The Children of Today (Short Story)

Updated 12/16/2015

I used to be like you.

What I mean is that I've spent most of my life running from the life everyone else wants, rejecting it for the things you're not supposed to want.  I never wanted a marriage, or a career, or a whole herd of little ones underfoot.

What I really wanted to do was spend time with the Children of Today.  They got a little bit of news coverage a while back.  One of the big news sites ran an article that made them out to be some sort of cult.  Most of the stories on TV referred to them as “The Children of Today, a local motorcycle gang,” but I used to run with them, and they were never that.  The Children of Today were never anything more than some hard-rock boys and some punk-rock girls living on short hours at work and small budgets at home.  They bonded over a shared interest in tinkering and interstate driving and having a good time.  The “compound” (as it was called online) or “headquarters” (as seen on TV) that they have downtown is actually just a shared living space.  As you can imagine, it really helps some of the Children stretch those small budgets.

The Children of Today were never a huge story, even locally, but when something any of your friends are a part of shows up on TV, it's a huge story with your friends.  My friends outside the group had a lot of questions.  They obviously believed what they saw on TV, and the questions were pretty pointed and uncomfortable.  “Why do you still hang out with those guys?”  “How bad was the initiation?  Did you have to commit any crimes?”  “If you pay more, do you get to level up or something?”  None of it was based on facts at all, and it just drove me away.  And of course, the Children of Today were there to welcome me with open arms.
   
My parents, though, never gave up on me.  They took me see this guy, this Dr. Calderero.  He was amazing.  So patient.  He taught me that I had been living under so many mistaken beliefs:  that I am not quite like most other people, that I'm not really interested in a career and a family, that time spent with the Children of Today is more valuable to me than the extra money I would make working longer hours.  He helped me to correct those beliefs.  He, like my parents, could see the Children of Today for what they really were—a bunch of pathetic Peter Pans trying to extend their childhood by having sleepovers every night.  Harmless, perhaps, but unhealthy.

It took a while, months in fact, but eventually I came around to see reason.  I was ready to agree with my parents and Dr. Calderero.  I was even able to.  But I still didn't want to.  That's when Dr. Calderero really came through for me.

You see, he's one of the pioneers in Elective Neuropsychological Adjustment.  It's an outpatient procedure.  I kept my daily appointment with Dr. Calderero, but this day was unlike any of the ones before.  He opened the door to his dimly-lit back room, to what looked like an abandoned dentist's office, plus or minus the wrist and ankle restraints on the chair.

Once I was inside, Dr. Calderero shut and locked the door behind me.  My parents shaved my head.  I sat down in the chair and put on this funny hat while Dr. Calderero strapped me in.  The hat clung to the skin of my scalp, moist and sticky.  The restraints bit.  Dr. Calderero turned on a machine, and I fell asleep.  When I woke up, it was like no time had passed, like nothing had happened.

A lifetime had passed.  Everything had happened.

I was a new person after that.  I am a new person now.  I have new friends.  Some of my old ones are mixed in there, from before the Children, I guess.  I have a new job, too.  It's not quite what I expected, but things are looking up.  I'm well on my way to having the life everyone else wants.  It seems impossible, but I am.  You see, I used to be just like you,

But I'm not anymore.

Bait (Short Story)

By all rights, I should be dead today. Just last night, I was way out ahead of the group when a zombie came running up on my left, at the very edge of my peripheral vision. That zombie isn't the reason I should be dead. I was half-expecting it. I put a battle-ax in his cerebellum.

I guess part of the problem is living in a world where I'm half-expecting to see a zombie at the edge of my peripheral vision. Four-year colleges don't really prepare a guy to live in a world where it's kind of normal to see a battle-ax. Or a cerebellum. But even that wasn't the immediate problem.

The immediate problem was the zombie that came limping up behind me. It was shaking like crazy, like they usually do. Usually you hear that shaking any time a zombie brushes up against something, but this time we were way out in the open, so that second one, the slow one, almost snuck up on me. I put my boot on the first one's chest, yanked my ax back out of his skull, flipped the handle around in my hand, and stabbed out blindly behind me. The top half of my ax blade sweeps back in a long, nasty point. It took me a lot of nights with a fire and hammer to get it just right. I went through a fair amount of scrap metal and a couple of ax heads, too, but it was worth it to be able to protect my own back.

I was once again rewarded for that hard work, rewarded with the sickly sound of rotten stomach splitting open. I felt it through the ax handle more than I heard it, really. That was enough to stop shaky, at least for a second. It was the pain that stopped him. I don't know anyone who wasn't surprised to learn that zombies feel pain. It always stops them. Personally, I figure they're shocked to feel something other than the hunger, something fresher, sharper.

We don't talk about it, and we try not to think about it. I think for most of us, the pain makes it harder, but this time, in this moment, it made things a whole lot easier, because just for a moment shaky stopped cold. Eventually the hunger won out, like it always does, and at that point, I heard more sickening sounds as shaky started pulling himself further up my ax's blade to get to me. Of course, while shaky had been stopped, I hadn't been. I had been looking over my shoulder and pulling my hatchet out of my belt with my right hand. As soon as shaky started pushing forward, I let go of the ax in my left hand, I spun around, and I brought the hatchet down as hard as I could onto the back of shaky's skull.

