Analog SFF, June 2009
Page 15
I just got a call from him! He sounds pretty stressed, even through the mask. It seems he's just about the only living thing left in town. He says he's got a whole truckload of oxygen, in a truck he borrowed when he found it blocking a street—though apparently “borrowing” meant pulling out the owner's body.
User: donttellmymom
Did he know the guy?
User: biochick'03
I don't know, but it's a pretty small town. All he said was it looked like the guy had coughed up big chunks of his lungs. The rest of the town, he says, is just plain eerie. Dead animals everywhere, all the leaves dead on the trees, but just waving in the breeze, not falling off like it's autumn. There's nothing green anywhere near the city center, but at least his gas mask worked. And he's mad as hell. He too's been thinking about the fact the pipes bypassed him, and figures it means they didn't take him seriously. He wants to make them pay for that, but is going to need help.
User: donttellmymom
That's what we're here for.
User: biochick'03
I'm going to continue relaying messages—it's hard for him to text without taking his gloves off. He says the gas is indeed coming out of storm sewers, though only a few of them, so there must be a system of valves down there to direct it. He tried blowing oxygen directly into a sewer grating, but it just blew back out. He compared it to trying to use one balloon to blow up another. What should he do next?
User: astroman-Fort.Worth
He needs to drill a hole in one of the upstream pipes and inject gas into it via an airtight fitting. That means getting back to his own yard, with ... let's see, in addition to a drill, some copper tubing, superglue, quick-setting caulk, duct tape, super-strong strapping tape, and maybe some caustic chemicals to soften up the pipe. What would they have in that high school lab? Sulfuric acid? Sodium hydroxide? Tell him to get some extra drill bits, because those chemicals may be as hard on them as on the pipe. He's also going to have to be careful to drip the chemicals on only one spot or he'll make too big a hole when he breaks through, and have the storm-sewer problem all over again.
User: simpleguy38304
If he breaks through.
User: astroman-Fort.Worth
Yeah, for all we know that stuff's immune to anything he can do. But as biochick said, then we're all dead, so we might as well presume he's got a chance. One other thing: he's going to need water to rinse off the acid, so it doesn't eat through his fitting. Anything else?
User: donttellmymom
An extra day to collect all this stuff?
User: astroman-Fort.Worth
Good point. Tell him that if he can't find everything, use what he can find.
User: biochick'03
He's on the way home. Drilling commences in ... five minutes?
User: mister12
I hope his protective equipment holds up.
User: biochick'03
Me too. He's home, trying the drill. No dice. It just skitters around when he tries to push down on it and barely leaves a mark, even though he got a diamond-carbide bit from someone-or-other's machine shop.
User: simpleguy38304
Damn. If this doesn't work, do you think the feds will figure it out in time to do something useful? Nuke the place, if nothing else. Heck, they'd never do that. Fallout in Iowa. Fat chance. They'd let the aliens kill everyone first.
User: biochick'03
He's trying the acid now. He says he can now scratch the pipe, but not by much. He rinsed it off and tried the base. Same result. It works ... but only slightly. He wants to know what would happen if he tried to alternate them without rinsing.
User: astroman-Fort.Worth
Lots of heat. Hmm, it might actually work. Who knows what that stuff's thermal properties are. Tell him to watch out; the mix might spatter, and if he holes his gas mask...
User: biochick'03
He hears you, loud and clear. It's working! The pipe didn't soften—it cracked. He's in.
User: biochick'03
Widening the hole now, just enough to fit the tubing. Washing off the acid. He says gas is blowing out, but not all that hard. Apparently the flow is steady but not high pressure.
User: biochick'03
Mounting the fitting ... Good, superglue binds to the pipe ... Caulk. Duct tape. He's got it set so when one oxygen cylinder empties, he can take it out and put in another.
User: donttellmymom
Oh yeah! Is it working?
