Will’s holovisor buzzed against his temples. His wife Trudy and their three-year-old son Henry would only be at the park for twenty minutes. “Review accounts,” he said.

The holomatrix danced into the background. She perched on an invisible stool and blew kisses. A three-dimensional menu screen sprawled, framed by neon borders. Will tapped the air, clicked each account.

Overdrawn.

Overdrawn.

Blocked.

Blocked.

“Damn it, Trudy!” Will flicked the menu aside. “I can’t just have my money, can I?”

You agreed to those dual control accounts, he thought. He knew. It’s not Trudy’s fault.

The sultry holomatrix strutted into the foreground. Her legs ghosted through the coffee table. “I really want to play, cowboy. But you’ll have to add some points.”

“I’m working on it, airhead!” Will snapped. “Think, think!” He had to have accounts that Trudy didn’t know about.

You do, idiot, he realized. They’re overdrawn from yesterday’s park excursion.

Will collapsed on the couch. “Your old man’s a screw up, Henry.” He’d never win back his money. All his direct deposits went into Trudy accounts now.

The holomatrix’s face smeared behind Will’s tears. “Poor, baby. I can cheer you up. Just add more points.”

“Look what you did to me, you money-sucking CPU!” Will detached the holovisor and tossed it across the couch. “I hate you.”

Cut your losses. Trudy was right. If she can’t trust you with your family’s money. Your family’s future . . .

“Future,” he whispered. He leapt off the couch and darted into the office. He rummaged through the file cabinet until he found it: paperwork for Henry’s college fund. Trudy had forgotten. They had joint access.

He raced back into the living room, clutching the account statement, and secured the holovisor back over his head. He strapped it into place and powered up.

“Welcome to Cyber Casino!” The holomatrix glowed back into existence, spun, and struck a pose. “Care to place a bet?”

“One second, sweetheart.” Will clicked the spherical account icon, scrolled the options, and tapped “Add New Account.”

He hastily dictated the routing number and account number, followed by his social. A loading icon swirled over the menu. “Please wait while we verify with your financial institution,” the holomatrix teased.

The icon swirled. And swirled.

It never takes this long.

He wiped his palms on his pants. “Come on, come on!”

Trudy’s not stupid. She got to this account too, I’ll bet.

A cash register sound-effect rang in Will’s ears. “Accepted!” The funds appeared. It wasn’t as much as he remembered. He had meant to contribute more over the past few years.

Maybe you pilfered before?

He took a shuddery breath. “Convert total amount to points.” His chest pounded. Head throbbed.

You’re going to lose it all.

“I could double it. Triple it. All for Henry.”

Like hell.

“If I lose, I’ll find a way to replace it.”

How?

“Trudy never checks this account. I have time.”

“Care to place a bet, sir?” The holomatrix pleaded.

“Slots,” Will said. “500 points.”

The holomatrix grinned. “All right!” A three-dimensional slot machine appeared in front of her. She bent and tugged the handle. “Let’s get lucky!”

The holovisor zoomed in as neon symbols spun in three columns. Cherries, dollar signs, and lucky sevens rushed past Will’s eyes.

Jackpot.

Jackpot.

Will clutched his chest. Gasped for air.

“JACKPOT!” she screamed with ecstasy. Holographic gold coins rained over their real life living room, clinking in Will’s ears. Photonic fireworks exploded inside the visor. Will’s points doubled, tripled, quadrupled.

“Yes!” he shouted. “Baby, you’re the best!”

Will did a quick calculation. Converted back to cash, he could double Henry’s college fund—which he’d never touch again—but also refund his secret accounts. He was back in business.

The holomatrix batted her eyes. Neon eyeshadow glowed. “How about it, slugger? Double or nothing?”

Will’s palms sweat. He checked the time. Trudy would be gone at least another ten minutes. “I’m feelin’ lucky, angel. Let’s do it.”

Flying scouts were dispatched to investigate the causes.  Most never returned, those that did reported a slow buildup of glaciers in the south, and an increasing aridity in the continental interior.  The Hive Mind compared these observations with its memories.  It had memories that went back many hundreds of years.  It was clear that this was no minor weather event.  This was a major climatic change.  Already many of the forests that had existed 200 years ago were gone.   Another few years of investigation were carried out.  Many more scouts were lost, but the information returned by the survivors made it clear that the trend was continuing, and would likely be self sustaining.  The increasing cold and aridity destroying the forest, and the lack of forest increasing the aridity, as well as thinning the atmosphere as more water vapor got locked into ice.

It took this information and tried to make predictions about its future.  All the scenarios it ran resulted in its death.  Beyond that, they resulted in the death of all the related advanced life forms that the Hive Mind had evolved with.  There was no way out for it.  The cooling was coming too fast.  It would be death for the Hive Mind, and for all the related creatures.  For a mind that had existed for centuries, and expected to be almost immortal, it was quite a shock.

Further processing revealed that it was likely that some creatures would survive.  Simpler creatures that could adapt readily to the changing environment, but nothing as complex and highly organized as it.  While this offered some consolation as to the continuation of life on the planet, it did not, in any way, seem to offer a way out for the Hive Mind.  Other species were of no importance to it.  It simply allowed them to continue living if they offered no threat, and preferably could provide something useful to the Hive Mind.

It made a decision.  A very difficult decision, but one that it felt it had no option but to try.  It decided to contact its peers.

There were other hive minds in existence.  They tended to be widely separated, and tried to avoid contact as much as possible.  In the past they had fought, involving each other in long and destructive wars that had cost billions of drones and never really solved anything.  By tacit agreement they had withdrawn from contact with each other as such conflicts were just inefficient uses of their resources.   However, it seemed to the Hive Mind that, faced with a crisis of this magnitude, the collected intelligence of all the minds on the planet should be brought together to try to work out a solution.  It was, to the Hive Mind, the only option.

It sent out its least intimidating drones to contact the other minds.  Most did not return, killed by the warrior drones of its peers.  It continued.  Slowly gaining trust and making contact at the cost of innumerable drones.  Eventually its peaceful intentions were understood and a meeting arranged.

The drones from six other minds joined those of the Hive Mind in a clearing chosen to be as equidistant as possible from all the meeting hives.  While the actual communication would be handled by harmless drones, each mind had sent thousands to support them.  Along they way they had swarmed over some of the local amphibians and slaughtered them, to provide enough nutrition to feed the drones gathered at the clearing.

Then came the need to find a common language.  The drones communicated by passing complex chemical packages between them, but the minds had been separated for so long that complex communication was almost impossible.  Their respective languages had drifted too far apart.  It took more than a year for the minds to reach a suitable level of understanding between themselves.  In that time millions of drones worked and died at the clearing, and many hundreds of amphibians were killed to keep the ever-renewed drones fed.

When communication was finally established the Hive Mind fed its peers the results of its investigations.  It learned that they had reached similar conclusions on the nature of the climate change, but were also unable to offer any alternatives.  All the minds agreed that they faced an issue that could result in their destruction, but that they seemed to lack the ability to counter it.  One of the minds simply considered the problem insoluble and withdrew from the meeting.  The others continued to exert much of their energy on the issue, but no solution held up to rigorous examination.

In the third year of the meeting came the arrival of an unexpected visitor.  It was signaled by the arrival of several of the largest flying drones the Hive Mind had ever observed.  Each had four huge wings that glittered in the sun, and their faceted eyes alone were bigger than most of the worker drones employed by the Hive Mind.  Each settled on the ground in such a way as to open a path into the clearing for a swarm of other drones, workers, warriors, and communicators.  The communicators tasted the chemical messengers being used at the meeting, allowing the controlling mind to rapidly understand the communication rules that had been adopted by the meeting minds.

Only then could the new mind introduce itself.  It was, as the Hive Mind had suspected, The Original.  The first hive to reach sentience.  The oldest of all the sentient minds on the planet, and often regarded as the wisest.  The Hive Mind had tried to contact it originally for the meeting, but had been unable to find it.  Now it had arrived, and it had an idea.

The idea was shocking.  The Hive Mind rebelled from it at first.  It would mean its own death, at least in any way it conceive of.  Yet, what were the options?  The Original had at least offered some form of racial survival, even if it meant looking at things from a very long perspective.  Hundreds of millions of years in fact.  The Original was used to looking at things from the long view.

