Unnaturals

by Merrill, Lynna

  "I knew about spy satellites, too, Nic," Mel said softy. "I didn't have to invent them, even if for some strange reason I would have wanted to. They are there, in the feeds of decades ago. How they work is even explained in detail—if you'd care to dig that deep, and if you'd care to read it all word by word and sift through the inconsistencies and contradictions in order to build the truth."

  "To build the concept. There is no way you could have built the real thing without tools. Couldn't you have waited before breaking anything here? Waited until you knew more? They seem willing to give us the knowledge! They did nothing this time, just showed you—"

  "This is the damn problem! They did nothing! All this time they have watched, and they did nothing! Why—"

  It wasn't Nicolas who answered.

  "Because, young lady," a strange man's voice said, "they have learned that sometimes the best you can do is nothing. No matter how hard this might be." The man smiled sadly. "And, no, I didn't watch or listen to you through the monitors. We have also learned that a person must sometimes have privacy in order to fulfill their full potential. Indeed these rooms are unwatched. You two were simply shouting so loud that I heard you through the door."

  "So, with full respect for our privacy you let yourself in," Nicolas answered in a voice now calm and cold. Mel didn't know if Nic even realized he'd stepped between her and the man, as if the man would at any moment now attack her. "You look young," Mel told the man, "like my mom used to look young—but your eyes are much older than hers. Somehow age shows, in the eyes. Even in Lucasta, if you bothered to watch, you could tell if a person was sixteen or thirty. I can tell, now. So is this how it goes? Death at thirty-something for the likes of my mom and decades of pain and frailty, and in the end death again, for Great-Granddad Nicolas. But not for you."

  "Not for me," the old-eyed man said. "Not yet. Because the world needs watchers."

  She saw Nicolas nod as if to himself, and she wanted to break things again—but what use was that, ever?

  It might be. It might be of use if you knew what exactly to break, and when. So how did one break a city that was already dead?

  "You must be wondering," Benedict said, "why we keep death around us."

  Meliora shrugged. "You tell me. You're the ones who read minds."

  The old man neither laughed nor got angry. He smiled at her a bit sadly, and the old eyes watched her kindly and with patience. Old eyes, kind eyes. Unlike the eyes of the other people here.

  "This is not death, old man," Nicolas said. "This is an enormous pile of old buildings and machines. You haven't ever seen the death of something living, have you, except on those screens of yours? You haven't caused death with your own hands. Have you?"

  Meliora looked at Nicolas' hands. The fresh bruises from fighting, glass making, and escaping artificial flowers shot by cannons had faded after the medstat's treatment, but the longstanding calluses from spears and stones and snares hadn't.

  You don't like hunting. I never knew that about you.

  Meliora's hands were also bruised and callused. She looked at her broken nails, and then at Benedict's own soft, white hands, not even wrinkled with age. He raised them in the air.

  "Peace! Peace! Sit back down, all right? Listen to me." Nicolas did sit back down. He'd clasped his hands before himself and his knuckles were white. Meliora didn't hate him too much just now.

  Benedict sighed. "The thing is, I have killed with my own hands—and with everything else my own—and so has everyone. Do you know about microorganisms?"

  Nicolas glared at him. Probably he didn't know. Meliora did. Jerome had told her as a part of her Doctor of Nature education. Invisible creatures lived everywhere. They were in the air, food, water. They lived even inside people; a person carried ten times the number of these as their own cells.

  Microorganisms could bring you disease. That, Jerome hadn't told her. She'd made her own conclusions after learning that disease could jump from person to person, after seeing old Codes wash her hands every time before treating the sick. You didn't have to wash your hands in Lucasta, unless you wanted to. Nothing you put in your mouth could kill you.

