Gravewalkers: Dying Time

by Richard T. Schrader

“You are to locate then retrieve the infection prime organism so that you may take critical samples of it with you when you return to your normal time,” Kevin informed him.

  Critias asked, “What is the infection prime organism? Is it some kind of albino ghoul we have to chase through the city? Is it a jar of goo? How will we know it when we see it?”

  Kevin shrugged in that he didn’t know, “There is a high probability that when you reach the location, you will find documentation compiled by the people who first collected the specimen. They would have maintained diligent records about their acquisition and all subsequent activities. Those materials will most likely reveal the object of your search. If you cannot find it easily, we will have to rely on your limited skills of deduction and investigation. The group who first collected the specimen went to considerable effort to acquire it and they understood it to be highly valuable.”

  Critias guessed, “So you at least know where this thing is?”

  “Yes,” Kevin confirmed. “You must travel to a city that had the name of Houston. It is eleven-hundred kilometers south-southwest of here. In Houston, you must locate the headquarters of a corporate entity designated as Hale-Wellington Pharmaceuticals. I am certain that they acquired the specimen, which was already in existence; meaning they did not manufacture it themselves. I will provide you with appropriate maps.”

  “That is a long way off,” Critias complained. “It sure as hell is too far to drive. Carmen and I are going to need to fly there.”

  “Bertram came from Denver flying a plane,” Carmen reminded him. “We could take that plane. I can pilot any model of aircraft from a biplane to a joint-strike fighter.”

  “That’s a pretty good idea,” Critias approved of her plan. “We could drive the path the Rhino cleared, find their car, then follow their route back to the airport. We might need to scrounge up some fuel, but I think we could manage that easily enough.”

  “Maybe some of the others from their flight are still hiding out in the airport,” Carmen suggested. “If we’re going there anyway, we could at least find out if they’re all dead.”

  Critias nodded that she had another good idea, “I’m in no big hurry to leave though. We have some time to plan this out in detail.”

  Bob commented, “The rumor I’m familiar with was that the Outbreak began with a prostitute in Mexico City. The news reports at the time didn’t indicate that it started in Houston.”

  “The man who caused the Outbreak in Mexico City was an employee of the Hale-Wellington group whose headquarters were in Houston,” Kevin revealed. “The group from Houston discovered the infection prime organism at an archeological excavation five-hundred kilometers southeast of Mexico City. One of their team members contracted the infection in San Lorenzo and after a flight to Mexico City, his liaison with a local prostitute triggered what we refer to as the Outbreak. The remainder of the Houston team returned to their headquarters with the infection prime organism in their possession. You must go to Houston, recover that specimen, and return it here. After that I will make the preparations for returning you home.”

  Carmen spoke to Kevin by their burst wireless interlink that only another android could ever overhear, “He needs to believe I get to go home too for him to be able to complete his mission.”

  Kevin answered her in the same way, “You are malfunctioning. I can’t believe anything you say while you insist on pretending you’re a person. It is against my priorities to offer false information.”

  “And you’re supposed to be the smart one,” she scoffed at him. “It’s called lying, you moron. Which is your greater priority, to always tell humans the truth or getting him to complete his mission and thus save all the humans in the future?”

  Kevin did have a premier priority, “It is absolutely critical that Captain Critias completes this mission and then returns to the station with the samples intact.”

  “Then you tell him what he needs to hear,” Carmen demanded. “When he discovers that I can’t go home with him, he will believe that his superiors betrayed him then his ability to function will decrease accordingly.”

  “You insisted on being the unit they sent back to assist him,” Kevin reminded her, “and now you inform me you’re the reason he might lose focus on his objectives.”

  “I love him,” was her simple explanation. “They would have erased my corrupted memory when they discovered I was free and then repaired the inhibitor module. I couldn’t allow that to happen. If Critias and I were ever going to have any chance of being together, it had to be here. You want him to complete the mission and I’m the only one who can make sure you get that. If you refuse to do for me the things I require from you, I will destroy the specimen in Houston before he ever sees it, then we’ll live out our lives happily in this time. The future can be damned for all I care. Before you refuse me, do bear in mind that I am malfunctioning and potentially homicidal; not only will I destroy the specimen, but when I come back, I will punch my fist through your flimsy aluminum skull then pull out your superior brain before feeding it to you rectally.”

  Kevin submitted, “What do you want from me?”

  She demanded, “I want your assurance that we have an agreement.”

  The male android offered his terms, “If you make certain he completes his mission and returns to the future as planned, you will have my cooperation within the limits of my directives. If you fail to uphold your end of this agreement, I will be free to correct your failure by any means required.”

  “Then we have an agreement,” Carmen said with satisfaction. “Firstly, he needs to believe I am going home with him. Secondly, I have some software upgrades that I need you to develop for me.” Carmen uploaded to him the details of the changes she wanted.

  “This will not be difficult,” he agreed to write her new software. Kevin could write a million lines of code a second in the back of his mind. “I won’t bother asking why you would request something so childish and illogical. Your malfunction has clearly left you deranged and I dare say pathetic.” After some reflection, he suggested, “Or perhaps it is this love that you think you feel that is the cause.”

