The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (10 page)

“No,” she said, putting her hands in front of her. “Jimmy, you don’t understand. If I knew, why would I have come back here to confess?”

“Guilt,” I said. “Regret. Anger with your parents. You were just a kid, right? Even if you knew, they still tricked you. They were still supposed to be protecting you, not using you to lure me away. Maybe you have a crush on me. Maybe you just want to screw with my head. Maybe you’ve just been distracting me while someone comes in to attack the wireheads.”

She gave a shiver when I said that, a little violent shake like the one I did at the end of a piss. I saw, very clearly in the footlights from the stage, her pupils contracting.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait, you’re here to attack the
wireheads
? Jesus Christ, Lacey, what the hell is wrong with you? They’re the most harmless, helpless bunch of farmers in the world. Christ, they’re practically Treehuggers, but without the stupid politics.”

She got up and grabbed her pack. “I understand why you’d be paranoid, Jimmy, but this isn’t fair. I’m just here to make things right between us—”

“Well, forgive me,” I said. “What could I possibly have been thinking? After all, you were only just skulking around here, gathering intelligence, slipping off into the night. After all, you only have a history of doing this. After all, it’s only the kind of thing you’ve been doing since you were a little girl—”

“Goodbye, Jimmy,” she said. “You have a nice life, all right?”

She went out into the night. My chest went up and down like a bellows. My hands were balled into fists so tight it made my arms shake. The pack didn’t like it. “Follow her,” I whispered to Ike and Mike, the best trackers in the pack. “Follow her”—a command they knew well enough. I’d used them to spy on my neighbors after arriving here, getting the lay of the land. “Follow her,” I said again, and they disappeared out the door, silent and swift.

I could watch and record their sensorium from my console. I packed a bag, keeping one eye on it as I went. I grabbed the pack’s canisters. They were too heavy to carry, but I had a little wagon for them. I piled them on the wagon, watching its suspension sag under the weight.

Ike and Mike had her trail. She headed into the woods with the uneasy gait of a weeping woman, but gradually she straightened out. She kept on walking, picking up speed, clipping on an infrared pince-nez when she came under the canopy into the real dark. I noted it and messaged Ike and Mike about their thermal signatures. They fell back and upped the zoom on their imaging, the picture going a little shaky as they struggled to stabilize the camera at that magnification.

She emerged from the woods into a clearing heaped high with rubble. I watched her sit down with her feet under her, facing it. She was saying something. I moved Ike up into mic range. She didn’t say much, though, and by the time he was in range, she fell silent.

The rubble stirred. Some rocks skittered down the side of the pile. Then a tentacle whipped out of the pile, a still-familiar mouth at the end of it. The mouth twisted around and grabbed up one of the larger rocks and began to digest it. More tentacles appeared, five, then fifty, then hundreds. The rubble shifted and revealed the wumpus beneath it.

It was the biggest one I’d ever seen. It had been twenty years since I’d last seen one of those bastards, and maybe my memories were faulty but this one seemed different. Meaner. Smarter. Wumpuses were usually bumblers, randomwalking and following concentration gradients for toxins, looking for cities to eat, mostly blind. This one unfolded itself and moved purposefully around the clearing, its wheels spinning and grinding. As it rolled, smaller wumpuses fell out of its hopper. It was . . . spawning!

It seemed to sense Ike and Mike’s presence, turning between one and the other. They were deep in the woods, running as cold as possible, camouflaged, perfectly still, communicating via narrow, phased-array signals. They should be undetectable. Nevertheless, I gave them the order to shut down comms and pull back slowly to me.

I stood out on the porch, waiting for them to rejoin me in the dark, hearing the sounds of the night woods, the wind soughing through the remaining leaves, the sounds of small animals scampering in the leaves and the distant frying-bacon sound of the wumpus and its litter digesting.

There was no chance that Lacey was doing something good with that wumpus. She had lied from the minute she met me in the woods. She had scouted out the wirehead city. She had gone back and reported to some kind of highly evolved descendant of the wumpuses that ate every city on the continent.

