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…”
