Plasma Frequency Magazine: Issue 14 (2 page)

The building shook as the spike clunked out. A tile slid loose and crashed down in the street.

'What are you doing?' Amina stood behind him, another crowbar in hand. 'I put those in.'

'Now take them out.' Benoit moved to the next spike, wriggled his crowbar in next to it. 'You have nothing to lose but your chains!'

'I don't have any chains,' Amina said, but she was bending to the work, flipping the spikes free with unnerving ease.

The road shook, a terrace jumping a foot down its track. In the distance, the top of a barricade slid away, blocking a pair of science soldiers as they chased protesters down the street.

'Of course!' Amina exclaimed, and set to the work with renewed energy.

A policeman yelled. Heavy footfalls headed their way, gaining speed as they grew closer.

Benoit finished yanking out a spike, grabbed Amina's arm and headed into the alleyway. He ran hell for leather, barely able to keep up with her though she paused every twenty feet to lever out a spike. Each time she grinned back at him, waiting till he caught up before releasing the next set of gears.

The police entered the alleyway just before it moved. With a sound like a rifle volley the last spikes shot free and the buildings rushed forward. Normally they might have moved thirty feet in an hour, but a day's worth of trapped energy drove them. They whipped the caps from the policemen's heads in the wind of their passage.

Benoit and Amina kept running, pursued by yells and whistles. With a grinding crunch another building broke free, knocking two of the policemen from their feet. All around them buildings were moving in, a chain reaction that sent spikes spinning free all over the district.

They ran into a warehouse just before it was closed off by a passing factory. By the time they reached the end of the building their pursuers were lost. Ahead was a frenzy of moving walls, running protesters and bewildered police.

'I'd like to see them arrest us all now,' Benoit said.

'And the protest?' Amina's eyes sparkled. She knew the answer, he could tell. But like him she needed to hear it out loud.

'As long as we're free, the protest goes on. This is our freedom - all equally lost in the spinning city.'

She grabbed his hand, pulled him close to her.

'Don't you have a sense of what matters?' he asked.

'No,' she said, moving in for the kiss. 'But I believe in you.'

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Andrew is a freelance writer based in Stockport, England, where the grey skies provide a good motive to stay inside at the word processor. He's had over forty stories published in places such as Daily Science Fiction, Wily Writers and Ann VanderMeer’s Steamunk anthologies. You can find out more about his writing at 
andrewknighton.wordpress.com
 and follow him on Twitter @gibbondemon .

The Beetle Farm

By DeAnna Knippling

Jackson's beetle farm had progressed through a period of accelerated development overnight.  It wasn't the first thing I noticed when I flipped on the banks of fluorescent overhead lights. 
That
distinction went to the class pet, Gerry the Gerbil, who had...well, let's just say janitors aren't as hard to replace as class pets.  In fact, I didn't have time to look at the beetles at all until after class started, when Jackson refused to return to his seat. 

I
should
have noticed them earlier.

"Miss Jonquil, the beetles are...come look!"

I sighed, heaved myself out of the Teacher's Chair, and walked between two narrow rows of wide-eyed peon's children to the back of the room, near the sink.

"What is it, Jackson?  Did your beetles develop anarchy and wipe themselves out, like Janine's?"

"Come look," he ordered, and I glared at him until he lowered his eyes.

Then I pushed him to the side and peered downward at the flat, mesh-covered pan.  The beetles had been modified to follow two different genetic types:  ones that craved fats, sugars, and salts in unlimited quantities (modeled after the peons), and ones that craved those things, but became satiated on them quickly, and as a result ate more healthful food (the nobles).  The peons would inevitably eat all the junk food in the pan, then begin eating each other, while the nobles ate more reasonably, and lived longer.  We were studying the "political systems" that arose when different proportions of peons and nobles were combined.

Jackson's pan held only peons.  They should have eaten themselves to death by now.

Piles of corn chips, candy, and bacon had been shoved in one corner along with a few strangely destroyed or disassembled beetle corpses.  The tomato, jalapeno, and piece of lean, cooked chicken had all disappeared. 

The beetles themselves scuttled about the pan in strange patterns.  I tilted my head to the side and tried to work out what kind of political structure they had achieved, silently crossing off the anarchist/libertarian groups, the monarchical/tyrannical groups, the oligarchic/corporate groups, and even the various types of collectivism.  In any case, the end result of every one of these systems was self-destruction; they relied on humans providing them food, and, in the long run, even the nobles would eat each other when there was nothing else left.

