Pressure Suite - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 3

by Various Writers

  Some of those lights moved nearly as quickly as a missile. Marom wondered if the rumors about hypersonic bombers were true.

  A detonation marker bloomed to morbid life over Delhi—Uys’ hometown.

  “No!” Uys shouted. He gaped for a second, staring at the screen before dissolving into tears. Marom shook his head.

  It’s in God’s hands now.

  Hopefully, Uys’ kin had survived. The Confederation had gone to a war footing as soon as the Great Volkstadt passed the Australian Resolution, so there was no reason for them not to have made it into the shelters in time.

  Another detonation marker appeared onscreen. Marom’s jaw dropped. Jo’burg. The beating heart of the mines and industries that built the Afrikaners’ empire had just been stabbed. Four more detonations followed. They’re making sure.

  He refused to think about what five near-simultaneous nuclear detonations meant. His resolve lasted only seconds before images of fiery death rushed in unbidden. The great white flash liquefying innocent children’s eyes, the heat spontaneously combusting the hundreds of thousands of books in the University Library, the city’s skyline crumbling before the terrible shock-wave…

  He shook his head again. He was still Kommandant and he still had his responsibilities.

  “There goes Leachport,” Uys said. “We’re blery naked now.”

  Marom gulped. The buried command center relied heavily on Leachport in the event of American penetration of the defenses. Without Leachport, they only had a couple of ground-based interceptors with which to defend themselves.

  “Kinetic weapons inbound,” the sterile voice of the public-address system warned. “Everyone brace themselves.”

  Marom exhaled. It was over now, at least for them. A tiny thump filled the big screen with static as the primary communications node died. The screen flickered as Uys searched for a backup, but it winked out again. This meant other nodes were out too.

  Marom cleared his throat, grabbing Uys’ attention. “We have done our duty. All we can do now is pray.”

  If they survive, what kind of world will Adriaan and Emily live in? Marom thought as they joined hands. What world will the Americans, race-mixers and heretics, create if they win? And will our people survive?

  He shook his head. All in God’s hands now. “Our Father,” he began, “who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”

  The complex shook, and the lights flickered but stayed on. Marom allowed himself, briefly, to hope they might come out of this alive.

  Then the ceiling fell in.

  50-Foot Woman over Redgunk, Mississippi

  By William R. Eakin

  Early one morning she started to grow. She went to Mabel Delashmit’s Videos and Pizzeria over on County Road 63 and rented The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman and The Incredible Shrinking Man; she went online and studied the sculptures of Ron Mueck, reviewed roughly a thousand back copies of Weekly World News, researched case studies of actual giantism, and even read the whole of Gulliver’s Travels; she visited with ole Doc Mulligan down at the Felpham General and underwent some initial tests, and still she gained no understanding of it. She simply grew.

  First it was just an issue of slippers and shoes no longer fitting; no longer size 6 M but 8, and then Men’s 12 W. It became an issue of underwear: brassieres that were 32 A suddenly had to be 34 B, then 38 C and then special-order 48 EEE, and finally she could only fit into lacerated XXXL Men’s T-shirts and then not even that—she had to wrap herself up in old tent canvas she had in the storage closet. Now down in Redgunk, Mississippi, it is not at all rare for young pretty girls to get into the habit of slobbing around a bit in pajamas and slippers and then suddenly find themselves ten sizes larger; in fact, you could say Blake County has something of a tradition in that. But this was different.

  It was an issue, too, of the cat: Gustavus, never a friendly one, was virtually terrified out of his gourd when suddenly a large monster of a woman semi-clothed in a tent could no longer comfortably fit through the door to leave the house, and could rest him on her little finger. He refused to purr. He refused to be happy about it. It was badly frightening for the both of them.

  Idella May Sauerwein did not know what to do when, after a full week of calling in sick to her boss down at First Felpham Bank and Loan, she was no better but, instead, some twenty-two feet tall. And when she accidentally stepped on Gustavus and broke his back and had to take him to the vet—Olen Schwartz, who’d just got out of vet school up in Memphis and who put the cat down—he said, “And you, lady: you need more than a vet.” When he said that, she knew she did.

  “I talked to Doc Mulligan.” She shrugged, and Olen Schwartz just shrugged back.

  When she got home afterwards, she tried to make a list of problems she faced right off, assuming she grew too big for the house; if, say, she doubled in size. It started:

  1) Clothing—what do I wear?

  2) Food—what do I eat?

  3) Proper place to urinate, bath, etc.—where do I go so that everybody in friggin’ Redgunk, Mississippi won’t be there to watch and gawk?

  4) Tampons—very soon!!?

  And she stopped with the list-making because, with fear and trembling, she saw that the list would be far too long to ever complete. She simply added:

  5) Countless other things too personal and real to be mentioned. Those stupid 1950s movies with people turning into giants that crushed cities did not have the foggiest idea!—How do I survive?

  And that was it for list making altogether. She realized as she put the tiny pencil down that she had to stop this growth or reverse it somehow, or die. It was as simple as that.