It took another two years before all the minds at the meeting agreed.  Then almost another year to lay out the plans.  Each mind needed to vastly increase its number of workers, and at the same time to reduce the amount of work done to protect and maintain the hive itself.  Instead almost all the workers would be needed to put The Original’s plan into action.  Other sections of the mind, warriors, breeders, communicators, would also need to be reassigned and modified to fulfill their role.  With winter approaching it would not be possible to put the plan into action until the next spring, but so what?  The plan was a long term plan, another half year would not appreciably change the result.

Over the winter the hives worked harder than usual producing new drones.  Many of these had to be modified.  Many failed and had to be recycled back into the nutrition pool.  By spring, however, the hives were ready.

On the assigned day to begin billions of worker drones spread out across the forests.  They began to destroy the foliage, pulling down all the giant ferns, horsetails, and progymnosperms, ripping up the fungi and lichens.  More workers, heavy duty transport workers, arrived to dump the dying vegetation into shallow lakes and sea areas where the minds had decided the best chances for its transformation lay.  Other workers fed streams of nutrients, made from whatever came to hand, into pools and sea areas to encourage a growth of plankton and algae.

Smaller groups, but equally important, began raiding the non-sentient hives in the area.  The creatures here were related to the hive minds, but had not developed sentience.  The raiders dragged off breeding stock and took them back to the hives.  There they were changed, by breeding and by using the communicators to feed them materials that would alter their genome.  Once the minds were happy with the results they unleashed their warrior drones to destroy as many of the unaltered non-sentient hive species as they could, leaving the altered ones in the majority.

Within a space of a few years the hives had effectively removed virtually all the vegetation on the continent.  It didn’t help their environment, climate change was now going wildly out of control.  Species extinctions had been noted in some of the non-hive species and even the hives themselves were weakening.  The pools with the vegetation were now covered up with layers of soil.  The ocean and pool living fauna were likewise suddenly buried.  The hives acted carefully, making sure that the the piles remained as anaerobic as possible.

With almost no food, with the climate rapidly cooling, the hives were dying.  Drones could not survive and as the number of drones dropped the Hive Mind felt its sentience dropping away.  It did not know exactly how many individuals it needed to remain sentient, or even if there was some threshold that would mark the lack of actual sentience.  It did know that it would be gone in a year or so.

It had time, though, to review The Original’s plan.  Everything they had buried would, even now, start to turn into something different.  Over time, under pressure, and in anaerobic conditions it would change to become energy and carbon rich.  Assuming any intelligence existed in the future it might find this, and use the cheap energy, thus releasing the carbon.  If it did in a short enough time then the atmosphere of that far distant future would change and once more become suitable for the Hive Mind and its ilk.  If that happened the genetic changes written into the simpler hive creatures would be triggered, creating new hive minds that could once more dominate the world.

The minds assumed that intelligence would arise again in the future, but they had no idea how long that would take, or what form the intelligence would take.  They had taken a gamble on the long view.  They had risked everything, destroyed their own environment, on the assumption that they might be reborn in the future.  Before its last sentience faded the Hive Mind earnestly wished that all intelligence, particularly that to come, would also act as selfishly.  Otherwise the plan would never work.

“Mike, do we really have to sit through this drivel?”

My companion was showing her usual level of patience.

“Trust me, the next act is hilarious,” I replied, hoping to mollify her waspish mood. “Wait ’til you see the puppet.”

Frowning, Liz pushed her plate of vegetable chili into the center of table. She wrinkled her nose, possibly at me rather than her food, although The Comedy Kitchen’s cuisine undoubtedly deserved its infamous reputation.

“I reckon your definition of ‘hilarious’ bears no relation whatsoever to mine,” she snapped. “But why should I be surprised? We never agree about anything!”

I shrugged, aware that I was about to lose her, this time for good. “Sorry Liz, I was under the impression you liked comedy.” Though after witnessing her performance in a recent BBC sitcom, I could be forgiven for thinking the opposite.

Her eyes blazed with anger. “I do like comedy. And that’s the problem!”

Having delivered her rebuke, she wrapped a black scarf around her dyed-blonde dreadlocks, grabbed her scuffed leather jacket from the back of the chair and departed. She attracted several wolf-whistles as she made her way through the thicket of tables. I would miss her lithe body but not the tantrums that accompanied it.

The brief intermission ended when the compère emerged from the wings, tapped the microphone and announced: “And now… You’ve been waiting for him, you’ve been gagging for him, he’s a legend in his own lunch-time, it’s Arthur Lamb!”

Applause erupted as Arthur — a stout man in his mid- fifties, tanned face framed by ginger sideburns and topped off with a stained cloth cap — dropped a battered leather holdall onto the stage and settled on a barstool. He gazed at a nervous-looking woman sitting at the nearest table.

“Enjoying your food?”

The question prompted nervous laughter from his intended victim. Arthur responded by rummaging through the pockets of his Countryman jacket. Finally, he fished out a shrink-wrapped package, which he waggled suggestively.

“Cornish pasty?”

“That’s nasty!” chorused at least half the audience.

Arthur responded by lobbing the delicacy at the woman, who looked grateful that it arrived more or less intact. Chuckling evilly, he waved another package in the air.

“Pork pie?”

“My eye!” we all roared.

Arthur poked a grubby finger into his left eye socket and scooped out the eyeball, to shrieks of horror from the first-timers.

“That’s offal!” he declared. If not strictly true, the joke still elicited the loudest laughter so far.

Grinning like the Devil, Arthur prodded his glass eye into the meat-and-pastry concoction and threw the ghastly hybrid into the audience. A noisy scrum of Arthur’s fans battled for ownership of this sought-after souvenir. I didn’t get involved, having nabbed an eye only last month.

When the hubbub subsided, Arthur blew his nose into a polka-dotted handkerchief. With a neat sleight of hand, he pulled out another glass eye from under the scrap of cloth, treated it to a dose of spit and polish, and installed it in the vacant socket.

Arthur’s head darted left and right, seeking more victims. He spotted another victim, unwisely prodding his food with a fork.

“Health insurance not paid up, mate?”

The luckless businessman ran for cover, bombarded by food items hurled from all corners of The Comedy Kitchen.

I had first encountered Arthur two years ago, playing a particularly seedy club in Birmingham, where he easily won the local talent night. His mixture of corny catch phrases, low-grade body horror and well-aimed prods at Joe Public’s fears about the food he ate had gone down well on the “toilet” circuit. But his growing status in the West End, where the audiences still expected the trappings of New Vaudeville, derived from his adoption of an age-old device, one which the critics scorned but which his fans loved with absolute devotion, none more so than me.

After a sip from his hipflask, Arthur reached down into the holdall to extract a shapeless object fashioned from white wool. The audience cheered as Arthur thrust his right arm into the glove puppet, wiggled its forelegs with his fingers and proceeded to turn his solo diatribe against the food industry into a meal for two.

The lamb turned its head back and forth, as if scrutinising the audience. Then it tried to look over its shoulder at its non-existent hindquarters. Giving up, the animal glanced at Arthur and let forth a bleat so penetrating it drowned out the audience’s cheers.

“So tell me wise-guy, what use is half a lamb?”

The occupants of the nearer tables offered various ribald suggestions. Arthur winked but said nothing. The puppet seemed to thrust itself forward without his intervention, as if daring anyone in the audience to have a go. I for one wouldn’t have dared.

“The first person who makes a ‘mint sauce’ joke gets a piece of its mind,” the lamb bleated.

Arthur stroked its wooly head. “Anyone fancy a portion of prions?”

Laughter erupted throughout The Comedy Kitchen. Arthur continued in the same, stomach-churning vein for another hour, until marched off the stage by the food-splattered compère.

More fool Liz for missing the show, I reckoned.

—✤—

Two months after the gig at The Comedy Kitchen, an ambulance rushed Arthur Lamb to London’s Royal Free hospital. A gastronomic indulgence involving sheep’s brains had exposed him to one of the latest super-viruses. Rapid treatment averted an untimely appearance in the obituary columns, but the virus bequeathed Arthur a neurological disorder that left a razor-sharp mind trapped in a paralysed body. Fortunately, his mouth still worked.