The beetles seemed to center around a glistening lump in the center of the pan.  It was so covered with beetles that I didn't know
what
it was.  I picked up a pencil, took off the mesh covering, and used the pencil to prod some of the beetles aside.

The creature underneath was made of glistening chitin—a super beetle, a mutated mother of a thing.  I prodded around a little more.  Her hindquarters weren't laying eggs, but perfect, tiny, eraser-sized tomatoes, which the beetles carried to the other side of the pan and hid under the corn chips.  I stirred up the junk food and saw more, a goldmine of miniature jalapenos.

They hadn't yet figured out how to replicate chicken, thank God.  Probably because it had been cooked.

"It's amazing, Miss Jonquil," Jackson said.  "I'm going to start eating tomatoes, too.  Tomatoes give you superpowers."

"Mmm-hmm," I said.  "Jackson, if it's all right with you, I'd like to take this over to the high school science teacher's lab.  He knows a lot more about genetic modification and mutation than I do.  Is that all right?"

"Oh, yes!" Jackson said.  "Can I come with you?"

"No, Jackson.  I have to go after school, when Mr. Jori isn't teaching his classes.  We all have work to do."

"Okay."

I put the mesh lid back on the pan of beetles.  Mr. Jori said that spontaneous mutations toward biologically-based new technologies were happening in classrooms daily, and that it was only  a matter of time before something really big, societal-changing big, came out of it.

He was a fool, Mr. Jori.  We were bred the way we were bred, and that was the end of it.

But he
did
have a really good garbage disposal, down his sink.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DeAnna Knippling is a freelance writer and editor in Colorado.  Her short stories have appeared in Black Static, Crossed Genres, Penumbra, and more.  She has a twelve-year-old daughter and has more than once guiltily wished that she could flush certain projects down the toilet.  She writes middle-grade fiction under the pseudonym De Kenyon, and her website is at 
www.WonderlandPress.com
.

City of One

By Damien Krsteski

Clasped around the City like two halves of a coconut. No way in. No way out.

“Does it have to be like this?” Bertrand shouts from the ground at their cirrus-enveloped features.

A curt alligator nod, after a perceptible bit of lag. “Of course. You're a hazard.” The two reptilian heads look down from a hole in the City’s ominous orange sky.

Bertrand has to sway them somehow. He prepares a thought for them: <>

He sends it.

Brief lag, then one of the alligators shakes his head. “Verbal communication only.”

Bertrand sighs. “How do we proceed from here on out?”

Pause. “We will investigate, leave no stone unturned. Once our analysis is done, we'll weed out the problem and allow your City to transmit and receive again.”

A desert gust whips at Bertrand's hair. He considers the situation. Under revision of the authorities, with the possibility of a never-ending quarantine unless he cooperates. Trapped, with no way in, no way out.

He closes his eyes, reaches into the City's config to modify the permissions file.

The two alligators receive their automatic notifications. Blood-thirsty grins spread on the snouts in the sky. “We begin at once.”

And their cloudy window into Bertrand's City closes, leaving behind a spotless orange sky.

~

Crossing into Mathilde's personal space takes courage Bertrand isn't always capable of mustering, but desperate times call for desperate measures. He raps twice on her portal – a wooden gate smack in the middle of no man's land, the place where the City's corrupt memory goes to die.

A yellow line appears, a glimpse into her world, as she opens the door just a tiny bit.

Peeking through it with an eyeball on a stalk. “What do you want?”

“Help,” he says.

The eyeball looks around, sees him alone. She considers, then swings the door open, light pouring out of it into the blank data graveyard. In the doorframe, a shadowy figure, stalks snaking out of her gray head, eyeballs at their tips.

Bertrand steps inside.

The room she welcomes him in is made of light, pure white light, but then Bertrand's sight adapts to it and the shapes of vegetation come into focus. Arrayed in clay pots, with fronds like Mathilde's eyestalks, the purple flowers blink at him.

“Like my garden?”

His eyes search for a place where the gazing flora can't meet them. “It's wonderful.”

Mathilde approaches a particularly lively plant. In a quick motion with her gardening scissors she snips off a thorny branch, leaving it to fall to the ground, the eye at its tip no longer blinking. “What do you need help with?”

