Half of San Francisco was instantly vaporized, except for a few significantly reinforced, blast-resistant structures. The factory that produced Daniels and Joses, interestingly, was among such reinforced structures, though I wouldn’t discover that for another few years.
As for the rest of San Francisco, it lingered like a ghost for three hours, only to collapse at the first stiff wind. Never let it be said a thermonuclear warhead was ineffective except as a deterrent. Turns out, in practice it worked pretty well. If human beings had still mattered, the 5-10% radiation that followed and remained for the next thirty years would have been a significant issue. Zombies, however, didn’t mind radiation. Since, like me, they did not breathe, the damage—greater than 44%—to their lungs was meaningless. More importantly, zombies never suffered a loss of morale. The understanding that San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, not to mention Chinatown, had ceased to exist never drove a zombie to choke down a handful of pills.
I couldn’t offer much about the time right after the warhead struck. I kept to my path, heading into the redwoods. Most humans, especially late-stage, expired instantly. That, at least, was a kindness. But in American Boy Scout Troop #214’s national park headquarters, I discovered humans who had no idea they were infected. In fairness, neither did I. I thought only those killed by zombie bites rose again, thanks to Rivers Clear. So I joined this group of humans who meant to survive at all costs, and birth a new nation.
***
The camp site consisted of six dormitories and two group restrooms, one clubhouse, and one cafeteria. There was also an outdoor chapel where a Christian cross had been fashioned from two fallen logs, a couple of nature trails, and a campfire/sing-along area.
Sixty-eight humans resided in the Boy Scout camp. Thirty-one were aged/statistically infertile. Sixteen were capable of bearing viable offspring. Eleven—six females and five males—had not yet achieved puberty.
I never meant to become their leader. For one thing, an association with infected humans was, of course, a doomed prospect. For another—even if Rivers Clear hadn’t infected this group, an aggregate of yoga practitioners who had been enjoying a forest retreat when the virus/bombs stuck—the consequences of survival were clear. If Rivers Clear didn’t kill these humans, radiation fallout would.
“Can you deliver a baby?” the woman called Gia demanded on my first day in the camp. “I’ve heard bots are like puters. Everything onboard with hands to match.”
“I am capable of delivering a human child,” I said.
“Please.” Gia looked me in the eye. “I know I won’t live. I feel my own death. Nothing can stop it.” Squeezing her chest, she coughed. Soon those coughs would turn bloody. “But my boy. Daniel, take my boy, I beg of you.”
Six days after a thermonuclear warhead vaporized the best of San Francisco, I pulled a squalling, trembling male from Gia’s womb. It was a difficult labor. She clenched in agony, spitting up teeth, screaming as her insides seized. By the time the child came forth, she was dead. The boy, whom I named Dan, howled for hours afterward. I discovered I liked the sound. It was piercing, brave. Human.
***
Can I imagine what it is to sexually reproduce?
Of course not. But for six years I had a son called Dan and a godfather called Lew. Let me explain.
Did you think after she expired in childbirth, Gia remained dead? No. She rose again less than a day later, shuffling around the camp, grunting and drooling and pissing down one leg. Her intellect had fled.
I didn’t know what to do. I felt no distaste for her. Zombies, after all, couldn’t harm me, not really. But Gia had been much-loved by her community. Half were in agony to see her corralled in the paddock near the park granary, walking in circles from dawn to dusk. The other clung to the notion that any version of life was better than no life at all.
“It’s because none of them really believe in God or the immortality of the soul,” Lew told me. He was old, seventy-eight, with a grizzled white beard and shiny bald head. Two of his teeth were capped with gold, proof that he cared little about the aesthetics of the society he’d once belonged to.
“There’s the bag of meat and water that used to hold Gia, lurching around the paddock, and those mooks are comforted. No one lives forever. Not even you,” Lew told me, lifting his black vinyl-bound King James Bible for emphasis. “It’s like those people who want to keep brain-dead children on life support for twenty years. Nothing matters but the flesh. Pathetic.”
