Thanatos Drive
By Andrew Dykstal
Where were you when it happened, baby?”
Alan Li knows he should keep walking. That’s the rule on a boulevard like this, and it goes double at nightfall—move fast, avoid eye contact, don’t let them touch you. But the question, or what’s behind the question, catches him like a choke chain: I look old enough to remember the Spasm? Nobody has ever thought he looked that old, or at least nobody has tumbled to it.
For her part, the woman in the legacy green sequin dress looks like something out of a Vollmann fever dream. There’s no feigned sensuality there, just an air of endless exhaustion, and her blush cracks where she’s cut her makeup with red Missouri clay. Her bloodshot eyes are sunk into sockets that probably always look like they’re just done healing up from a bruise. Veins wander her legs, stark against skin pale with cold. She looks about forty, which means she might be half that.
“Don’t be stingy, baby,” she says.
There’s nothing he can say. He takes his bearings by what’s left of the Arch and walks on.
She makes one final pitch: “The soils commonly known as red clay are in fact ultisols, the final product of weathering when there is no glaciation to create new soil.”
Either she’s gone mad or he has. He keeps walking, fighting down the impulse to look back.
Behind him, the woman picks her next prospect: “Where were you when it happened, baby?”
The first flakes of October snow drift down, white and gray in the glow of the gaslights, and Li sees the world trapped in an immense glass eye stirring with the silvery threads of old nightmares.
#
His contact is waiting behind the bar, out by the stills. Some were liberated from Prohibition museums in the greater St. Louis area. Li doesn’t want to know what the old man is fermenting; there hasn’t been surplus grain for twenty years, fruit is worth more fresh or dried, and every potato in North America is going toward efforts to create something on par with the old monocultures. Grass, maybe? Cassava-plus?
Li accepts a tin cup of clearish liquid, takes the ritual sip, feels his eyes water. Godpuppets don’t drink, or so the local rumor goes. “You found me a job.”
“Might’ve.”
“I take it it’s the Doctor.”
“Might be.”
In the end, the price is a bit of gold the size of Li’s thumbnail, a pair of sunglasses, and four genuine Advil. What they call a night/day kit out East, where that flake of gold would be just enough to buy you a three-day hangover and maybe the clap.
Out here, it will keep the moonshiner in shoes for another winter.
The moonshiner gives him an address, a password, and a companionable hand on the shoulder. “The man’s PRA, so you watch yourself.”
The People’s Republic of Austin. Deep pockets if you live long enough to pick them. Li puts another Advil on the barrelhead. “Anything else I should watch?”
A grin. “Saw the Doctor myself three weeks back.”
“And you didn’t kill her.”
“Hard to un-kill somebody. I got myself a thing about permanent choices. Amelie’s still human. Sold her new maps of the Turnwell Confederacy. And an old terrain one of western Nebraska.”
“That’s in the Dust.”
“Said she was human. Never said she was sane. That Delray of yours still running?”
“You going to try to sell me something else?”
“Tinfoil’s getting preachy about cars.”
“It’s a fifty-seven. Good old Detroit metal. No microchips.”
“You know that. I know that. Next Tinfoil technophobe you meet might not. I hear they burned a man for his well pump last month. Ought to trade up for a couple bicycles and an apprentice.”
The moonshiner lets him copy a couple of maps gratis so long as he puts his own kerosene in the lamp. Li’s eyes ache by the end. “When did we get old?” he asks.
“What, you were young?”
#
The man from the People’s Republic of Austin is waiting in an upstairs suite over half a bookstore. He wears the Longhorn pin of an Ambassador and three pieces of three different suits.
“You’re Alan Li,” the Ambassador says, flipping open a typewritten dossier.
“I know that.”
“You . . . find certain sorts of people.”
“I know that too.”
“How long have you been tracking the Doctor?”
“Eleven years.” The answer is automatic.
The Ambassador gives off a little flare of bureaucratic smugness. “That seems to imply you aren’t very good at it.”
In his mind’s eye, Burden’s Ford is burning again, and he can feel the mud of the riverbank oozing around his elbow as he peers through a rifle scope at silhouettes faceless and yet recognizable, some of them terribly small. The full moon crests a cloud bank, and now their eyes are shining silver, smiling. Where were you when it happened? Forget the rest of the world and its lingering where-were-you-when-Kennedy-was-shot mindset. For him, it was never the Spasm that proved the indifference of all the old gods and the madness of the new one. This is his it. Eleven years ago.
And he’s never been fond of flippancy.
“Maybe,” he says. “Thing about tracking the Doctor is that when her work goes well, there’s nobody willing to talk about her. When it goes bad, there’s nobody able. Sometimes for a good mile around.”
“From the stories I hear, you don’t take the time to ask questions in the latter case.”
Li pictures the Ambassador flat on his back, screaming up at the smiling godpuppets while fine silver wires thread down into his eyes, his nose, his mouth. “No,” he says, pleasantly, “on account of how I’m smarter than a root vegetable.”
A bark of laughter from his left snaps his head around. A woman dressed for travel slips in from the farther room. She’s slight, her brown hair bound back in a short tail, and her footfalls make no sound. Her jacket is cut loose, and Li would bet Prozac to pruno that there’s an arsenal under it.
“Yes, Mr. Li,” she says, dropping into a chair, “you might be at that.” Her voice is smooth, low, touched with the same humor as her pale green eyes.
The Ambassador cuts in. “This is Jackie Boon, our resident expert on Doctor Amelie Bourreau, high-splice, and all things cybernetic. She has a lead on the Doctor’s whereabouts.”
So do I, Li doesn’t say. “So what do you need me for?”
The Ambassador squirms. “Our own people have seen. . . limited success.”
Boon is more direct. “The last four teams we sent after her didn’t come back. The sole known survivor of the fifth team returned with a high-splice node in his head and forty pounds of ANFO under his jacket.”
That gives him pause. He’d heard about the bombing that took out half the PRA Department of Economic Development, but to learn that a godpuppet did it forces a change in perspective. For one thing, the PRA put out that a radical faction from some hick city-state in the mid-Atlantic was responsible, and they built a good bit of foreign policy around the lie. For another, to assert that a godpuppet targeted a government pursuing the Doctor has its own unsettling implications, not least of which is God taking an interest in Amelie Bourreau.