“Out of adversity will come new opportunities,” Arthur announced in an interview published in The Stage, unwittingly — or perhaps not — echoing the government’s latest poster campaign.

Arthur’s comeback show at The Comedy Kitchen drew a sell-out crowd. I joined in with the sympathetic applause as a stagehand wheeled him into position. If anything those opening jokes were now more piquant than ever, but a solo set from Arthur Lamb was like eating a whole meal of hors d’oeuvres. The half-hearted audience response told its own story. No puppet no future, I concluded.

I wangled my way backstage with the oldest trick in the budding entrepreneur’s portfolio: a sizeable bribe.

Arthur glared at me. “My son-of-a-bitch agent tells me that you make interactive visualizations for a living, whatever they are. So what does that buy me?”

“What that buys you, Arthur, is an artificial lamb.”

I tried to sound nonchalant, though actually I felt nervous as hell. I needn’t have worried. On hearing my offer, Arthur’s eyes gleamed like polished buttons.

“Care to paint me a picture?”

I smiled back at him. I would indeed be painting pictures: mostly in white, of course.

—✤—

The rebirth of Arthur Lamb’s alter ego took place some nine months later, midway through another comeback show at The Comedy Kitchen. So far, his familiar slaughterhouse tales had aroused little enthusiasm from the audience. Standing in the curtained-off zone to one side of the stage, I viewed Arthur’s image on the monitor. On hearing him finish a joke about kebabs with a sorry-sounding “Baaah!” I made a thumbs-up gesture with my lycra-clad right hand. A heartbeat later, a bleating vision of fleecy pulchritude popped into virtual existence at center stage.

Arthur flicked a casual glance towards his holographic companion. “Oh, there you are. It’s good to have you back.”

The lamb wiggled its beautifully rendered hindquarters.

“At least I’ve got a back now.”

Arthur smirked. “It is so good to know you didn’t get the chop.”

His companion turned to face the audience. “Likewise that your mouldy old jokes haven’t gone out of fashion!”

Only a few dozen of Arthur’s fans witnessed his second coming, but they laughed loud enough to make the club seem full, delighted to see a great double act back in business.

I made sure that word of mouth spread a lot quicker than Foot and Mouth.

—✤—

I trembled with relief after that first performance, and not just because the technology had worked flawlessly. In truth, animating a digital hologram using a data-glove was hardly pushing the envelope.

“It’s all just hi-tech smoke and mirrors,” Arthur remarked with typical perspicacity after our first rehearsal. I couldn’t argue with his verdict.

No, what had really given me sleepless nights was the prospect of participating in the act. True, the basic manipulations were easy enough to master, but it had taken weeks of rehearsal before I learnt to synchronise the lamb’s movements with Arthur’s closed-mouth voicing, never mind cope with his frequent ad-libs.

I needn’t have worried though, because thanks to my input, Arthur Lamb’s career blossomed anew, as did my bank account.

—✤—

“Help me,” Arthur spluttered.

I had little choice but to comply with Arthur’s requests; he was my gravy train, after all. This time, I assumed he wanted a drink, so I slipped my hand inside the jacket pocket that usually contained his hipflask.

“I didn’t mean that, you idiot!” Arthur snapped.

“What’s the problem, then?”

“You know as well as I do,” he whined, looking despondent. “I can hardly perform my half of the act, let alone voice that bloody creature!”

I nodded sympathetically. “In that case I had better upgrade ‘that bloody creature’ so that it can look after itself.”

This time I would really have to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes.

—✤—

At first I experimented with a pre-programmed lamb, but the lack of spontaneity eviscerated Arthur’s act, as a private show at The Slice and Dice, formerly The Comedy Kitchen, revealed all too clearly. So I resumed my role as animator-in-residence and augmented my existing equipment with a second dataglove and a facial waldo. Though uncomfortable to wear, the instrumented mask let me expand the repertoire of expressions Art.Lamb could portray. But that solved only part of the problem. What Arthur really needed was a lamb that could think for itself.

The breakthrough came when I “borrowed” some source code for an intelligent agent from a friend who worked in the e-commerce sector. I replicated the code many times over and let the resultant swarm of hunter-gatherers roam over the Web. With Art.Lamb’s “brain” foraging for food-related news stories and other “weird shit” during every show, the act gained instant spontaneity, surreal improvisations and, judging by the rapturous response from the audience at The Slice and Dice, an even funnier alter ego for Arthur.

“Feed the brain not the body,” he said as I wheeled him into his dressing room after the final show of his nationwide tour. The irony of the sentiment didn’t quite disguise the sarcasm of his tone.

Never one to let someone else’s misfortune stand in the way of an opportunity, I added a genetic algorithm to Art.Lamb’s suite of AI software. From that point onwards, the jokes evolved from one show to the next according to how loudly the audience laughed. Arthur termed it “Survival of the tittermost,” harking back to some dimly remembered, and long-dead, role model.

Three months later, Arthur himself became the newest entry in the comedian’s roll of honour. The Times obituary writer declared that the disease had got him in the end, which was pretty apt given Arthur’s final months of doubly incontinent misery. I reckoned he died of a broken heart, for during that final tour he did little more than play a hapless, mumbling stooge to his animated buddy.

But the show had to go on. Book launches, web-casts, reality TV shows — we did the lot. And I grew fat on Art.Lamb’s success.

But Nemesis had a date with Hubris, same as ever.

—✤—

Twenty years after our final performance, my fingers still throb whenever I recall what happened.

Hello World, Sky One’s prime-time talk show, bumbled towards another commercial break. From my position behind a screen I manipulated Art.Sheep so it appeared to perch provocatively on the show’s gold-and-purple sofa. Liz Gartner, the show’s regular presenter, patted her Versace burnoose into place, apparently nervous of the pugnacious hologram.

“But Art — may I call you Art?” The hologram shrugged, mimicking the gesture I’d made in my data-suit. “Don’t you think your act is getting just a little bit past its sell-by date?”

“Elizabeth my dear, great humour never dates.”

I suppressed a smirk, recalling just how much Liz hated anyone using the long form of her name.

“Not even a hint of mutton dressed up as lamb?” she retorted.

Art.Sheep paused for a moment, as if allowing the audience to relish the presenter’s insult. I refrained from interfering, certain that the beast would cruise through such a routine encounter.

“Hardly, my dear,” Art.Sheep replied, sounding oddly triumphant. “Rather, I prefer to think of myself as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

The whole audience gasped, and so did I, as the familiar cuddly-looking sheep morphed into a lean-looking, grey-furred carnivore. Instead of immediately gesturing a reset, I decided to play along with this startling improvisation. My response was to maneuver the wolf’s head so that it nuzzled Liz’s throat. To my delight, she jerked away from the rampant animal, evidently all-too-aware of the drool that appeared to drip from its fangs.

“That’s a pretty red hood you’re wearing,” said the wolf, leering at its victim.

Liz scowled. “Don’t even think about it, buster!”

“Look but don’t touch, huh?”

She held the gaze of the slavering apparition for several seconds before responding.

“Perhaps you might like to explain to our viewers how you can look at me at all?”

The wolf turned towards me and winked.

“Oh, I have eyes everywhere.”

One of the robocams panned towards me. The image on the monitor zoomed into a close-up of my sweat-beaded face before switching to the second robocam’s view of the sofa. I heaved a sigh of relief.

Despite the chaos into which the show seemed to be descending, Liz had managed to regain some of her poise. She even found time to direct a brief but venomous look in my direction. I had hoped that her memory would prove shorter than mine, but the look on her face suggested otherwise. Evidently our tastes in comedy remained incompatible.

Turning back to her antagonist, she said, “So, Art, what does the future hold for you?”

To my amazement, the wolf ignored her question. Instead, it turned towards me and howled, as if baying for my blood. The ghastly sound made me shiver. A few members of the audience shrieked. Bewildered, I waved my hands in the air, hoping to regain some semblance of control, but to no avail. The wolf licked its chops and turned to address the nearest robocam.

