Honey to Soothe the Itch Read online

  Talon One Science Fiction presents:

  Honey to Soothe the Itch

  A short story

  by

  Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Published by Talon One Science Fiction

  Copyright 2013 Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Cover designed by Kris Austen Radcliffe for Six Talon Sign Media LLC

  The world used to be a beautiful place.

  It’s all gone. It changed in one split second five months, eighteen days, four hours, and twenty-five minutes ago. Just like that. And before I die—before the cancer riddling my body and my bones finishes metastasizing and the pain becomes too much—I’m going to bring it all back.

  Because I can.

  Birds used to sing. Butterflies fluttered. Chai lattes presented themselves for consumption with both the correct flare of cinnamon and the perfect balance of bitter and sweet. I played hard and worked even harder, riding a hundred miles a week on my state-of-the-art graphite mountain bike in the wind, rain, or fog, until my muscles hummed and my blood pumped the right endorphins into my brain. Then I’d go back to my twelve hour days of building the invisible infrastructure of the modern world.

  I miss it. We used to have air with smells. You don’t notice it until it’s gone—the faint hints of the apple trees down the street. The neighbor’s roses. The differences between old cars and new. Wind carries all sorts of scents. Sometimes, if you’d just sit there and breathe, you’d get moments of the Rockies floating down, and you’d smell the West. Dust, maybe a wildfire. Bears. Snowcapped mountains.

  The world used to give us history with every action we took. Our noses filled with land and industry. Our eyes with reds too garish to be real, and greens too bright to not. I remember touching flower petals and feeling silk under the pads of my fingers. At the time, it just seemed the thing to do. Now, it’s the one memory I cherish above all the others.

  I’m going to take away the homogenization and give the world back its life. The plants are only one shade of green now—that vivid, easily printable color of fully saturated grass. The flowers are exactly blue, or exactly red. Everything moves with ease. The thunderstorms sound hollow. Out in the flat gray buildings and the straight lines of the asphalt roads and the manicured trees, it’s all fake.

  Even the zombies all wear the same clothes.

  I’m clad in the few garments we can scrounge up. The rest of my enclave, the same. Finding food that doesn’t taste like white kindergarten paste is near impossible.

  But I’m going to fix it. Out there, somewhere, is one special zombie. One who is the key to cracking open what’s left and spreading the world’s candy center over its cinder crust, and I’m going to find that zombie. I’m one of the implanted. I’m a walking, talking generator, and I’m still able to work the invisible technology of the world.

  But now, my skin crawls and no one will touch me. My body disintegrates because of the tech inside me. Five months ago it marked me as one of the privileged—one of the geeky ultra-rich who could afford the toys and the implants and the medical support necessary to maintain it.

  We weren’t useless. We designed. We programmed and refined and built. The world stood rapt at the beauty we created and I ran triathlons and posed for magazine covers because I was gorgeous, rich, and special.

  The implants made it possible—instant connection, total bandwidth. We collaborated and the paparazzi snapped our photos as we literally glimmered our way through life and restaurants and airport security. We made the invisible technology permeating human space possible. It collects data, analyzes streams, optimizes potentials. We did what we set out to do: made an efficient biosphere.

  One afternoon, as a stunt, I downshifted my temporal lobe and jacked one of the Mars rovers. Me became more than me—I gained more body. What I breathed, what I saw, it all stayed the same, except I tasted more, saw more. Under my wheels, Mars felt smaller, weaker. In my cameras, the horizon too close. The world gawked as I tasted the old and expired chemistry of another planet and used my infrared eyes to gaze upon its dead spaces.

  Then the million-dollar IV ran out and my senses snapped back to Earth and the cyber screams of the others like myself.

  There are fifteen of us left. The zombies got everyone else.

  We tried to warn the world. We sent out a glaring cacophony that should have stopped all the information and industry in its tracks, but it didn’t. The seamless invisible tech of the world “fixed” the problem we created before either humans or machines knew anything was wrong.

  No diagnostics ran. No one blinked. Nothing burned. Sometimes I wonder if the zombies even realize they’re zombies.

  Though, honestly, we’re not sure if they’re zombies. I suppose it depends on which definition of “zombie” you use. They somehow manage to operate in the solidified ruins of the world even though we struggle to find what little food’s left. And they do have a single-minded determination to kill.

  I think the free humans roaming the hidden spaces of the cities add too many eddies to the new order. We’re little points of chaos and change. Free humans need to eat and sleep and take a crap. We need to pet our dogs and touch each other and sometimes die.

  Like me. Like I’m dying. Every moment I stand up and stick my brain into where they don’t want me anymore I bring some of that dying with me. And it makes me itch.

  Not the tingly itch I used to get after turning my face to the sun or my sculpted and well-tanned boyfriend tickled the nape of my neck with his stubble. No, this is a deep itch, the kind that starts in the bones where my cancer pounds on shields with swords and spears.

  My nerves load a trebuchet with boiling oil and fling it toward my skin, just to make sure I’m paying attention.