  Finally, before she was too big to lie down and squeeze through the front door, she left her little house over there next to the First Mount Zion Christian Church and began the process of leaving Redgunk and Blue Falls and Felpham and Blake County altogether. With the help of several lawyers from Felpham and a semi-flatbed truck, she went to 200 acres of flat, grassy plains she purchased way over in Oklahoma, pretty much out in the middle of what people even here in Redgunk would call nowhere, where none of the people who knew her from her days at the Consolidated Schools of Blake County or from the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the First Mount Zion Christian Church would know what was happening to her. And sometimes, from the interstate far off in the distance, people driving by could see the top of her head over the horizon. But, for a while, she was left to herself out there in that field.

  This large acreage was pretty much the answer to a lot of her problems. She did not have to worry about what people thought of her:, not Eileen Sawitsky, her chief rival from the Consolidated Schools; not Wanda Gravitz or Dorothy Scallions, her two best friends from the same period; not Doc Mulligan or that damned vet Olen Schwartz, probably the only men she’d seen up close in a year; not Mabel Delashmit or Iva May Hart or Mattie Stambaugh or any of the grand ole casserole-baking queen-mothers of the Ladies’ gossip society.

  What she did have to think about was food, but with the remainder of what she had from a savings account she’d started just after she got out of school, she was able to contract to have trucks of fruits and veggies come out every few days. And so, while the canvas tents no longer did much good as clothing and only really as a kind of umbrella she erected in case of rain, and when she attained a height of some fifty feet—she was a naked 50-foot woman and growing—she began to feel like she could live nevertheless.

  When she realized the savings account wouldn’t last forever, she concocted various ways to make some money—the one she thought of first off was simply tourism: let ’em come through the gates for twenty bucks a pop to see the giantess. She was, after all, a pretty impressive elephantine sight, even if the nudity wasn’t all that erotic. She knew that someday she would have to put herself on exhibit like that even though it would about kill her from embarrassment to put her body out there in public for everyone to see; thankfully, for now, the finances would hold.

  Then the Men came.
Not, of course, the lawyers, with whom she kept in close contact, and not the farmers who ran the big columbines and haymakers across the great grand fields next to hers, but the scientists.

  First it was the biologists and doctors and zoologists. They wanted to study her, they said, and as a sign of their good will, they brought her things—long synthetic fabrics from which they’d sewn together something like a hospital gown for her to wear, and long funky gauzy stuff from which they’d constructed tampons and other amazingly necessary things because a couple of the Men scientists were women; they built her forks and spoons and bowls and plates too. More impressively, they developed a massive keyboard that, astonishingly enough, interfaced with a computer that had a screen big enough for her to read.

  Most impressive of all, perhaps, was that somehow they’d made her a big-as-hell iPod, which meant she could listen to her favorite oldies, mostly old Beergoozer favorites from the 1960s (long before her time), hits like “Surfin’, Surfin’ Mamacita” and “They Called Her Tucum Carrie from New Mexico”.

  She was able to make phone calls on the internet to her friends Wanda Gravitz and Dorothy Scallions, with whom she’d not spoken since the onset of her delicate condition. What she found was that she was always drifting back to thoughts of her friends and acquaintances back in Redgunk, Missisippi; what the technology did for her was help her do it, and help accentuate the fact that she wasn’t back there. For a moment, it was kind of like going home. Wanda Gravitz even said she might get a carpool together to come see her. But do you have any idea how melancholy such a thing is to learn about yourself: that what you really want, however far away you managed to get, is to go home?

  Except to go home means you have to grow small again.

  In exchange for the big gown and the technology, the scientists wanted permission to crawl all over her. They wanted to measure her and poke her and monitor her cardiopulmonary rates, and do blood work and chemical analyses of everything from her toenails to her saliva. She emphatically did not let them touch her or feel her, like they wanted to. She did let them—without touching her, thank you very much—stick needles in her arms to do a little blood work.

  “There seems to be…less resistance,” said the nurse who administered the shot,“…less resistance to the needle than there should be.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t object to that part.”

  “No, I mean—” And the nurse called over a bevy of scientists. They looked—without touching, mind—as the needle went in and came out, in and out of her arm a couple of times, too easily.

  One asked, “Did it look as if…it grew bigger in her arm?” And likely they were just pulling at straws, wanting some kind of explanation for something they could not explain.

  “Ma’am, can we—” And a couple of boys in lab coats reached out to touch her again and she puffed a breath at them, blowing their hair back and making her feelings about any of that quite clear.

  She did not like to be touched much anyway. Never had. Spent her life avoiding it, in fact. And what she most of all would not let them do—and in fact had to keep refusing them the right to do—was, well, crawl around inside her. Because that was what they now said they wished they could do.

  “But think of it: once upon a time, it was imagined we’d have to shrink a submarine to really explore the human body from the inside—I mean directly. For a long time, we thought fiber optics and resonance imaging and CAT scanning equipment would give us a good peek inside the body. But now we’ve enlarged the body itself! Think of it! There are natural entrances—the mouth, ear, other parts—we can…we can walk in!”

  “No, you can’t,” she told them. And, well, that was that.