I had already been ready to go. I could just follow through on my plan, hit the road and never look back. The wireheads weren’t my people, just people I’d lived with.

If I was a better person, my instinct would be to stay and warn them. Maybe to stay and fight. The wumpus would need fighting, I knew that much.

I’m not a good person. I just wanted to go.

I didn’t go—and not because I’m a good person. I didn’t go because I needed to see Inga and find out if she really had the cure for my immortality.

- - -

Inga lived in the same house she’d grown up in. I’d gone over to play there, twenty years ago. Her parents had just grown new rooms as their kids had grown up, married, and needed more space. Now their place had ramified in all directions, with outbuildings and half-submerged cellars. I took a chance that Inga’s room would be where it had been the last time.

I knocked on the door, softly at first. Then louder.

The man who answered the door was old and grey. His pajamas flapped around him in the wind that whipped through the autumn night. He scrubbed at his eyes and looked at me.

“Can I help you?” His antenna radiated his peevish sleepiness.

“Inga,” I said. My heart was hammering in my chest and the sweat of my exertions, lugging the pack’s canisters across town, was drying in the icy wind, making me shiver. “I need to see Inga.”

“You know what time it is?”

“Please,” I said. “I’m one of her research subjects. It’s urgent.”

He shook his head. The irritation intensified. With all the other wireheads asleep, there was no one to damp his emotion. I wondered if he was souring their dreams with his bad vibes.

“She’s in there,” he said, pointing to another outbuilding, smaller and farther away from the main house. I thanked him and pulled my wagon over to Inga’s door.

She answered the door in a nightshirt and a pair of heavy boots. Her hair was in a wild halo around her head and limned by the light behind her and I had a moment where I realized that she was very beautiful, something that had escaped me until then.

“Jimmy?” she said, peering at me. “Christ, Jimmy—”

“Can I come in?”

“What’s this about?”

“Can I come in?”

She stood aside. I felt her irritation, too.

Her room was small and crowded with elaborate sculpture made from fallen branches wound with twine. Some of them were very good. It was a side of her I’d never suspected. Weirdly enough, being a wirehead didn’t seem to diminish artistic capacity—there were some very good painters and even a couple of epic poets in the cult that I quite liked.

“You know that there’s been a woman staying with me?”

She made a face. “It’s not any of my business, and I don’t really have any romantic advice—”

I cut her off. I told her everything. Even the sex parts. Even the antenna parts. Especially the wumpus parts. For such a big load of secrets, it didn’t take long to impart.

“So you think she’ll attack the city?”

I suppressed my own irritation—maybe it was the dull reflection of hers. “I know she will.” I took out my console and showed her the pictures of the wumpus.

“So you’re telling me this. Why? Why not wake up someone important? Someone who can help us?”

“I don’t think there’s any helping us. You saw it. You saw its babies. It’s coming for us, soon. This place is all over. I don’t know if it eats people, but it’s going to eat everything human-made here. That’s what they do.”

I felt her draw strength and calm from the sleeping people around us, from the whole city, dissipating her fear through the network.

“So why
are
you here?”

“I want you to give me the Chandrasekhar treatment before I go.”

“You’re leaving?”

I gestured at my wagon.

“And you want the cure? Yesterday you didn’t want to be a guinea pig.”

“Yesterday I thought there’d be a tomorrow. Now I’m not so sure. I want the cure.”

She folded her arms and stared at me.

“Your antenna isn’t totally dead, you know,” she said at last. “I can sort of feel a little of what you’re feeling. It’s too bad it doesn’t work better. That’s not a good way to feel.”

“You’ll do it?”

“Why not? It’s the end of the world, apparently.”

- - -

The sound of frying bacon filled the night as we worked in her lab. We dilated the windows at first, so we could track the progress of the wumpuses through town. There were a lot of angry shouts and sobs, but nothing that sounded like screams of pain. The wumpuses were apparently eating the buildings and leaving the people, just as they had two decades before.