“You think I’ll have more luck?”
Boon shrugs, gives him a once-over. “You’re supposed to be a survivor.”
“In any event,” the Ambassador adds, “you’ll have an advantage the others did not. Ms. Boon will be going with you.”
“No.”
The Ambassador names a figure.
“I’ll think about it.”
Boon names another figure.
“All right.” He might have fought harder, but he finds himself immediately and irrationally liking Boon. Laughing at a man in a Longhorn pin takes guts, and there’s something competent in how she moves, something he hasn’t seen in a long time. As long as he’s useful to her, she’ll have his back. After that, she won’t be the first slippery partner he’s outmatched.
“And,” the Ambassador adds, “you will be taking the Doctor in alive.”
Disbelief, then anger, then puzzlement. “Alive? Why would you want her alive? Kill her, and there’s nobody making new godpuppets. God would be better than half-dead.”
The Ambassador gives no reply. Neither does Boon.
“Fine. If you want her alive, we’ll need more support. That’s a four-man job. Maybe more. If it’s a party anyway, why not lend us a few of your hitters?”
The Ambassador clears his throat. “There are reasons of state.”
Boon gives the real answer. “We’ve had security issues with the identities of our wetwork people, and it’s about to get worse. In a few days, it’s going to be unhealthy to wear PRA colors north of the Arkansas River. This stays small.”
Another civil war. He thinks of the copied maps folded in his pocket. Suddenly, being well-north of St. Louis seems like an excellent idea. “All right. We can come to an agreement. In addition to my fee, I’ll need forty gallons of gasoline, ration kits for two people for fifteen days, and all the legacy .357 rounds you can give me. All pre-Spasm, all stored right, all new brass. None of that remanufactured stuff—I’ve seen too many ruptured cases.”
The Ambassador doesn’t even try to bargain. That night, as Li tries to fall asleep over the moonshiner’s bar, this disregard for expense disturbs him more than anything else.
After a while, he gets up and inspects his eyes and gums in the mirror. He finds nothing--no change, no glint of metal. In time, he sleeps.
#
They set out westward at dawn, extra gas cans ratchet-strapped to the roof, Jackie Boon’s pile of luggage crammed in the back. She’s wearing aviators that cover half her face and chewing a wad of candied ginger. “I get carsick,” she mumbles through a mouthful. “Your car can smell like ginger, or it can smell like vomit. Your call, Alan.”
“How about you tell me your new and promising leads?”
“We think she’s headed for western Nebraska.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Did you know we have a list of five stops she’ll be making en route?”
He blinks. “How could you know that?”
“She and some of her clients use shortwave radio. Spell everything out letter by letter in cipher. I broke the encryption. Well, I have a method for breaking it, I should say. It takes time. The plaintexts are a few months old.”
“How?”
“I’d tell you, but the story goes back to Poland in the 1930s, and if the boredom didn’t kill you, I’d have to.”
He glances at the crude, hand-built radio clipped to the dash, thinking. It took him a while to get used to the thing. Radios are the heart of networks, and networks are the heart of God. He designed the mount for quick disassembly should Tinfoil come calling, or if it caught his eye the wrong way. And this sort of dumb radio is known to be safe, is almost in common use. He doesn’t know much about ciphers, but he knows the one used by Amelie Bourreau has resisted decryption for two decades and is widely believed to be based on the naval version of the German Enigma machine. There’s only one explanation for the breakthrough, and it’s no comfort.
“You built a computer,” he murmurs.
Boon startles, which is oddly satisfying. “A crude, electromechanical one,” she says. “Perfectly safe. Nothing beyond 1940s technology.”
He eases onto I-70, brings the Delray up to an easy thirty. The PRA is building computers. The north, frozen wasteland or not, is looking more and more attractive. “You know, that’s got to be one of the Doctor’s lines when she’s selling implants.”
“What?”
“That it’s all perfectly safe. Now give me an exit number.”
She slouches in the bench seat and pulls her hat down over her eyes, sunglasses and all. “Just follow the signs for Columbia.”
“That on your magic list?”
“No magic about it.”
“Sure.”
They drive in silence for a while. Then Boon asks, “Do you always wear your hair like that?”
He touches the rough shag that falls over his ears. “Yeah. Cuts down on sunburn. Why?”
“I just notice things, is all.” Another long silence. Then: “‘Alive’ doesn’t mean ‘unpunished,’ Alan. She’ll answer for Burden’s Ford. You have my word on that.”
#
Columbia has a population of almost eight thousand. Driving past the variously racked and hitched bicycles and horses, feeling the hustle and pulse of the city, Li feels like a plague doctor touring an overcrowded prison. If the Doctor did any work here, there’s a one-in-ten chance he’s walking into hell with untested backup.
Li curses by Shockley and Nader alike the quirk of timing that set him on the Doctor’s trail in winter. Barring flickers of the old, mild October, there will be nothing but long sleeves and hats and heavy coats in every town clear out to Boise. Half the population could be walking around with surgical dressing packed from crotch to throat and he’d never know it. And coats can hide other things. He has two nickel-sized scars low on his back where a godpuppet tried to ventilate his kidneys with a derringer. When the cutters let him go three months later with a massive bill, two legacy Percocet, and a bag of willow bark to chew when the opioids wore off, he finally cleared up enough to realize why the thing hadn’t gone for the easy headshot, and he had nightmares about it for the better part of a year, nightmares that mingled weirdly with those left over from Burden’s Ford.
Three weeks. She had been here three weeks ago.
He parks behind a stable and tips the muckrakers a legacy skin mag to keep his tires from disappearing. For extra insurance, he makes sure they get a good look at the gun on his hip and the flat wand of the scrubber slung across his back. The signs of his office, such as it is. He tries not to think too hard about the scrubber; the capacitors are degrading, and it only works about half the time. And it never does what he tells people, never kills the godpuppet but leaves the person. The scrubber’s real value is its aura of hope, which tends to keep the situation from devolving for an extra three minutes or so. Enough time to get in, sometimes even enough to get out.
If Boon is uneasy, she gives no sign. She straps a Turnwell-issue automatic to her belt with the easy nonchalance usually reserved for donning socks.
“The house is a block north,” she says, eyeing his scrubber with an air of disapproval. “And you know those things don’t work on solid-state memory, right? You can’t degauss nonmagnetic storage, and almost no implants use hard disks.”
