by Lee S. Hawke
She didn’t answer, and that was when I knew. And I wondered. Five of us. Maybe all in this compound.
I’m not alone.
* * *
The super-malaria ate me slowly. I didn’t have all that much on me to begin with, but now I thought that if my mother was alive, she would have had to squint to recognise me, and then she would’ve cried a lot and fed me mountains of goat curry to get back into shape.
Dr. Prasad’s voice came through, hoarse and crackling like an order. “Fight it, Tamun.”
I’ve always been a little bit annoyed by that phrase. As if people who get sick and die just aren’t fighting it hard enough. How are we meant to fight it? It’s all up to our cells, and it’s a roll of the dice whether they’re normal soldiers or Special Forces like mine. When I was seven, my grandma got throat cancer, despite never having smoked a single cigarette in her life. When I was eight, I went to my first funeral. If it had been about fighting or sheer willpower, believe me, the lady would still be alive. “You want to come in and try this, doc?”
Silence. And then, “You’re doing well. All you have to do is hold on.”
I gave up, in my head. Not that it made a difference to the cells exploding through my body. But it made me think. I watched the news and the spreading panic, the dug-up documentaries that charted our evolutionary arms race against disease. Most of them glossed over the tens of thousands of years that the pathogens comfortably won every war, supping on our settlements and cities. They focused on the last few hundred instead, when we fought back with antibiotics, hygiene, vaccines. Only the honest ones admitted that we’ve always been on the losing side. After all, it takes us around 20-30 years to form a new evolutionary generation. It takes most bacteria under an hour, about the same time it takes for politicians to reallocate funding. And now the army’s back, bristling with antibiotic-resistant strains, superbugs, pandemics.
I wondered if this would be the final salvo, the last gunshot in the war.
* * *
Special Forces cleaned up the last of the goblins, but not before they’d taken a good munch of the local populace and left me feeling like a three week old kitten.
“Just one more,” Doctor Prasad said. “And then you can have a well deserved rest.”
I struggled onto my elbows, and then onto my feet. I wanted her to see my face when I was asking. By this point, I had no doubt that if they could have reliably and quickly given me cancer, just to see what would happen, they would have. “What is it?” I rasped.
She paused for a moment. She left the line open, so that when she suddenly sneezed the sound reverberated through my cell and I almost got a heart attack.
“Doc, what the hell?!”
She sniffed. She blew her nose. “Sorry,” she said. “And it’s a variation of H5N1.”
I vaguely recognised the combination. She filled in the blanks for me. “It’s one of the deadliest flu viruses that we’ve come across. And in the two months that you’ve been here, it’s… well… let’s just say it spread faster than we thought it would.”
Two months. I seized onto the time like a lifeline, trying to slot my memory into the available calibrations. I’d been here two months. And in that time, Ebola, whatever had killed my family, malaria, and now this, had been ravaging the world. I wondered what the world looked like now.
“I’m sorry, doc,” I said. And I was, even if I hated her a little. “I don’t think I can do it right now.”
Her voice took on an edge. “What do you mean?”
I looked pointedly at the wall. I gestured at my ravaged body. Even without a mirror, I knew that I looked like a prisoner of war. “I’m going to die, doc,” I said. “I can’t do it.”
She started coughing. Hacking. I recognised that cough, deep and guttural. Viral. “I’m sorry, Tamun,” she said, and then the line cut off.
When they came in with the needle, I didn’t fight them. There was no point. I could have shaken my bones at them half-heartedly perhaps, but instead I went inward. Trying to conserve what little energy I had left. Bracing myself for the last war.
* * *
They took away my remote so that I could see what was happening.
Death. That was what was happening. On the maps of the world, the spread of disease sprouted like fungal blooms. The new commentators became increasingly panicked. And I noticed they started changing too, disappearing, until finally the person in front of the camera was a young girl, maybe the age of my sister, obviously petrified but carrying it like a pro.
So that was the world. Sick, dying, dead. One that I felt strangely divorced from, hyped up on drugs and playing through my fourth consecutive fever in less than three months. After all, my world was different. My world was four white walls and captors in bubble suits and meals left on the floor. I had to force myself to eat when the food came, trying to stay strong. It was all in cans now. That told me everything I needed to know.
Inside me, I felt my Special Forces hunkering down. They were exhausted. They had been thrown into war after war after war, with no backup, reinforcement, or gear. And I was tired too. Every day when the lights dimmed (but never darkened, so they could keep watching their investment), I thought that perhaps this would be it. This would be the last day, the last night. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be well anymore. I’d been steeped in sickness so long that I’d forgotten.
Dr. Prasad got worse too. “Why don’t you take a break, doc?” I asked her once, when she had left the line open again and we’d both been treated to each other’s hacking coughs. “Get someone else to watch?”
She coughed again. “There is no-one else,” she said. I had the sense of her leaning forward across the mike, her lab coat rustling, her eyes bloodshot and intense. “Any chance you could work faster, Tamun?”
There was a wryness in her voice that hadn’t been there before, a fragility. We both knew what was coming. I still hated her, a little. But I couldn’t now. “I’ll do my best, doc,” I said softly.
