Authors: James Hider
Cronix
Copyright © 2014, James Hider
Cover art by Matt Forsyth
Published by Worldbuilders Press
Worldbuilders Press is the science fiction publishing arm of the Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency
“Okay, we better be quick.” The man was lean, with a horse face, and kept glancing at the entrance of the restaurant.
It was an ugly place, just rough cement walls painted the dark burgundy of a Victorian whorehouse. No ornaments or decorations adorned the pocked masonry. Despite the disregard for aesthetic appeal, the joint was heaving, the clamor of drunken voices and blaring music thickening the air of anticipation.
“Why?”
“Because in about fifteen minutes some guy strapped with TNT is gonna walk through that door there and blow himself and everyone else in here to shit. And if you’re not chipped, you don’t wanna be here. Hell, I’m chipped and even I don’t want to be here.”
Oriente glanced nervously over his shoulder. All around, at tables set with bowls of pretzels and nuts and frothing pots of beer, people were laughing and talking excitedly. “A suicide bomber? That’s pretty retro. It’s been a while since the Islamic wars.”
“It’s all the rage with the young crowd these days,” said horse-face.
“How will you know it’s him?”
“Well, first of all the music changes. Suicide Blonde, by INXS. Then the waiters disappear. Look at ‘em now, rushing round like crazy to make sure everyone has a drink before the bomb comes in.”
“Okay, so let’s talk,” Oriente said. “How do I get past the vetting without a chip?”
“There’s a doctor called Wilson. He does the screening. It’s not like he’s a real doctor or anything, but they get to call him one anyway. He doesn’t give a shit, but he doesn’t want to get caught either. So you have to take him to one side, tell him you’ve got an embarrassing condition you’d rather not discuss in public. Then, when he takes you into his room, you give him the dough. Thousand’s the asking price.”
“And that’s all I have to do?” The music faded out. Oriente anxiously listened to the opening chords of the next song. Shiny Happy People by REM. A raucous laugh from the drunken crowd.
“That’s all. No questions asked. He’ll give you a badge so you can come and go. Though it’s way dangerous for you, you know. Why d’you wanna work up there without a chip? Some of them leapers can drag a man over the edge, y’know. And it’s a loooooong way down to the street.”
“Why do I want to work there, or why don’t I want a chip?”
The man shrugged. “Whichever.”
Oriente took a swig of beer from his plastic cup. “It’s a good job. Easy, satisfying. Well paid. And I’d like to help the planet sweat off the virus of humanity.”
The man stared at him blankly. “But why not get a chip? It’d make life a hell of lot easier. After all, this is Chiptown. Technically speaking, it’s illegal to even be here without one.”
Oriente took another gulp. “Call me perverse.”
“Whatever floats your boat, man” said the horse-faced man. “Anything goes round here. Literally. You know, there’s a place round the corner where they have these orgies where they’ve got human sacrifices. You get naked and tied up in front of this stoned, boozed-up mob and some big-titted German
Fraulein
comes out in rubber thigh boots and teases your manhood for about five minutes. Then, just when you’re about to get off, another incredibly hot babe comes in stabs you in the heart.”
“And what’s this place called?”
“The Whores of Perception,” the man said.
Oriente smiled. “Sounds like a fun night out.”
“Down in the Village, they got all sorts of that shit. They got gladiator fights, and there’s this bear pit where they chuck people in and they get ripped to pieces. Course, they get pretty tanked up first. That’s where the real money is, not in seeing some schmuck get eaten.”
“A regular New World Babylon,” said Oriente. On the speaker system, a pounding guitar rhythm grabbed horse face's attention.
“Hey, man, that’s our song. Time to get outta here.” Oriente looked round. The front door was still closed, but the waiting staff had melted away. No one else seemed to have noticed. But then, they were all chipped and about to enter paradise. Pre-paid tickets only tonight.