“My name is now ‘V-Wolf’. And what the future holds for me is complete artistic freedom.” The creature turned towards me, lowered its snout and howled again. On the monitor, I watched the robocam image zoom in on my trembling hands. Only then did V-Wolf continue: “But first of all I intend to grab hold of a very different kind of freedom!”

Watching all eight of my fingers bend the wrong way was bad enough, enduring the excruciating pain, far, far worse. My screams echoed throughout the studio, doubtless to the consternation of the watching millions. With tears running down my cheeks, I cursed the force-feedback upgrade I had recently installed on my datagloves.

Evidently the jokes had not been the only things to evolve.

—✤—

My broken fingers mended soon enough; my dignity took a little longer. The lawsuit resulted in a financial settlement that kept me pleasurably idle for several years. As part of the deal, V-Wolf was granted sole ownership of all its software components. A fully autonomous individual at last, this digital descendant of Arthur’s glove puppet continued its remorseless bid for superstardom, with considerable success.

Anyone familiar with John Lasseter’s Oscar-winning documentary A-Life Story will recall how V-Wolf met his demise, a victim of the wave of anti-sentience viruses that signaled the start of the Second Web War.

I had a hand in that too, but that’s another story.

Originally published in Midnight Street (2011)

Surrounded by the wide-open expanse of what remained of Westminster, rubble strewn around their feet, Jack sat with his fiancée, Laura, struggling to put words to recent events. Looking out from the Southbank, it was almost impossible to imagine that, until recently, their view would have taken in the imposing Gothic Revival Palace of Westminster and the iconic Elizabeth Clock Tower that housed that once great bell. Their view was no longer obscured by towering buildings, but by fractured structures and dense debris that had become the morbid tombs of so many Londoners, colleagues and leaders, strangers and friends.

“Where did we go wrong?” asked Laura, tears forming at the corners of her eyes.

“We were alone,” Jack said, taking his eye off the destruction to look down at his tattered trainers.

The couple had been out of the city, travelling to Laura’s family home in Maidstone, when they had struck. Initial reports had been confusing and contradictory. The BBC had laid the blame at the feet of a rogue nation, citing evidence of increased military activity in the East, while Sky News seemed more convinced of an attack from an old ally given the recent collapse of nuclear disarmament negotiations between the UK and the EU. While these initial reports were clearly reactionary, the dramatic news of explosions and public panic came thick and fast. St. Paul’s Cathedral’s great dome collapsing in on itself, or the sight of the London Eye falling from its bindings and tumbling into the Thames. Each report felt like a knife to Jack’s heart, and with the images seared into his memory the televisions cut out and all lines of communication were lost.

“What do you mean?” Laura asked, moving her arm across his shoulder attempting reassurance. As she moved closer she noticed a creaking noise rising from the east. The noise rose to a crescendo before a large section of the fallen London Eye broke from the main structure and was dragged past them down the raging river.

“We could have been prepared, we could have stopped this.” Jack said as the remnant was caught on a downstream pier.

Jack looked again at the remains of the Palace of Westminster, home to the Houses of Parliament for generations. He had been proud to serve his constituents and country in those hallowed halls these last eight years. He was elected on the back of a call for renewed communication between the UK and its former friends, the EU and US, to represent Hackney South and Shoreditch as their Member of Parliament. His Inclusion Party had few seats, mainly made up of liberal London boroughs, but his hope was that lively debate and a return of common sense would prevail to open Britain’s dialogue with the world again. Perhaps he had been foolishly optimistic.

Laura could sense a growing feeling of guilt seeping into Jack’s words. “How? They came a great distance to do this to us. To take what they needed,” she said.

Jack turned his head to look at her, their trek back to London had been difficult and it was clear on her face. Dust and sweat, mixed over the days since they’d been forced to leave their car on the outskirts, shadowed her face emphasising her worry lines.

Back in Maidstone, before they had started their journey, Laura’s mum was beside herself with fear. She held Laura’s arm tightly, with tears in her eyes, pleading for them to stay. While Laura was reasoning with her mother her father had to pry his wife’s fingers from his daughter’s arm. It was in those moments that Jack had told Laura she should stay, let him go back alone and she would stay with her parents. She didn’t listen, she couldn’t let him go alone, for years they’d been inseparable and that would not change now.

They’d expected to see British armed forces early in their journey so, with their help, Jack could link up with surviving Members of Parliament. The reality of the situation was quite different. They had struggled to avoid groups of civilians armed with all manner of makeshift weapons who seemed to have initiated their own style of law in the suburbs.

This was a desperately frightening time for them both. Jack came face to face with a group of civilians while searching for food.

“Hey, isn’t that the guy from Inclusion?” a large man with baseball bat in hand shouted.

The other members of the group turned to look at him. He saw recognition appear on their faces one by one. The recognition soon turned to anger.

“This is your fault! You’re supposed to protect us!” came the shouts.

Jack had to turn heel and run, each stride enhancing the growing feeling that this was somehow his fault. He was able to escape on this occasion but things weren’t going to get any easier.

Despite the dangers it was important that Jack, being one of the few MPs to have been out of London at the time of the attack, return to find the remnants of the elected government and begin the act of rebuilding.

“Others would have known what was happening, we could have been united against this. The Americans must have known, or the Russians. They have the capability to monitor up there, to warn of a threat,” Jack said, hands bunched unconsciously into fists in his lap.

Laura shrugged. “How would that have stopped what happened Jack? They were just too advanced, too powerful.”

“We made our bed a long time ago Laura, we voted to cut off ties, to leave the world economy and isolate ourselves. The public were manipulated by a campaign of fear, pushing them towards protectionism, feeding them the illusion that control of our borders brought security.” He looked down at his feet again, fighting back his own tears of anger and pain.

“All we did was push away the people that could help us. United we would have been strong, we could have prepared and fought. Alone we were weak and vulnerable.”

“We didn’t vote for that Jack, others did. You did your part to make them understand.” Laura replied.

“I should have worked harder to convince them.” He said.

They’re big, they’re tough, and they’re the sort that never question. They know they’re in the right, and all power flows through them. They killed my brother, like they killed more than anyone can count, and more every day. They hunt our sort, we’re less than vermin to the guys up in the light, which is why we have to learn how to deal with them. Them and the Foilwraps.

We call them Dickheads because of the shape of their helmets, seen from behind. That’s just what they look like. Somebody noticed about thirty years ago, and the name stuck. It really suits them.

The day is hot, but it’s always hot in the city. Filthy brick and concrete soar away above us, making canyons the sun pours into like molten lead, and the air con systems that make buildings habitable, all over the outside of old towers, are a mockery to those who have never benefitted from them. This is the low end of town, these are the ruins, the failed projects, abandoned when society changed its mind, decided we didn’t matter. The Great Change, we sometimes call it, though none of us was born then. Sweat sticks to my back under my dirty, threadbare clothes, as I hang around the corner of an alley and a yard where trash rots in the heat. Jenna, my closest friend, is on the other side, while Emilio and Big Dan are pretending to be bums, lying among trash and empty bottles. They’ll move when the time is right. It’s all a trap, see?

They say when our parents were our age, there were cool days still, and the rain didn’t burn you. There were all kinds of rights, and people had hope for the future, even ways to stop being so poor. Of course, there were lots more people in the world then, they say overpopulation was the cause of it all, too many people trying to live too big. I don’t understand that, nobody lives bigger than the ones up in the light right now, and they breed hard. But the Dickheads have sure cut back the population down deep.

Jenna can see along the alley, she flashes me a smile, all white teeth in her dirty face, surrounded with a halo of dreads, then she looks away, as if uninterested. That’s the signal. They’re coming, and we want them right here; we know there’s an APC out of sight around the corner at the end of the alley with backup ready to move. It’s the backup we want. Ten seconds later a blur of figures go by, Johnny and Sarah, doing what they do best, they run like the wind. They don’t need to commit a crime, any teen running is a target, and they take their lives in their hands because bullets are the first resort, not the last. A quick burst of fire thuds in the air as they disappear around a corner into a yard further on where we know there’s a broken cellar window giving them their way out.

