Animal Theater
Stories of the Second Civil War
Benjamin Broke
Copyright 2014 Benjamin Broke
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Contents:
THE HAUNTED HEAD
When a soldier records a mysterious signal and then dies suddenly, Nelly Reills has to figure out what happened before the enemy strikes.
DEATH SPIRAL
A woman tries to keep her daughter from being forcibly enrolled in a Christian Nationalist Party school.
LEDA AND THE SWAN
Tully would do anything to rescue a priceless work of modern art from Civil War America, including smuggling in large quantities of a new designer drug.
EXCHANGE RATE
An alternative media figure feels the walls closing in and must fight for the ideals she stands for on her show.
SHOPKEEPER’S DAUGHTER
Sir Karl is up for a promotion, all he has to do is kill an innocent person.
THEORETICAL SUBSTANCES
An official CNP report on some very strange experiments going on in a research lab in Pittsburgh.
NUTRIENT SLOP
A militiaman is chosen for a special mission, but when things go wrong can he trust his superior officers to do the right thing?
FULL EMPLOYMENT IN AMERICA
A radical proposal to end unemployment and repair our economy.
FREE SOUP
When a homeless man and a young girl go to a soup kitchen run by a UFO cult, they find out that there’s really no such thing as free soup.
THE MANY ITERATIONS OF KENDRA DIXON
A brain surgery reveals the true nature of time to Kendra Dixon and allows her to freely roam all possible versions of her life.
FOUNDING FATHERS
An increasingly desperate school teacher tries to locate a missing student.
THE ACCOMPANIST
In a nightclub in what’s left of Las Vegas, he plays piano for a singer named Carrie Masters, but the piano isn’t the only thing getting played.
ANNIHILATING THE PAST
An interview with the man who permanently erased the line between entertainment and brainwashing.
GLITCH X 7
When a nanotech attack destroys the town of Conifer, Washington, Gabriel Marte is the only man left alive.
THE FLOATING ORPHAN OF RAINBOW RIDGE
A new bio-weapon has the town of Rainbow Ridge under military quarantine, but some members of the community have no intention of waiting around to die.
FOR THE FUTURE
A wounded veteran finds a group of likeminded people with plans to change the world.
THE ABUELITAS
The future of Pacifica hinges on an election, the election hinges on an endorsement, and the endorsement hinges on a favor -what could be more simple than a favor?
CAT FANCY
A young man investigates the theory that a major corporation is putting people-meat in its cat food.
INOCULATION STORY
The Conglominatrix Financial Group is investing heavily in a young filmmaker, but before he takes their money he wants to know what they’re getting out of the deal.
THE MARIONETTES
After two friends are liberated from prison, their plans to get to California are complicated by suspicion and fear.
About Benjamin Broke
Also By Benjamin Broke
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The Haunted Head
Sir Karl came into the mess waving his small-screen in Nelly’s face. “I got proof.” He said. “This morning before dawn I found the signal again and this time I recorded it. I got ninety six seconds of it before it jumped frequencies.”
“Is the source local?” She asked.
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
“Send it to me.” She said. “I’ll look at it today.”
“You think the buttons are tracking the unit somehow?” He asked.
“I don’t know. That’s why we set up the scanners, it wasn’t just to pick up the Mexican porn channels. Get some sleep soldier, you look like you could use it. I’ll let you know what I find out.” Nelly went back to her breakfast, wondering why they assigned non-tech personnel to the scanners. Her tech-crew probably needed their beauty-rest. She’d have to have give them the discipline talk again. Sir Karl was a Subcomandante so he outranked most of the dipshits whose job he was doing.
After drills Nelly made her way to the tech tent and transported Sir Karl’s Pick Axe to her big-screen and ran a standard analysis. She assumed it would be some kind of garbage signal produced by space junk or a solar flare, but no, the signal he’d recorded contained a lot of information. Deciphering that information was another thing. She worked through lunch and into evening and had only gotten as far as identifying it as a Well-Armed Militia code.
