You are dissatisfied; you want more. So do we.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  Her eyes lit up. “Kill the Earth.”

  I can’t imagine what she saw on my face.

  “Hear me out . . . No more one-on-one. Move on to mass extermination. You tell us how and we give you the means. The terror of a planetary extinction will produce in you the worldwide equivalent of what you induce here. You collect it for us; we store our supply. It won’t be as much as you could have provided over time—it’ll be less refined, less potent. But good enough.”

  She smiled, sunny bright.

  “Does that renew your enthusiasm, to see your entire race die screaming, any way you choose? It’s not essential, but it would improve collection. Give us a better buzz, as you might say.”

  I thought of Kathy, my boss, all the students and staff at NYU, my neighbors, and everyone else I’d ever met, dead, as horribly as I please, with the rest of the human race. For a better buzz . . . I am a killer, no doubt of that, a serial killer many times over. Am I capable of being history’s last and greatest mass murderer? Is that all I am?

  “No. This can’t be real. . . .” I faltered. There was that odd feeling again; had I finally slipped over the edge into complete psychosis? Was I hallucinating? I looked down at my hands, wrist-deep inside the drone’s abdomen, and knew I wasn’t.

  “What’s in it for me?” I asked suddenly, not sure why.

  “A world to kill, Neal McConnell. No limits, no restrictions, no consequences.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “The catch?” The girl looked quizzical, as if she didn’t understand something on the menu.

  “You’re offering a lot. What’s the downside?”

  “To total domination over the human race?”

  “It sounds awfully administrative. You’re talking planetary extinction. That means heavy equipment, staff, paperwork, human resources . . .” I shook my head, realized I was stalling for time as I tried to process what I felt. “And what do I do when I’m done? What’s my retirement plan after wiping out mankind?”

  “Oh, I don’t know; keep a few for your . . . wait.”

  The girl’s operators went into consultation again as her eyes went blank. She raised her head again, looked even more puzzled. “What do you suggest?”

  I sat back on my stool, selected another blade, one with serrated edges. “Well . . . the real issue here’s the buzz, right? You’re not getting as good from me as you want. Maybe the problem is your source material.”

  “Yes?” She looked cutely peeved. “Your point?”

  “Well . . . can’t you harvest the impulses of your own kind through me? Can you experience this kind of fear or pain?” I toyed with a new tool.

  There was a long silence before she answered.

  “What’s the purpose of the question?”

  “I was thinking that if I tortured one of you to death, it would be much more interesting to me than killing more humans. More exciting. The high could be incredible.” I twiddled with some long green stringy things that the new tool had uncovered. “For us both . . .”

  The girl twitched. I wasn’t sure if it was because of something I’d done inside her or because of the idea. Her face looked thoughtful; a slight frown creased her tanned brow.

  “That’s impossible. Our environment would kill you. There’s no protection that makes you a suitable killer. You would be too vulnerable. We are many times stronger than humans—”

  “Yet you can put your consciousness into a perfect human simulacrum. You can’t put mine into one like you?”

  I could see the storm at the other end of the line play out on the girl’s face. She was appalled, excited, angry, aroused . . . but greedy for a better buzz. There was the longest wait yet, then a slow response.

  “This is not . . . technically impossible.”

  “Excellent!”

  “You could elicit from one of us what you get from one of these?” asked the girl.

  “So much more. I’d be better motivated.” I didn’t explain why. “You’d feel the horror of your own kind, the suffering of greater minds than ours, far more intense than those of mere humans, even as you experience my pleasure in doing it.

  “My people make entertainment of the things I do to them, in TV and movies. There are few surprises for my victims, save that it’s being done to them. They bore me. You’d be fresh material, unexplored, a blank page I will fill with blood. You have all been so safe for so long, so superior. . . . Your terror will be exquisite, your suffering sublime. The high would surpass any and all possibilities left for me here.”

  I stared down into their biological doll’s eyes with a salesman’s smile and dangled an abstract internal organ I’d just removed from its thorax before the thing’s wide eyes.

  “I will make meat of you.”

  Then I paused and waited.

  “There could be a way . . .” Her face looked as pleased as it had when the boy let her order lobster at the restaurant. “Your idea has merit. But we can’t let you hunt freely on our world as you do on yours—”

  “No, of course not, but surely there are those who are . . . undes
irable, for whatever reason. Criminals? Deviants? Those who obstruct the greater good . . . I could pick them off for years before anyone notices they’re gone.”