He watches the dead branch go from purple to black. “Bureaucrats in orbit are claiming we're a memetic hazard.” He sends: <>

“Yikes,” she says. Her eyestalks swirl around her head, looking in all directions as if the bureaucrats could be sneaking behind a plant. Turning to face him, “What kind of hazard?”

“Life-threatening memes. Non-removable by conventional mind cuts.”

Shuddering, not in any overtly discernible way, but Bertrand knows her well enough to recognize it. “Life-threatening? From
here
?”

“Yeah. They had found traces of one of our citizens in Williamsburg, a new City two hundred and thirty light years away.”

“What happened?” She drops her scissors, folds her arms.

“She had caused quite a scare there. Three people close to her had committed suicide. Just up and terminated themselves, backups and all.”

“Holy crap.” Mathilde gasps, her eyestalks stretching out in an atavistic defensive reaction. The purple flower-monsters around her do the same. Whether they understand, or simply are mimicking her, Bertrand doesn't know.

“Frightening stuff,” he says.

“Do you know who it was?”

He shrugs. “She had left Williamsburg before they figured it all out so she’s in another City by now, or in transit. Could be anyone.”

“How can they be sure of her origin? Those things can be faked, she might be from who knows—”

“There’s no shred of doubt,” he cuts her off, “that she is from here. She had been either very clumsy, or nonchalant, discussing her origin on several occasions with random citizens.”

Contemplating the situation with a frown on her face, tapping her foot. “But there are blockages,” she says, “prevention mechanisms. Citizens don’t just
commit suicide
like that. It’s so… barbaric.”

“It is.”

He watches her deliberate, mentally crossing his fingers. After a moment of tension she exhales loudly. “Okay,” she says, sending: <>

Bertrand smiles. “Thank you,” he says.

~

A fishing rod swung over her shoulder, bucket of worms hanging from her hand, she walks beside him across the desert, toward his hut.

Tilting her head back, examining the sky. “What is it with you and orange?”

“Strong color,” he says. “Sooths me.”

Baked earth cracks beneath their step. “So,” he says, “this your scanning equipment?” Meaning her fishing rod and bait.

A sidelong glance. “Last time I was your guest your corner of the City was a lagoon. Great piranhas. Very tasty.”

“Sorry,” he says, meaning it.

She shakes her head, as if shaking off a creeping bit of nostalgia, then in one deft motion launches the rod and bucket of worms up in the air. With a pop, they vanish. “So am I,” she says.

In the distance, a thin reddish horizon separates the two shades of orange representing ground and sky. Sometimes, when Bertrand squints, he can't tell which is which.

His hut begins resolving late in the afternoon as it always does, in the middle of the desert, appearing to his visitors only after they've walked long enough to find it. Made out of dark orange baked earth, with a roof of broken branches tied together with brittle rope, the hut looks big enough to be comfortable for one person only, provided that person's stay is brief. Standing before it, Mathilde shoots another of her sidelong glances at him.

“Don't worry,” he says, gesturing toward the straw door. “Much bigger on the inside.”

She crouches to enter, her eyestalks flattening against her back, and once inside, she sees that he's right, that it does seem wider this side of the entrance. They sit down opposite each other on a wooden table. Bertrand gives her City permissions.

“Mmmm,” she says, all eyes snapping shut. “How do you not enjoy this delicious power?”

“Gotten used to it.”

A blissful smile on her face when she opens some of her eyes. She shivers, the eyestalks rattling.

Bertrand bows his head a bit. “Will you please?”

“One second.” She takes a slow, deep breath, savoring the momentary Superuser privileges given to her. Dropping the smile, she says, “All right, Berty, let's see what everyone's been up to.” And she's gone, mind somersaulting through the City's logs, boring in those rotting heaps of memory no one but her can handle, inspecting the software for fishy traffic, for anything out of the ordinary.

Bertrand sees a blank face before him, as if carved out of marble, unmoving, while she works at speeds no citizen can match. He gets up, pours two cups of tea from a copper kettle which holds a never-ending supply of hot water. It's been years since he's had visitors. She is probably the first since he's remodeled the place, made the change from lagoon to desert, hedonistic wonderland to ascetic temple. Blowing at his tea, he sits himself back across the Mathilde-shaped marble sculpture, wondering which part of the City's software she might be diving into now. A rare gift, that is. To take the data plunge without drowning.