She took a break for dinner and found Sir Karl sitting with his crew, eating heaping forkfuls of rehydrated chicken and rice. Nelly sat down with the boys and told Sir Karl that he’d done well. “It’s an enemy transmission alright, and it’s coming from this camp. Stumbling on that signal might’ve saved all our asses. I thought you’d like to know. If we can figure out where it’s coming from I’ll put your name in for commendation.” His friends clapped for him and slapped him on the back. “My crew would just love to see a Subcomandante get a tech commendation.”
Sir Karl laughed, but then winced as if the laughter had caused him pain. One of his crew asked if he was okay. “Yeah,” he said, “I just got a splitting headache. It came on all of a sudden.” He rubbed his head. “Jesus, it’s bad.”
“Maybe you should go to the medic.” Nelly said.
He squinted at her. “Yeah,” he said. He got to his feet and staggered partway across the mess before falling. He was in spasms, shaking violently on the ground as Nelly and the others at the table rushed to him. He was hacking up blood and phlegm from his nose and mouth, and Nelly saw blood coming from his ears. She looked around and didn’t see anyone who outranked her, so she told everyone to clear the mess tent. If he was bleeding out from some kind of Ebola he could’ve already infected everyone there.
The medics put on protective gear and went into the mess. They weren’t in there very long. The medical crew took the twelve people who had been there to the med tent and told them to sit and not talk to each other or touch anything in case they were infected with whatever Sir Karl had.
Outside the tent Nelly could see them carrying a special body bag designed to contain pathogens, not the typical body bag Nelly was used to seeing. After a couple of hours of wondering if they might be about to meet the same fate as Sir Karl, the head medic came in and told them that no virus, bacteria, or known bio-weapon was detected in Sir Karl and that they were all free to go. Nelly asked what had killed him. “Some kind of brain aneurysm, we’re not sure.” She said.
Nelly went back to the tech tent feeling drained and weak. With all the violent death she’d witnessed, death from a brain aneurysm seemed especially cruel and pointless. She’d talked to Sir Karl a little when she was training him on the scanners. He was from Arizona, but had moved to San Diego as a child. He’d been liberated from one of the corporate prisons after independence, and had come to the 512 from a propaganda unit that had been obliterated. He’d shown Nelly pictures of his adopted daughter, but she couldn’t remember what the kid had looked like. She was in a Practical Ed unit down south, part of a growing number of kids who were getting an education and fighting for Pacifica at the sa
me time. Nelly wondered how hard the kid would take the news.
She went back to work trying to decipher the signal he’d recorded. If she could figure out where it was coming from and what it was, the Subcomandante might still get a medal posthumously. Sometimes there was a monetary payout for the family with a posthumous medal, so Nelly thought she was working not just for her unit but for Sir Karl’s daughter. She worked into the night, sharing the tent with the kid on scanning duty.
She finally wormed her way into the signal’s content, and found that it contained streams of video and sound along with coordinates updated every five seconds. When she finished converting the signal she put the image up on the big-screen.
It was a low resolution video of a small-screen having been set to record and then the screen of the scanner and the data being recorded. The sound was just breathing. Nelly was confused and at first she thought the scanner had been bugged somehow, but on second viewing she realized something else must be going on. The image started with a finger moving away from the record button of a small-screen hooked up to the scanner. The perspective was from outside the scanner, and the sound of breathing was a mystery.
Nelly watched the ninety six second video two more times and then went to wake Subcomandante Alphonso, the head of tech-ops. It was two in the morning and he wasn’t happy about being woken up by his div-leader. “Are we under attack?” He asked. “Because I don’t see any other reason why you should be waking me up right now.”
“It’s about Sir Karl, he picked up a signal last night on the scanner and I just decoded it. I think you need to see it.”
“Does it explain why the guy aint breathing?”
“Maybe,” Nelly said, “I’m not sure. You need to see it.”
He got dressed quickly and went with Nelly. “What the hell am I looking at?” He asked while the video was playing.
“New technology that’s being used against us. Somehow Sir Karl transmitted this image along with location data. I think what he was seeing and hearing were being transmitted somehow.”
“You mean he was a spy?”
“No, I don’t think he knew. He’s the one who found the signal and recorded it, he brought it to me. He wouldn’t have done that if he were a spy.”