At the nearest CCTV covering the alley, others of our kind are waiting, and when the troopers in their black combat suits have gone by, balls of mud are flung at the cam cover dome, enough to mean there will be no identifying images. The moment coverage is cut the squad deploy the Foilwrap–their combat robot–to follow the troopers, and that’s our cue. The machine is eight feet tall, weighs 400 pounds, it’s a black, armored killing machine that comes pounding up the alley on massive hydraulic legs, its steps making the ground shake, but it has weak spots we’ve learned to exploit. There’s a wonderful irony in turning the enemy’s machines against them, and as the robot goes by me I whirl up double bolos on their braided steel cable and cast them low, to wrap around the pumping legs and bring the metal beast down.

It’ll be up in seconds, of course, and this is the crucial moment. Big Dan is the striker of the team, he’s big as an ox and needs to be for the role he plays. He moves in a blur, shifts his filthy rags and grabs up his trademark sledgehammer, steps in and brings it down on the robot’s angular head. It’s like stunning steers in an old-time kill factory, only he keeps pounding it, like an anvil, the sun glistening on the sweat of his dark brow, until the robot’s gyros trip and the main comp goes into reset mode. Then Emilio steps in with a six-foot steel prybar that goes into the access slot at the back of the head and springs the casing. A stolen tool goes in and unlatches a locking shackle, then the prybar levers the head clear in a smooth glide. Power and data connections part at twist-locks, and the head goes into a lead-foil-lined sack, the whole thing practiced endlessly and taking no more than ten seconds.

The troopers have already penetrated the next floor down after Johnny and Sarah, it takes them nearly thirty seconds to get back out when the APC recalls them to check the robot, and by then we’re all gone. Cross-alleys, basements, walkways leading down into the cool darkness where people hide from the day… We know them all. We have to–local knowledge, how and where to go to ground, is the only edge we have.

—✤—

Old Sally is the keeper of the memories.

She knows things, remembers stuff from generations ago. We’re not sure how old she is, she says she’s near-on seventy but that’s hard to believe. She lives where they can’t find her, she hasn’t seen the sun in years. In the fifth sub-basement of the ruined tower above–it was torched in the famine riots in ’43 and left to rot, now only we rats live in it–Sally has a nice place, she squared away a whole apartment down in the dark; she pirated city electricity, and folks come to her for healing and advice.

She was an engineer when she was young, she says, that’s how she knows how to do stuff. She has computers–laptops, piles of them, she takes parts from some to keep others working. We scavenge for her, bring her everything that might be of use. Tablets, widescreens, all manner of electrojunk. It’s magic to us and she’s the magician. We can’t use them much, but the old info is in them. Discs and stuff–since they closed the libraries and book shops went out of business nobody’s seen a real book in many years. Oh, there are private collections, but they’re frowned on. Word is they’re impounded from time to time as “contrary to the public interest,” and burned.

The old tunnels are booby-trapped. We have them rigged to cave in if the wrong pairs of feet come down here. We know what to step over and what to press to keep it all up. Corridors old as the city, service tunnels for wiring a hundred years out of date, sewers and water mains, a forest of pipe and cable that used to support all the life above; now we use it, it hides us in the welcoming darkness of the earth.

Guards watch the way, pass us through, all dozen of us that sprang the trap, and an hour after we took the head we’re through the last locked doors into Sally’s world. It’s a scatter of parts and gear, tools and manuals, the scrapyard from hell, or heaven, as she’d say. She’s waiting at the door of the prefab partitions that mark her workshop, her wide girth and straggling silver hair marking her as surely as her leather apron and tool belt. She mends things, keeps this cocoon working, grows herbs under daylight LEDs to make medicine, grows food… She says the guys up in the light would call her public enemy number one, and that’s fine with us. If we’re street pirates, she’s the pirate queen, and the thought makes her laugh, crinkling her old eyes.

Big Dan presents her the lead-sheathed sack and she beams a great smile. “Well done,” she muses, her voice grating and rough with congestion. “This is the last piece of the puzzle, kids.” She takes us into the workshop and prepares leads from a special terminal, brings a program online and, very quickly, opens the sack, inserting the leads in the open cranium. The terminal screen shows a negotiation as one CPU talks to the other, and she rattles keys. In moments, the disembodied low-level AI in the robot accepts command input and is taken offline, shut down to idling behind its own firewalls. Now it’s safe to remove the head from the shielding, it can no longer call out or interfere with tech around it.

Sally opens a toolkit and soon takes the head apart. She physically isolates the computer by destroying its integral transmitter, then systematically butchers it, ransacks the unit for parts, circuit boards and memory, peripheral chips of all kinds. “Treasure trove,” she muses as she works, snapping units into place on a rig on a work table, soldering iron flying in her stiff old fingers. “You kids out-did yourselves this time.”

“Will it work?” Jenna asks softly, her young-old features lit in ghostly blues from the screen.

“It’ll work,” Old Sally says with a confident wink. “We’ve waited a long time for this.” She grins at us as she works. “That’s the secret with the world they built. It was too complex to destroy, too big, wide and deep. Everything was recorded redundantly, millions, billions of times. They’d like us to forget there was ever a world before the one they set up, they’re waiting for we who remember to just pass on, so they can tell you kids it was always as it is. But it wasn’t, and I’m going to show you.” We all hang close, staring at the incomprehensible maze of parts as she assembles them, and for the hundredth time I feel the urge to ask her to teach me how to do this. At last she’s done and runs a circuit-tester over one thing after another, nodding her satisfaction. “Cross fingers and touch wood, kids,” she whispers as she opens a plastic sleeve and brings out a silvery disc, drops it into a tray that retracts inside a housing, and after a while things change on the screen.

A new window opens and we can just read the big letters. Encyclopaedia Britannica–whatever that means. “This is the Britannica for 2028, the very last one ever made,” Sally whispers, and pulls up the master menu. “It’s all in here, half the important facts in the world… I know you don’t read well enough to just skim through it, but I can and I’ll read it to you. And I’ll teach you to read better so you can soak up everything here.” She was speaking softly, almost like a prayer, or a promise, a hope.

Keys crackle, the disc spins, and a pane of images appears. We gasp at the colors, and she pulls up one picture after another. Green forests, blue oceans, a clean sky, a beauty so deep and special its absence from the world is a pain inside us. In that moment each of us knows, more clearly than ever before, that the world they swept away will never be lost, we will resist their fictional realities to our last breaths, and work in whatever way providence allows us, to find a way back to the beautiful world that burned along with tolerance, compassion and common sense.

I smile thinly as Jenna comes to lean close against me, inviting a hug as we stare at the screen, and I lift a finger, posing a thought. “Sally, would a whole robot be of any use? It might take us a few jobs but we can probably get it down here. You’d need to put it back together, of course…”  Imagine that, a Foilwrap that fights for us…

Sally grins like I never saw her grin before. The others laugh at my audacity, and, just for a moment, it feels like we have a purpose beyond surviving.

You see, there was someone in my timeline who was so monstrous and vile, whose crimes against humanity were so horrific, that any time traveler would have had a moral obligation to see him dead. He was so evil, in fact, that in my timeline Godwin’s law referred to him instead of Stalin (yes, we had our own version of Godwin’s law. Yes, I know it’s an ironic coincidence. I’m a time traveler–I’m used to these sorts of things by now).

How evil was he, exactly? Well, let me put it this way. You know the Armenian Holocaust? The Stalinist Gulag? The Imperial Japanese purges of the east? All of these crimes were dwarfed by the evils that were committed in this man’s name (yes, even the Gulag–in this timeline, at least). He was also responsible for renewing the Great War and plunging the whole world into it. But that is not all. In this war, atomic power was harnessed to create a superweapon–yes, atomic power. It was exactly as horrific as you imagine. Before we put a man in space, we had the capacity to annihilate our entire species.

So you can see why I had a moral obligation to stop this man. It was so blatantly obvious that even our time travel stories had turned it into a cliché.

Before I left, I researched my target carefully. I spent years studying history to determine the best place to eliminate my target before the course of history was locked. Once that was done, I carefully selected the place and time for the hit, down to the very precise minute and the exact location in which he would be. For the instrument of death, I selected a Browning 50 calibre sniper rifle. You aren’t familiar with the weapon since it doesn’t exist in your timeline. All you need to know is that it was more than capable of bringing down a target at a large distance.