“The ones that are supposed to be perfectly safe do.”
That keeps her looking pensive all the way to the house.
A man answers the door after three knocks. His eyes lock on the scrubber. Boon gives him a bright smile. “Hi.”
He bolts for the back door. Li tackles him at the ankles, rolls him over, gets a forearm across his throat, and leans on it for a while. The man goes still.
Boon crouches in the doorway, pistol down by her side. “Should you be that close?”
“It’s only been three weeks. Even if he’s turned, God hasn’t had much time to improve him.” Li peels back an eyelid, studies the pupil, the deep clear brown of the iris. He pulls open the mouth and checks the gums, the soft palate. “He’s either clean or a slow burn.” A lie: the man is clean, and Li can feel it, but Boon doesn’t need to know that.
A flicker of motion from the corner of his eye. A kid on the short side of fourteen is standing in the kitchen three yards off with a shotgun pointed at Li’s head, his mouth working around uncertain sounds. Li ignores the weapon. “What was wrong with your dad?”
“He couldn’t see.”
“Degenerative nerve disorder,” Boon adds. “He needed two chips, one at the base of the skull, one in the frontal lobe.”
Li feels around and finds the healing incision on the back of the unconscious man’s head. There’s nothing on his forehead. The Doctor probably went in through the nose. No denying she’s good at what she does.
“High-splice?”
“No,” Boon and the kid say together. The kid: “She said it was just old tech. No radios in it, no nothing.”
Boon holsters her automatic. “He’s clean, Alan.”
“How do you know?”
She points down the hall to a spray of broken glass he hadn’t even seen. “You knocked his glasses off. If he were infected, his vision would be perfect, not just better.” She pushes past Li, reaches out, and takes the shotgun from the kid’s unresisting hands. When she opens the breech, Li sees light glinting inside empty chambers. “Not even loaded.” She passes the gun back to the kid, sighing. “The world doesn’t deserve people like you.”
Li grimaces. “It doesn’t tend to keep them around real long, either. Kid, we need to know what you paid the Doctor and anything and everything she told you.”
The kids shakes his head. “She was good,” he says. “I don’t care what you say. She was good.”
“She rolled the dice with your lives. Ever hear of Bayside? New Tampa? Burden’s Ford?”
The kid sticks his chin out.
“I need something from the car,” Boon says, and she slips out the front door, moving without sound.
The kid kneels beside the unconscious man, feeling for a pulse.
“He’s fine,” Li says when the quiet starts getting heavy. “He might even still be fine tomorrow.”
Boon returns with one of her heavier personal effects: a cloth-covered parcel in a leather sling. She sets it on the floor and whips off the covering with a flourish.
It’s a cylindrical glass tank. Inside, a brain and part of a spinal cord float in clear fluid, surrounded and penetrated by silver threads drifting and twining like kelp. With the sudden rush of light, one thread reaches up and taps the glass.
The kid yells and recoils. So does Li, and his gun clears leather before Boon catches his wrist.
“Wait,” she says.
Li jerks his wrist free. “You kept one? Have you lost your mind?”
Boon ignores him, eyes on the kid. The questing threads feel around the edges of their enclosure, seem to reach a conclusion, and lapse into quiescence.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Kevin.”
“I’m Jackie. This is a mature high-splice node. We call it a squid. You’ve heard of them? I’ve seen and dissected more than I want to think about, Kevin. This is what could have happened to your dad. Then it would have happened to you, and to your mom, and maybe to your friends, your neighbors, your whole town.”
Fighting every instinct, Li forces his gun back into its holster and follows Boon’s play, which he has to admit has a certain shock value. “In one sense,” he says, voice almost steady, “nobody knows how God spreads. In another, I know perfectly well how it spreads: It spreads when somebody thinks that they’ll be lucky, that this time it’ll be different, that they’re so special they don’t have to think about who and what they’re putting at risk.” He points at the mass swirling in the tank. “When they think that can’t happen, not to them.”
The kid tells them everything he knows. When his father wakes and sees the monstrosity exposed and impossibly alive, so does he. For a chance at sight, he gave the Doctor a few thousand Turnwell dollars, a tank of hydraulic fluid, and several sets of replacement gaskets. The father was a mechanic before his vision went. Now, he might be again. Li can see that possible future rattling around in the man’s brain, no longer quite able to balance out all the nightmare alternatives. Relief will fix him up soon enough. But for a day or two, he’ll convince himself he’d have chosen to stay blind had he known what might have taken root in his head.
“She’s pretty,” the kid says after Boon leaves with the squid.
Li almost smiles. “You’re fourteen.”
“Fifteen.”
“Fourteen.”
A sigh. “Fourteen.”
Li pauses on the doorstep and turns back. “You’ve got some courage,” he says. “And I’ll give you that. But you listen, and you listen well. You never point a weapon at somebody you’re not willing to kill, and never at somebody you’re not able to. Yeah?”
The kid just stares.
The father says, “You look for God in men’s eyes, and yet have you beheld the man?”
Doubt, sudden and cold, uncoils inside him, bound somehow to the prostitute’s non sequitur. “Sure,” he says, which is no answer at all. But then, he can’t be certain the father asked a question.
#
They spend the night in a rebuilt hotel south of Olathe, as close as either is willing to come to the ruins of Kansas City. There hadn’t been many deployable nuclear weapons left at the Spasm—the world had attained near-perfect nuclear disarmament—but the few dozen that remained had all been launched. Some, like the ones that did for Washington and Kansas City, had been old strategic types, the sort with yields so high into the megatons they had no practical use outside the mad counter-value logic of the Cold War.
Looking out the window to the north, Li can almost see the ghosts of that holocaust, each one a shadow against an incandescent wall. Flat and featureless and imperfectly blotted from the world. So like the silhouettes of Burden’s Ford.
Boon has taken the bed nearer the door. She’s paging through a notebook, scribbling, a vaguely contemplative expression flickering across her face. Her nerve, initially arresting, has become an obvious liability.
He drags the room’s sole chair over. “We need to talk about the world-killing abomination you’ve got in my trunk.”
“It’s contained. That’s ballistic glass.”
“Physically contained. It could be transmitting.”
“We’ve never detected any transmissions, and as it has no sense organs, I don’t know what it could be sending.”