“Some sort of bio implant maybe?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.” Nelly said.
“Alright, fuck.” He said. “You get the medic and I’ll get the Comandante and we’ll figure out what to do next.”
The Comandante pulled Sir Karl’s file on his small-screen and found that he’d been liberated from a prison run by a Chinese corporation that had a bio-tech division. He ordered the medic to saw open Sir Karl’s skull to see what he could figure out. Nelly was told to find a way to scan for that signal or a signal like it. The Comandante ordered them to tell no one what they were doing. “Whoever was monitoring Sir Karl’s signal found out that we were close to discovering it, so they probably flipped a switch and killed him.” The Comandante said. “We should operate under the assumption that there are more in the 512 like him, hell, half the soldiers here came from one corporate prison or another.”
Nelly had to hook the scanner up to her big-screen to get the computing power she needed. Since the signal jumped frequencies, probably at irregular intervals, she set the system up to scan every frequency on the spectrum in twenty six seconds. She figured if every soldier was near the scanner for five minutes, the signal would be picked up. She finished setting up the system just before dawn.
She found the Comandante in the med tent with Subcomandante Alphonso watching the medic perform brain surgery on Sir Karl’s corpse. She told them she had a system ready to scan people for the implant, but they had to be in the tech tent. Subcomandante Alphonso held up what looked like a tangle of meat gristle. “There’s the culprit.” He said. “It’s a bio product so it’s indistinguishable from the rest of the contents of the victim’s cerebral cortex. Our best guess is that it uses the spinal column as an antennae somehow.”
“Fuck.” Nelly said.
At dawn the Comandante called the whole unit to assembly. The cover story was that the buttons had cooked up a weaponized variation of lyme disease that Sir Karl had gotten from a tick. Every soldier in the unit would have to be scanned for ticks, and it would have to be done in the tech tent because it would be faster than using a small-screen bio scanner. They set up a division rotation and Nelly began scanning soldiers one by one.
She was thirty one soldiers into the scanning when she got a hit on a soldier named Dawn Racino. Nelly signaled the medic and Racino was told that she was going to quarantine. After lunch she hit on two more soldiers, Dennis Roy, and Micky Brevett. Nelly was dragging and the medic took mercy on her and gave her a shot of Vigilance to keep her awake.
The first soldier she scanned after dinner also had the implant. His name was Ron Williams, and when the medic told him he had to go to quarantine he started crying. Nelly kept scanning late into the night and found one more implant, in the second to last soldier. Her name was Bella DiMarco. Nelly finished the scanning, still feeling alert from the shot, and the Comandante and Subcomandante Alphonso came into the scanner tent. The Comandante sat in the chair. “My turn.” He said.
“Really?” Nelly asked.
“If my brain is broadcasting images to the enemy, I want to know about it. Do it.”
Nelly scanned him and then Alphonso, the medic and finally herself. None of them had implants. “We’re the only four people in the unit who know what’s going on,” the Comandante said, “and for now I’d like to keep it that way. There were six implants in our unit, SIX! There’s probably thousands of these spies in the guard. We need to get the word out about this threat. I’ll put it up on the tight network for command to scope -Nelly, send me the specs for your scanning system. In the meantime we’ve got to lose these five remaining implants. Any suggestions?”
“Sir Karl’s implant killed him when he was on the verge of discovering it.” The medic said. “So if these soldiers find out that we know about the implants, they’ll die.”
“Whoever’s monitoring these soldiers should’ve figured it out by now.” Alphonso said. “All the implants in our unit have been quarantined. I’m surprised they’re not all dead right now.”
“I’ve got them isolated so they don’t know how many others are quarantined. For all they know half the 512 has ticks.” The medic said.
They all looked at the Comandante. “My first thought,” he said, “is to put them all together and tell them the truth. If I were in their shoes I’d want to know.”
“You’d be killing them.” The medic said.
“What would you do?” He asked.
“Give them all emergency medical leave.” The medic said. “I’ll tell them they’ve got the weaponized Lyme disease and give them a placebo shot. I’ll tell them if they live six months they should be okay, but that they aren’t fit for military service anymore.”
