Dead Science: A Zombie Anthology Page 18

  "Those that can afford it." The president punctuated his statement with a raised index finger.

  "Precisely my point. We do not work for free. That's the way the world works. The strong survive, flourish, reproduce. Yet, we're made to feel selfish for this." He pointed out the window to the ruins and homeless mobs outside the Castle walls. "Why? The lower class siphons while the rest of us work to make the world a better place. Why should we be expected to pull them out of their bogs? Why must it be our responsibility?"

  I gestured toward the president. "Well, I guess it's his."

  Valace turned around and met my eyes. "George, the president and I here have been discussing an alternative to the despondency . . . overtaking the nation's unemployed and homeless."

  "Oh, hush, Marshall. You're treating the man like a child. Talk straight."

  Valace cleared his throat. "George, the president can't take care of all the sick and hungry. Nor am I obligated to. Times have changed. We'll soon be on Mars but we still have business here a while longer. Effective reform for the homeless would bankrupt the nation and everything we've worked for. They need to go."

  "Wait." My jaw dropped. "Are you suggesting---"

  "We're not suggestion anything."

  "Let me handle this," the president said. "George, we help the ones we can. But our deficit is high. Our debts are astronomical."

  "Borrow money."

  "Oh we've borrowed enough money. No, the people want a way out. They know full well we can't give them a better life. We can barely give them food and shelter. And what food and shelter we do give them isn't very tasteful. Do you know what the current suicide rate is?"

  I turned to my benefactor. "But, Marshall, you could help. You could fund a project to---"

  "I'm not funding any project but the ones I want to. And right now I am putting all my chips on Mars. With your software and my capital we'll establish the first American city on another planet. Think about that."

  President Santiago stepped closer. "We're on board with Marshall here. We want Mars. And despite Valace Technologies' private status, we see it as a win for all of America. These dregs that line the streets out there . . . . Look, times are different. We can't help them beyond what we can afford to dole out to them bit by bit."

  I shook my head. "So what are we talking about? You said they want a way out . . . ?"

  "They do. And we're gonna give it to them. Tomorrow I'm drafting a bill for Congress. Legal suicide."

  "You're kidding. It'll never pass."

  "Sure it will. Marshall owns half the yammering lobbyists on the hill and I'm sure he'll grease some palms as well. It's going to go through. Maybe not right away but soon enough. Relax, you look upset. We're not talking about killing people. We're giving them an option. They'll have to sign all the forms, testify on video, have legal witnesses, yadda yadda yadda. George, they want this. They're jumping off buildings and overdosing on drugs by the minute. There's no work for most of them. I have no jobs to give them. This way we can ease their pain."

  "Nobody wants this," I insisted.

  Marshall put his hand on my shoulder. "Nevertheless, they're going to keep offing themselves. So we'll charge a small fee, give them a painless way out, and we'll kick back some profit to the boys in the Whitehouse. George, I want you to invent the machine. Keep it in line with our style, you know, automated. Take care of the software. The usual routine. I'll pay you triple your salary. Can you do it?"

  "Me? What about Richardson---"

  "I've got him busy on other stuff. Just answer me."

  A long silence overtook me, during which I thought long and hard about my answer. My software had made me financially comfortable, but had already put so many out of work. Now I would be the man to put them in the grave. But I would be a liar to say my thoughts didn't drift toward further financial gain. Gavin would be set for life, and I could retire early. If what they were saying was true, if people wanted it and would willingly sign the requisite forms, then why should I feel like I was in the wrong? The world was overcrowded, and so many contributed nothing to society. People were free to make their own choices, right? Maybe it was time to give them a better option than pills and bullets.

  "Okay, Marshall. I'll come up with something."

  "Good man. I knew you'd come through."