  Late at night, when the physicians and biologists and biochemists left her to herself out in the dark fields of Oklahoma, and the stars poked themselves out bright and clear like diamonds in the black velvet of the sky, she switched on the computer they’d made for her and spent time surfing the web and text messaging guys on the singles-dating.com sites.

  It wasn’t much different than being at home, where she’d done this every night for a year. Chat, get a little risqué, and think it would be nice to meet a young man, but then at the last real minute realize what it would mean to do so: that it would involve the first embarrassing moments of face-to-face contact. It seemed absurd and embarrassing and boring and quite frankly frightening.

  Now men found her intriguing, and sometimes she’d strike up nice conversations until she typed in things like, “And I should tell you the truth: I’m a little oversized.” That would either mean the other side of the text messaging went silent or the guy she was talking to would type back, “Well, I confess, I’m not 175 pounds, more like 280.”

  She was not sure which was worse, their silence or their petty confessions, because to the latter she had to respond: “Well, I confess I’m not 5’2” and 120. Currently, scientists estimate I’m around—” And then she would guess according to the scientific estimate: 2,800 pounds?

  That was a real text-conversation stopper. Inevitably, she’d follow it with: “lol” or “jk”.

  But by then it was too late.

  Things began to get serious, as if they weren’t already, when finally one of the scientists there, some Chinese fellow from Stanford, said something like, “It really isn’t a matter of biochemistry.” Which meant her growth—which had taken her now to more like 100 feet in height—wasn’t just a matter of her increasing weight or mass or volume in response to larger quantities of food input, like in that children’s book where the fish keeps growing and growing because he is overfed.

  It wasn’t that she was over-eating.

  “You’re getting thinner,” said the cute young physicist, whom she might have adored if he’d been larger—size does matter, after all.

  When what he’d said registered, she snapped back crankily, “How the hell could I be getting thinner? Have you measured my waist lately?”

  He looked taken aback and gulped, getting that male look that signified he thought he was dealing with, well, an irrational woman, and responded, “Well, what I really mean is that it’s a matter of physics.” Quantum physics, he meant.

  She snapped something back, angry about the way virtually all the scientists and doctors referred to her at this point: “I’m not an ‘it’.”

  Really, the reference to “it” was her growth and her continuing to grow, but that was rapidly becoming identical with her “self”. That was all she was to them. And the doctors and then the physicists that came to see her in little minivans from Stanford and Harvard and a number of other programs kept referring to her as an “it,” but now—now that this little pipsqueak knew she was not a problem of biology or medicine, not even nuclear medicine, but rather that she was a problem of physics—well, maybe that solved it all?

  “What the hell do you mean?” she snarled, and she imagined just for a moment ransacking and demolishing and stomping on the physics graduate studies departments of several major universities.

  “I mean, well, to put it crudely, your atoms—atoms is crude—your particles are growing farther apart. Only that’s not really it either…”

  “I don’t want to hear anything more from you, you son of a bitch!”

  “But I—I’m trying to help.”

  And then she scared the snot out of him, literally, by snapping her massive fingers at him, and he ran away.

  A real problem: she wasn’t “growing” said the little graduate student heads that took his place, all huddled together, but rather “expanding.”

  “Expanding,” they told her after they’d said it to each other over and over and pretty much entirely ignored her for days, “like space-time.”

  “What?” she demanded, and then they ignored her for several more days as they charted things out and wrote down various formulae and hummed and Ah-ha’d! and grunted and spoke in the weird Asian-French-pseudo-Latin words that physicists made up. And sometimes they asked if they could to
uch her and she flat-out refused, just as she now flat-out refused the use of any instrument, needle, hammer, poker, finger, or anything at all to make contact with her.

  “You’re not really growing,” said some grad student at some point, sensing that she was getting perturbed by being left out of the conversation. “You’re expanding in all directions. Like the universe, only faster. Let us just see what happens when—at this size, at this rate—when something slips under your skin…”

  “Under my skin?”

  “Like a needle, like—”

  “Forget it.”

  “You’re taking up the exact same space you took up when you were, uh, normal. It’s just that the space-time you inhabit, if you will, is expanding with you, faster than the rest of space where we are.”

  “Like the universe,” said another. “If we could just shoot you in a particle accelerator with—” And at that point, Idella May got fed up; she’d had a headache of monumental proportions anyway and some major PMS and at this point just said, “Fuck off,” and made them leave. She really did—she made them get in their little minivans and drive off.

  For about one hour she was alone by herself on the Great Plains and the rolling hills of Oklahoma, until finally she saw a worm-like trail of black Humvees heading her way. The vehicles stopped at the edge of her property and a man in a black suit got out. It was Bob. From Homeland Security.

  Bob looked almost identical to all the other guys who followed him out of the vehicles—men in black suits and black Rock-a-billy ties with black crew cuts—but she knew that first one was Bob: she’d seen his face online. She’d talked to him. She knew he was Homeland Security and had known the night before when he talked over the internet dating service with her; she’d known he wasn’t for real when he first got on: he hadn’t seemed to mind at all how big she’d let herself get, for instance. He’d been nice—too nice. He’d said, “I’m coming out to the site with some friends of mine.”