  A lesion appeared on my wrist yesterday. It will fester soon. I curl my fingers and pull back my hand when I realize my body wants to do something about it. If I rake my nails over the weld, the itch will stop for a brief, brilliant moment. I’ll breathe as calm hits my blood. The world will gain color again and for that one shining second, I’ll swear white sandy beaches and sea breezes still exist.

  They don’t. Nothing exists but efficient fractals and the solidified currents of what used to be a living planet. Cities still stand, but nothing grows. Nothing decays. It’s like the game’s been paused.

  We don’t have monitoring equipment—not the old-school stuff with screens or displays. I’m the only one who can see the nets.

  Which is why I’m still special. I used to be important, a sweet example of what you could be if you stayed in school but did your own thing, because that’s what true pioneers did. Now I’m special because I’m the only one who can see where the food is, or if the zombies are getting close, or if there’s a group of free humans who need to be brought in.

  I’ve become functional, even if it’s eating me from the inside out and making my skin crawl like a full colony of ants is tunneling toward my bones. And I’ll be damned if my last breath leaves me before I serve my function.

  Two hours ago, there were sixteen of us special ones. Sixteen free humans with full implants scattered across the globe, until we lost Jefferies when zombies overran the St. Petersburg enclave. He’d broadcast one final message: Thirty-six people out. They were running—he took them west toward the Baltic and was asking for help from the London group to get them across to Britain. Then he vanished. Gone, no ghost, no signal, not even a hole. Nothing of his sensations—no haptic moments of cold Artic air or increased adrenalin flow because he ran. The world swallowed his soul and now only fifteen of us implanted remain.

  Fifteen who felt each other every moment of every second, sleeping, awake, fucking, eating, or dying. Our itches are surprisi
ngly similar.

  I wait for a spy satellite to cross over northern Europe. The group fights, the zombies amassing, but without Jeffries they will be dead as soon as their ammo runs out. Randall, doing his damnedest not to send the sensory feedback of his knotted guts and need to scream, sent his remaining fighter jet and a cargo helicopter from London, praying he’d get at least a few out alive.

  Now we wait and I sit here in my dark room, technically alone but feeling my stomach churn because there are people we need to save. And I can’t. I can’t save Jeffries’ group and I can’t save myself, so I try not to scratch open the welt on my arm.

  Yesterday, my hunters brought in another family—a mother with a ten-year-old girl and a teenaged boy she found after the world ended. The boy’s jittery and my nurse, Amanda, thinks he’s going to go over, but his immune system is still keeping it under control. She’s checking him for antibodies, and if it’s true, it’s only a matter of time. But until it happens, he’s with us, and he can work.

  The mother’s got programming skills. Tony put her to work as soon as they walked through the fence.

  The girl sits in the corner behind her mother, rocking back and forth. She won’t let anyone touch her, not even Amanda.

  On the net, Lin-We reported a break in the cloud deck over Brisbane. The sun shines in Australia, even as we watch Jefferies vanish.

  Just under two hundred thousand free humans remain, spread out over the globe. It’s enough—they could come back from this. But fifteen implanted might not be enough to guide them through the end of the world.

  And it might not be enough to hold them together.

  It will be fourteen, soon. Another lesion opened on my calf when we lost Jefferies. I don’t pull up my dirty jeans to look at it, but it’s itching in that deep, cracking way. Amanda would see if I looked, and she’d make me lie down. I’ve tried to tell her lying down doesn’t do squat but she’s a nurse and she knows best.

  A flash drops into my head—Randall got fifteen out. The relief of exhausted adrenalin floods my systems. I’m suddenly too tired to scratch my itches, but I can’t rest. He lost two of his own. Six of the rescued have programming skills. One was a young woman with pre-implants.

  He’s hopeful, but he needs to fly them out.

  The door cracks and light floods my little room. Real light, diffuse and dull from filtering through the fractal clouds, but it comes from a real sun in a physical world. Motion sickness sets in, partly from the jarring use of my eyes and partly from Randall’s exhaustion, and I lift my hand to shield my face.

  Amanda steps in.

  She’s this perky thing, tall and thin but she stands up straight and wears her soul like a huge, silly hat meant to scream support for the home team she won’t let the end of the world crush. I suspect she used to keep her hair in a nice-but-utilitarian cut, one that said I’m friendly but I’m your nurse so shut up. Now, it’s a mass of ordinary curls pulled back and tied with a piece of twine.

  She’s the only thing keeping me alive.

  “I brought broth.” Amanda walks across the squeaky floor, carefully staying within the shaft of light thrown into the room by the sun outside. “You need to eat.”

  I nod and take the bowl, knowing full well that the new family needed the food, too. And that I needed extra, to power my revved metabolism. Have to power the implants somehow.

  I told her to just give me candy bars, but the hunters cleared out all the stores and warehouses a month ago. Now I eat like the rest of them—broth from the bones of the few deer and rabbits they manage to catch, and the flat bread Amanda figured out how to make from stale flour.

  At this point, I don’t think I could keep down anything other than broth and a little bread, anyway. Cancer’s a cruel bitch.

  I taste the broth. It’s got a sting to it—someone must have found a can of chili peppers.

  Amanda smiles when I make a face. “We need to use what we have, you know.”

  I nod and take another sip. The broth should help the nausea. I hope.

