Unnaturals (32 page)

"And you, Ben buddy, why don't you go back to your books and feeds and frogs and such?
Microorganisms.
You're actually telling these feral kittens that we are all murderers because we kill
microorganisms.
Don't you have anything better to show them? Come with me, kittens. Yes, both of you."

They let him plug them into wonderful experiences, and Meliora walked in a world where cities were as numerous and dense in the world as the junk was out there in the City of Death, and the junk piles surrounding them were almost as dense.

"Yeah," Jerome said. "Think the people of that world had an idea?" Meliora cringed. No one ever talked to you when you were plugged into a wonderful experience, or at least you didn't hear. Jerome's voice felt as if she were being pricked with a thousand ice-cold sewing needles. "Think they ever noticed anything beyond their noses, or even looked? They were weak and meek, but still they did damage. There were too many of them."

"So this is where you tell me the truth about enemies, conspiracies, and being locked into your own mind."

"Huh. Conspiracies. About as interesting as microorganisms. It's old Septima you want if you care about conspiracies, just as Benedict is your frog and bacteria guy. This is where I tell you about
these.
"

She watched people buy stuff, barely use it, and then throw it away and buy new stuff. They had no idea where the old stuff went. It often went to the junk piles, but not always. Almost as often it went to the rivers and lakes, to the big water she knew must be the ocean. Animals and plants died, and no one even ate them. There were fumes in the sky and poisons in the crop fields. The humans had put the poisons there themselves.

"For more food, and cheaper food, you see."

"But that food is too much! Can't they—"

"They can. But they don't."

The people had no idea where the materials for their shiny, new goods came from, or how anything was made. Didn't know about the little children with bleeding fingers who worked through most of the day in stuffy little rooms to produce silk blouses—

"Wait! So not all people are the same. These little children—Their whole city—"

"You think they are different from the rest? They are all
people,
Meliora."

She watched a child get a chance to leave the place of torturing work. It got added to a family in another city who had money. The first thing the child did was buy fancy clothes and a fourwheeler—and next month, again.

Meliora looked at the village dress she still wore even in the wonderful experience, nondescript gray, torn by work and repaired by hand, crusty with grime from all that had happened in the last few days. She'd resented having only two dresses. Until today.

She saw people crawl in the streets in countless fourwheelers and drill the earth for fuel. She watched them start breaking mountains when they could drill no longer.

"Many years before what you see—centuries even—it was even worse." Jerome said. "They burned coal and had factories. Disease was more rampant, or at least more visible. But
after
what you see it was a hundred times as bad. They waged war for fuel and for thousands of other things—when what the fools should have paid attention to was that their poisons had already soaked into the earth so deeply that life was changed forever. This is where Ben's microorganisms come into play."

"But these people—most of them wouldn't do what they were doing if they knew the consequences, right? Why did no one tell them?"

"Oh, they were told. But, you see, girl, what you don't see with your own eyes doesn't exist. What doesn't hit you personally
right now
doesn't exist. You've seen all that."

Yes. She had.

Another wonderful experience. A person wanted to be the CEO of a corporation, but not like in Lucasta where all that CEO-s did was help produce new perfect items for people. Or—was that so? She wondered now. She hadn't known any CEO-s or people who wanted this job. Why, it took as much of your time as being a doctor or a teacher! Two hours a day, perhaps.

Now, in the wonderful experience some people spent twenty hours a day at that job because they wanted power. Power? What was that?

"Why, girl, that desire is the same as the wanting to be chief or priestess," Jerome said in her mind.

"They are the unnaturals, then." Meliora replied. Who but unnaturals would care for such a job? Who else would be willing to take the pain to do for others what they couldn't, or wouldn't, do for themselves?

"No, they were quite natural indeed." Amusement. "In those days,
natural
was different. The people you see wanted just the same as everyone else—to be, and to have, more than the rest. Some would tell you the only difference between them and the others was that they were better at achieving it. Others would tell you that they weren't better at all, that they just wanted more. But in the end everyone, the sheep in the streets who had a four-wheeler or two or the ones in the air who had an airtrain or ten, wanted, and wanted, and never got enough."

Next, Mel saw wars. She remembered the wars in the wonderful experiences back at home. Small wars, personal wars. They were all about blood, mutilation, explosions, thirst and famine—things that a Lucastan could touch, feel, understand, even if only for a few minutes before waking up to medstats and pills that took it all away. But what would Lucastans understand of people sitting in comfortable rooms full of gadgets and buttons, looking at war that happened on screens?

Jerome showed her people who liked to watch other people being blown to bits on screens, never with real blood. He showed her people who ordered war but didn't care to watch. Instead, they closely watched the fluctuation of prices of little papers. She saw cities fall into decay, and cites being blown away without a trace left. She saw forests—artificial forests that people had planted after the ones from the fairytales were long gone—go again. She saw a world turning into scorched darkness and poison, and people creeping underground with the few possessions they could salvage.

Then she saw new grasses peek from the dry earth, and new trees brave the winds coming from the lakes and seas—she saw new microorganisms eat the yellow-green slime and crust from the tops of oceans and lakes and from the air itself. She also saw the sun. The earth had changed so much, but the sun must not have, for it crept from behind the poisonous clouds the same as ever. Even its strange color turned back to normal when the microorganisms finally got rid of the clouds.

The people, or what was left of them, crept out of their concrete underground homes. Many were dead, she learned, both from the poison that they had let loose on the world and from the microorganisms and monsters that the world was fighting back with. The people fought, too. She saw doctors rise from amid the rest, both with salvaged medical equipment and new herbs that the world had never seen before—she saw humanity slowly get back on its feet.

"They changed," Jerome said. "But not enough."