User: biochick'03
Too early to tell. He says that while he's waiting, he might as well attack the other pipes. He also says he's got an idea for another surprise for the aliens—he seems to think they're terraformers, not kudzu. Meanwhile, he wants to know how long it'll take the oxygen to permeate the system.
User: astroman-Fort.Worth
That's hard to guess. A couple of hours? Too many unknowns. How much has he got, anyway?
User: biochick'03
Enough that his back is going to hurt tomorrow from lugging it around, he says. There's more where it came from.
User: biochick'03
OK, there were six pipes total, counting one that wasn't technically in his yard. He's into all of them, and on his second round of oxygen tanks for the first couple. He's now drilling second holes into them, hoping to double the dose.
User: biochick'03
His grass is dying, but everything's under control, he says. So he's off for more oxygen ... and his surprise.
User: donttellmymom
Man, I hope it's a good surprise. My girlfriend thought she'd surprise me for my birthday and got ... never mind. Let's just say that tofu was part of it. Ha! Let's give the aliens some tofu!
User: biochick'03
What's wrong with tofu? Anyway, GW definitely has something else in mind, but he won't say what.
User: mister12
Isn't oxygen enough? What are they saying on CNN? Is it having any effect?
User: astroman-Fort.Worth
While he was working, the death zone was still expanding, but, let me check ... yes, the rate of expansion has decreased. That doesn't prove anything but it's a good sign.
User: biochick'03
“Great” he says, though he adds it would be nice if the gas mask allowed him to drink some coffee. How long do we think he should keep this up?
User: astroman-Fort.Worth
No idea. At least until the death zone quits expanding.
User: biochick'03
He's off for a third truckload of oxygen. He says that'll be the end of it.
User: astroman-Fort.Worth
Damn I wish we could have gotten the feds to listen. They'd have had a boatload of the stuff. Still, the death zone's not expanded any more. Either we're winning, or this was as far as the stuff planned to go.
User: biochick'03
OK, he's back. Replacing empty oxygen tanks and starting to add his surprise to some of the taps. He still won't say what it is. “I love you guys,” is all I can get out of him. It has something to do with the second holes he's drilled in all the pipes.
User: biochick'03
Oh no! He's finally told me. I can't stop him!
User: simpleguy38304
What the hell is it?
User: biochick'03
Propane! He's been adding it now for an hour. He figures a big explosion might make a nice coup de grace. He's going to kill himself!
User: mister12
Holy cow! Did you see that? Fox News had it.
User: donttellmymom
So did CNN. Wha'd he do? Toss in a match?
User: biochick'03
Pretty much.
User: astroman-Fort.Worth
Well he sure did something. They've got gouts of flame popping up miles away.
User: Farmer John X
Hell, he probably didn't need the propane. That stuff's probably flammable enough on its own. Ever try lighting a cow fart? Kinda like that, I bet.
User: simpleguy38304
>
You speaking from experience?
User: astroman-Fort.Worth
Who knows, but he's got a point. If we're right that the aliens don't like oxygen, odds are they live in a reducing atmosphere, which means any gas they do like is probably pretty explosive.
User: simpleguy38304
What about the impact site?
User: astroman-Fort.Worth
From the aerials, it looks like he got that too. I'd been worried because the oxygen probably wasn't blowing upstream. But it looks like the fire took out everything. I bet it ruptured the pipes, then produced a big backdraft or something.
User: nojest-bill
What about GW? He must have cooked himself. Will anyone ever know he saved the world?
User: biochick'03
I don't know about that, but he's not cooked! Singed, yes, but he says that other than missing eyebrows and stinky hair, he made it! He was out of contact because the blast knocked him silly, but he's mostly with it, now. Unfortunately, his house is on fire, but there are also flames all the way back to the river, so he's sure he got the source. If nothing else, when the flames subside, there will be all kinds of holes for air to get in and finish the job. Not that the feds will ever give him credit.
User: donttellmymom
Or us.