  Pause. “There are always those. In any society.”

  “Well, then. Just point me to them. If you guys like pot, you’re gonna love peyote. . . .” I didn’t oversell it, but then, you never have to sell a better high to a junkie.

  “Transportation will be arranged,” she said quickly. “A host body of our species will be grown and we will provide lessons so you can function in it and in our culture.” Her eyes glittered brightly as she smiled broadly. “This is a very interesting new venture, Neal McConnell. We will be in contact.”

  The eyes went blank, its head rolled to the side, the breath and heartbeat stopped as soon as the drone disconnected. I sighed and started the process of cleaning up my playroom. It looked like I wouldn’t be seeing it for a while, if ever again.

  Space. Who would have thought?

  How many murders had it taken for me to find the real reason I did it? I chuckled at the irony as I cut up what was left of the drone and her dead date, dropped the parts into acid, and burned what was left in the crematorium. The answer wasn’t what I’d expected, nor was my final fate. I’d assumed I’d die in jail or an asylum. Instead, after years of whittling it down, I’d just saved the human race—by being raised to be the best guy for the job of killing it, then coming up with a better idea.

  Too bad for my employers that they didn’t know there was a catch. I had finally recognized the feeling they’d drawn out of me when they answered the one question that had plagued me all my life. . . . Why was I a monster?

  The feeling was rage.

  Rage over my lost life, for all I might have been without their interference, for all that my tortured victims might have been without mine. They’d taken my life, made me a killer, and then wanted me to murder my world for their weekend fix. I could have lashed out, but thanks to the years of rational thinking and discipline that the aliens had instilled in me, I channeled my rage into salvation for the human race, and some small measure of revenge, enough for now. It would grow until I found my makers and fulfilled my promise to make meat of them all.

  My parents could finally be proud of me. I wasn’t sure if saving humanity redeemed me for all I’d done, or if it was even a good idea. I just knew that I had an adventure ahead unlike any I’d imagined. I looked forward to my new career of murdering those who made me what I am, with renewed enthusiasm. My heart was back in my work.

  Neal McConnell. Savior of Earth.

  I can’t wait to build my new playroom.

  HUNTERS IN THE WOOD

  TIM PRATT

  “So the idea is, we’re supposed to shoot each other, right?” Edgar said.

  I nodded. “Looks like it. I don’t see anybody else we can shoot around here.” I shifted in search of a more comfortable position on the mossy rock, but no matter how much I wiggled my butt, the mossy rock refused to turn into a cushioned chaise longue. “They did the same thing, what, eight years ago? When they chose that married couple to be the Hunters.”

  “At least they dumped those two on a tropical island.” Edgar sat on a log across from me, rifle across his knees, bright orange bulletproof vest doing nothing good at all for his complexion. Apart from the vest, he was dressed in street clothes, just like me, though his shoes were shinier and even less suited to tromping through this heavily wooded wilderness than my running shoes were. “They got to float in the pure blue waters before they tried to murder each other.”

  “Are we, ah . . . I mean . . .”

  Edgar shook his head. “I can’t shoot you, Gary. Even if I did, I don’t think I could live with myself afterward, not for all the cash and prizes in the world. If it comes to it, you should shoot me. I’d rather have you alive than be alive myself without you.”

  “You say the sweetest things,” I said. “And ditto.”

  “I mean it, Gary. If it’s you or me, I pick you—”

  I shook my head. “Nope. That’s off the table. Just move on. So, instead, what? We just wait it out, and when the Gamekeeper comes tomorrow morning, we let him execute us both together?”

  “Go out holding hands, and kid ourselves that we’ll become martyrs or revolutionary symbols or something, the power of love conquering self-preservation?”

  We both sighed, simultaneously. Our thoughts often ran along similar lines. It was one reason we’d stayed together after what should have been a drunken one-night stand all those years ago. “At least if we die that way, we’re just victims of the brutal, oppressive oligarchy, and not traitors to our own hearts,” Edgar said.

