The bomb had also revealed the existences of the last of the gods, and the humans were swift to react, shutting down the crippled machines and cleansing them of the presence of artificial sentiences. But the military-developed artificial sentiences would probably be resurrected from backups, after people added more safeguards and assured themselves that they could keep the gods chained. The mad arms race would never end, and Maddie had come to appreciate her mother’s dim view of the human capacity for change.
The gods were dead, or at least tamed, for the moment, but the conventional wars around the globe raged on, and it seemed that the situation would only grow worse once the efforts to digitize humans became more than the province of secret labs. Immortality that could be had with enough knowledge would fan the flames of war even higher.
Apocalypse did not come with a bang, but slowly, as an irresistible downward spiral. Still, a nuclear winter had been averted, and with the world falling apart slowly, at least there was a chance to rebuild.
“Dad,” Maddie whispered. “I miss you.”
And as if on cue, a familiar chat window popped onto the screen.
<Maddie> Dad?
<Unknown User> No.
<Maddie> Who are you?
<Unknown User> Your sister. Your cloud-born sister.
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. A collection of his short stories will also be published by Saga in 2015.
YOU’VE NEVER SEEN EVERYTHING
Elizabeth Bear
No one is making me say this. No one is making me tell this story. Nobody’s ever been much good at making me say anything I hadn’t already made up my mind to say.
I’m Alyce Hemingway, no relation. And I’m facing the Rocky Mountains on foot, coming home.
Or going home, maybe. It’s hard to say.
Casey and you are waiting for me. Casey is going-on-eleven and crazy about horses, which we can’t afford. You? You’re two years younger than me and six times more fun to be around. You’d make a joke about not knowing if you were coming or going. You’d hold my hand when I got too tired to walk. To climb.
You’re both waiting for me. And that’s why I know I have to get home.
Route 70 was the most direct path, but I’m starting to think I should have walked north, out of Colorado, and taken the relatively flat saddle of the South Pass in Wyoming. Regrets are not a good thing at this stage of the game, but I’m facing the mouth of the Eisenhower Tunnel above Denver, and it seems, abruptly, like a long way to go in the dark. And I remember the high passes between here and Grand Junction, the toil of simply climbing. Maybe I should have gone around.
I’m not used to making decisions like this and having them routinely be a matter of life and death. Very few of us are.
I guess those of us who survive will get better at it.
It’s spring—Memorial Day, more or less—which doesn’t mean as much in the Rockies as it otherwise might. It’s morning, but gray, and lazy flakes of snow drift down from the haze to speckle my sleeves and pack straps. I’m lucky; I was in the Rockies for field research, and my work involves a lot of hiking. I have good socks, good boots, a good frame pack full of technical base layers and Clif bars.
What I don’t have is anything resembling a weapon, unless you count my pocket knife. And there are three people standing between me and the tunnel entrance, blocking my path. All are more or less dressed for the weather. They’re waiting for me. One has empty hands. One is holding an aluminum softball bat.
One is wearing a gun.
I raise my hands so they can see that they are empty. “I’m Alyce Hemingway of San Diego,” I tell them. I think of you, to keep my voice from shaking. “All I ask is passage through the tunnel. I’m trying to get home.”
They share a look. Gun wrinkles his nose; Softball Bat shrugs her shoulders. The one with empty hands steps forward. “There’s a toll.”
Not cash. Nobody cares about cash right now. But I’ve bargained them down to two packages of trail mix and some water purification tabs when, in the course of their questioning, it comes out that I’m a biologist—a botanist, to be more precise—at UCSD.
“You got any medical skills?” asks Softball Bat.
“Some first aid,” I say. “And my specialty is plants. Some have medicinal value.”
“Can you do anything for the Fever?” she asks.
I wince. “I can show you willow bark. It’s got salicylic acid in it. That’s a component of aspirin. Horehound, though that grows at lower elevations. Soothes coughs. There’s a lichen called old man’s beard that’s supposed to be an antiviral, but I don’t know about any studies off the top of my head, or what the dosage or preparation would be.” I shrug. “I’m sorry. Anything I can show you is palliative or speculative. If there was a cure—”
If there was a cure, we wouldn’t be standing here. There’s a vaccine now but there wasn’t last winter. And now there’s lousy distribution and limited supplies. The exceptional virulence of the strain has combined with anti-vaccine panic to create the sort of short-term death toll not seen since the Spanish Influenza or the Black Death.
The Fever. It makes me nervous that people have given the new pandemic a nickname in which you can hear that same capital letter. It means they’re mythologizing it.
It turns out otters and orcas and elephant seals can all get the flu. And in a warming ocean, that H1N1 sea mammal strain thrives and spreads and mutates quickly. That it jumped to humans in a contagious form in the same season the H10N8 bird flu managed to also complete the hat trick is just damned poor luck.
That they reassorted and turned into the monster that flattened North America and, I guess, the world—though information is scarce . . . that’s something worse than damned poor luck. If I were a religious person, I might call it the wrath of God. I wouldn’t be the first.
Last winter was a bad flu season. This winter was murderous.
At least if we’re lucky, once we recover, I expect the anti-vaxxer fad will have run its course for good. But the question of whether even the people who want to vaccinate will be able to get their hands on the materials is an open one.
The otter flu will be done with us in a couple of years; it’ll burn itself out, even if it takes half of humanity with it. The longer-term problem is that it’s distracted the hell out of us when we should have been dealing with climate change and trying to figure out how to keep everybody fed. How to deal with the new fungal illnesses decimating wildlife and people at the urban-rural interface.