  "I know about microorganisms." Nic was still glaring. "My grandfather told me about them. Told me sometimes that these tiny creatures, which even they couldn't see, might get to them one day. 'The not seeing is the key,' he said. Though at other times he thought something completely different would get to you. Yes, I had a grandfather. Yes, he believed in strange things. Don't you know about him? Didn't you watch him die with only a strange girl for company? He told me that I would die if I stayed. That they would get me soon enough. He begged me to go to a place about which none of us knew anything but the name I had once found. It could have been a fairytale—But certainly you know all that!"

  "Your grandfather was a wise man," Benedict said gently.

  Another voice replied. "Wise or not, he was just a man. Can you, boy, be something different, or are you a waste of time?" Jerome, of course. Nicolas didn't react. Neither did he seem surprised to see him. Of course. He was the hunter, he must know for how long exactly her teacher had stood outside that open door.

  "And you, Ben buddy, why don't you go back to your books and feeds and frogs and such? Microorganisms. You're actually telling these feral kittens that we are all murderers because we kill microorganisms. Don't you have anything better to show them? Come with me, kittens. Yes, both of you."

  They let him plug them into wonderful experiences, and Meliora walked in a world where cities were as numerous and dense in the world as the junk was out there in the City of Death, and the junk piles surrounding them were almost as dense.

  "Yeah," Jerome said. "Think the people of that world had an idea?" Meliora cringed. No one ever talked to you when you were plugged into a wonderful experience, or at least you didn't hear. Jerome's voice felt as if she were being pricked with a thousand ice-cold sewing needles. "Think they ever noticed anything beyond their noses, or even looked? They were weak and meek, but still they did damage. There were too many of them."

  "So this is where you tell me the truth about enemies, conspiracies, and being locked into your own mind."

  "Huh. Conspiracies. About as interesting as microorganisms. It's old Septima you want if you care about conspiracies, just as Benedict is your frog and bacteria guy. This is where I tell you about these."

  She watched people buy stuff, barely use it, and then throw it away and buy new stuff. They had no idea where the old stuff went. It often went to the junk piles, but not always. Almost as often it went to the rivers and lakes, to the big water she knew must be the ocean. Animals and plants died, and no one even ate them. There were fumes in the sky and poisons in the crop fields. The humans had put the poisons there themselves.

  "For more food, and cheaper food, you see."

  "But that food is too much! Can't they—"

  "They can. But they don't."

  The people had no idea where the materials for their shiny, new goods came from, or how anything was made. Didn't know about the little children with bleeding fingers who worked through most of the day in stuffy little rooms to produce silk blouses—

  "Wait! So not all people are the same. These little children—Their whole city—"

  "You think they are different from the rest? They are all people, Meliora."

  She watched a child get a chance to leave the place of torturing work. It got added to a family in another city who had money. The first thing the child did was buy fancy clothes and a fourwheeler—and next month, again.

  Meliora looked at the village dress she still wore even in the wonderful experience, nondescript gray, torn by work and repaired by hand, crusty with grime from all that had happened in the last few days. She'd resented having only two dresses. Until today.

  She saw people crawl in the streets in countless fourwheelers and drill the earth for fuel. She watched them start breaking mountains when they could drill no longer.

  "Many
years before what you see—centuries even—it was even worse." Jerome said. "They burned coal and had factories. Disease was more rampant, or at least more visible. But after what you see it was a hundred times as bad. They waged war for fuel and for thousands of other things—when what the fools should have paid attention to was that their poisons had already soaked into the earth so deeply that life was changed forever. This is where Ben's microorganisms come into play."

  "But these people—most of them wouldn't do what they were doing if they knew the consequences, right? Why did no one tell them?"

  "Oh, they were told. But, you see, girl, what you don't see with your own eyes doesn't exist. What doesn't hit you personally right now doesn't exist. You've seen all that."

  Yes. She had.

  Another wonderful experience. A person wanted to be the CEO of a corporation, but not like in Lucasta where all that CEO-s did was help produce new perfect items for people. Or—was that so? She wondered now. She hadn't known any CEO-s or people who wanted this job. Why, it took as much of your time as being a doctor or a teacher! Two hours a day, perhaps.