  * * * *

  The bill was passed. The Exit Pods worked effectively and painlessly. People lined up by the thousands. The Vatican attacked us in the papers and millions protested, but what did we care? I went from comfortable to wealthy, planned on retiring as soon as Gavin graduated. Then, three years later . . . the Reclamation Pits. What a mess. Valace tried to squash it but the news teams were persistent. Fact was, it was news to me as well. Why had Valace kept it from me? It took Gavin to later explain it all to me. Leave it to our youth to find alternate ways of getting the truth. But again, I'm ahead of myself. Gavin's distrust came first.

  "I saw you in the news today, Dad," he said, coming back from the third-floor high school one day. "Mandy Richardson showed it to me. It said you ruined the stock market. It said something about you being the father of suicide."

  I turned off the news feed and shut down the vapor screen. The images of all the dead still swam through my mind. "We're successful, Gav. Some people just don't like it when other people get ahead."

  He threw his book bag on the couch and grabbed a juice from the fridge. "Not true," he said, coming back into the living room. "Mandy's dad was in the news, too. They said his invention is 'the new fountain of youth.' They mean the nano thingies, I think. So nobody is mad at him."

  "Craig's nanobots are revolutionizing medicine, Gav. But they run on my program. They'll attack cancerous cells and repair damaged tissue, whatever they find, but they can only do it by communicating with one another. I made that happen. The Valace Standard, remember?"

  "The news reels didn't mention that. Just said Mr. Richardson's invention is, like, some crazy special advancement of science."

  "Well, that because the nanobots are special. They're the first ones that can reproduce at their own will. It's a big deal for Mr. Richardson and for Valace Technologies."

  "Why do they reproduce?"

  "Any number of reasons. Maybe one is damaged and wants to replace itself. Maybe one needs help attacking a rapidly replicating virus and has to call in some help. The nanobots can heal people faster if there are more of them."

  "And your program lets them do that?"

  "Well, Mr. Richardson came up with the mechanism that allows them to copy themselves into new bots . . . but they still communicate through my software. And the best part is they can do it on their own. They don't have to wait for someone to tell them to fix what they find. They just do it, talk amongst themselves. That's my program." I smiled triumphantly.

  "Yeah, and now doctors are out of work, most people can't even afford the nano things, homeless are offing themselves because there are no jobs, and you're some kind of benevolent god, right?" Gavin stormed off to his room.

  "Gavin! We're preparing to move civilization to other planets. It'll make life better for everyone."

  But the truth was plain as day outside the Castle, in the crumbling city. Exit Queues were through the roof, and our special brand of medical care was not cheap. Each nanobot implantation cost upwards of eighty thousand dollars. Of course it was worth it. A single nanobot could stay in your system for over fifty years, constantly fighting off problems, creating more nanobots if the need arose. People were going to live longer. At least, the ones that could afford it.

  Both myself and Gavin had been injected with a nanobot at our last physical, though I was ordered by Marshall to keep it secret. Gavin didn't even know he had one in him. Richardson's kids didn't either. But nobody had been ill since.

  I looked at Gavin's room and thanked God he would never have to want for anything. It was for his future I had written my program. It was for him I blocked the news file every morning.

  * *
* *

  In July of Gavin's senior year of high school, we launched the first Valace Shuttle to Mars. It crashed on the surface near the Valles Marineris and all the crew died. It was a major failure for Valace Industries and sent Marshall into a severe depression. The press made him a pariah, plastered his face all over the net along with the faces of the dead---ten married couples. His spin doctors might have turned it around but the press had just revealed the news about the Reclamation Pits, and this only set him over the edge. I didn't see him for many months afterward.

  I had expected to be fired, or at least blamed for the disaster, but it turned out to be human error---wrong landing coordinates.

  But for me, that wasn't the worse problem: Gavin had disappeared. Ever since the Reclamation Pits had been discovered he wouldn't talk to me. Our last conversation burned in my head:

  "You used people! You manipulated them and killed them and used them!"

  "I did no such thing. Mr. Valace gave people an option. A very legal option."