Color comes back into the marble. She opens her eyes. Slowly.

“Not a lot of traffic.” She picks up the cup of tea Bertrand placed before her. “In fact, only one person has left the City the past thousand years.”

“Who?”

Taking a sip of her tea. “According to the census all citizens are still here, so someone’s Copy.”

“I presume you checked whose.”

She nods. “I tried. No data. Incognito.”

Bertrand smiles despite himself. “You know what that means?”

Her face is marble-like again. She's dead serious. “Our Patient Zero is a Superuser.”

He finishes his tea in one gulp. “Look on the bright side,” he grins. “This really narrows our search down.”

He reaches out, takes her power away.

~

Sitting cross-legged on cracked earth, looking up at the sky. “Have you contacted any of the other Superusers?”

That lag again, presumably while they process Bertrand's words for hazardous attachments. “No,” says the alligator on the left, wearing a black turtleneck. “When we first queried the City, your name was on top of the contact list. Alphabetically ordered.”

“Good,” says Bertrand. “There are four of us. I’ll discuss the matter of the Copy with each of the other three individually.”

The one on the right scratches his jaw with a claw. He nods.

“How are things going on your end?” says Bertrand.

A pause, then two grimaces which are meant to be smiles. “We are taking a different approach.” The one on the left. “Not so interested in the
who
but more in the
how
.”

“And?”

“Confidential.”

Bertrand sighs. “Of course it is.”

A bit of lag, then the alligator on the right says, “How familiar are you with your City's history?”

“Quite a bit, I suppose,” says Bertrand, shrugging, “considering I'm part of the older generations.”

“But not the first, am I right?” Scratching his jaw again.

“No,” says Bertrand. “Not the first.”

A flicker in their window, as if they've cut out a part of the transmission. The two heads look at each other, briefly. “What do you know about the first generation of citizens?”

“Only what they’ve chosen to share.” Bertrand thinks, tries to remember, his mind accessing unused pathways. “The City’s readme contains their notes.”

They nod. “We've seen the readme. Says the first generation founded this City by diverging from a bigger settlement. Took a bit of nanotech and launched it into space, regardless of direction. Do you know more, Bertrand?”

“I don't.” He shakes his head. “Why do you want to know? How's this relevant?”

Flicker. A cut out. “Thank you,” says black turtleneck. “That's all we wanted to know.”

~

“What did the bastards say?” Mathilde stands next to the kitchen sink, drinking tea.

He sends her a brief thought, summarizing his conversation with the bureaucrats.

“Huh?” She frowns behind the tea cup. “Why the heck they care about our history?”

“Weird, isn’t it?” Bertrand rummages through a closet in the far side of the hut. He pulls out a brown cowhide hip flask, unscrews the lid and takes a sip. He shudders.

“What's that?”

“Something to keep us warm. Come on, we're leaving.”

Mathilde sets the empty tea cup in the sink. “Actually, I’d rather get back to—”

“Please,” he says. “Don’t let me face the other Superusers alone.”

“But you’re such a fun bunch.”

He offers her his hand. “Please?”

Arms folded, her dozen eyebrows raised. “Who are we seeing first?”

“I figured we better start with the oldest. The bear.”

“Oh, goodie,” she says, sounding like she'd rather deal with the hazardous memes themselves. Sighing, rolling all her eyes, she accepts his hand.

The orangeness of the hut and the entire personal Bertrand-space dissolves, and for a moment the two of them are in no man's land, between the City's modules, but then a sudden cold snap clutches their bones and they find themselves in the middle of a snow storm.

“For fuck's sake.”

Bertrand extends his flask. She takes a sip.

“Well, we knew he wouldn't make it easy,” he says, tightening the hood of his newly-instantiated parka.

The curtain of snow between the two of them doesn’t prevent Bertrand from seeing her exasperated gray face. He points toward a patch of whiteness in the distance. “There,” he says. “Up the mountain. The bear cave.”

They climb up the steep slope, their boots digging into the layer of ice under the snow, meter by meter, helping each other up, as the wind becomes less forgiving. They take breaks behind frozen jagged cliffs when they can to sip from Bertrand's flask. It helps, though not much, in alleviating the pain in their exposed cheeks.