And then one day, Dr. Prasad stopped answering back, and the food stopped coming.
* * *
“Doc?” I called out. “Dr. Prasad?” No answer. “Anybody?”
No one. I was in the last stages of the flu, my body still hacking up fluids and desperately trying to expel everything it could. But I was getting hungry again. I drank from the sink unit and then made my shaky way across the floor. The door was closed. I pressed my face to the eyehole and heard the hum of the lock, saw the blinking of the keypad on the other side.
There was no keypad on my side.
I shuffled back to the centre of my room. I looked around for options. There was only the disposal unit, the sink above it, the speaker, the television, and the bed. I couldn’t reach the speaker, even if I somehow had the strength to drag the bed over and stand on it. I looked at the bed. I had time. I got onto my hands and knees and went around it. Without people coming in to change it and me every few days, the scent of antiseptic was wearing off. I didn’t want to think about how I smelled. So I focused instead, trying to squint, bleary eyes seeking out anything I could use. I came up with a loose screw. That was it.
I sat down on the floor and contemplated the ceiling and life’s ironies. Because even thought I’d survived three of the deadliest diseases known to humankind, I was going to die here after all.
* * *
And then the power turned off.
For two days, the television had been stuttering between static and emergency signals, telling everybody who was still alive to either uselessly stay at home or uselessly flee. Now it snapped off forever, and I became aware for the first time in many weeks of a complete and utter silence.
And a complete and utter darkness. For a moment, the old childhood fear came back, swamping me with the nightmares of the night. But then I realised that the humming of the lock was gone.
I had no strength, but I had the loose screw from the bed that I had painstakingly swivelled out with my fr
agile nails. I stabbed it into the door’s edge with shaking hands, again and again. Twice I dropped it. And then it held, and with a strength I didn’t know I had anymore, I forced my way through and the door grudgingly slid open. I walked out into the corridor.
It was still almost completely dark. I felt my way across the walls, almost falling into the depressions that marked the decontamination station barriers. But the power had well and truly died, and with my trusty screw, I prised the doors open one by one and kept going.
At one point, I tripped over a body. It was still covered in a bubble suit, thick and heavy enough that it cushioned my fall. Horrified, I pushed myself back up. I didn’t want to look at the black glass, not that I could have seen the features behind it. It was death that I didn’t want to see. Death that hadn’t seemed real on the television screen, the news reports. A death that forced me to confront what had happened to the world outside.
I couldn’t do it. Just like I couldn’t wrap my head around the cellular warfare that I had survived, I couldn’t even begin to think about numbers. Millions. Billions. So I settled on one thing. Air. After all these weeks, I was starving for it. I clambered around the body and out, clinging to the walls again. Hoping they weren’t leading me around in circles. Squinting in the darkness for even the tiniest hint of daylight.
Time slowed. The corridor stopped, became a room. I tried counting steps, hanging onto the walls like a lifeline. Even so, I tripped over three more bodies. I didn’t look down. I did wonder if one of them was Dr. Prasad, and then I killed that thought. I wouldn’t have recognised her anyway.
But with the bodies came a memory. Five. There were others here. Maybe they were still alive as well.
That was when I noticed the sounds.
I should have been scared. I was in the darkness, in a dead or abandoned research outpost. And there were footsteps coming from all different directions, slow and shuffling.
But I wasn’t scared. I’d survived Ebola and Malaria and H5N1’s deadlier cousin. And one of those footsteps were mine. It made me think suddenly of a petri dish, lined with its channels of gels and colonies. We were all slowly coming together. We, the antibiotic-resistant bacteria. We, humankind’s next evolution in the arms race. We, the soldiers.
And I smiled.
It wasn’t a happy smile. Once upon a time, I got very, very, sick, but there are no happily ever afters in war. Not for anyone.
But at least the war wasn’t over yet.
DISSIMILATION
Sara was late to class again.
The other children were already lined up and plugged in, eyes staring straight ahead into the complex mess of lights and blinking sensors of the DEON Brain. She took a short breath, too abrupt to be one of relief, and looked away. The teacher was at his desk with an ancient book, slowly translating it over onto his data-reader. He glanced up and scowled at the interruption, before a flick of his finger on the screen marked her as tardy.
“You have one and a half hours until recess,” he said. His eyes were bloodshot over his white collar. He glowered at her, like it was her fault that his body was disintegrating. “Hurry up.”
She hurried into the line of silent bodies and moved to plug herself in. The jack was smooth and red, and she fitted it neatly into the second slot below her neck. Even with practice, her fingers slipped as she attached the pads to her forehead. The screen pulsed and flashed as she glanced surreptitiously out of the corner of her eye at her classmates. Most looked like they were in the business simulation; the lesson map was glowing dull red with heavy activity. Within that bull’s-eye were a few patches of scattered browns, the consulting and banking simulations. The science and health sectors were blinking green, waiting for input.
She swiped her finger and breathed deeply. The world blinked like a giant eye: one… two… and then everything changed around her.