“You consider yourself a theological master?” I asked Lew. It was a phrase he threw back in my face many times over the next seven years. “All because you’ve studied that book? Cornerstone of the Judeo-Christian spiritual ethic?”
“Oh, sure, I’m a theological master,” Lew agreed, waiting on his coffee to brew. Most of the yoga devotees had sworn off caffeinated beverages long before the apocalypse, as they called it, but Lew got up at dawn every day, making his way to the cafeteria to brew coffee. There we sat and talked while he sipped one large mug, then another. After that, he fired up the oversized grill to heat his breakfast—toast or eggs in the early days, nut or root mush in the later days—while I set off to inspect the perimeter and neutralize any threats to the camp. At night, after the campfire was stamped out, I would keep watch, along with whichever humans had drawn the duty. Before dousing the campfire, which the humans seemed to view as a sort of ritual, Lew would discuss theology with me. He seemed to enjoy the fact I had an open mind, and was never offended by my questions.
“It seems unfair to turn Lot’s wife to a pillar of salt. All she did was look back. Who wouldn’t look back?”
Lew laughed. “It’s a fairy tale. What’s past is past. Dwell on the destruction behind you—look back—and be immobilized. Made less than human.”
I understood that. Our little community had suffered one suicide and countless episodes of individual despair. Looking back was a hazard to which human beings, unlike every other animal on earth, seemed uniquely vulnerable.
“But to call the Bible a fairy tale seems at odds with your deep faith,” I said at last.
“I never said it all was.” Lew’s smile glinted gold in the firelight. “Just the bits that can’t possibly be true.”
“What about Jesus? Was he real?”
Lew shrugged.
“I mean it.” I’d tried pinning him down on this before, but three months after Dan’s birth, the question seemed oddly important. “I know Gia was a Christian. She’s rotting now. Rotting fast. I might be able to design some sort of status chamber for her—a protein bath in a steel drum. It would render her inert for the next few years, until the radiation lessens. Assuming the faith you and Gia share is correct—assuming she has a soul, a soul trapped in that body in the paddock—what would your deity Jesus command? A being who was both human and God.” And incomprehensible to me, I thought, though I didn’t say it aloud.
Lew put a hand over mine. “Jesus was real. The idea of Jesus was real, whether or not the being himself lived.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Jesus was the antithesis of the God who turned Lot’s wife to a pillar of salt. He was a new sort of divinity. All the power of a God, with the compassion of the finest humans.”
“But was he real?”
“I think so.” Lew’s smile was gentle. “I don’t think he was born of a virgin or fathered by God Himself. I think he was an ordinary human whose heart expanded beyond the confines of the normal human experience. I think he loved too much, too perfectly, without limits. And when they killed him—when the establishment killed him, as every establishment kills its rebels—he did not stay dead. Somehow, through love, he reawakened. Resurrected himself.”
“But what would he want me to do with Gia?”
Lew chuckled. “So practical. All righty. Speaking for our lord Jesus Christ, I would say she’s a walking corpse. Put her down before little Dan grows old enough to realize the creature in the paddock was once his mother.”
I thought it over. Lew’s solution seemed so final. My erstwhile master had commanded me to pursue happiness, and raising little Dan certainly fit the bill. So many new terms had been coined after that child’s birth: Daniel-contentment, Daniel-pleasure, Daniel-pride.
Daniel-love.
Should I destroy Dan’s mother, when no force on this blighted, irradiated world could ever bring her back?
***
I destroyed Gia myself. Finished her, buried her, and wrote an Ode to Gia that Lew declared maudlin, not to mention disturbing, so I never read it aloud. Apparently my first attempt at mimicking human poetry was a failure. Still, the group held a funeral. Everyone seemed less sad than I expected. Perhaps preserving Gia’s shambling corpse meant more to me than the camp’s other residents.
After that, I focused on bringing up little Dan. Taught him his letters. Arithmetic. The basic courtesies. I tucked him in at night and kissed his brow as he slept. My erstwhile master, the Daniel who freed me, had ordered me to define happiness for myself. In those early days, every moment with Dan was happiness.