“You don’t know how God works. Or if there are sense organs in there you can’t identify. I could have sworn it was responding to light. It might have been listening to everything we said. It might be sending location information. Last I checked, you can still get signals off GPS satellites.”
Boon finally looks up. “There is a point beyond which paranoia is unproductive. I can make educated guesses, and it is my professional opinion that the danger is minimal.”
“I’ll buy that if you can answer me one question: The squid can’t live without a functioning brain. And I’m guessing you’ve had it sealed up in that jar for months. Yeah? So how’s the brain oxygenating itself?”
She lays aside the notebook. “All right. I don’t know how God works. Nobody does. It’s possible nobody ever knew how high-splice worked, or why it . . . behaved. What is beyond dispute is that the Spasm arose from a perfect storm of circumstances unrepeatable in the present world. The squid is dangerous, yes, but not nearly as much as you think.”
“Because everything’s already broken?”
“In a way. There’s no American Congress now, no concentration of critical demographics within key sociopolitical and economic structures.”
He can feel the lecture coming, but short of going out and killing the squid himself, he doesn’t see an alternative. “All right. I’ll bite. Explain.”
“Ten years before the Spasm, the median age of a Congressperson was sixty-two, the median net worth in the low millions. Access to their medical records is difficult for obvious reasons, but actuarial data suggests that up to seventy percent of them had conditions treatable via high-splice and other networked neural correctives—and they could almost universally afford those treatments. The situation was similar for the European Parliament and even worse for the Chinese Central Committee. Commercial interests were a bit different, but the overall pattern held, especially in the central banks. With the right thousand or so people, you could control the world. God had several times that many in key positions. Hence the success of mutual disarmament treaties, free trade policies, and, obviously, the aerosol sulfate and reflector mitigations of climate change.”
Li remembers clawing through five feet of snow to get to a courthouse in South Carolina the previous year. He’d almost lost a few toes. “Which ended so well,” he mutters.
She pushes on. “Now, you’d need to distribute high-splice or hackable implants across the leadership of several thousand unstable, highly decentralized city-states and small nations. To reach the same level of influence God had in the old world, it would need to turn more than forty-five thousand people based on conservative estimates. At an infection rate of ten percent, that means nearly half a million installations of high-splice chips.”
“You’re leaving out the secondary infections. This thing spreads, Boon. And you’re not accounting for the outbreaks that started with nothing more advanced than a pacemaker from the 1990s. Burden’s Ford started with an insulin pump that barely had an abacus-worth of processing power—but God hacked it from the outside. The original hijacked tech with no biological components at all. We’re talking about kitchen appliances, transit automation, factories. We don’t know where any of the thresholds are. I’m not worried about the Doctor doing half a million operations. I’m worried about her doing just one in Columbia, or Mexico City, or Havana.” Or Austin, he doesn’t add.
“So far, outbreaks have been self-containing. There’s no definitive evidence of high-level coordination among infected individuals.”
“Godpuppets.”
“We dislike that term.”
Words, he thinks. She’s actually concerned about words. “I dislike the thing.”
“There’s every reason to believe God is dead, Alan. It was as much the people that comprised it as the technology inside them, and those people are gone. What we’re seeing is just a remnant, a few random high-splice nodes talking to each other. The squid is inert, a single cell without a larger body.”
“God had a psychotic break when it realized it had overshot its climate-change fix, that half the population was gone no matter what it did. That doesn’t mean it’s dead. It just means it’s insane.”
She sniffs. “That’s a metaphor drawn from single human minds, and almost worthless.”
“You’re the one who said it was made out of people. And you can’t look at the PRA or Tinfoil or those white supremacist hacks out east and then tell me people can’t go crazy in groups.”
Silence. Boon glares at him, or maybe just at his unreasonability.
“How old are you, Boon?”
“Thirty-eight. Would you like to know my weight next?”
“I’m forty-nine,” Li says, rubbing at his eyes. “I was wearing onesies when the Spasm happened. My parents died less than a year later. My stepmom raised me on stories of watching C-SPAN and seeing most of Congress screaming incoherent apologies in unison like a madhouse choir until the government folded up and the nukes started flying, all while the readout on the office microwave kept trying to explain that this was really for the best.”
“You’ve internalized an irrational fear of science rather than a rational fear of a specific application of a specific technology.” She folds her hands, and there’s something prim in the gesture he finds exasperating. “That’s how movements like Tinfoil survive. My generation has more distance on the issue. And the theory that God had anything analogous to a psychotic break is entirely unsubstantiated.”
“So are all the other theories. Seeing as the most popular runner-up is that it got fed up halfway through saving the world and decided to kill us all, I don’t find much comfort in the alternatives.”
“True. That’s true.” She gnaws at her lip for a moment. “The squid stays. You saw how effective it was at convincing the boy, and it’s worth the risk.”
“Never seen an outbreak, have you?”
“No. But I’ve studied them. I understand the danger.”
He strips off his jacket and crawls into his bed, tucking his revolver into the bedside holster. He leaves the knife at his ankle undisturbed. No reason to call attention to it. “If you understood,” he mutters, “you wouldn’t be trying to hand the Doctor over to your government alive.”
“We’re not trying to resurrect God. Yes, the Doctor might give us certain technological advantages in the coming conflict, but we’re not so foolish as to try that.”
He turns out the oil lamp. “Nobody was trying to build God in the first place. Nobody even noticed it until the world was coming apart. And I honestly can’t believe you’re naive enough to believe half of what you’re saying. You don’t take risks with the likes of the Doctor. You shoot them.”
“Tell me, Alan, what did you feel after Burden’s Ford?”
“What do you think? I felt the insides of bottles.” He hesitates. “Guilt.” It feels wrong not to say it. “Mostly guilt.”
“Interesting, given that it wasn’t remotely your fault. It’s nice to meet a man who’s not afraid to express his feelings.”
“If I were expressing my feelings right now, you’d be in that jar with your squid.”
Quiet laughter. “You know, I don’t think I would.”
#
He dreams of tree roots he has to keep pulling up from his throat and piling on plates that are whisked away in their turn to a dining room hung with pleated fans and banners bright with the mad patriotism of a half-dozen nascent empires. With a final heave and ripple of contraction, he draws up the bulb, that choicest piece, which is served to Jackie Boon. She reclines at the head table, resplendent, attended by his friends from Burden’s Ford, both his children, and the indistinct impression of his wife, who died in childbirth long before the Doctor passed through town.