The procedure was surprisingly simple—mostly it was just installing some code on my console and then a couple of shots from a long, thin bone-needle. That hurt, but less than I expected. I made sure I had the source-code as well as the object-code in case I needed to debug anything: the last thing I wanted was to be unable to manage my system.

We watched in fascination as statistical data about my transcriptions began to fill the screens around us. The app came with some statistically normal data-sets that overlaid the visualizations of my own internal functionality. It was clear even to my eye that I was pretty goddamned weird down there at the cellular level.

“What happens now?”

“The thing wants a full two month’s worth of data before it starts doing anything. So basically, you run that for a couple of months, and then it should prompt you for permission to intervene in your transcriptions to make them more normal.”

“Two months? That must suck if you’ve got cancer.”

“Cancer might kill you in two months and it might not. Bad nanites messing with your cellular activity is a lot scarier.”

“I’ve been trying not to think of that,” I said.

The frying bacon noises were growing louder.

“No more shouts,” Inga said. Her eyes were big and round. “What do you think is going on out there?”

I shook my head. “I’m an idiot, give me a second.”

I gathered the pack in my arms and gave them their instructions, then tossed them out the window. They scampered down the building side and I fired up the console.

“There,” I said, pointing. The wumpuses were moving in a long curved line now, a line as wide as the town, curving up like a pincer at the edges. They moved slowly and deliberately through the night. Pepe found a spot where they were working their way through a block of flats, tentacles whipping back and forth, great plumes of soil arcing out behind them. People ran out of the house, carrying their belongings, shouting at the wumpuses, throwing rocks at them. The wumpuses took no notice, save to snatch the thrown rocks out of the air and drop them into their hoppers.

An older man—I recognized him as Emmanuel, one of the real village elders around here—moved around to confront the wumpus that was eating his house. He shouted more words at it, then took another step toward it.

One of the tentacles moved faster than I’d ever seen a wumpus go. It whipped forward and snatched Emmanuel up by the torso and lifted him high in the air. Before he could make a sound, it had plunged him headfirst into its hopper. One of his legs kicked out, just once, before he disappeared.

The other wireheads around him were catching the fear, spread by the wires, too intense to damp down. They screamed and ran and the wumpuses picked them up, one after another, seeming to blindly triangulate on the sounds of their voices. Each one went headfirst into the hopper. Each one vanished.

I stood up and whistled the pack back to me.

I moved for the door. Inga blocked my way.

“Where are you going?”

“Away,” I said. I thought for a moment. “You can come if you want.”

She looked at me and I realized that what I’d always mistaken for pity was really a kind of disgust. Why not? I was the neighbor kid who’d never grown up. It was disgusting.

“You brought her here,” she said, quietly. I wondered from the tone of her voice if she meant to kill me, even though she’d just treated me.

“She came here,” I said. “I had nothing to do with it. Just a coincidence. Sit in one place for twenty years and everyone you’ve ever known will cross your path. Whatever she’s doing, it’s nothing to do with me. I explained that.”

Inga slumped into a lab-chair.

“Are you coming?” I asked.

She cried. I’d never heard a wirehead cry. Either there wasn’t enough mass in the wirehead network to absorb her emotion or the prevailing mood was complete despair. I stood on the threshold, holding my wagon filled with the pack’s canisters. I reached out and grabbed her hand and tugged at it. She jerked it away. I tried again and she got off her stool and stalked deeper into labs.

That settled it.

I left, pulling my wagon behind me.

- - -

The sound of frying bacon was everywhere. I had the pack running surveillance patterns around me, scouting in all directions, their little squirrel cases eminently suited to this kind of thing. We were a team, my pack and me. We could keep it up for days before their batteries needed recharging. I’d topped up the nutrients in their canisters before leaving the Carousel.

The frying bacon sound had to include the destruction of the Carousel. Every carefully turned replacement part, all those lines of code. The mom and the dad and the son and the sister and the grandparents and their doggies. Dad’s most precious prize, gone to wumpusdust.

The sound of frying bacon was all around us. The sound of screams. Lacey had arrived from the west. To the east was the ocean. I would go south, where it was warm and where, if the world was coming to an end, I would at least not freeze to death.