“Fuck that.” The Subcomandante said. “If you lie to them they could get back into the guard someday. If the war keeps going the way it has been, it’s not hard to imagine that the guard would start taking anyone they could get, regardless of their medical history. I say we tell them and if they die, so be it.”
“You’d be killing them.” The medic said again.
“No, the party killed them when they put that shit in their cerebral cortexes.”
“Nelly, what do you think?” The Comandante asked.
“It’s above my pay-grade but I would want to know.” She said. “And they’ll know something is fishy with an emergency medical leave anyway. They’ll see other doctors and if word get’s out about the implants they’ll eventually figure it out anyway. It’s better to tell them the truth.”
“I’d rather be lied to than bleed out through my ears.” The medic said.
“Yeah,” The Comandante said, “but Alphonso is right, if we discharge them they could very well end up back in the guard somed
ay. There’s no way to remove these devices?”
“I can’t do brain surgery in a tent.” The medic said. “Besides, the way the device is implanted it would leave them brain damaged and probably paralyzed if I removed it.”
Nelly noticed some pings on the scanner while the Comandante answered. “I’ve made my decision.” He said as Nelly picked up the headphones. “We’ll tell them the truth. This is a situation where there are no good options. God only knows how many of our soldiers were killed because of those things…”
“Incoming nanotech cloud.” Nelly said. “It’ll be in range within five minutes.”
“Alphonso, put the unit on alert, Nelly come with me, we’re going to get these bug head soldiers as far away from here as possible. No wonder the damned buttons always know our position.” The Comandante cursed as he got up. “Come on!” He shouted at Nelly. Nelly put down the headphones and followed him to the fleet tent. He took her to an old van that had been converted from gasoline to battery power many years before. “Take this to the med tent and put the bug heads in the back,” he said, “drive south as fast as you can and when you make it twenty miles pull off the road and tell them what’s going on. When they’re all dead just leave the bodies and send me a Pick Axe before you come back, understand?”
“Yes sir.”
“If they don’t die for some reason, let me know and I’ll give you further instructions. PACIFICA!”
“STAND STRONG!” She shouted. The keys were in the ignition and Nelly navigated through the suddenly busy encampment to the med tent. Alphonso had the whole unit running the scatter drill, only this time it wasn’t a drill, there was a death cloud coming. Nelly got the five soldiers out of their isolation bunks and into the van. They all looked scared except for Dawn Racino, who was angry. “This is bullshit, I don’t have any ticks on me! I’m not getting in a van, the unit’s under attack and I can help decamp.”
“Get in the van.” Nelly said. “The Comandante ordered me to get all of you in the van.”
“Where the fuck are we going?” She asked.
“The hospital in Indio.” Nelly pushed Racino into the back of the van and slammed the door. She got behind the wheel and once they were out of camp she stepped on the gas. There were no seats in the back and the soldiers were being thrown around by all the bumps in the road. Nelly wasn’t used to driving, but the van was old and didn’t have a small-screen drive hookup.
Racino climbed up to the front passenger seat and put the seatbelt on. She looked back at the four soldiers in the back of the van. “They’re scared.” She said quietly to Nelly. “What do you know about this? What did the Comandante tell you?”
“Just to get you to the hospital in Indio as fast as possible.” Nelly said.
“So whatever it was that killed Sir Karl, we’ve got it too?”
“I don’t know.” Nelly said.
“Yeah you do.” Racino said. “I can tell. Don’t give me that bullshit about weaponized Lyme disease either…” She stopped talking and was nodding rapidly. Nelly looked at her and saw her eyes rolling back in their sockets.
“You okay?” She asked, knowing that she wasn’t okay. She expected Racino to start throwing a fit like Sir Karl had, but she didn’t. She just sat there with her eyes rolled back in her head, completely still. Nelly looked back and saw the four other soldiers in the same state. She reached over and shook Racino. “Hey,” she said, “snap out of it.” She got no response.