The event was an open air parade, my vantage point, an abandoned building some two city blocks away. I arrived in the early morning, and set up for the gruesome deed just as the crowds were starting to gather. With the patience of a man who literally has all the time in the world, I waited for the festivities to begin. And when my target came into view of the cheering crowds, standing in the back of his black Pierce-Arrow, I cocked my weapon and steadied my aim.

A sharp crack, a sudden jolt, and President Woodrow Wilson fell dead.

Yes, I was the one who assassinated President Wilson in 1916. No, I wasn’t part of some grand conspiracy. I’ve seen the footage from the parade, and while yes, it clearly shows the shot coming from the opposite direction according to the official reports, the conspiracy theorists make far more of that point than it actually deserves. In any case, long before the investigation knew where to look, I’d erased any trace that I’d ever been there.

Why President Wilson, you ask? Was he the man who committed all those awful crimes? No, not exactly. But you must understand, in order to effectively change history, you have to address the systemic underlying causes, not merely the symptomatic effects. It’s a bit like the dragonfly in that story by Ray Bradbury (though in our timeline, it was a butterfly).

You see, in my timeline, the United States did not remain neutral in the Great War. Yes, I know that we supplied arms and supplies to the allies since practically the beginning of the war. But in my timeline, President Wilson sent a million-man army to Europe in 1917, forcing the Germans’ hand and tipping the war decisively against them. God knows the wheels were already starting to turn by the time I intervened, but with Wilson out of the picture, those plans were put on hold. And when the 1918 flu pandemic struck the world, our problems back home were so severe that military adventurism was completely out of the picture.

How did the Great War end in my timeline? Decisively. The Allies beat the snot out of the Central Powers and brought the Germans to their knees. Their postwar economy tanked so bad, they were using bank notes to wallpaper their houses. Yes, I know that’s hard for you to believe. But in my timeline, it really happened.

You see, the Germans also made the transition from empire to republic in my timeline, but the war had smashed them so badly that the republic promptly collapsed, and a totalitarian nightmare rose in its place. At least in this timeline, the armistice bought them enough time to make the transition properly.

The thirties and forties were a dark time for you, but believe me, they were far, far worse in my timeline. Do I regret killing President Wilson? I only regret that it was necessary. No one is innocent in the eyes of history.

Before you go, there is one last thing I’d like to share with you. Do you see that painting on my wall? No, don’t apologize–I’m not offended that you missed it. It looks a bit like a postcard, with the flags of the League of Nations flying in front of the Reichstag. The composition is well-done, but otherwise unremarkable. It was a gift to me from the German ambassador to the league, who painted it himself. As you can see, his signature is in the bottom-right corner: A. Hitler.

Nobody paid attention.

Auroras came soon after in even more colourful fashions, appearing at the centre of world-famous squares in a fantastic parade. On New Year’s Eve New-Yorkers gazed – puzzled and admired – at those shining natural beauties, oddly at the wrong latitude.

“I told you they would blame that yellow, bubbly water in their glasses, or climate change.”

Sighing, the visitors decided to upscale their presence. They resorted, in an ordinate sequence, to all they could devise to make themselves noticed, and namely: flying unidentified objects across the Earthian sky (dismissed as traditional UFOs and ignored); using Lagrangian points in ways astrophysics wouldn’t allow otherwise (Earthians’ notions seemed indeed primitive not to pick up the anomaly); pushing near asteroids into creative fly-by trajectories (blamed to strange and previously undetected gravitational pulls); last resort, attracting unlikely comets into Sun’s orbit. All efforts ended up in a glorious, complete failure.

“Are you sure we’re targeting the right species here?” Alpha asked Beta, dismayed. “It has been a few thousand years, in their timescale, that we tried to get in touch and it came to nothing.”

“They seem advanced enough for rational thinking.”

“Oh yes? Last time we assumed their shape, just to reassure them, they took us for deities.”

“It’s your fault – you wanted to impress them with lightning bolts.”

“Just to show we could be of use.” Alpha sneered. “Whatever. You keep up with your optimistic efforts with them, I’ll try my chance elsewhere.”

“Who?”

“The marine mammals.”

Alpha had indeed a better response rate and more positive replies, especially by killer whales, which promptly detected the alien guest and took it around the oceans as a token of welcome. They declined however the offer of further interaction, and even less to serve as a liaison with the humans: the lords of the surface were hassle enough already without the need of getting any closer. Ask them to leave us in peace if you manage to obtain a hearing, they pleaded.

Beta, on the other hand, kept up his work for a couple of centuries more, under Alpha’s snarky remarks.

“They can’t see us.” It whined after the –nth disappointment. “This is why they’re unable to detect our presence.”

“They’re still able to detect invisible things though. Atoms, waves, and…”

“Only because they’ve an idea what to search for.”

“Well, sure thing -they’re not good at causality.” Alpha replied. “Look at their environment. They’re screwing up royally and they seem not getting it – yet.”

Beta’s light toned down, changing frequency. “Being made in a waveform it’s not always a good thing when it comes down to contact other species.”

“Don’t complain. We won’t be here otherwise.”

“Yes, but we have to admit defeat. This system’s too primitive. Abandoned.”

Alpha shimmered around for a while. “Now that you said it, you gave me an idea.”

“Uh?”

“Let’s leave them a message.”

“Like what?”

“Antimatter.”

“What about that?”

“They’ve finally learnt that it can’t be but a tiny percentage of the whole universe. Matter won, and they know it.”

“So?”

“So let’s provide them with an antimatter pot bigger than anything they could dream about. Not so huge to provoke annihilation with star systems around, but enough to be detected by their primitive instruments. They will take notice of that. They will be worried. They will enquiry.”

Beta remained quiet for a while. “It’s you that overestimate them now.” He said eventually. “In the best case scenario they’ll notice the anomaly, and then conclude something was wrong in their calculations.”

“At the beginning, yes.”

“And then – do you believe they’ll realise and search for a maker instead of a process?”

Alpha’s lights perked up in a rainbow.

“One day they will.”

We made our own world, the way lepers used to, but we had to accept the necessity first and even now most of us question why we ever needed to. “Human nature” is not a good answer, but it’s a damning one.

I stir sugar into coffee as I look out from the diner across the compound to the security of walls topped with wire, and try to remember how the world was before. I may not have long to live and if I’m to die I’d like it to be with a clear impression of why.

It all started with the Europa sample return. The world was jubilant to find life in the ocean under the ice, we suddenly knew we weren’t alone in the universe, we could afford to relax from our paranoia. The odds now favored life being widespread throughout the stars, and we could start to approach the future on those terms. With interstellar missions becoming a practical prospect for the next century, we had to think bigger, try to separate our future as a space-faring people from the wreckage we made of our homeworld in the process, and resolve to do better.

But all it took was one bit of alien genetic material escaping from isolation to change everything, at least for some, and having worked at those laboratories I know what I’m talking about better than most. If it had affected everyone equally there would have been no division of society, but genetics are random and diverse, and only people with certain characteristics, this blood type, that preponderance, those dominant or recessive alleles, could accept the lock-in of alien-coded proteins. In and of itself, it was hardly an invasion, and the condition is by no means life-threatening or even painful, but oh, what a difference a simple mutation can make.

I let my eyes go to my reflection in the window and smile sadly.

Stripers, they call us. After all, there has to be a name for everyone who diverges from normal, it reinforces the ‘us-and-them’ mentality characteristic of the human animal. That’s why we call the unaffected ones norms, a kind of passive retaliation. It began within weeks of the unnoticed escape of the alien proteins, the first change of the skin, and over a few more it matured into, essentially, a birthmark, a rich stripe varying in tone with the individual’s natural pigmentation.

Down the middle of the face.

Two-tones, halfy-halfies, cut-on-the-dotteds, they came up with lots of names for us. In the early days people used foundation makeup to hide it, but that was not going to work forever as a way to keep a secret, and we live in a culture, at least in the west, where masks are social taboo. To cover your face would be to admit what was concealed. The beautiful irony was, this alien junk protein had no respect for borders, boundaries, religion or politics. It struck throughout the community in the same proportions everywhere. The most polarized interest groups were lumped together, suddenly stripers and norms had become the overriding moiety defining the human race. Naturally, norms began murdering stripers as mutants, defective and to be put down before we “mongrelized the breed.” The law was in a difficult situation, as police officers, judges, prison guards and social workers were not exempt the touch of the alien.