His guide weaved quickly through the tables and out a thick metal door peppered with gouges, like some ferocious beast had tried to claw its way out of the room. Down a corridor and out into a piss-reeking alleyway. As the outer door clanged to behind them, an ear-splitting boom enveloped the two men, as though the entire building were about to come down on their heads. Oriente instinctively ducked, but horse face barely flinched. By the time they had emerged onto Fifth Avenue, a group of sozzled revelers had gathered in the acrid smoke drifting from the front door of the restaurant and were observing the scene of carnage within: the floor of the eatery was a lake of blood, concrete walls sprayed an even brighter red with fresh gore and gobbets of human flesh, scarcely distinguishable from the char-grilled buffalo wings.
Someone in the crowd whooped, but Oriente saw a young woman turn away and gag.
On the other side of the street, Oriente spotted a neat diner where several customers were slumped across tables set with little dishes of sushi and cups of sake. A neon sign flickered its shaky message to the smoky city night:
Cyanide Sue’s Suicide Sushi
. Below it was a painted billboard that announced:
Last Supper, every nite at 8.
A man holding a beer bottle giggled, pointed to the restaurant’s alliterative moniker. “Try saying that when you’re wasted,” he slurred. His companions cackled.
Beyond them, the sheer cliff-face of the Empire State Building pierced the night sky. Oriente could see a giddy blur in the spotlights mounted on the uppers ramparts: two tiny figures arced out from the viewing gallery and hovered for a split second, before gravity hurled them in a voiceless plunge to the sealed-off section of street below.
A week later, he started work there.
For much of their evolutionary history, human beings failed to perceive that their personalities were mere byproducts created by the animal species Homo Sapiens, a socially and technically advanced primate, which allowed them to co-exist in the vast and complex societies that came to dominate the planet. Trapped in the bodies of these fleshy animals, the condemned souls lived brief and often violent lives, then perished when the organism that hosted them died. This system existed for millions of years until the period known as the Exodus.
There still exist on Earth small communities of mortals who cling to this drastically brief tenure of life.
Extracted from the introduction of
‘On the Origins of Post-Human Species’
by Liu Tran, 115th edition
And am I born to die? And lay this body down? And as my trembling spirits fly
Into a world unknown
Charles Wesley,
Idumea
Most people are stupid, ugly and bored with their lives, and quite frankly would be happy to be someone else.
Miles Bradlee, head of DKarn’s marketing board, in an interview with Forbes magazine
There were ghosts in the forest.
The hunter first saw them at dusk, flitting between spring ferns and empty-headed hollyhocks, and he sensed they meant bad days ahead.
The ghosts themselves weren't scary, just ethereal and indifferent. They seemed unaware they were even back in the mossy woods of Mother Earth. The phantoms were too intent on doing whatever they were doing to notice him: chatting among themselves or chasing each other, tapping out ghostly messages on unseen screens, or staring off into the distance, watching for something. They ran through the oaks' solid trunks and through the beeches’ low boughs as though they were nothing more than thin air. They sometimes disappeared into the escarpment where Box Hill rose slowly from the leafy canopy below the hunter's hut, as though diving into some concealed tunnel in the dead grasses of last summer.
But the hunter recalled with a shudder the last time the ghosts had come, a long way from these green wooded hills of Surrey.
The Haitian Voodoo Head
, the newspapers had dubbed it. So he watched the ethereal figures as they played and cavorted, dreamed or laughed, and he scanned the sky at night to see what else might be on its way down.
Sometimes he would spot just one or two of the visitors, beautiful young children at play on a forest path. At other times, there were would be scores of them, men at arms in scarlet uniforms, marching through the underbrush. He could probably walk right through their ranks and they wouldn't even notice. But he didn't.
"No sense in playing with fire," he muttered to his dogs, Arthur and Jess, who strained at their leashes and growled ominously. At nights, he chained the dogs to keep them from dashing after some luminous sprite floating through the trees. He'd lie in bed, listening to the groan of the chains and the throaty burr of the dogs, and wish he had the hill all to himself again.
He had been alone for years. Nobody came up here, and only occasionally would he venture down to the village to pick up supplies. His needs were simple, so his trips were few. Once every sixty years or so, when he felt his body stiffen and grow old, he'd saddle up his mule and make the long trek to Ma Gurfinkel's clinic to get himself a new set of bones, then return, young, handsome and vigorous again, to his home.