She drove on about another minute or so before she saw the glint of reflected sunlight in the sky in her rearview mirror. She knew it was the nanotech cloud over the encampment. Her rearview erupted with light and Nelly saw a shockwave rippling the desert dust, coming up on her fast. She lost control of the van and the road twisted to a wrong angle. The last thing she felt was a hot breeze on her forehead, and everything inside and outside and everywhere was all wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Elenor Reills has regained consciousness. She woke up early this morning.” Doctor Stewart said to the resident assigned to him that morning. He was a young guy with a tattoo of an eagle on his neck. Doctor Stewart thought his name was Deitz, but couldn’t remember for sure. The residents changed so often it was hard to keep track. “Apparently she’s been asking a lot of questions.” He said. “Of course confusion is only natural. The woman has been in a coma for almost two months, she’s lucky to be alive.”
He opened the door for Deitz and found the patient sucking on a pack of nutrient-rich sugar water. “Div-leader Reills? Welcome back to the world of the conscious. I’m doctor Stewart, this is my resident today.” The doctor thought maybe the tattooed youth would introduce himself, and he paused for a moment, but no luck. He turned back to the patient. “How are you feeling this morning?”
“Weird.” Nelly said. “Have I really been in this bed for eight weeks?”
“55 days to be exact.” He said. “Do you have any pain?”
“Yeah, my leg.” She said.
“It was badly broken. You have three bone implants in your left shin now, but your body is well into the healing process at this point, and eventually your leg will be even stronger than it was before.”
“Oh goody.” She said. “If I’ve been sleeping for 55 days why the hell am I so tired?”
“It’s normal.” The doctor said. “You weren’t asleep, you were in a coma. There’s a difference. Your body has been through a severe trauma and you need to recognize that.”
“What happened to my unit?”
“It was a new kind of nanotech courtesy of the Well-Armed Militia. The 512 was the first ever to be hit with it.”
“A new kind of cloud?”
“Well it’s the same principle as a traditional nanotech cloud, but these clusters created a high pitched resonance, designed to essentially liquefy your brain. Luckily you were far away from the source and there was a good amount of Vigilance in your system, which we think allowed your brain to process some of the sound instead of being damaged by it.”
“How many casualties doctor?”
“Everyone in the unit was killed except for you and the five other soldiers in the van.”
“They lived?”
“All five were actually unharmed by the cloud. One had a slight concussion from the accident, but he’s since recovered.”
“Where are they now?”
“One’s still on medical leave, another was taken into the 125 and the other three were assigned to the 216.” The doctor said.
“No, we’ve got to get them out of there!” Nelly sat up in bed and immediately felt dizzy.
“Ms. Reills, please don’t exert yourself.” The doctor said. “We know all about the Lyme disease scare and quarantine. I’m not sure what your medic was seeing, but we cleared them before we let them go. We gave them a complete scan, and none of them had any sign of illness.”
“They’re bug heads…” Nelly said, feeling suddenly out of breath. “The enemy sees through their eyes!”
“Please Ms. Reills, calm down. You’re under incredible strain.”
“I need to talk to central command. It’s a major threat.” She winced at the sound of her own voice.
Doctor Stewart shot a look to Deitz, who nodded and began preparing a dose of Sonambule. “You need rest.” The doctor said. “When you’re feeling better you can tell me all about your concerns. Your main job at the moment is to get better, you’re no good to Pacifica in your current state.”
Deitz injected the serum into Nelly’s IV tube. “They’re unconscious spies.” Nelly said. The doctor smiled at her and his smile looked fuzzy. “Look in their brains, you’ll see…” She drifted for a moment and tried to focus, but it was no use.
“I’d like you to stay close to this patient.” The doctor said to Deitz. Yes, Deitz, that was his name, he was certain now. “She’s liable to stay delirious for a time. There might be brain damage there, or maybe it’s the emotional impact of losing her whole unit. Just make sure she gets everything she needs.?
??
“Yes Doctor.” He said. “I’ll stay with her.” He had tried to get the go-ahead from intel to terminate the subject while she was still in the coma, but they were so sure their new weapon would eventually kill her they told him not to risk it. Now she was awake and had attempted to disclose the program. He would have to do it as soon as possible and get back across the border for reassignment. Whatever his new orders would be, he knew they would be a lot harder than killing a woman while she slept.
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Death Spiral