  "He gave people an option? No, he didn't. He made them believe it was the only way out. And you gave him the means to cash in on it. You told me the bodies were cremated."

  "No, I didn't. People have the option of burial, too."

  "Bull, Dad." Gavin rarely talked back to me, and normally I'd have scolded him but he was a grown man now and had every right to be angry. I'd been just as angry when I found out what Marshall had been doing with the bodies.

  "I didn't know about the Pits, Gav. Honest."

  "Would it have mattered? You'd have still built the Exit Pods." He paused, walked into his room and came out a minute later carrying a backpack, the one he'd been wearing to school all these years. The one I bought him for kindergarten. "I'm leaving, Dad. I can't stay here. You're blind to what you have become. But out there, outside, there are people who need real help, not stupid gadgets and rockets. I won't let you ruin my life anymore."

  "What are you talking about? You're one of the wealthiest teenagers on the planet right now. I did this all for you. Gav, the people out there have made their choices. I worked hard to give us all of this. It's for you."

  "I don't want it. People hate us."

  I punched the wall. "What have they been teaching you in that school!"

  "Nothing but lies, if you must know. Nothing but history rewritten by your boss. But I got a real education. Me, Mandy, all of us. You can't hide the truth anymore. We find our news like the rest of the world. We seek it out from the places you can't silence. From the people you put out of work, the people you've killed. We know the truth about the Reclamation Pits. We know how you stacked the bodies in the Pits and let them rot. How you collected the gasses as they decomposed and used it to fuel your factories. Your machines and computers and industry ate up the Earth's fuel so you found a new source: people. You put them out of work, made them suffer, made them believe they were better off dead. All so you could harness some methane and hydrogen and use it to get to Mars. But it didn't work!"

  "That was all Marshall! I didn't know!"

  "So you've said. Either way . . . your machines killed them. Your other machines used them. The only machines this company created to save people nobody can afford. Nobody except the people Valace wants to go to Mars. His new race of space traveling billionaires. It's disgusting. The people outside this building---sorry, compound---hate us. And we're not on Mars. We're here, with an angry populace waiting to kill us."

  I couldn't deny that. The press, the people, had turned against Valace Industries. They called the Reclamation Pits an atrocity. I swear I didn't know. Worse, Valace still hadn't shut them down, said he was waiting for a court ruling. The rest of the world compared us to the Nazis. But I was only trying to do good, to provide for my family and help further the future of our race.

  Gavin opened the door and left. I let him go. I figured he'd spend the night with a friend and come back cool in the morning. But he didn't come back.

  A month later I got a letter in the mail. It was addressed from the Valace Industries Exit Program and was accompanied by a small plastic box. I knew what it was; I'd developed the program that mailed them. The letter informed me that Gavin had taken his own life in one of our Exit Pods. The form said the accompanying box contained his belongings. It also said it contained his ashes, but what it really contained, if the press was right, was burned road kill. Gavin was likely rotting in one of the Pits somewhere.

  I fell to my knees and wailed. Later, I discovered in his belongings, a scrap of paper with my Standard override code written on it.

  NOW

  I open the door to the hallway and peek outside. The lights are off and there is blood smeared along the walls. A severed leg rests like rolled up dough against the baseboard. At the end of the hall a shadow darts out of one of the apartments and bolts through the double doors opposite it. I hear it jumping down the stairwell. I know it is a Reclamation when I hear it howl on the way down. It is a miracle it doesn't see or smell me.

  The morphine sets my insides itching and I stumble as I walk, but I hold myself up against the wall and make my way toward the elevator. The bot scanner scrapes against the wall as I move. Time is short and I need to get to Valace's penthouse office; it is the only unit above the labs with direct access to the satellites. According to my systems check, the labs are destroyed, awash in blood.