  Amanda squats, still inside the square of light thrown by the sun outside, her body tossing its own shadow over me. But I see her face clearly in the light reflected off my noisy floor. She’s concerned.

  Amanda’s always concerned. She takes her role as seriously as I take mine, which gives me hope. If anyone’s going to keep my body alive until I see this through, it’s her.

  “News?” she asks.

  I take another sip of the broth before answering. “We lost Jefferies. Randall got out about a third of his people. They’re on their way to London right now.”

  Her facial muscles do a little dance and I can see that she wants to frown and bite her lip. But she stays calm. “What’s that mean?”

  I shrug. Other than losing a good chunk of the remaining viable human genetics and one of the implanted, I don’t really know. It’s a battle lost in a war without strategy.

  “What does this mean for your… side project?” She sits now, dropping cross-legged onto the dirty floor next to me, and the metal panel under her behind groans. Nothing stealthy at all about my little container box hovel. I told them I needed it because it “acts like an antenna,” which is total bullshit, but it keeps them from putting me in a safer place instead of the kids.

  I don’t answer Amanda’s question for a second. I’d been combing for the right ghost when the St. Petersburg enclave was overrun. Jefferies vanishing had taken all my processing power.

  But Randall had the few who remained and I could go back to work. Except now without Jefferies, a new hole in our network had opened up and the rest of us needed to learn how to fill it.

  Jackson, our free human enclave’s de facto hunter-protector, asked me once what that meant. He’d assumed the implanted like me jacked into something that was already there and that we interfaced, not created.

  It’s not like that. We can—and do—interface with systems, not just the internet. If there’s a network available, we build a link, and we do that by learning. Where’s the edges? What is the shape of what I’m linking to? Information takes on a physicality, a weight. A body. And we grow a new limb.

  Or, more precisely, we grow new synapses that allow us to use this new, wonderful limb we’re all of a sudden attached to. It takes time, and practice. And now Jefferies is gone and the rest of us need to grow into his space.

  We can’t leave blank areas. The zombies fester if we don’t throw light on them. We made that mistake with Siberia. And now Jefferies is gone.

  And if there’s a space, a patch of the world in the middle of our collective back we can’t contort to scratch, I might miss the one I need. The zombie with the right ghost.

  I noticed something about the zombies right at the end of the world—I could network into a few of them. Not many, but a few. The other implanted thought this was just a glitch and a worthless one at that. What were we supposed to do with one or two influenced zombies? It’s not like we had the time or resources to figure out how to control one.

  Stevens, one of the three hundred or so implanted in California who’d been at the forefront of the initial attempts to stop the end, he’d sent out a burst of info about artificial limb control, cyber-telepathy, mind snapshots—projects ranging over multiple work groups imbedded in a wide and diverse set of corporations and cultures.

  Humans weren’t connecting the dots, but the invisible technology was.

  Stevens vanished within hours of the end, as did the majority of the Silicon Valley implanted. I think they fought the first real battle in this war, and they lost big time. We will never know.

  But his burst stuck with me, and now I wonder—can I see the last moment before the zombie became non-human? Is there a mind snapshot in there? And most important, can I use it?

  Amanda touches my arm, her face reflecting what must be on mine. I’ve noticed that, too, with her. Her expressions tend to mirror what she sees on the faces of others, but with a clarity of emotion the mirrored person doe
sn’t have. Amanda feeds you back a cleaned-up file.

  She’s looking at me wearing a grave mask of determination. “Eat your broth. I’ll come back in an hour or two with your meds. Okay?”

  I nod. She’d given one of the hunters a detailed list of pharmaceuticals to cull from local hospitals. He’d come back with a truck full of stuff to keep us all alive, but mostly to keep me functioning.

  “Tell Jackson I’ll have a report for him then.” Jefferies may be gone, and I may be running out of time, but Jackson needed info to keep this enclave alive. Info I could provide.

  Amanda stands and dusts off her knees, more to unkink her back from sitting on the metal floor than to get off the dirt. “Do you want me to shut the door?”

  I look out. The light poured into my metal box from a sun low on the horizon, throwing real shadows. Intense, delineated slices of light that spread deep enough into my room they almost touched me. It was evening outside.

  “Yes,” I say. Yes, I did. The kids moved around the gravel, playing their silent games. They’d learned how to be quiet. And how to dress so they blended into whatever they stood on—they all wore dirt and bleakness and looked like the dirt they danced on. They all learned how to hide when out in the open.

  Kids shouldn’t have to live like that. They should all feel cozy and protected. This time of night, they should be finishing their chores and settling down for an evening’s reading of a favorite bedtime story. Maybe one about talking animals who lived someplace beautiful and idyllic, a place safe for kids and adults alike.

  A place like the world should be.

  ***

  I don’t sleep. Not really. I dream, perhaps, when I take on the senses of a zombie. I sort of feel them, sort of understand what they are doing, but the connection isn’t complete and my brain doesn’t recognize their spaces as legitimate. Everything is too tall, or too wide. Angles are too steep and I get vertigo looking up a hill or down at the zombie’s feet. How they step can’t be a real step, or touch can’t give real information.