User: biochick'03
True. But you know, I don't think I care. What's the cheapest way to get to Iowa, anyway?
User: simpleguy38304
Swim, then run?
User: lumpylawnnotiniowa
Hey, I just found this forum, and I've got moles. Really. Zigzagging all across my lawn. Does anyone here actually know what I can do about them?
Copyright © 2009 Richrd A. Lovett
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Novelette: MONUMENT OF UNAGEING INTELLECT
by Howard V. Hendrix
* * * *
Illustrated by Broeck Steadman
* * * *
When some wishes are granted, it may take a long time to decide whether they were worth it....
* * * *
Grabbing the board's nose in his left hand, Hisao cut its repellers. Straightening up and angling the front of the board downward, he kicked in the jets and plummeted from the low clouds toward the choppy seas.
He was soon moving at one hundred fifty miles per hour. A county-sized chunk of the northern Pacific's surface and the airspace above it had been reserved for the hoverball match. There was nothing for him to watch out for beyond the occasional errant seabird. And, oh yes—the opposing team.
Despite his velocity as he arced forward and down, the ball rested almost motionless in its smashcradle. From headplug chatter he knew defenders were swarming up toward him. Out of the corners of his eyes he saw his team's forwards blocking most of them. Three defenders, undeterred, still raced toward him, fanning out to stop him from getting off a shot.
Hisao continued his dive, straight at them, and on toward the surface of the sea below them. His eye-augments began to flash red messages.
WARNING! CONTINUING ON CURRENT TRAJECTORY AT CURRENT VELOCITY WILL PLACE YOU BELOW GAME FLOOR!
He nodded absently. His augments didn't need to remind him how the game “floor” worked—overlapping fields from a grid of gyrostabilized levitation disks, perched ten feet above the ocean's surface atop bright orange buoys. Once he plunged below that floor, the repellers on his board would have nothing to repel against.
Hisao cut his board's jets—too late to stay above field threshold. The approaching defenders’ monitors must have relayed them the same information. Surmising Hisao was fated to splash into the drink and go immobile, the three defenders were at nearly full stop by the time he passed under them on his dead board—
—and hit the back of a wave fast and hard enough to skip back up eleven feet, just above the invisible field-floor, where he cut in his repellers, slammed on his jets, and left the defenders awash in the blast of his spray before they could even swivel around to pursue.
Hisao bee-lined toward the goal. Now only the goalie—his sometime-love, Wilena—hovered between him and scoring. He flipped open his smashcradle. A flick of his wrist sent the ball onto and into its sweetspot pocket. With all his strength he swung the streamlined and servomotored smashcradle (lineal descendant of atlatl and jai alai basket-glove) forward in a great sidelong arc.
The ball shot from the cradle toward the goal, moving at a third the speed of sound. Wilena raced forward from the virtual net whose space, both real and cyber, she was so diligently defending. The next moment everyone's eye-monitors flashed projections that the ball would fall short of the goal.
And so the ball did, skipping to a stop on the surface of the sea.
Wilena slalomed forward to take the ball. Just as she was about to fish it out of the water with her telescoping catchcradle, the sphere suddenly leapt a dozen feet off the ocean's surface. A moment later, a dolphin's body erupted from the water, nose down and tail up, catching with its flukes the same ball it had head-butted out of the water an instant before.
With its powerful tail the dolphin smacked the ball, spiking it past the goalie's outstretched arms and into the virtual net.
“Score!”
No sooner had the defenders overcome their astonishment at the fluky maneuver than their protests roared up on the comm.
“That's Alphonse! One of Hisao's work dolphins!”
“He wasn't legally on the field!”
“I thought we were playing this as a single-species sport today!”
Hisao's teammates, once they were able to stop laughing, came to his defense. No such solo-species agreement had been made! If everyone checked their playbacks, they'd see that only the regulation twelve offensive players had been on the field during Hisao's drive—Alphonse included.