  I come to a T-intersection and go right. The backup lighting starts to flicker and buzz. Halfway down I stop and throw up. The Reclamations have caught people here and finished them off. I count six heads. It looks like someone blew them up with dynamite. I put my hand over my mouth and slosh through the bloody goo.

  The elevators have a backup power source that runs on stored solar energy; Valace was petrified that he might have to get down in an emergency and wasn't about to walk down ten flights of stairs. Only a handful of people know the code to run the lifts this way. I'm one of them.

  I punch the code into the keypad. The elevator doors open and I step inside, key the code to ascend.

  "Wait! Hold the doors!"

  Through the closing doors I see a man and woman running my way through the carnage. I thrust my hand forward to hold the doors for them but stop when I see two Reclamations burst after them from around the corner. The creatures sprint with lightning speed, leap through the air with nails flared and teeth bared. They land on the two terrified Valace Industry workers and eviscerate them, like someone shooting bullets through plums. Entrails suddenly drip from the ceiling. The creatures look up. See me. Bolt for the closing elevator doors. Their dead bodies and rotten flesh slam into the other side, bulging the metal inward like a giant welt. Their shrieks cut through the walls.

  Then I'm rising, and praying.

  The doors open into Marshall's office. The lights wink on and off, the furniture has been overturned. A vapor screen is on to a local news channel. The live footage comes from a helicopter hovering over the city, filming the streets below as people run willy-nilly trying to get away from the raging undead.

  For a second I stop and watch, mesmerized by the carnage and destruction. Then one of them walks through the vapor screen's mist, sees me and lunges.

  I jump to my left, slide over Marshall's desk and hit the red button underneath. Instantly, red beams separate the desk from the rest of the room, a security device Marshall had installed ages ago. The Reclamation hits the beams and bounces back, a lattice work of fresh electrical burns cooking its flesh.

  The creature looks . . . confused. It tries again and is met with the same result. If it tries to run all the way through the beams they will slice it to pieces. Does it know this? It must because it doesn't try again, just howls and leers at me.

  Its flesh is gray and eroded, the face stained with ichor, but I see its muscles rippling beneath the tattered clothes. He is undead, but something more, something else. A Reclamation, his body even now being repaired and upgraded.

  Tentatively, I step forward to the beams, a foot away fr
om the monster on the other side, and wave the scanner at it. As I suspect, millions of nanobots scurry about its system, fixing the dead tissue, repairing everything. They have reproduced at an alarming rate. They communicate so efficiently, fixing things faster than any human doctor ever could . . . if a human doctor could figure out how to bring the dead back to life.

  And now my suspicions fall into place. These undead are a product of all my work, of Gavin's depression and hate. The nanobots have gotten into the Reclamation Pits when Gavin killed himself. Then they started repairing the decaying corpses. But why do they want to kill?

  Now I see the leftovers of a body to my right, an arm and an ear. I see Marshall's remains spattered in the corner. Like the others, he's been torn to bits.

  I move back to the desk, key in my personal password, and call up the visual on the vapor screen. The news switches to the computer's desktop view and the data for the satellite link . . . and reveals my worst fear. I am denied access to the system. I've come here to key in my override code and manually input the shutdown command for anything using the Valace Standard. But of course it doesn't work. Richardson already told me what Gav told Mandy when he split. He wanted to get back at me, destroy the Valace Standard so automated production would fail and people would be able to work again. But this is the opposite! He never shut it down; instead he opened a universal link. Is that why he killed himself? He failed? He has opened the floodgates of communication, allowed the nanobots a link to---

  "We are coming for you."

  I step back, frozen. It can speak! The creature's inhuman voice carries with it a threat on a cosmic level.

  "Who are you? What do you want?"

  "Want your world. Kill you first. Then come. Then our world."

  On the vapor screen there's the path of the signal, carrying messages to the nanobots in the undead bodies. A universal signal being carried to every nanobot, every machine using the Valace Standard. It does not originate from any of the computers here on Earth.