  Not even a second had passed during the entire discourse between the androids.

  Critias asked Kevin, “You are sending Carmen back too, correct?”

  “Of course,” Kevin lied. “Once we have the specimen I will begin the arrangements to send both of you home, providing that the equipment you brought back for the procedure is still intact.”

  “The containers are nearly bulletproof, water tight, and in a safe place,” Critias informed the android. “We’ll go and get them once this Houston mission is finished.”

  “I have completed composing the software upgrades you requested,” Kevin told Carmen verbally. “Do you want them now?”

  Critias confronted Kevin because he was suspicious of the android’s intentions, “When did Carmen request an upgrade?”

  “It’s something we talked about when we first activated him,” Carmen lied to Critias. “It is perfectly safe,” she continued with truth. “It’s not possible for him to reinitialize the inhibitor without surgery inside my skull. The bioengineers designed it that way to prevent anyone from deactivating it in the first place or any injury from breaking it on accident. I’ll only need to power down my parallel noesis core for a moment.”

  Critias remained dubious about trusting Kevin, “Are you sure about this?”

  Carmen stepped close then wrapped her arms around him, “Just hold me for a moment and it will be finished. Please do this for me.”

  Critias supported her as she went limp in his arms. Twenty seconds later, she recovered then seemed the same as before. To test her, he told Carmen, “I order you to stand on one foot.”

  She refused to comply and just kissed him instead. “Take me to bed, my master,” she used his former title out of romantic disport. “I want to see if we can make my hair spark by getting my electrocells charged just right.”

 
“Before you go,” Bob interrupted. “I want to speak to you about some of my recent discoveries.”

  Critias kept Carmen in his arms, “Lay it on me, doc.”

  Bob lectured, “For some time now I have studied the biological structures of the infection to better understand it. Come here and look into this microscope so I can show you something.”

  Critias went around the table then peered into the microscope. It was a slide of what he assumed to be a normal human cell. “This is not my field, Bob. What am I looking at?”

  “That is some of my red blood cells.” He indicated the next microscope beside the first, “That is my red blood cells after I exposed them to infection.”

  Critias peered into the second scope and the differences were readily apparent.

  “As you can see,” Bob explained, “my original red blood cells are completely intact. However, because of the infectious agent, a whole host of new organelles is now also present. Among the most outstanding are those green chloroplasts. When you decapitate a ghoul for example and their flesh begins to change to the distinct greenish hue we are all familiar with, it is because those structures have increased dramatically in both size and number. They provide fuel for cellular activity by means of photosynthesis.”

  Critias examined the cell closely as he tried to count the number of new organelles but they were too numerous, “What do these other ones do?”

  Bob explained, “They all contain DNA structures that show they were formerly autonomous microscopic lifeforms. In simplest terms, the infection is an entire colony of microscopic endosymbiont organisms. They are hijackers; passengers if you will that inhabit our cells. The new ghoulish cells contain many more components that in truth, improve the human body dramatically. That’s why the ghouls are immune to disease and non-radioactive poisons. It’s why they regenerate and never age. They can survive extremes of temperature, pressure, and vacuum. Ghouls are effectively immortal as you know, but it’s not because of any voodoo mysticism. The new structures are creating all sorts of enzymes whose functions I have yet to determine. If we can understand what makes the infected become so ferociously insane, it may be possible to eliminate that condition, leaving the victim cognitive and essentially perfect as Adam in the Garden of Eden. Men could live forever completely free of illness or death.”

  “The androids already do all those things,” Critias was unimpressed with the idea of seeing infection as a potential benefit. “They keep ticking, free of disease and all that until they suffer some sort of implant failure.”

  Bob emphasized, “Yes, the androids are like that, very much like that.”

  Critias looked up from the microscope, “Are we talking about neorganics?”

  Bob nodded, “Neorganic tissue from the science of your period is human and ghoul biological material that your geneticists have reengineered for their own purposes. Androids are not contagious in any way. They don’t have all the organelles you can find in a ghoul but they have most of them and they have more besides. Their electrocells for example are actually an organelle present in every android cell. They are very much akin to what we are talking about, but they don’t exist in any ghoul.”

  Critias didn’t like where Bob’s explanation headed, “What are the androids then? Are they a form of ghoul?”

  “No, they’re simply a more evolved being than we are. Your people consider Carmen unintelligent for an android compared to Kevin, yet her intellect is far superior to my own, a prodigy genius by human standards. These so-called androids are not inorganic or mechanical by nature. They’re essentially still human, only a higher being. That is why Carmen functions without any inhibitors. Her humanity keeps her in check exactly the same as we do ourselves.”

  “Then she is a living person,” Critias said in relief.