Some still sought that power thing. Even doctors. They were still different from chiefs or priestesses. The stronger ones rose above the rest again. They had better tools, or better computers, or better means to make others' things their own.

There were fewer computers than before. Many had been destroyed—but new ones were being made in the new factories that humans slowly started setting up. There wasn't any soot like many centuries before that. There wasn't even the poison of times much more recent. But there were
people
—and slowly they made the world similar to what it had always been, only with new technology, new food, new junk and poison, new diseases.

"They still want and want," Mel whispered. "But they don't get the scope of it all, Jerome! And if they can't understand, there must be other ways! Let those who have more than they need think they have more than they do! Give them a new computer every week—how's a person to know that their new computer was someone else's before if it
looks
new? Give them entertainment. If
someone
keeps a watchful eye and allocates resources correctly, there will even be food and clothes left for the hungry and naked—there will even be new computers for them, and everyone can—"

"Ah. That might work, you know. If there were fewer people in the world, to leave a smaller footprint. If they were more biologically pliable to what is good for them and nature." Wheezing laughter. "You have the right ideas, my girl. You'll make a good watcher."

She bit her lip until it bled. She felt herself wriggle in her chair. Suddenly she was out of the wonderful experience.

Jerome looked surprised, and Nicolas was still asleep in his chair.

"We aren't done yet." The old wheeze pulled the wonderful experiences attachments from her body. She gasped. Usually it didn't hurt, but now the electrodes had become lodged in the skin and the sweat that had surfaced on it. "Let's plug you back in."

"No."

Nevertheless, he snapped the electrodes back onto her, and for a moment clunkers and poisons flashed somewhere in her mind.

"No!" she screamed—and almost got out of the dream. She could still see Jerome's room. The tiny plates on her arms were blinking just like Nicolas', but she wasn't seeing what Jerome wanted her to see. Jerome looked more disconcerted than ever. Her plates started beeping. She tried to sit up from the chair and realized she was tied to it.

In the village, Nicolas had threatened to tie her to a bed. It had supposedly been for her own good. Somehow she didn't believe it was the same in this place.

Jerome stood across from her, watching her strangely.

She was in so much pain that she'd have cried if she hadn't remembered her vow never to cry before a man. She felt as if all the poisons of humans long gone had crept into her, as if their fourwheelers had run her down, as if hungry fairytale dragons had been at her.

She pulled at her ties. Something creaked. "What are you doing! Let me out, you nasty old clunker! Let me out of this!"

But he wouldn't. Oh, no. He never did what she wanted him to do.

A wonderful experience was safe. It let you experience unpleasant things in a controlled environment. You never brought the wonderful experience with you into the real world. You could not, with all the medstats there to help you.

But there were no medstats here, just old Jerome who rarely needed medstats and always refused her pills during her training.

More plates on her skin. More pain. But not just that. The wonderful experience must be enabled by a computer, and she'd felt computers all her life. She felt them now, too—Nicolas' computer, which he'd slipped into her pocket before they'd come here, and the big, powerful computer of the wonderful experience, trying to manipulate her mind. Her tied hands had no access to an interface, but she could almost see an interface in her mind—she had always been able to, she thought. Only, it had never been that strong.

The computer against her was strong. She was half-way inside a wonderful experience now, driving a dirty fourwheeler with her lungs full of poison. Yet, she also saw the blinking lights and Jerome's face, and she thought she saw something in the air in Jerome's room as well—shiny transparent wires, like nerves, leading towards the computer integrated in the wall. Hints of buttons in the air. Things you could imagine reaching out towards and tying together and pushing.

She tied. She pushed.

The wonderful experience shattered like a broken screen.

"No more!" Meliora screamed, in the real world, in the City of Death, when her thrashing body tore the ties of the chair. "No more wonder! No more fairytales! Show me the real world if you want to show me something so much! Show me what you and the likes of you did to it! Show me the gods-damn cure for young age, even though it is too late for it!"

She had jumped over the old man and toppled him to the floor. Medstats were running to them now, as well as people.

"Show her." Jerome grinned from under her as humans and machines gripped her and inserted needles into her. "Show her the real world!" he shouted as they dragged her away.

Snow

They didn't imprison her in a room with no windows or interweb. They thrust her into an airtrain cabin.

The two men and two women who dragged her there kicking and screaming all had the expressionless eyes that sent shivers up her spine. The door sealed itself closed, and the airtrain took off. That sent shivers up her spine, too, and it hadn't last time. Nic's computer beeped, but there was no message. She felt dizzy.

"You all right in there?" The pilot was a glass door away from her. His eyes were expressionless, too, but at least his voice wasn't. She thought she detected trembling in it even through the microphone.

They were going to kill her.

The City of the Gods had too much power, but people like her—
unnaturals
—could sometimes take it away from them. They wouldn't let her.

The pilot wasn't happy. Perhaps even in the City of Death not everyone could kill creatures easily.

Right. No rash movements now. The enemy against her wasn't just Andreas with a knife. She controlled the trembling of her hands. It was because of the shivers in her spine and hadn't stopped since the airtrain had taken off. But it could be hidden, at least. She made her eyes as expressionless as she could. Nic's computer, now. She turned with her back to the pilot. Could he see? Screens? Perhaps he didn't see. He was looking outside and steering the airtrain.

Nicolas had shown her a little of how to gain access to networks, and the airtrain certainly had one, and even now she sensed—oh, gods.
Nic.
He had been asleep in that chair when they dragged her away. For all she knew, he was still in the wonderful experiences. For all she knew, he was already dead.

I must get back to him.
She must get him out—whatever he'd done in the village, she couldn't just leave him in the hands of those people. And if it was too late...