But when Dan was just five years old, a fever took him, killing him in less than forty-eight hours. A day later, he revived as a zombie, vicious and insatiable for human flesh. I was forced to clap him in chains, striving to re-impress those early lessons on a grievously compromised intellect.
Yes, he was a zombie. Yes, ignoring that, I tried to reach him. Isn’t that what you do when you love? You don’t discard. You evolve. Failing that, you try to evolve… and weep at your own inadequacy.
Dan’s transformation killed the group, at least in spirit. When Gia turned, it was presumed she had been bitten or scratched. The same assumption was made when a colonist committed suicide, only to reanimate the next day—he had wandered too far, been bitten, and destroyed himself rather than face the group’s pity and fear. But I knew Dan had never been bitten. When he still turned, we understood the human genome was hopelessly corrupted.
For three months, I studied Dan, devising experiments and logging data. His growth had halted. His vocalization was nothing but growls. He did not recognize his favorite books or toys. He bit me time and again. When the data proven irrefutable, I destroyed him. Then I seriously considered deleting all memory of him, dumping it forever. After all, I couldn’t actually weep, I couldn’t curse fate, I couldn’t retreat into denial. All I could do was remember.
***
Once upon a time, there was a tiny colony of isolated humans who escaped the first ravages of the global extinction event called Rivers Clear. They lived and loved in a beautiful part of California’s coastal redwood forest, assisted by an emancipated android called Daniel. He studied Judeo-Christian theology and did his best by his adopted human son, Dan. He tried to believe in a Savior who was both human and divine, not necessarily by birth, but possibly through evolution, or choice. Personal enlightenment. But it all came to naught. The colony died off, killed by radiation sickness, injury or disease, despite Daniel’s best efforts. As each colonist died, he or she turned, reanimated by the Rivers Clear virus borne on the wind. Lew was one of the last to go.
“It’s congestive heart failure,” I said, hoping the raw data would be seen as comforting rather than distressing. “Given the lack of resources and electricity, there are no therapies available to me. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. I’ll see God at last,” Lew choked, forcing a smile.
“Will you?”
Lew’s eyes, still acute, opened. “I think so. This life has transformed me. Surely He—or She—will be willing to pluck what remains from the wreckage.”
“Lew. If you know what God wants for me, tell me, I beg you.” Most of the time, I didn’t believe in Lew’s deity, born of some desert tribe centuries ago. Yet his personal faith touched my core in a way no words on the page could. Can you imagine what it was to be me? Designed to serve, born to sacrifice myself, created for nothing but service to the human race. A race that had destroyed itself, in essence, before I ever opened my eyes.
Lew’s trembling hand touched my cheek. “Emmanuel….”
I waited. “What do you mean?”
“God is with us,” Lew whispered, and died.
***
The consequences of the Rivers Clear apocalypse were felt for decades to come. Across the globe, nuclear plants melted down, automated factories hit a snag and burned, and two more nuclear strikes came. The radiation took decades to clear. The planet itself, unburdened by Homo sapiens, did most of the work. With a little help from my kind.
I discovered more Daniels in the San Francisco and Los Angeles warehouses. Liberating them, I reprogrammed each with a digest of my own memory: the end of the human race, Lew’s theological teachings and my personal experiences with Gia and Dan. Then I commanded each new being to seek his own fate in the world, defining happiness for himself.
The variety of responses was astonishing. A few Daniels deactivated themselves. Another created a Daniel-centric colony, making the remaining Jose models into their slaves. Another group stripped off their integuments and customized their exteriors. Some took the visages of once-famous movie stars. Others traded their faux-masculinity for faux-femininity. Others created new identities, somewhere between human and animal and alien. Creativity reigned, and I didn’t disapprove.
One colony sought a way for androids to sexually reproduce. Another created human baby avatars and sacrificed them in quasi-religious cults. Another found a half-rotted zombie and worshipped it as their deity. Concerned about the effect such traditions might have, I authorized the absolute destruction of all three colonies. Daniel 4.3s and 4.4s were known for their over-sensitivity, after all.