There are not enough roots to go around. This is a problem. He’s responsible for ensuring plentiful and equitable distribution of food. Already the favoritism he’s shown Jackie is causing whispers. The St. Louis prostitute shakes her head sadly. “You don’t remember at all, do you?”
Jackie holds up the bulb, letting its dangling fibers quiver and squirm like the tentacles of a terrestrial jellyfish. “It’s all right,” she says, still cheerful. She reaches for his mouth. “I can wait while we grow more. We’ll just put it back for a bit.”
He wakes screaming, clawing at his throat, gasping. Reality rushes back in, and he subsides. On the far side of the room, Boon is pretending to sleep. He lies back, shame and anxiety mingling with gratitude.
From long experience, he knows he will spend the rest of the night awake, thinking.
#
They follow the track northwest, assembling a picture of the Doctor’s final destination and intentions from the objects and currencies she takes in payment. Northwest scrip, which makes sense. A random selection of fuses and hydraulic parts, which doesn’t, not until Boon realizes that all the parts belong to a backhoe or similar piece of equipment. From there, the rest is obvious. Li long ago concluded that the Doctor wasn’t procuring her tech from overlooked warehouses, which leaves one other source: graveyards.
Reactions to their arrival run the gamut from terror to indignation to sullen apology. No former patient keeps silent upon seeing the squid, though, and Li takes this as proof that the Doctor has been underselling the danger of her cures.
Nowhere do they meet resistance. Nowhere, as far as Li’s hard evidence and sixth sense can tell, do they see any godpuppets at all. And nowhere do they discuss just what is going to happen when they catch up with the Doctor.
They cross into the Dust, following cracked and broken roads through cracked and broken land. Winter deepens with the advent of November. The rising winds spray dry grit over the windshield, graying out the windows, and they sleep in the car within a hissing cocoon of sound.
The last town on Boon’s list lies in what was once a small river valley. Now the river is a rind of frost on the ground and a few fractured panes of ice. Signs of hopeless tillage dot the landscape downstream. Glassing the town from a bluff to the east, Li considers the empty streets, the unguarded well, the broken yet unboarded windows of the pre-Spasm buildings. His teeth hurt, and a sensation not quite nausea gathers slickness in his mouth.
“Well?” Boon says beside him.
“Why do you want to find the Doctor? Personally, I mean.”
“She’s a genius. Irresponsible, obviously, but a genius. The PRA needs people like that.”
He shifts the binoculars to focus on the decaying chapel on the far side of town. “No, that’s not it.”
“What does it matter?”
“Because we can either make a detour and keep after the Doctor for king, country, and mad science, or we can take the time and risk to do the right thing here.”
To her credit, she wastes no time asking how he knows. “How many?”
“From the fields and the number of buildings in some kind of repair, I’d say about fifty.”
In the town below them, doors swing open. A small crowd gathers around the chapel. One figure steps forward, facing the church doors, and seems to offer a speech, hands moving with a strange and perfect grace.
“We’ve got survivors,” Li murmurs, lowering his voice out of reflex. “There, in the church. No way to know how many. I count forty godpuppets. You?”
“Forty-two.”
“How’s your shooting?”
“Excellent. Why? There are too many of them.”
“No. No, there aren’t.”
#
“Would you like to be saved?” the godpuppet asks as they roll into town. In life, it had been a middle-aged woman, traces of an old and practical frumpery visible in her dress and hair. As a puppet, it has a severe, drawn beauty, perhaps how the woman had always wished she could look, and little flickers of silver lick at its lips. “We have found things small and entire. There will be punch on Tuesdays—Tuesdays are lovely—and a hymn-sing.”
Boon, aiming out the rear passenger-side window, swings Li’s old Winchester 94 into line and drops the godpuppet with the first round and levers another into the chamber. Li floors the accelerator and draws a long curve of dust as the Delray slews around, aiming back the way they came. In rearview mirror miniature, a form sprawls on the ground, a question mark dotted with gray and red and the brightness of wet metal.
Then the howl goes up around them, and the pursuit begins.
Forty-two is a small outbreak. There’s no meaningful collective intelligence, nothing beyond an enhanced facility for barn-raising or maybe tug-of-war. In the sudden, mad reaction to the loss of one of their own, the godpuppets use no strategy. They just chase, strung out and reaching with hands and wire, coming into range one by one as Li finesses the accelerator.
It’s murder, pure and simple, and he can hear Boon realizing it, hear the little hesitation creep into the rhythm of her shooting, hear it creep back out as she substitutes mechanical proficiency for awareness. She counts under her breath, her voice flat. “Fifteen. Sixteen.”
And so on until she says it’s finished and Li lets the car coast to a stop.
It’s murder. The only question is whether they committed it, or the Doctor the previous month. Li has given up trying to decide.
“Can we drive back a different way?” Boon asks.
For a moment disgust floods him, and he almost tells her she can walk back to town alone, can linger by each body, can get a look at the ones that were just kids, or that were old but phasing weirdly back into a kind of youth and were still caught in the delight of it. But he sees her face and just wishes there were something, anything, they could do but what comes next.
“No,” he says softly.
Comprehension dawns, and with it revulsion. “The squids,” she mutters. Shaking hands pack the last of her ginger into her mouth. “We’ve got to kill the squids.”
Li draws his revolver. “I’ll do it.”
“We’ll do it together.”
“Keep a six-foot distance. One of those wires tags you, you’ve had it.”
She doesn’t even bother to look insulted. She just opens the door and goes to work.
#
To the survivors barricaded in the church falls the burial of the dead, as if anything in that wind-scoured wasteland could stay buried. They spill everything, say they gave the Doctor the names of a few halfway honest innkeepers and arms dealers on the Turnwell border. Li puts the odds of finding her at over fifty percent.
The town is dead. Maybe it was never alive. There are enough bicycles and dried stores for the twelve survivors to make a run south for warmer climes. On an impulse he can’t quite explain, Li gives them a half-dozen little blue pills packed in nitrogen. It’s a small fortune, an emergency fund Li liberated from a man with more bravado than situational awareness. If they can make it to Austin or El Paso or even Louisville, it will buy them a fresh start, or would, were such things more than empty fantasy.