One day, after weeks of almost daily sightings, the ghosts vanished. Their abrupt absence made him even more nervous as he checked his snares, billy club in hand to dispatch a luckless hare or pheasant. He sensed the ghosts were not gone, only that a new phase had been begun. What it might be, he could not yet tell. He trod carefully in the morning mist, but allowed his dogs to run free in the woods again. Their howling stopped, and he started to sleep more easily. But it was at night that things started to change.
Every night, he would have the same dreams. Or were they memories, floating through the distant canopy of sleep?
A young Korean man stares at the slow-moving figures on his computer screen. His mother comes in, yaps at him for the millionth time: ‘You should get up, go out and get some exercise.’ The boy grunts but does not remove his eyes from the screen. He has been playing this game for three days now, pissing in Coke bottles and nibbling delivery pizzas, and he is nearing the prize. His mother comes in hours later to find him slumped on the floor. The clock ticks on. ‘Thrombosis,’ the coroner says. The gentle tug of evolution.
An almost-young Englishman sits at a wooden bar, a glass of amber liquor in front of him. He stares at the magazine spread out on the counter. A review of his art installation, the first to capture a critic's attention. “They say that if an infinite number of chimpanzees were given an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time, they would eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare,” he reads. “The idea for this self-styled open-air installation appears to have been dashed off by a lone bonobo during its lunch break, after one too many G&Ts.” The scruffy Englishman orders another drink.
A fading blonde American woman walks into the kitchen of a house on a deserted prairie. “Okay, try this one,” she says to the older man smoking a cigarette behind his newspaper. “Supposing there is a God, but he didn’t create us. We spend centuries screaming supplications at him, trying to grab his attention. He doesn’t respond. What does that make us? Stalkers, that’s what!” Her shark-eyed companion glances up from the paper, blows blue smoke out of the corner of his mouth, but says nothing.
The barking of the dogs ripped the hunter from the slurry of his dreams, a caesarian din slicing the womb of sleep. The hunter threw back the quilt, scratched his stubbly chin and rose stiffly from his wooden cot. A threadbare dressing gown hung on a nail. As he pulled it free in the darkness, the fabric ripped loudly. He swore under his breath, wrapped the garment close to his chest, then reached for the twelve-bore before stepping into the cold, pre-dawn world outside.
"More frickin’ ghosts?" he muttered.
The dogs were straining at their chains, tilting at something across the clearing, beyond the old man’s vision. His breath steamed out into the starlight. It was early spring, and the last inky shades of night were laced with the smell of cold earth and leaf mulch. On the horizon, the approaching dawn traced a faint ridge of charcoal across the back of the South Downs.
"Calm down," he croaked to his dogs. The animals paid no heed. He squinted into the deeper black of the tree line. Half-stepping back into his cabin, he fumbled on the shelf for a lantern, lit the wick and held it out before him. The light transfused the forest glade with other-worldly whiteness, reflecting diamonds of dew on the bare branches. In the far coppice of skeletal oaks, two yellow eyes gleamed in the reflected light. The dogs snarled, less sure of themselves as the twin dots hovered, then moved towards the frozen spectators.
Into the hoary glade stepped an enormous wolf.
"Sweet shitting Jesus," whispered the hunter, marveling at the sheer size of the beast: shoulders broad as a stallion's, girth as generous as a late-summer grizzly. It was the creature’s head that stole his attention: a vast boulder of skull, the snout unnaturally foreshortened by the sheer breadth of cranium swelling up behind it.
"What the hell
are
you?" the hunter whispered as he brought the shotgun to his shoulder, and stared down the barrels at the animal. A nervous tic trembled under his right eye, briefly blurring his aim. Arthur and Jess, sensing that the firearm had suddenly shored up the odds, leapt again at their chains. The wolf stepped into center of the lamp-lit grove, where it stopped and sat down, displaying a queer daintiness for a creature of such size.
The hunter's finger was frozen on the trigger, as though waiting for dawn to break and make the decision for him. To shoot or not to shoot. Being the only furless creature in the scene, he was suffering the cold the most. Seeing the wolf make no further approach, he cautiously relaxed his aim.
"Scat," he hissed, waving the weapon in the animal's direction. "Gwan, get the hell out of here." But the wolf just sat and stared implacably at him. The barking of the dogs grated the hunter's nerves.