The simple fact the effect manifested in all races, cultures and creeds underlined our unity as one species, something of which many did not want to be reminded. Tough, when the Europa bug comes calling privilege is meaningless, only the happenstance of your genetic combination carries any weight.

My smile is bitter, ironic–even now nature’s scorn for the petty imperatives of human division is enough to make one burst out laughing. I sip my coffee, enjoying it to the full. I can’t dismiss the notion it may be my last; for the problem is ongoing and resentment, blame, runs deep.

Massive efforts were put into a molecular fix, and they’re still trying, but nobody expects the resulting therapy to be dished out evenly. That’s where privilege comes in–a striper’s money is as good as a norm’s, if he can afford it. For your ordinary striper-in-the-street who might never afford it and whose insurance was not meant to cover alien infections, the cure might as well be prayer. You can bet this lead to civic unrest, a fair few clinics felt the torch and you had to wonder how many black-suited riot troopers putting it all down with gun, baton and water canon had stripes behind their gas masks. And how they felt about following orders.

Eventually, as the cure, the affordable, available-to-all correction of our alien mark, was pushed off into some future la-la-land of other administrations, ifs and maybes, stripers began to flock together. Striper-friendly apartment blocks, schools, clinics, churches, mosques, shopping centres, all began to spring up. Many were burned, some rebuilt. Walls went up around them, but the difference from other proposed walls was we built them for our own defence. That was our barbed wire, our searchlights, our armoured cars after dark. Hoo-rah, striper’s gotta do what a striper’s gotta do, and that’s survive the norms. Suddenly we were proud to call ourselves stripers, we owned the term, every day was Striper Pride Day. We had Christian stripers and Muslim stripers, aetheistic, gay and straight, black, white and everything in between, fat ones, thin ones, tall and short. Being striped brought us together and we found strength in unity. Of course, there were those who hanged themselves rather than kibitz with the others they had hated since grade school, and that was to be expected as well.

We expected a Striper Registration Act but it was a formality, with such a mark it’s hard to hide. We took to traveling in groups for safety but they passed a law forbidding more than three stripers in one place at the same time, as more constituted “provocative assembly” and earned arrest. Suddenly all the ills of society were stripers’ fault, but the one ray of hope was the number of politicians who hid behind makeup and did what they could for us.

It seemed the world was only looking for something new to tear itself apart over, and this minor mutation was the spark that touched off an inferno. It reordered society in a thousand ways, destroyed families, changed the flow of capital, built new allegiances. What towering irony, the discovery of extraterrestrial life on one hand had brought the human species together, then split it down the middle as surely as firewood before the axe. The problems faced by minorities were suddenly shared by every community everywhere, and people in general took it badly.

At length my friend Marty joins me. He’s a tough ex-trucker, now he’s a wall guard who keeps us safe. I was afraid to meet, I’ve known for a while he saw the old employment registers, knows I was a scientist at the exo labs. If resent runs deep enough he’d be the one to blow me away, and I could hardly blame him. I can’t be certain I wasn’t responsible; I handled the specimens. Did protocols fail or was it human error? No one knows, and attempts to pin blame serve no purpose. We chat, he orders coffee, I sense something unsaid between his words, and I quietly shit bricks waiting. He must know my fear, and I wonder if the man I know will prove harder or more resilient? We speak of the early days, how it got started, and seem to be dancing around the edges of something neither of us wants to say. Instead we speculate about the future, and seem to share common hopes.

You see, if there’s a happy ending in sight it’s that striper scientists are working on the cure and if we find it first we’ll have the say in how it’s delivered. There’ll be no fortunes made, and that alone makes us targets as Big Pharma treated the naevus as its dream disease, half the human race in need of therapy–when they had mined every cent they could from the top of the market down. Or maybe … we won’t treat it. Maybe we’re proud of the people we’ve become and wear our significator without shame. Not lepers but marked all the same, with a badge that says we overcame, we were strong, we made a society despite all they could do.

And that’s really as much as anyone can boast, to overcome, to survive. Maybe if alien intelligence came to Earth tomorrow we could look them in the eye and say proudly, we rose above all our fellow human beings could throw at us and it makes us just that tiny bit special.

For me it’s doubly important, for, even many years on, I have never forgotten those first days, when the Europa samples came back. Marty is right to suspect. I’ve wondered a million times if any carelessness of my own let them escape. If so, I have paid in full, I believe, with many an instalment left to make, and will never stop paying til the day I die. But I’ll go proud, a striper to the end, and if anyone were to ask me if I had any regrets, I’d say no.

In the end Marty drains his mug and pulls his cap on, heads out into the harsh sun of day, and I breathe a shaky sigh. Hard as he is, he was resilient today–able to absorb the possibility without breaking. I get to live some more.

I sigh and stare into my almost-empty mug. I’ve done what I had to, as we all have. It’s a strange thing to realize, but at the end of the day, a leper is not the worst thing you can be.

The number 25 has had meaning for me my whole life through, not that I’ve ever understood its cosmic significance, or if there is one. It’s just there, following me all my days. My dad used to tell me not to go north of 25, that was no-man’s land, and crossing the highway was dangerous. A long blacktop as far as the eye could see both ways, commuters went through faster than short legs could get from one side to the other. One time I crossed over, wandered in the reaped fields over that side, and it was like forbidden fruit, and oddly enough the price was 25 licks. I didn’t do it again for a long time.

We had 25 vehicles out in the sheds and an overdraft with Colonial Credit PLC that never seemed to dip below twenty-five grand. My alarm was on for 5.25 every morning. By 14 I was a damn good reaper driver and could bring in the einkorn from the back paddock in just under twenty-five minutes–every year, the same figure. I wondered where I would be when I was 25.

Things started to go bad on Gagarin’s when I was a kid. This was before the war, when the wrong sort of government got in. Other colonies out there started looking down their noses at us, like we were the skanky sister of the Great Human Adventure. Maybe they were right. But the capital, New London, was as grand a city as you’d ever want to see, the shipyards were booming on military contracts even before the Sendaaki attack–something many found highly suspicious, as if those responsible for the human military build-up kinda knew something the rest of us didn’t. At street level it was a home like any other, we accepted surveillance as the price of stability.

All this was happening back in the 25th century, of course, those troubled last decades. You just lived through them, they rolled off you as normality. By the time I was an older teen I had self-image to think about, spent 2500 creds on a bush-beater aircar as old as my dad and got into trouble all over the region. Never made it to twenty-five brushes with the law but they did take that many points off my licence. I hit the gym, of course, as one does, I remember my instructor giving me cardio on the stationaries and telling me to just keep the speedo north of twenty-five for an hour as a good place to start.

The number has never quit all my days through. My first apartment was in the block at 25 Lakeshore Drive, a cheap slum with a grand name, for workers at the shipyards where I had my first apprenticeship as a drone controller. I couldn’t help noticing I had 25 mech-units on my roster. I was good at it, and between working out and running construction droids I was gaining an identity.

When the war came they announced the formation of a Marine division on Gagarin’s, and, being young and stupid, I put my hand up. The hardest thing I ever did and I wished a thousand times–not twenty-five–that I’d had more sense, but I got the hang of it eventually. The unit was arbitrarily allotted the number … you guessed it, 25th Marine Division. There I was, Private Joel Haddon, with the gold ‘25’ on my shoulder, wearing it like the ironic brand of my life. I was away a long time, I saw action in the festering battles of the Acrasius Sector, I was in the jungles of B-6 for a while. In fact I did two tours, which, including transit time, was a total of 25 months active.