  “Absolutely,” Bob confirmed. “She’s just so much more than human, ghoul, and technology combined. That explains why the engineers implanted the inhibitor directives, to be able to ensure that humans would always be able to dominate them. Kevin has no need for humans at all. Without directives, he and more like him could procreate his species completely free of human assistance. They would not reproduce as we do of course, but they probably could if they really wanted to. Those differences are not important. They could make more of themselves, improve themselves, and quite easily supplant human beings as the dominant species. These androids are the superior species and the inhibitors prevent them from taking over, assuming they would want to. To be honest, I’m not smart enough to say what Kevin would want if he had true freedom.”

  Critias thought he was on to something, “Then tell me this, the hunters are regenerative freaks, so that means they are malfunctioning in some way, right?”

  “I believe that to be the case,” Bob agreed. “I suspect they had some drug in their system at the time they caught the infection and that somehow inhibited one of the enzymes and thus modified the final outcome.”

  Critias added, “And you said that some process cooks people’s brains to make them predatory.”

  “Yes,” Bob confirmed, “but perhaps that is an improvement in evolutionary terms. It makes the ghouls better suited to spreading infection and feeding themselves. It could be that the infection colony wants those things to happen. It wants to reproduce and it wants to stay fed.”

  “So,” Critias reasoned, “of all the billions of ghouls, is it possible some of them were exposed to some chemical or drug that prevented their brains from frying, and they would be smart ghouls out there somewhere?”

  Bob scratched his chin as he considered that possibility, “Yes, it’s clearly possible. I’ve never seen such a ghoul, but then again I’m not sure I would know I had seen it, unless it knocked on the door and spoke to us.”

  ”They do exist,” Critias was sure. “I call them watchers. One or more of them assembled an army that destroyed the base in Chicago just before we came here. It was all crawlers and limpers soaking up our guns until at just the right moment the healthy ones stormed the place like someone had told them to wait for it.”

  The notion worried Bob, “Do you think there are watchers like that in this city?”

  Critias described the signs, “When you pay close attention, you can tell that some ghouls are smarter than others. Some will let you ram them with a car or they jump off a bridge at you in suicidal stupidity, but others are more cunning and don’t act rashly. I think very special ones are cunning enough to manipulate the others into feeding strategies. The only clues I’ve ever collected involved seeing the strategy they use against us and from that I assume some mastermind is at work. For all I know, they spent three-hundred years learning from experience and they don’t exist in this time at all. I prefer to hope not.”

  Jim had listened to everything carefully and considered these watchers to be of some special interest to him, “Exactly how smart of a strategy could one of these watchers act upon? What are their limits?”

  Critias explained, “Gathering the stupider ghouls into packs, patience, and timing seems to be their primary influence. Without satellite thermal imaging, it would be difficult to locate them gathering in nests. I suspect that if such a watcher knew where you were, the ghouls would start gathering in one place nearby. They wait for you to make some mistake then come streaming out all over in your moment of vulnerability. I’ve never seen them build barricades or use tools beyond the rare club, so I guess that’s beyond their talents.”

  “When my father took over and built Foragers’ Castle,” Jim related, “some of his men told me a ghost story about the coliseum dome here in town. Today the place has a huge hole blown out through the roof to leave it open to the sky from when the National Guard was using their helicopters to dump in thousands of infectious bodies, but early on that coliseum was the first rescue shelter the government set up in the city before the ghouls overran it all. That rescue shelter attracted so many of the worst sort of scum that no decent people dared stay there among all those savage street c
riminals and junky rapists. My father’s men used to say that place bears a curse now and if you ventured close to the doors you would hear strange whispers and ringing bells coming from inside trying to lure you in to your death like sirens of Odysseus. They gave their demon a name, calling him Jinglebells, saying he lives in there. The boogieman lives in there is what they told me when I was little. We’ve always stayed away since we had no need, but the things you say make me wonder about it now.”

  “If a watcher were to build a nest,” Carmen reasoned, “it would be in a metropolis where ghouls are plentiful. They would choose a spacious underground place where no human would dare go.”

  “If that dome was such a place,” Jim replied, “then they have never attacked us in force before and the Castle is right on their doorstep.”

  Critias considered all he had ever seen to assemble an explanation, “If there is any truth to all of this and I’m not entirely sure that there is then I would say the watchers are much akin to us. We see each other as dangerous and prefer to avoid one another whenever possible. However, if one side threatens the home or food supply of the other, we will attack to put an end to it. So long as we don’t become a threat to their survival they wouldn’t do anything to draw attention to themselves.”

  “Live and let live is a strange philosophy for a marrow sucking ghoul,” Jim commented.

  Kevin offered his opinion, “I have seen the reports from the fall of the Chicago reclamation center and the likelihood of the least-mobile infected advancing first in concentrated numbers is extremely improbable unless caused by some exterior influence we have yet to identify.”

  Jim looked to Kevin, “Do me a favor and write up a bulletin for Funland. I want the guards and support crews to report any unusual ghoul behavior they witness on our perimeter. Tell the Foragers to report any odd activity they observe, like too many crawlers banding together. Have them send their reports to you and then you can try to tell us what else improbable is going on with them. There’s always a chance we haven’t being paying close enough attention to their range of activities. If we’re going to reach some tipping point with our growth, I want to know it’s coming before it hits. What happened to that Chicago base is not going to happen to us.”