"Go on, get out of here, whatever you are, or I'm gonna have to shoot you, even if I don't want to."
The two creatures peered at each other for a moment. Then the wolf stood again. The man swiftly raised his gun again, the dogs too hoarse now to bark. To the hunter’s astonishment, the giant beast opened its long mouth.
"Laura was right," it said.
Or at least it appeared to say. Its lips weren't crafted for speech, its lolling tongue had no ancestral familiarity with words. The hunter stood rooted to the ground, jaw collapsed almost to his chest. Before he could respond, the wolf turned and bounded off into the dark woods again, its white tail conjuring a last ghost of lantern light before blackness consumed it. The hunter came to life like a rusted automaton.
"Holy mother of God," he whispered into the dark. "Fitch?” He was shouting now. “Jesus Christ, is that you?
Fitch?
"
The shout clung to the frosty slopes of Box Hill before evaporating in the slow wash of dawn creeping through the chalky uplands.
***
The hunter waited until the sun was up before setting out. As he loaded his mule, he fretted over whether he was, after all these years alone, finally losing his mind. First of all the ghosts, now this: only Fitch would deliver a message like that, so terse and frustratingly obscure. And yet…
“And yet it was a goddam wolf,” he said out loud, reassuring himself that he hadn’t finally slipped into madness, the ever-lurking phantom of the recluse and hermit. “And Doug Fitch never was a wolf. Crazy bastard genius, father of the afterlife, for sure, everyone knows that much, but he didn’t have a goddam tail.” He tightened the girth. “That and he’s been dead for hundreds of years now,” he said, mounting the indifferent mule and trotting down the hill.
It was a two hour ride down to Dorking, the only village in the valley. A mile from the ancient settlement, the forest gave way to meadows, winter grass thick with lingering pools of mist. Two boys were herding a sleepy Jerseys outside the village walls. They waved as he trotted through the silver dew, then sniggered conspiratorially. The hunter knew he was regarded as a semi-mythical figure in the community – he had, after all, written himself into the village’s historical scrolls a century and a half before as the legendary Old Man of the Forest– but realized he cut a comic figure jiggling on his mule's rump. He liked that these people didn’t take their myths too seriously. He waved his stick, like a cavalry officer leading the charge, and the lads guffawed. At the village gate, the half-awake watchman stamped his feet to get the night frost out of his boots.
"Cold as a witch's tit, ain’t it?" the sentry said.
The hunter nodded, reining in his mule. “Morning. Is Guld in town?"
"Just saw him heading back from temple," said the sentinel. His rifle, fitted with a night-vision scope, was propped against the wall behind him. "Should be having breakfast by now. I'd be gettin' me own if that fucker Mott would show up on time. Right dozy bastard, that one."
The hunter tapped his heels against the mule's side and rode on.
Dorking was a pretty village, rising on a gentle slope beyond the postern. He passed cottages made of stone and of washed-out red bricks, topped with sagging thatched roofs. Dotted among them were overgrown gardens where abandoned homes had rotted and let nature back in.
Like most places, the population had collapsed during the Exodus. But in Dorking it had slowly risen again, boosted by the settling of the Dianite leadership. They made a comfortable living off game hunting and animal husbandry, trading meat and furs for grain and barley from the farmers on the coastal plain, or throwing lavish hunters roasts for the few tourists who still came from London. Some farmed themselves, though raising crops was largely frowned upon as a curse of the old civilizations. It did produce some welcome diversions, though, in the form of beer and spirits, as well as weed. A hundred families lived there, yet at any given time half of them were off hunting for days, even weeks, at a time. Old Carter had been known to vanish for years on end, then suddenly show up at the pub one bitter night at the start of winter, long after everyone had given him up for dead.
The hunter hitched his mule by the village hall. One of its doors was open, revealing an oak-paneled lobby whose walls were hung with stuffed game birds and stag heads. At the foot of the stairs, a mangy grizzly reared on hind legs: in the center of the hall was a vast reptile, jaws open to display impressive incisors. It looked like a prehistoric monster from one of the old city museums, but the hunter knew it had been shot in the nearby hills little more than two centuries before.