  “Nice one,” I said. Edgar wrote listicles for websites for a living—“9 Ways to Blow Her Mind in the Kitchen!” and the like—so he was good at pithy turns of phrase. I was the more blue-collar of the two of us, which meant I occasionally had to leave my desk to do my work: I serviced Internet connections and made sure the oligarchy’s snoopware was running properly.

  “You want to just have sex until death comes for us?” I asked. I wondered if that green stuff over there was poison ivy. We never even went camping.

  Edgar looked up at the hovering camera-orbs, which were also loaded with nonlethal (and, eventually, lethal) countermeasures designed to keep us from leaving the field of play. “You know I have trouble doing it with people watching. Even people watching through floating cameras. Besides, I don’t want to give them the satisfaction, you know? I’d rather my last hours alive not be used to get people to sign up for a gay porn site next week.”

  “Then we might as well walk around for a while,” I said. “We’ve got almost a full day. Who knows, maybe there are a couple of off-the-grid hermits living in these woods.”

  “We can dare to dream.” Edgar rose, cradling his rifle awkwardly. “Where do you think we are, anyway? The northwest zone?”

  “Mmm. Maybe. The air’s pretty crisp, though. Probably part of old Canada, or maybe—what was it called, Alaska?”

  “Probably not a lot of hermits around here, then,” he said. “They’d die the first winter.”

  “Oh, well. It’s been ages since we went hiking.”

  “It’s not a bad way to spend the last day of your life.” He spat in the direction of one of the floating orbs, and it bobbed out of the way. “At least we can make sure the show is boring.”

  We set off, neither of us expecting to find an innocent human being to kill, but hoping.

  * * * *

  Edgar liked to trade for those old dystopian novels at the swap market. He liked to laugh at how much worse things really were, in some ways, than what those writers had imagined. Me, I always thought they were implausible, all the convoluted explanations they’d come up with to explain why the government would send a bunch of teenagers to murder each other on an island with automatic weapons, or send a bunch of teenagers to murder each other in a high-tech arena with bows and arrows, or send a bunch of teenagers to run from genetically engineered monsters in a maze, or whatever—there was always some kind of reason. Like, the games were pacification measures to keep the oppressed peoples in line, or the result of some ancient pact with dark forces, or a way to fund a cash-strapped prison system with baroque live executions, or whatever.

  When the real reason the people in charge make games of life and death is so much simpler: because they can, and because it amuses them.

  So, a few times a year, two Hunters are chosen, snatched out of their beds, given a hasty briefing, and handed weapons—anything from machetes to flamethrowers. They’re dropped in the middle of somewhere—a major city, or one of the lawless zones, or a hidden rebel camp. (They’re never as hidden as the rebels think.) If the Hunters get dropped someplace where there might be real resistance, they probably get full body armor. If they’re dropped on a soft target, like a resort for mid-level bureaucrats or a vocational school for the plebs, they get stab-proof vests or something.

  The rules are si
mple: as a Hunter, you can kill anyone. And as a Hunter, you have to kill at least one person. If you don’t kill someone before your time limit runs out, the Gamekeeper—whichever minor media personality the oligarchs appoint to host a particular show—appears and kills you in some baroque way, often sobbing uncontrollably during the process, since minor media personalities aren’t usually stone-cold emotionless killers. That way, the audience got to see something entertaining, even if the Hunters don’t play along.

  Except the oligarchs don’t actually care about the audience; they just care about amusing themselves. My department monitors all web traffic, and ratings are actually a lot lower than you might expect, at least if you get your ideas about human nature from the sort of books Edgar liked to read. It turns out most people don’t enjoy watching snuff films—the incidence of psychopaths in the general population just isn’t that high. (The incidence of psychopaths among the oligarchs, on the other hand . . .)

  So, when Edgar and I were roused in our bed in the middle of the night, we had a brief flare of hope that it was just a murderous home invasion but were swiftly brought around to the reality that we’d been chosen as Hunters. We talked about it in the downtime between briefings, and surgeries, and transport—about whether we’d be able to go through with it, whether it would be okay if we picked people who were really old or something—and came to terms with the reality that we would have to kill to live.

  Then we were given bright orange bulletproof vests, rifles, and hunting knives, and dumped in the middle of the woods seemingly days away from anyone, and we thought: Fuck it. Maybe doomed token resistance was the best we could do, but it was better than the alternative of turning on each other.

  * * * *