  Now, in the wonderful experience some people spent twenty hours a day at that job because they wanted power. Power? What was that?

  "Why, girl, that desire is the same as the wanting to be chief or priestess," Jerome said in her mind.

  "They are the unnaturals, then." Meliora replied. Who but unnaturals would care for such a job? Who else would be willing to take the pain to do for others what they couldn't, or wouldn't, do for themselves?

  "No, they were quite natural indeed." Amusement. "In those days, natural was different. The people you see wanted just the same as everyone else—to be, and to have, more than the rest. Some would tell you the only difference between them and the others was that they were better at achieving it. Others would tell you that they weren't better at all, that they just wanted more. But in the end everyone, the sheep in the streets who had a four-wheeler or two or the ones in the air who had an airtrain or ten, wanted, and wanted, and never got enough."

  Next, Mel saw wars. She remembered the wars in the wonderful experiences back at home. Small wars, personal wars. They were all about blood, mutilation, explosions, thirst and famine—things that a Lucastan could touch, feel, understand, even if only for a few minutes before waking up to medstats and pills that took it all away. But what would Lucastans understand of people sitting in comfortable rooms full of gadgets and buttons, looking at war that happened on screens?

  Jerome showed her people who liked to watch other people being blown to bits on screens, never with real blood. He showed her people who ordered war but didn't care to watch. Instead, they closely watched the fluctuation of prices of little papers. She saw cities fall into decay, and cites being blown away without a trace left. She saw forests—artificial forests that people had planted after the ones from the fairytales were long gone—go again. She saw a world turning into scorched darkness and poison, and people creeping underground with the few possessions they could salvage.

  Then she saw new grasses peek from the dry earth, and new trees brave the winds coming from the lakes and seas—she saw new microorganisms eat the yellow-green slime and crust from the tops of oceans and lakes and from the air itself. She also saw the sun. The earth had changed so much, but the sun must not have, for it crept from behind the poisonous clouds the same as ever. Even its strange color turned back to normal when the microorganisms finally got rid of the clouds.

  The people, or what was left of them, crept out of their concrete underground homes. Many were dead, she learned, both from the poison that they had let loose on the world and from the microorganisms and monsters that the world was fighting back with. The people fought, too. She saw doctors rise from amid the rest, both with salvaged medical equipment and new herbs that the world had never seen before—she saw humanity slowly get back on its feet.

  "They changed," Jerome said. "But not enough."

  Some still sought that power thing. Even doctors. They were still different from chiefs or priestesses. The stronger ones rose above the rest again. They had better tools, or better computers, or better means to make others' things their own.

  There were fewer computers than before. Many had been destroyed—but new ones were being made in the new factories that humans slowly started setting up. There wasn't any soot like many centuries before that. There wasn't even the poison of times much more recent. But there were people—and slowly they made the world similar to what it had always been, only with new technology, new food, new junk and poison, new diseases.

  "They still want and want," Mel whispered. "But they don't get the scope of it all, Jerome! And if they can't understand, there must be other ways! Let those who have more than they need think they have more than they do! Give them a new computer every week—how's a person to know that their new computer was someone else's before if it looks new? Give them entertainment. If someone keeps a watchful eye and allocates resources correctly, there will even be food and clothes left for the hungry and naked—there will even be new computers for them, and everyone can—"

  "Ah. That might work, you know. If there were fewer people in the world, to leave a smaller footprint. If they were more biologically pliable to what is good for them and nature." Wheezing laughter. "You have the right ideas, my girl. You'll make a good watcher."

  She bit her lip until it bled. She felt herself wriggle in her chair. Suddenly she was out of the wonderful experience.

  Jerome looked surprised, and Nicolas was still asleep in his chair.

  "We aren't done yet." The old wheeze pulled the wonderful experiences attachments from her body. She gasped. Usually it didn't hurt, but now the electrodes had become lodged in the skin and the sweat that had surfaced on it. "Let's plug you back in."