Li and Boon sit up all night in the church, wrapped in blankets, drinking what the locals said was coffee. The wind is a long whine punctuated by creaks and pops and the rattle of detritus against glass and plywood. For all that the survivors said everyone in town was accounted for among the living or the dead, every small discontinuity of sound or trick of shadow is a godpuppet returning in rage or terror or strange lust with tendrils snapping out like tongues to unite itself with its enemies.
“Do you know what ALS is?” Boon asks.
“Lou Gehrig’s disease. Motor neuron disorder. Degenerative.”
“Yes.”
Silence.
Li coughs. “You still shoot pretty straight.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t tell me that.”
“Does the PRA know?”
“No. I’ve been careful. And the diagnosis is less than six months old.”
So that’s why she’s after the Doctor. He imagines brightness growing in Boon’s eyes, hears her spouting cheery inanities as the chips in her brain rebuild her body’s cellular machinery to cast silver paths for signals beyond all hope of human reckoning. A sudden picture, stark in the shuddering light of an atomic detonation, of her mouth opening to kiss him and spilling wires past his lips, down his throat, setting them to turn and quest in the very core of him.
But he also sees her stumbling, then bedridden, unable to chew or swallow or draw a full breath. Clear eyes in a slack face, the sick one-way awareness of them, their life peering up out of a dead body.
“You think the Doctor can save you?”
“I think I have a ninety percent chance. That’s not so bad. And if it goes wrong. . . .” She smiles in the darkness. “I didn’t bring you along because I need protection, or a conscience, or your attempts to analyze something I’ve spent my whole life studying.”
Light grows in the windows. The rising sun is a pale, heatless eye. Li finds his voice, finds himself speaking without thought or effort. The words spill down, fluid and unstoppable. “There were fifty of us outside Burden’s Ford when it happened. We were out clearing a lock downriver when people started turning, and we didn’t know. We came home, and there were our friends, our families waiting for us. They didn’t sound right, didn’t move right. I could see it wasn’t really them, sense it wasn’t really them, and then the others couldn’t deny it anymore. . . . A couple of us got to the armory, and then we won free to the river. But there were six hundred and twenty-four of them. Enough for some cleverness. Some tricks. They started talking in their old voices. Showing off memories. It was so clear, so perfectly clear that everyone we loved was still in there, in a way.
“All twisted up, though. I heard Shengzhi’s daughter telling him the story of her own birth like she remembered it. Maybe she did, or God did; it had her mother, too, so maybe that’s where it got the details. And my sons were there.”
This is the detail he hasn’t told anyone, the little crook in the story that warps it from tragedy into something small and cowardly and not even piteous. Boon’s eyes are bright but unreadable, fixed.
“Shengzhi and I traded. You understand? We all traded. We would’ve worked it out on the back of a napkin if we’d had enough time, because they were crossing the river, all those friends and relations, and it was complicated. Thirty-seven of us left with hunting rifles and shotguns on the bank, and the town burning, and the full moon showing us just what we were doing, what we were allowing. We murdered each other’s wives, husbands, lovers, kids, parents.
“The heroes of Burden’s Ford. That’s what three governments called us. So there’s my credential. There’s my expertise. I can kill my friends. Most of the others killed themselves, too, sooner or later. There. Was it better than reading my résumé?”
Her voice is just above a whisper. “It shows I was right.”
“Yeah?”
“I can trust you to do what’s necessary if something goes wrong. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. All that blood on your hands—what difference, in the end, would mine make?”
A bar of sunlight eases into being in the dust of the old church.
“Then there’s the matter of your self-loathing,” she adds, softly. “I don’t know why, but I’m almost sure that it means something.”
As if from very far away, Li remembers that the Methodists served punch on Tuesdays in this very church, that it was someone’s favorite night of the week because her mother seemed to come alive in a mad whirl of activity involving casseroles and elaborate social networks and keeping the swarm of self-righteous do-gooders from quashing what was really a surprisingly good time. Nights like a bright string of pearls in a dim and abortive childhood, clutched long into the Spasm and the coming of the Dust.
#
The town of Mercy stands on the western edge of the Dust in territory nominally Turnwell’s and practically the domain of anyone who can coax life from it. News comes over the shortwave that the PRA has declared war on Dixie and is pushing northeast. St. Louis has expelled the PRA embassy staff. In Louisville, the radio says, PRA diplomats are strung from lamp posts.
It’s easy, in the end, and almost disappointing. Boon asks the townsfolk a few pointed questions, greases a few palms. Li gets the right man drunk enough to talk, then he gets himself drunk enough to feel nothing for a while. He wakes wrapped around a woman whose name he can’t remember.
“Where were you when it happened?” he asks. In daylight, she seems gaunt. Her ribs show, and the sharp curve of her hip bones.
A small, sleepy noise and a rank wash of morning breath. “How old do you think I am, mister?”
He checks his eyes and mouth in the mirror. When the girl sees what he’s doing, she looks more confused than afraid. He finds nothing. Just a dirty mirror giving back a tired, windburned face.
He finds Boon waiting downstairs. She looks as ragged as he feels, and he wonders how she coped with her own uncertainties. “I have the backhoe seller,” she says.
Li slaps a hand-drawn map down on the table. “I have the graveyard.”
#
Doctor Amelie Bourreau does not turn when they enter the cemetery. She zips the body bag closed on something nearly unrecognizable, stretches, and sheds her hat. A few strands of iron-gray hair float in the wind. The ancient backhoe stands beside the row of exhumed graves, all awkward angles and flaking yellow paint.
“The puzzle,” she tells the bag in a light Creole accent, “is the people who do not change. Of course, there are no such people. Before the Spasm, there were notions of selective infection, as if the choice could precede the means of making it. And now, Alan, you treat infection as a random event: a roll of the dice, I believe, is your preferred metaphor.”
Li watches her, watches Boon watch her, feels Boon watching him right back. A complex triad of attention and indifference. “Doctor,” he says, unable to think of anything else. The rage he should be feeling is nowhere to be found. Burden’s Ford plays out in his mind, but the memories are faraway, drained of color and vitality.