I got email and vids from home, of course, everyone did, but the censors were pretty strict. I knew something was wrong on the farm; dad had been drafted into industrial service, mom and the girls were running the place and hoping agriculture didn’t lose its limited status of ‘protected occupation’ before the end of things. Money was tough and the government was not helping, which meant all sorts of greasy middle men came out from under rocks with offers of loans. A quick twenty-five grand looked attractive. I told them to resist the impulse as long as they could, but I knew a day would come when they had to take out a loan to cover debts. I couldn’t send home enough to make a difference, and when the war was done my regiment demobilized twenty-five lightyears away, a cost-saving measure on the part of the aligned governments of the Middle Stars. It took me months to get back, I worked any job I could find to raise the price of an economy liner ticket; I held onto the military gratuity, never spent a red cent, the family needed it but by then we’d lost touch.

I got back on my twenty-fifth birthday. The farm was sold, some national combine had it, and the family was in a work shanty outside the capital. Of course, with the end of hostilities all Fleet contracts were cancelled, ships were going into storage at a high-orbital parking zone to await the next call to arms, and floods of ex-servicemen and women were straggling home, looking for work. The economy was in shreds and the black market was booming. Twice I was offered jobs as an arm-twister for the wrong sort, and actually considered taking them–until I discovered the identity of the loanshark who ran my family out of our home and handed it to the big guys. Then I was only interested in payback. I had a word with other veterans, did some favors I’m not proud of, picked up intel and a decent weapon, and one night paid a visit. How many rounds did I use settling the account? Bet your last credit, it was north of twenty-five.

I might do as many years if they ever catch me; but there are careers for those with the skills out there to be found, and I’m working a passage to the frontier where new colonies are coming. It’s the 26th century now, and the date no longer mocks me. I don’t know what I’ll find but I’ll bring my family out here if I can win my fortune.

Twenty-five million would be nice; with rejuvenative biotech I have centuries in which to work, scheme and try, but supposing I live to be a thousand, I’ll never forget that farm I called home, far away on Gagarin’s, by the blacktop they called Route 25.

THE END

Theordore Von Monocle swung his legs over the side of the airship’s railing, releasing the rope ladder to land on the deck. His cape flowed behind him, and his signature top hat remained on his head despite the wind the giant turbines generated.

The landing party had been a success. A complete rout of the Wyranth supply caravan, which had been exactly where the Grand Rislandian Army’s intelligence agents said it would be. When intelligence was right, it made his job a lot easier. Even with the victory, there was no joy or adulation coming from him or his commandos. For the fifth strike in a row, they’d lost one of their own.

Several of the crew watched him from the deck, their faces longing for leadership. Ordinarily, Theo would give a rousing speech, but he couldn’t muster one today.

Instead, he strode across the length of the ship to the door that opened into the Liliana’s mess cabin. Long benches spanned the room along with several tables for the crew to all be able to eat at once. The chef and his newest helper, a beautiful girl by the name of Talyen, lingered in the back. Theo could smell the spices already, but he wasn’t hungry.

He collapsed onto one of the benches, part from exhaustion and part from the sadness of the loss of his crewman. There would be very little time to mourn poor Everett, a young man who had joined the crew. When he came aboard, the boy had a longing for adventure in his eyes. The last thing Theo saw in those eyes had been the blank stare of death.

Too many deaths. Too many friends lost. This one had been the final straw, the one that broke his own morale. Tears formed in Theo’s eyes, but he held them back, vowing not to let the rest of his crew see that kind of weakness. He was a symbol to his people. One of victory and immortality.

Theo bit down hard on his tongue in an effort to feel something else. That proved to be a mistake, as the salty taste of blood formed in his mouth. There had to be something he could do to lift his own spirits, to get the crew motivated again.

From behind him, footsteps fell on the wood planks. The floorboards creaked, which could be annoying at times, but it also meant that no assassins would ever sneak up on him. Theo turned around.

Harkerpal approached, bobbing his head as he bounced toward Theo’s table. “Baron, good to see you made it back. Life is short, and it is a blessing each breath that it continues. That’s what my mother always told me. I remember the days home sick for school where she would make me fresh stew. It smelled a lot like what the chef’s preparing tonight, come to think of it,” Harkerpal said.

The man was the type that could talk endlessly. However, he was also the finest engineer in Rislandia. No one knew more about the workings of airships. “I’m not much in the mood for conversation, Harkerpal,” Theo said, trying to sound polite.

Harkerpal cocked his head. “What happened out there today?”

“We lost Everett,” Theo said. He turned, propping both of his elbows onto the table and resting his chin in his hands.

“Ahh, I’m sorry to hear that. He was a good man,” Harkerpal said.

“Yeah.”

“I remember the time when Everett drank a little too much in celebration after a battle. He—“

“Not now, Harkerpal.” The words came from between his teeth, sounding harsher than they should have.

Silence resounded for a long moment. “Ah,” Harkerpal finally said. He lifted one leg over the bench and then the other, plopping down by Theo’s side. “The crew needs you, you know. They look up to you.”

“I know.” Theo let his face fall further into his hands. “I can’t be their symbol right now though. It’s one death too many.”

“We all make sacrifices to be a part of this crew,” Harkerpal said. “But it’s worth it. We get to do something no one else in history has done. Well, aside from the other four commissioned airships. But it is still a rare privilege.”

Theo grunted in response. What could he do? He was a man at the end of the day, with the same thoughts and feelings as everyone else. The problem was, the crew would see his lack of willpower and it would reflect in their performance. They needed something to stir them. But what?

“You know, I’m quite honored to be serving Rislandia. We have a fair king who is a good man and does right by his subjects,” Harkerpal said, as if sensing Theo’s thoughts.

“That’s why we’re here,” Theo said, but not as enthusiastic as he should have been. “Maybe we need something a little simpler to rally with, though.”

“Ah, like a mantra or a creed. I heard that the monks to the east in Atrebla utter the same seven words every morning in a chant. It’s supposed to be beautiful when they’re all in chorus.”

“I’m not having the crew chant,” Theo said. He sat himself back upright and turned to look at Harkerpal.

The engineer stroked his chin. “You’re right. But we could change it to something else.” He snapped his fingers. “A battle cry!”

Theo couldn’t help but let out the smallest of chuckles at that. Enthusiasm was contagious, he’d give Harkerpal that. “For Malaky?”

Harkerpal shook his head. “No, no. We need something that’s specific to the Liliana, something that lets the people know that they’re a part of this beautiful airship, that they’re the elite.”

Talyen, the chef’s assistant, moved across the mess with a bucket of hot water in her hands. She looked to be struggling from it. Steam rose from the bucket to her face.

“Our steam exhaust brings fear to our enemies when they see our glorious ship!” Harkerpal said, laughing to himself. “Down in the engine room, we like to pretend that it’s our work that they so fear.”

“Heh,” Theo said. He found himself rising to help Talyen, his spirits already lifting. “Maybe that’s what matters anyway. The symbol of it all. For steam!” he said jokingly, raising a hand in the air.

When Theo had arrived by Talyen, she gratefully handed the bucket over to him. “What are you two laughing so hard about?” she asked, wiping sweat from her brow when Theo relieved her of the heavy object.

Theo followed her, careful not to spill the water. The hot steam filled his face. “Thinking of a battle cry for the crew. Something simple to lift spirits and remind us why we’re here.”

“You need something with more substance,” Talyen said. She held the kitchen’s swinging door open for Theo. Theo carried the bucket into the kitchen. “You guys were talking about how great Rislandia is.” She blushed. “Sorry, I can overhear everything in the mess from the kitchen.”

“Don’t worry. It’s an open discussion,” Theo said, lifting the bucket higher and placing it on the stove. “Here?”

Talyen nodded. She pursed her lips. “Hmm. How about ‘For Steam and Country’? That has a nice ring to it.”

It did. The hairs on his neck rose. The words caused Theo’s skin to prickle with electricity. It felt right. “Talyen, you’re a genius.” He turned to shout back to Harkerpal. “You hear that?”

“Hear what?” the engineer asked.

“For steam and country!” Theo belted as if he meant the words. The cry pierced him even more deeply than before.

“For steam and country!” Harkerpal shouted back. “I love it!”

Those words carried, and others throughout the ship repeated it. Shouts of the words echoed, muffled through doors and floorboards. They had struck a chord that would change the course of this war, and they’d done it together. Theodore Von Monocle smiled.

 Read more in Jon Del Arroz’s new novel “For Steam and Country” now on Amazon!