Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1) (4 page)

As small children, we always played the primitive version of “Robots versus Zombies” out in the fields and forests of our hometown. Our digibooks were issued when we started school, but we were forbidden from taking them out to play until we were older. An unofficial “coming-of-age” ritual in our society is when our parents bought us our first EagleVision sets. These see-through face visors had inlaid light-emitting-fiber displays which displayed information about whatever we focused on. They functioned as sunglasses, binoculars, and a wearable computer screen. When connected to our digibooks by wireless connection, this allowed us to play augmented reality games.

Though I was usually busy studying in my spare time, I still needed to relax and play with the neighbor kids. There were a lot of augmented reality games, but our favorite game was
Slayers.
When the game activated, the glasses completely replaced the world around us with an augmented world. The alabaster buildings became crumbled ruins. The trees turned to smoldering stumps. Zombies wandered the streets and parks. We teamed up in groups to take down digital zombie enemies and compete against other teams of adults and kids around the universe. Just like the other multiplayer console games, you had to level up your character to get new abilities and weapons and quests. Some of the quests took us to other cities, like the capital and Okanagan Valley. The game was addictive, and we were really good at it. Well specifically, Adara was really good at it, and her scores carried our local team to victory in the annual tournament—twice.

I wondered, occasionally, how accurate the depictions of the zombies were. The main storyline of the game was supposed to have taken place during the 2100’s as the world collapsed from the old ways to the new society. Did the zombies still look like that? Had they evolved? And if the Plague was so fatal and so punishing…how come they hadn’t disappeared entirely?

We sat in history class one day while Instructor Sanders went on and on about the earliest days of the Republic. We’d all heard the stories before about the early formation of the Republic; how Washington and Oregon, previously part of the United States, had joined with the former Canadian province of British Columbia. How the State of California had launched a war to obtain badly needed freshwater supplies from the Columbia River. How the US government sided with California. How the war for independence was cut short by the zombie infestation.

And since it was old news, I quietly tapped the glassy screen of the digibook on my desk and opened a secret Cortex window. I couldn’t have cared less about history. If wasn’t science or
Slayers
, at this point in my life, I didn’t care at all. I started reading about the national tournament up in Whistler and got really excited. Everyone who would play in the tournament would get early access to play the new “Dinosaur Hunter” EagleVision game. I was reading more about the tournament rules when suddenly my screen froze. I looked up, and noticed everyone else was looking up too.

Instructor Sanders had locked us out. It was an annoying feature of school-age children’s digibooks, that instructors could force feed your screen whatever they liked. A quote populated the screen:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~ Jorge Santayana

“I know,” the instructor chided, “that most of you don’t care about social sciences. I know your parents are scientists and politicians and champions of industry, and that they haven’t raised you with a desire to learn about these sorts of things. But the Republic has you attend this course because they want you to know the past in an attempt not to repeat it.”

He paused to let that sink in. “Greed. Ignorance. Pride. Hubris. These human conditions destroyed our way of life in the twenty-first century. The water and air became too polluted to drink or breathe. The cities became overcrowded and reeked of filth. People were dying everywhere. In the streets. Bodies rotting on the side of a freeway overpass. Preventable diseases killed infants before they could walk. We had become such
consumers
that we had peed in our own pool. You’ve never seen things like this in real life, but you will
right now
.”

He started flashing images on the main screen at the front of the room, and on each of our digibooks, as he spoke. War. Famine. Floods. Disasters. Zombies. Dead bodies. Rotting corpses. Burning cities. Riots. Murders. Crucifixions. Beheadings. Rape. They were both fascinating and sickening.

“During the early 22nd century, the very people who had destroyed our world in the name of profit escaped the planet in worldships: massive primitive starships without faster-than-light capabilities. They set out in stasis on five-hundred-year journeys across the universe. They’re still traveling today, unaware of what we’ve repaired since their betrayal.”

“But that was their solution: destroy everything they held dear, throw the planet into chaos, kill off 90 percent of the species on the planet, flood 70 percent of the world’s biggest cities, set the stage for a disease to wipeout
everyone
…and then race to the stars with all the wealth they had robbed from the rest of the world. It was disgusting. We’re still cleaning up their mess four
hundred
years later.”

“So when I ask you to pay attention, there’s a damn good reason. That wasn’t the first time our species had read that chapter of history and failed to learn its lesson. Not even the second, actually. But you can be better than your forebears.”

There was only silence. I tried to think back to
Slayers
but kept seeing those images from the screen. I’d never seen a dead body. I’d never seen destroyed cities. The version of history we normally got was so condensed that it glossed over the harsh realities of the world before.

Pair-bonding was only allowed for adults in our society and forbidden for children. They reasoned that such attachments were too serious for kids and that we should spend our time studying, playing sports, or taking up hobbies, but I was still always curious about the opposite sex. We had basic anatomy as part of Tier M, but since I was so advanced, in school, I didn’t really care about body parts at the time I studied them. Later, when I was fourteen, I very bluntly asked fifteen-year-old Adara to show me what was under her clothes and agreed to show her what was under mine.

We found a large, lighted supply closet in the school where she proceeded to undress in a very matter-of-fact manner. There isn’t shame in our society, by the way. There is modesty for civility’s sake, but no embarrassment. In any case, by the time she was completely naked, the school administrator swung the door open wide and I never got to live up to my end of the deal. I was put to hard labor for a week scrubbing floors and cleaning the bathrooms in the school. I still got excited when I saw girls after that, especially the really pretty ones, but I never acted on it. It was forbidden.