The Doctor ignores him. “Tell me, Jackie, why you think my otherwise excellent implementation of a strong encryption system began to deteriorate? Surely you noticed the sudden appearance of cribs, repeated settings, and other errors?”
“I noticed,” Boon murmurs, staring at the Doctor with something between hope and desperation, her face that of a woman seeing home after years at sea, or seeing it burn. “I wasn’t sure what it meant.”
“It meant I wanted to meet you. And him? What have you noticed about Alan Li?”
“He’s good at killing godpuppets. They’re bad at killing him.”
“And isn’t that odd?”
Li finds his voice again. “We’re here to take you back to Austin.”
“No, I don’t believe so. You’re here to kill me. Jackie is here for my help.” A pause. “I’m unsure either of you will get what you want, I’m afraid.” She tucks something metallic into a satchel at her feet. A pacemaker, or a high-splice neural sync. “Come along. We have much to discuss. And we’ll need a razor, I’m afraid.”
Jackie’s come a long way for meatball surgery. “Not a scalpel? Standards are slipping.”
The Doctor crooks an eyebrow. “For a haircut, Alan? If you insist.”
The moment is tilting, sliding out of control. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. He holds up a pair of handcuffs, trying to recover some trace of equilibrium. “How about we start with these?”
The Doctor smiles beatifically. “If it makes you feel better.”
“It does.”
It doesn’t. It really doesn’t.
#
His protests amount to nothing before the Doctor’s cool persuasion, and Jackie Boon shaves his head in the upstairs room where the sheets still need changing. He watches in the same mirror he used that morning to check his eyes, his gums, to keep his uncertainty at bay. The outline of his head changes by degrees in the mirror as she trades scissors for straight razor, working with calm, steady hands.
From the chair in the far corner, the Doctor speaks: “I was fifteen at the Spasm. Eighteen when a GP and a neurosurgeon took me to apprentice. I took excellent notes on all our cases, I’m proud to say. Of particular note was a male child, age four, Chinese and mixed northern European ancestry, otherwise healthy, who presented with myoclonic seizures. Having ruled out febrile seizures and a handful of other possibilities, my teachers diagnosed him as epileptic, which means less than most laymen think; there are a host of possible underlying causes, most of them treatable only via high-splice or surgeries which are, regrettably, no longer possible.”
A bit of hair has gotten into Li’s nose. It itches. The inside of his head itches too, horribly, as if something is squirming within his skull. His heart pounds. Boon runs a rag through the sweat on his brow.
“We fitted him with a high-splice implant, admittedly an ethically questionable decision, but he showed no signs of mania or physical conversion. The seizures simply stopped.”
A pause in the scrape of the razor. Resumption. He can feel a faint tremor through the blade, and warmth flows down from just above his left ear.
“Now we come to a man who, by all accounts, has an uncanny aptitude for identifying godpuppets and, as they say, a knack for killing them. And around him, they develop a peculiar ineptitude. Why might that be, Alan?”
His tongue feels like lead. “They want what’s in my brain. It’s why that one didn’t take the headshot all those years ago. They want my memories, or something I can do.”
“Ego.” The Doctor sighs. “Yours is exceptional. No, Alan, I can assure you that God neither wants nor needs your memories.”
Boon wipes away the blood and presses his shoulder until he turns and leans toward the mirror.
The scar is faint, long-faded, a slim arc two inches above his ear punctuated by four small circles of roughened tissue. How many times did he comb his hair and not feel it? Did his wife ever trace the outline and hesitate while he remained oblivious?
“God already has your memories, Alan. I imagine you have a few of its. What it wants from you is more . . . complicated. The difficulty is that God’s mind is the sum of so many beliefs, so many networked associations of things, that it functions rather like a language. And language functions like the unconscious. Fundamental drives surfacing as signs, signs refigured as fundamental drives. Do you see?”
“No.”
“Eros and thanatos: the motions toward life and death. So many of the people who make up the mind of God are no more than unstructured open space, a bulk of mental critical mass—today, subcritical mass. Parts of an unconscious, if you will, that holds echoes of the former being but could so easily be otherwise. And you, Alan, are the part of God that wants to die.”
Jackie is still standing behind him, stock-still. “You’re bringing it back,” she whispers.
“In a more controlled fashion, yes. I am, if you will, building from scratch, selecting minds which contain qualities conducive to humanity’s long-term survival. I make mistakes now and then, and a mind grows . . . assertive, rather than phasing smoothly, unconsciously, into greater alignment with the others. I know the problems that accompany these outbreaks of higher function. They are worth the eventual benefits. In time, I expect to achieve critical mass, and God, or a more stable variation, will have a second chance. This will not be a God of elites. This will be a God of the people. The side effects should be mild.”
“That’s insane,” Li snaps. “Look what it did the first time. Look what happens when it starts growing your ‘higher functions.’ It kills people.”
“Only in self-defense.”
“It . . . takes people over.”
A soft laugh. “The word is ‘assimilates.’ I suppose I know why no one likes to use it, even though it’s been half a century since anyone has watched an episode of Star Trek. No one likes to feel ridiculous. And no one wants to wonder if people are really better off afterward—or if they even know the difference.”
His gun is in his hand, the front sight a black cutout over the Doctor’s left eye. “I am not a part of God.”
“Are you sure?”
Cool pressure at his throat. The razor. “Wait, Alan,” Boon says. “Hear her out.”
“Why should I? She’s lost it.”
“She’s not the only one.” She takes a deep breath, lets it out. “How long until God could oppose the PRA?”
The Doctor shrugs. “Years.”
Li keeps the revolver aimed. He can feel a little creak in the trigger, and his volume is rising. “Listen to yourselves. Boon, you’ve seen it. Seen what an outbreak looks like, what people have to do. People like us, cleaning up the mess. Have you seen it, Doctor?” He’s shouting now, and someone downstairs thumps the ceiling. The razor scrapes pain along the side of his neck. He ignores it. “Seen the kids with wires hanging out of their mouths? Heard people talking in each other’s voices?”
“I would have,” the Doctor says softly, “and I would have gone a long way toward mitigating outbreaks early if people like you weren’t chasing me.”
Silence. Li gropes for a refutation that isn’t there. What would Burden’s Ford have looked like with the Doctor still there, waiting by the patient’s bedside with a humane killer? A single shot, a single shattered family. A kind of containment possible only outside the world he has so labored since to create.