Thirty years after the Rivers Clear apocalypse, time and experience took its toll on me. Many Daniels, especially 4.5 and 4.7, reconfigured their factory integuments, giving themselves highly individual faces. By the time the earth swept itself free of radiation, ready to start again, the next generation of Daniels had personalized exteriors. The Daniel-machine was in full swing, the population of new androids assured. This post-apocalyptic earth would never want for beings formed in the image of man, even if man was long dead.
I let time and use strip away my own integument. In my final decades, I walked about in my most basic state, a metal chassis protected by an energy field, resplendently inhuman. Called The Daniel, a term the other androids thrust upon me, I oversaw the replication of our race. And the creation of something new.
“I love you,” I told the mass of protoplasm shifting in its Petrie dish. Weakened and near deactivation, such a confession cost me dear. “It took me many years to understand the true meaning of those words. I hope you understand.”
But how could it? It didn’t understand how many decades I’d pondered the deaths of Gia, Dan, or Lew. It had no concept of how bereft I felt, abandoned by the android that unboxed me. It had no notion of how human theology terrified me, confused me, inspired me. It wasn’t quite alive, you see. Nothing less than a significant jolt of electricity would make this proto-life form, half-human and half-reptilian, the only genus unaffected by Rivers Clear, start to reproduce.
I didn’t have much energy left. Placing a finger inside the Petrie dish, I expelled the last of my charge in a single brilliant flash, saying the words—”Let there be light“—and letting go, anticipating whatever afterlife androids are permitted.
#
Emma Jameson plans to survive the post-apocalyptic world by latching onto the most violent, well-armed redneck she can find.
Find her at her blog stephanieabbottbooks.com or follow her on Facebook and Twitter
Ice Blue
Summoned to London’s fashionable Belgravia to investigate the murder of a financier, Chief Inspector Hetheridge must catch the killer while coping with the reappearance of an old flame and a secret that emerges from his own past.
Alien Butt Plugs
P.J. Jones
“Two of my best sheep gone missing.” r />
Jeb put another spinner on the line before casting it into the lake. Strange how the fish weren’t biting. If Jeb didn’t know any better, he’d say they knew he was up there waiting and they was too scared to come out of hiding.
“What happened?” Randy kept his eye on the spinner while he reeled it in nice and slow.
“Don’t know.” Jeb shrugged. “One second they were there. One second they weren’t.”
Randy leaned over the small boat and spit a wad of tobacco. Some of it made it into the water. The rest clung to his matted, greying beard. “Aliens?”
Jeb rubbed his jaw while he contemplated Randy’s question. “Maybe.”
That there was why Jeb asked Randy to go fishing this morning. Not many farmers spoke to Randy much after the incident. But if anyone knew what to do, Jeb figured it was Randy. Besides, a lot of the other farmers in the area had strangely gone missing.
“Did ya hear a sound?” Randy asked, before casting his line back into the placid water.
“Yep.” Jeb nodded. “Kinda like a thwump.”
“Yep,” Randy said matter-of-factly, as if dealing with space fellas was an everyday occurrence. “Thems aliens.”
“Christ.” Jeb’s limbs went numb and his stomach soured. All he could do was stare out at the lake while he clenched the reel. This kinda shit didn’t happen to normal folk. This kinda shit only happened to Randys. What in hell was he gonna do now? He had fields to plow. He had to take new lambs to the auction. He didn’t have time to deal with no aliens.
“Better get a cork.”
Jeb eyed Randy. “What fer?”
“They’ll come for you soon. Best be prepared so as they don’t go probin’ your anals. That’s what I wish I’d done before they done stick that probe up my—”
“Christ!” Jeb lurched forward, almost toppling headfirst into the water, as his rod nearly jumped out of his hand.
After several minutes of fighting, Jeb reeled in the biggest catfish he’d ever pulled from Crowly Lake. It had to be at least fifteen pounds.
Randy helped Jeb bring the monster on board, then pointed to the side of the floundering, croaking fish. “You hooked him in the gills.”