* * *
She was in a waiting room. Automatically, she tilted back slightly and looked up at the metal names inscribed on the wall. She’d played this simulation often enough that all of them were lit up: dentist, surgeon, ophthalmologist. She chose surgeon, and a name card materialised onto her jacket. The hallway lit up ahead.
She walked past the entertainment ports and the people lying with closed eyes on trolleys, their necks pulsing with light. Her data-scrubs were waiting for her. She put them on correctly, and Nurse Rawling came up behind her. “Morning Sara,” she sang out.
Sara turned around and forced a smile. It was easier than outside. And it was important to keep up social appearances in simulations, otherwise your co-workers could sabotage you or make life generally unpleasant. She had made the mistake once as a dentist of snapping at Nurse Rawling in the tearoom. She had resolved never to play that simulation again when Rawling had stopped saying good morning, the patients had given her accusing looks, and the other nurses and practitioners had formed a polite but unwelcome circle excluding her from the kitchen at lunchtime. “Good morning, Jane!” she said, attempting to be cheery herself. “What’s patient number one?”
Rawling consulted her screen. “An all-over job,” she said, with a sigh. “Pity, I don’t think he needs it.”
Sara made a face herself. She’d thought originally cosmetic work would be lovely, making others prettier. She wasn’t so sure anymore. It was an ugly process, and she rarely got to see the end results, and sometimes even if it went perfectly they weren’t happy anyway. But she liked it better than opthamology. And at least there was no blood. Nobody cared what you looked like in the real world.
“Sara?”
She shook her head, blinking. The walls stared back at her, pristine and hygienic. She took a deep breath. “I’m ready.”
The operating theatre glowed dully with quiescent lights, waiting to be activated. She took her place and began checking her connections. The anaesthetist was late as always, as was the head surgeon. It didn’t matter. Even though it was an easy route to efficiency scores, she knew that haranguing them about it would only make them even later. They were simulations after all, complete with egos and eccentricities. She waited instead, listening to the nurses’ chatter wash over her. It was easy to wedge herself between the screens and fade away. Even easier to do it once the head surgeon swept into the room, glasses perched on her nose, somehow managing to make even her shapeless data-scrubs look intimidating.
“Everyone ready? Good. Sara, I want you working at the head. I’ll take the rest.”
They gathered around the patient as he was wheeled in. His eyes were slack and unfocused already, the pads attached to the peeled-back skin of his forehead. They each took their position around the wires and then plugged themselves directly into his neural cortex.
The world blinked like a giant eye. One… two…
* * *
She was in a bedroom cluttered with old screens and faded clothes. The patient stood in the centre, suspended by the anaesthesia. She approached him carefully, stepping over the trash he’d left scattered on the floor, and looked up at his slack, still face. It gave nothing away. Sara took another deep breath. Working with a simulation’s self-perception was taxing. There was code and psychology, biological eyes and mental ones. Her job was to operate on the latter: the hardest, realest part.
She floated the interactive screen in front of her and started the scan. The results flickered on a moment later, and she suddenly saw what he saw: a sad, overweight, insignificant man unmatched in superiority. Within the program of a program, she straightened her shoulders and got to work. As the head surgeon and other nurses worked on massaging through the subtleties, Sara crafted him a new image, one that precariously balanced mental stability on the skeleton of his innate arrogance. After that she made him beautiful: trimming around his belly and injecting the fat into his self-esteem. And slowly, slowly, the trash around them on the bedroom floor began to disintegrate away. She was smiling by the time the last discarded pair of cotton pants vanished. Perhaps she would choose to specialise in surger
y when she graduated. She was good at it. And it was time to start thinking about that, wasn’t it? Only two years away. She wished that she could speed life up, like you could in a sim.
She was almost done when dimly, like a sound from outer space, she heard the school bell ring. Annoyance hit her first; she’d wanted to see the results of this one, she thought she’d done a good job. But then the fear came, swallowing everything else. She had time to suck in a breath, and then the world blinked, like a giant eye. One… two…
On three it went black, and then she was opening her own eyes and the screen was dancing in front of her again. She blinked. Colour bled, and then stabilised. Around her, quicker children were unplugging themselves, shaking out hair and cracking necks and rolling shoulders. She watched as they moved, rearranged themselves like data packets, and clustered around a centre. One of the boys, Jack, had a rather sick look on his face.
“I think I got fired,” he said. “I lost $250 trillion. I’m going to have to start all over again.”
“Why not switch to another sim?” his friend asked earnestly. Catherine, with the big blue eyes and highest hours ranked across all the fields. An all-rounder it was impossible to hate, because she was so kind. “It could still be in banking, maybe an assistant manager?”
Jack hung his head and mumbled something. Catherine rested her hand on his shoulder hesitantly, and then pulled him into a one-armed hug. Sara didn’t need to read his lips (a handy skill she’d picked up in the disability sim, meant to teach tolerance and understanding) to know what he was saying. His father was one of those people whose heart monitors rose and fell with the stock market. She liked to imagine how different he was from his son, who was gentle-eyed and afraid of a sim.
Ultimately, for all the sims that she’d resolved never to go into again, it wasn’t the sims she was afraid of.