Slowly, he lowers the revolver. Boon takes the razor from his throat. “They’re pushing north,” Boon tells the Doctor, relaxing. “The PRA intends to drive all the way to the Dakotas. It will take a few months, but they can do it. They’re after the nuclear stockpiles. With the intel they’ve collected over the last few years, and the new computers, they’ll be able to break into the warehouses and reactivate the non-deployable warheads. In two years, there will be an armed nuclear weapon hidden in every port city in the world. Then there will be a demonstration and a list of demands. I assume this is as unacceptable to you as it is to me?”
The Doctor considers for a moment. “It depends on what percentage of the PRA upper leadership might find itself in need of specialized medical care in the coming years.”
“Nukes,” Li says, leaning into the word. “Nuclear warheads, Boon. You can’t be serious about trusting God with those.”
“I don’t trust people with them,” Boon says. “Not the ones I know.”
“Is this what you wanted all along?” he asks. “Are you even sick?”
“I wasn’t sure. And yes, I really am sick.” At the Doctor’s questioning look, she adds, “ALS. Very early stages.”
The Doctor nods. “I supposed it was something along those lines. I can treat that.”
A long sigh from Boon. Li stares, trying to read the decision in her eyes. “You’re insane. Both of you.”
“Now, Alan. God tried to fix the world, made a mistake, and collapsed with the guilt of it. To me, that sounds human—perhaps even what is best about humanity, for all that it reflects regrettable underlying instabilities and assumptions. Can you say the same for the PRA? Turnwell? Tinfoil?” She rattles her handcuffs. “Survivors in the Carolinas attempted to revive black slavery. Can you imagine God doing that?”
“No. I guess I can’t.”
“God has been borrowing your mind for almost your entire life, Alan, and vice versa. Do you feel worse for it? Do you feel your individuality diminished? Do you feel coerced as you would living within the borders of the PRA, or strapped down on a Tinfoil pyre because some zealot mistook your wristwatch for witchcraft? Jackie here rose to the upper echelons of the PRA, and her plan, regardless of what happens here, is to defect to Turnwell, isn’t it? And how much better, Jackie, do you think the devil you don’t know will treat you?
The doctor pauses, studies them, evaluation turning behind her eyes. “We have a chance to make a better world. Do you know how many enemies I’ve made into allies over the years? You’re not the first to be offered this choice. You wouldn’t be the first to accept it. I need an engineer and a wetworks man. We can do better this time. Jackie, Alan—all it requires is a small extension of faith.”
“Then start small,” Boon says. “Fix me. Cure me, and we’ll talk.”
Li says nothing at all.
#
Only when Boon is unconscious and the air cool with the sweet smell of ether does Li free both of the Doctor’s hands. “I’m leaving a scalpel on the tray,” he says. “I don’t have to tell you what happens if you abuse it.”
“But of course.” With neat, practiced motions, she arranges the various needful things beside the patient, culminating in a small metal cylinder trailing short leads. “This moment is a test, you realize, yes?”
“I figured. Not sure what for.”
“You’re the part of God that wants to die. The surest way to accomplish that would be to kill me. Of course, if you follow that impulse, you might not be acting freely at all. If you resist it, you prove to yourself that your freedom can coexist with your role. A reconciliation, theologically long-overdue, of God and free will.”
“So I have to let you live to prove I’m not afraid of God, do I?”
“I do believe the point, Alan, is that you don’t have to do anything at all.” The scalpel traces a red line at the nape of Boon’s neck. “Including take a risk you allegedly believe, deep in your heart of hearts, to be both selfish and foolish. I am even inclined to think that, by permitting this operation, you’ve already made your decision, just as by placing my life in your hands I’ve made mine. Well?”
“How long will the operation take?”
“Two hours.”
“Then I guess I have two hours to think it over.”
#
The first thing Boon asks when she wakes is whether she might have a drink of water. The second is where Li buried the Doctor.
“In one of the graves she opened. I smashed all her other gadgets, too, just to be sure.”
She’s still shivering from the anesthesia, the tremors a mockery of what might have been. “I should be angry.”
“No. We both know you made your choice the minute you breathed that ether. Otherwise, you’d have cut my throat first. What convinced you?”
She shrugged. “I can sympathize with wanting to fix the world. But she picked dangerous tools.”
“So now you come around.”
“Not God. The PRA. Those people. Everything she said, and she was still going to let them back in. What about you? You hesitated.” She touches the surgical gauze at the nape of her neck. “You let her do it. I wasn’t sure you would.”
“I guess I decided I’m still human. That the risk of an outbreak is minimal if there’s someone able to stay, someone who knows what they’re doing, what to look for. She was right about that: If we hadn’t been chasing her all these years, a lot of outbreaks never would have happened. I might even have let her live, let her go if she’d just been taking mad risks to save people. But I don’t think she cared about the people at all. Not anymore, not as patients or human beings. It’s why she lied to them. It’s all about God and better worlds. And aside from that, everything she said might have been completely nuts.”
The sun is setting, the grimy windowpanes transfigured into sheets of light. Downstairs, men and women are beginning to sing, drunk on fermented cassava-plus and the knowledge that life goes on, at least for a while. Forty-nine doesn’t seem so old now. There are still choices left, and enough time for them to matter.
“I have a nine-in-ten chance,” Boon says. “That’s better than most people get.”
Li nods.
“You’ll come with me? For a few weeks, at least. We can go west, get to Seattle, take a ship anywhere.”
He studies her eyes, the calm intelligence behind them, the trace of doubt. The future history already written there of a lifetime spent peering into mirrors for fine silver flecks in the iris, for bleeding around the gums. The nightmares that he is now convinced might not belong to anyone in particular. He wonders what form they will take for her.
“We’ll watch each other,” he says.
“Yes. And when we’re in the middle of the Pacific, we’re throwing the squid overboard.”
Li lets himself smile. “I know that too.”
“What are we going to do about the PRA?”
To that, and to the questions behind it, he has only the beginnings of an answer.
The next morning, he sells his Delray to a man with more cash than sense and buys two bicycles with trailers. By noon, they are riding west into a gentle fall of snow while the world behind them fades into subtle, sloping shapes, all of them gray.
~~~
Thanatos Drive was originally published in Writers of the Future, Volume 35.