  "No."

  Nevertheless, he snapped the electrodes back onto her, and for a moment clunkers and poisons flashed somewhere in her mind.

  "No!" she screamed—and almost got out of the dream. She could still see Jerome's room. The tiny plates on her arms were blinking just like Nicolas', but she wasn't seeing what Jerome wanted her to see. Jerome looked more disconcerted than ever. Her plates started beeping. She tried to sit up from the chair and realized she was tied to it.

  In the village, Nicolas had threatened to tie her to a bed. It had supposedly been for her own good. Somehow she didn't believe it was the same in this place.

  Jerome stood across from her, watching her strangely.

  She was in so much pain that she'd have cried if she hadn't remembered her vow never to cry before a man. She felt as if all the poisons of humans long gone had crept into her, as if their fourwheelers had run her down, as if hungry fairytale dragons had been at her.

  She pulled at her ties. Something creaked. "What are you doing! Let me out, you nasty old clunker! Let me out of this!"

  But he wouldn't. Oh, no. He never did what she wanted him to do.

  A wonderful experience was safe. It let you experience unpleasant things in a controlled environment. You never brought the wonderful experience with you into the real world. You could not, with all the medstats there to help you.

  But there were no medstats here, just old Jerome who rarely needed medstats and always refused her pills during her training.

  More plates on her skin. More pain. But not just that. The wonderful experience must be enabled by a computer, and she'd felt computers all her life. She felt them now, too—Nicolas' computer, which he'd slipped into her pocket before they'd come here, and the big, powerful computer of the wonderful experience, trying to manipulate her mind. Her tied hands had no access to an interface, but she could almost see an interface in her mind—she had always been able to, she thought. Only, it had never been that strong.

  The computer against her was strong. She was half-way inside a wonderful experience now, driving a dirty fourwheeler with her lungs full of poison. Yet, she also saw the blinking lights and Jerome's face, and she thought s
he saw something in the air in Jerome's room as well—shiny transparent wires, like nerves, leading towards the computer integrated in the wall. Hints of buttons in the air. Things you could imagine reaching out towards and tying together and pushing.

  She tied. She pushed.

  The wonderful experience shattered like a broken screen.

  "No more!" Meliora screamed, in the real world, in the City of Death, when her thrashing body tore the ties of the chair. "No more wonder! No more fairytales! Show me the real world if you want to show me something so much! Show me what you and the likes of you did to it! Show me the gods-damn cure for young age, even though it is too late for it!"

  She had jumped over the old man and toppled him to the floor. Medstats were running to them now, as well as people.

  "Show her." Jerome grinned from under her as humans and machines gripped her and inserted needles into her. "Show her the real world!" he shouted as they dragged her away.

  Snow

  They didn't imprison her in a room with no windows or interweb. They thrust her into an airtrain cabin.

  The two men and two women who dragged her there kicking and screaming all had the expressionless eyes that sent shivers up her spine. The door sealed itself closed, and the airtrain took off. That sent shivers up her spine, too, and it hadn't last time. Nic's computer beeped, but there was no message. She felt dizzy.

  "You all right in there?" The pilot was a glass door away from her. His eyes were expressionless, too, but at least his voice wasn't. She thought she detected trembling in it even through the microphone.

  They were going to kill her.

  The City of the Gods had too much power, but people like her—unnaturals—could sometimes take it away from them. They wouldn't let her.

  The pilot wasn't happy. Perhaps even in the City of Death not everyone could kill creatures easily.

  Right. No rash movements now. The enemy against her wasn't just Andreas with a knife. She controlled the trembling of her hands. It was because of the shivers in her spine and hadn't stopped since the airtrain had taken off. But it could be hidden, at least. She made her eyes as expressionless as she could. Nic's computer, now. She turned with her back to the pilot. Could he see? Screens? Perhaps he didn't see. He was looking outside and steering the airtrain.