Hisao kept out of it. He knew that, in the end, the point probably wouldn't count, but everything—setting it up with his teammates, the hours spent rehearsing the moves with Alphonse—had all been worth it, just to see the utterly bewildered look on Wilena's face!
“The dolphin was not entered on the roster,” said Moira at last, serving as referee. “Hisao's score is nulled.”
Hisao and his teammates did some grutching, but made no official complaint. An aura of seriousness, of gravity and fair consideration, gave all Moira's pronouncements added weight. Hisao had long found it inexplicably attractive.
“Now that we've had our little joke,” Moira said, preparing to toss the ball back into play, “how about a little less levity and a lot more levitation for the rest of the game? Hmm?”
She hurled the ball back into bounds, where it was greeted with the laughter of young gods and goddesses, golden Olympians at play, flashing and moving in waves with the ball and the game.
* * * *
Like everyone in his cohort, Hisao traveled a great deal. He hovercruised the South Seas a dozen times. He dived all the Earth's oceans, from the shallowest sun-dappled reefs to the deepest midnight trenches. He loved that world. It was one of the reasons he decided to become a cetologist.
Like those few others (his friends and work teammates, mainly) who still pursued the arcana of diplomas, degrees, and certifications, he endured the interminable forty-plus years of basic formal education—or as formal as it got, with its thousands of hours of screen, VR, and headplugged human-peripheral time.
Throughout his training, he had happily traded such seat-time for sea-time and mobile learning. After a dozen years, though, even his ocean-diving fieldwork began to seem a little too much like schoolwork. For something different, he joined a team climbing the five highest peaks in the Himalayas—without perfused bloodox, lift boots, or an augment suit. As part of a shifting group of several friends, he rambled around the Moon for half a year. Bent on climbing the highest mountain in the Solar System, he joined an expedition to Mars, then followed that up with a cloud-cruise tour of the Jovian atmosphere. He joined a crew of off-world ice-divers, too,
exploring some of the more important moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Taking time with their educations was no problem for anyone in his cohort. They free-floated from team to team, network to network, putting on and taking off new roles, tasks, and ever-temporary jobs as if they were changes of clothing, updated implants, new hairstyles or skin colors. Like everyone else, Hisao too was destined to be forever young. They could all afford to be cavalier with time.
All except Moira.
He first noticed the difference during one of his annual “sittings” for her. She was studying ancient art media—sculpture, in particular. The sittings she harangued him and two dozen or so of their mutual friends into, from all over the Solar System, were purportedly part of her ongoing educational experience.
“Sitting” was an antiquated term for what Moira actually did. Using the medscan tech to which Wilena had introduced her, Moira created a life-mold of each of them, once each year—minutely detailed three-dimensional renderings of their bodies. She then cast in bronze each life-molded subject.
Because the medscan showed each subject with eyes closed and without clothing or hair, there was something unsettling about the resulting sculptures. Holographically projecting clothes and hair back onto the statues in overlay, which Moira always did, only managed to make the effect even more disquieting. When she flashed through several years’ worth of projections—ever-changing fashions in apparel and hairstyle, overlain on unchanging statuary forms—the effect made Hisao slightly queasy.
“I call them Persistent Personae,” Moira said. “I took the idea from the old practice of making a death mask—something artists used to do after someone famous got old and died.”
Hisao nodded. He wasn't much interested in archaic art forms. Besides, only non-human creatures aged and died, these days—like his dolphin friends, unfortunately. True, there were the not unheard-of cases of death by accidents too obliterating for even the moteswarms to mend—but human beings, getting old and dying like everything else in nature? That was ancient history.
Yet, over six years of sittings, he began to notice something changing in Moira's looks. Something different about her face, her body, even her hair. He couldn't quite put his finger on it. Then, during one afternoon of his sixth sitting, he asked Moira something he'd never thought to ask her before.