In time, Adara overcame her worries about me getting her in trouble again and we became friends once more. She would hang out with Semper and me after school, and even came out on my dad’s boat a few times. Occasionally, I would feel a spark of electric tingle as her hand brushed mine or I’d feel a strange sensation in my stomach when she’d get close to me, even innocently.

I didn’t know what to do about those feelings. I knew I liked them, but I’d never seen my father do anything with my mother that was “animalistic” as it was called. They’d occasionally kiss on the cheek or hug, but mostly, they just held hands. I tried holding Adara’s hand one time and she immediately withdrew it, slapping me with the other one. That was for pair-bonded adults to do, she scolded. But we didn’t stop spending time together.

Semper and I finished all twenty-six tiers at the same time—when I was fifteen and he was sixteen. We graduated and then began taking university classes together, remotely. We didn’t need to travel to the capital, so we spent the days either at his house or my house studying. Even though I wanted to major in astrophysics, and Semper was more interested in mechanical engineering, our general education courses overlapped. For two years we were study buddies and partners in crime. One day he talked to me about something he’d read.

It was a word he’d found that didn’t make sense: brothers. We’d often seen the word used in some old plays and we always thought it meant comrades. Deeper research into the word revealed that it meant a male sibling. A sibling was another child, born of the same parents as you. We were stunned. I ran to my dad immediately and asked why I didn’t have any siblings and he gave me the long version of the short story we’d been told our whole lives.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, the planet Earth was in trouble. There were nearly ten billion people on it. The air was polluted, the ice caps were melting, and people fought over water and food and resources. A tiny minority of the people owned almost all the resources. Most of the rest of the people were so poor they couldn’t eat and they placed all their hope that a space god would save them from their misery. But one group of people was smarter than those other two groups. They moved to the Northwest portion of this continent of the Earth and started to build a society that was fair and smart and balanced.

Of course I knew all this from school. The forerunners of our society built the first space elevator. Perfected matter replication. Built an air exchanger to clean the carbon and soot from the skies. While everyone else fought for the last scraps of a dying world, we strove for something better. Eventually, when the Plague ravaged the planet, billions died. The Northwest quarantined itself from the rest of the world while their leading scientists developed a cure to the rapidly mutating disease. A scientist named Kip Rudinger decided that a vaccine wasn’t sufficient so he began work on a program called the Cybernetic Immortality Project which developed the earliest prototype robotic bodies. Doctor Rudinger’s work led thousands of people to shed their vulnerable flesh for undying cyborg forms. The robots didn’t look pretty and weren’t nearly as powerful as the “enhanced forms” that people get today when they reach physical maturity at age eighteen, but the initial models inspired even more innovation. Though a Plague vaccine was discovered, it came too late for most of the world. Most of the world refused the vaccine, trusting the space god over the science. Those that survived outside of the Northwest refused to trust technology again, and swore it off entirely. They still live in roaming nomadic bands that fight over territory and pride. They have no education. They may have even lost language abilities, but no one knows because they can’t be observed up close without being killed.

Dad continued with his story. When humans lived only a few decades, the key to survival was to have as many offspring as possible. Some parents had dozens of children. Now that every single human can live forever in an enhanced form, population control is vital, to prevent the overcrowding and overconsumption of resources that nearly destroyed the world centuries ago. With humans expanding across the stars, however, the human race still needs to grow in numbers, so every pair-bonded couple is allowed to have a single child. Pair-bonds were established to give legal custody of a child to one man and one woman who provided the genetic material to create it. They were obligated to raise it, educate it, and care for it until age eighteen, when it underwent the transformation. It was important that there be one male and one female present to raise the child, so pair-bonds and child-rearing was reserved for heterosexual couples. Homosexuals could still “couple” but because child-rearing was so tightly controlled, they were not allowed to have children.

There haven’t been siblings for three or four generations, at least, since sexual intercourse was outlawed. Males had mandatory vasectomies performed at infancy. Cybernetic female bodies were unable to bear children, despite countless attempts at upgrades over the years. It was deemed too risky to allow natural mating under age eighteen because of the emotional distress it would cause when you later underwent the cybernetic transformation.

With all of the books I had read, I never heard anything about mating or birth of humans; there was simply too much other material to read to even consider it. Clearly I knew animals did it, but never really thought about humans and reproduction in an animal sense. Such things never even dawned on me. I was astounded to learn that there were things about the universe I’d never considered. When I asked Dad why they never told us these things in school, he replied that they didn’t want us to experiment with mating. It’s dangerous, he warned. I asked him if he ever did. He shook his head and muttered that he hadn’t, but I somehow didn’t believe him.

I started to research more about how children were born. I had just always taken for granted that I’d come from my mother, but never really put it together that she had long abandoned her necessary biological equipment to rear me. As smart as I was, how could I have missed this? I suppose there was so much to learn about the universe that I never had time to contemplate such things. I knew all about the animal process of mating, but human males were sterilized at birth to prevent unwanted pregnancies, so how did our species continue?

Well, the answer astonished me: I was grown in a lab. My father’s sperm and my mother’s eggs were cryogenically frozen at the time they underwent their transformations. Decades later, when they pair-bonded, they had their gametes selected for optimal genetic desirability and grew me in an artificial womb for six months. Normal human fetuses would take nine or more months to reach viability but with perfect doses of hormones and vitamins, babies were ready for “birth” in much less time. And if that wasn’t shocking enough, I had segments inserted into my genetic code for Plague-resistance and hyper-intelligence. I was created. Designed. Perfected in the eyes of science and my parents. How “human” could I really be?