Because he was falling forward, and because of the awkward position shaky was in, with his two feet and two hands plus the butt of my ax handle on the ground, but his head hanging half-limp in the air, I didn't quite cut his head off with the narrow blade of the hatchet. That's what I was trying to do. I guess the easiest way to describe what I actually did is to say that I turned shaky into the single most gruesome Pez dispenser in recorded human history. Although it's a stretch to call this time recorded, or historic, or human.

I could also give a more clinical description of what happened, and use words like “fractured” and “lacerated,” but I find that the dark humor helps at least a little.

They do usually give themselves away by their shaking, which of course is where their nickname, “shakies,” comes from. For a while after they get sick, they're not really shaky as much as they are jerky. They move too fast, too urgently for the space they're in. At that stage, we call them “live shakies.” If you lock a live shaky in a closet, he'll sprint two steps to the far corner and then stop short. He won't hit his head hard during the stop, but he might bloody up his nose pretty good. Then he'll pick another corner and sprint toward that one, stopping short just a hair late again. Leave one in a closet long enough, and he'd come out with Michael Jackson's nose, but without a concussion. I think. To be honest, I don't know if even a live shaky has enough up there to concuss it, but I guess that's beside the point. Anyway, that stage lasts a couple weeks, or maybe a month at the longest. After that, they still try to move quickly, but they aren't strong enough anymore, so they shake instead. Then they're not live shakies anymore. They're just shakies.

Everyone, even those of us who are still alive, has had plenty of run-ins with shakies at this point. It's not like it happens to me because I'm reckless. Well, okay, I am reckless. I'm almost always way out in front of the group, for one thing. That hasn't been particularly good for my health, of course. I lost two fingers on my right hand and most of the structural integrity of my left knee, both to live shakies who grabbed an extremity and twisted. There was also the time I came around a corner and basically ran into three of them. I'd just killed one and had my hands full with the other two when another guy in our group came around the corner and shot one of them square in the face, taking off most of my ear in the process. Of course, if he hadn't done that, I might not be hearing anything at all now, so I don't complain about it.

Plus there was that time with the motorcycle. At first, a lot of us had vehicles, but we ditched them. Engine noise is like a dinner bell to the shakies. I guess snarling, semi-conscious fiends don't have the skills it takes to keep a car running, so when someone else does, the shakies figure him (or her) for food. But one time I came across this old Indian Chief from back when World War II was still a current cultural reference. One of its owners during a more recent historical period had restored it, and souped it up for added power. The engine on that sucker made enough noise to draw pretty much every shaky in a one-mile radius. I used to be kind of a motorcycle guy before all this, so I decided to take it for a spin. I took it down this little logging road, caning it and carving my turns on the switchbacks, occasionally letting off a little to let the shakies think they might get me before twisting the throttle hard. A lot of them would jump off the switchbacks above me, sometimes two or three turns above me, trying to be first in line at the buffet. Of course, something that doesn't have enough brains to not run in a closet has no chance of grasping the concept of leading a target, so I was never in any danger from those guys. They just saved me the trouble of breaking their necks for them.

The ones that made more trouble were the ones who came up onto the road from below me, the ones coming from the opposite direction who had been drawn into my path by the noise. It got to where I couldn't let off the throttle at all for fear that the sheer volume of shakies reaching out to grab me would slow me to a stop. At that point, I knew I couldn't keep going much longer. Every foot or leg or torso that got under my wheels could throw me off balance bad enough to lose the bike. Finally, I came up on a turn that I didn't see until too late. I didn't even try to brake. Instead, I shifted up a gear, gunned the throttle, and got a solid footing on my pegs. I saw a tree branch overhanging the edge of the road and aimed for it. When I was about a pace and a half away from the tree, I jumped and grabbed for the branch. Unlike the shakies, I know just about everything there is to know about leading a target, and that day, just about everything was just enough. Not enough to keep me from turning my shoulders into a practical study in sports medicine, but that's the price I pay to play the game I play. Although I suppose it's a stretch to call this a game, or playing, or a price I could afford.

Anyway, I grabbed that branch, and then I climbed up a couple more branches, and then I swung my legs up over branch number three. The motorcycle kept going over the edge of the road, falling and then tumbling and then sliding down the hill. I could still hear it running when it came to a stop–they don't make 'em like that anymore. Meanwhile, the shakies started climbing up the tree, one by one. Hanging upside-down by my legs, I hacked at their heads or their hands or whatever else they gave me to hack at.

Interesting fact: the shakies can indeed bleed to death. It's not like in the movies. They'll bleed and bleed, and their hearts will keep going until they're pumping nothing but air. That final stage only lasts for about five or ten seconds, though. After that, they drop like a shot. In general, of course, it's a pretty bad idea to just wait around to see it happen, but when you're a good fifteen feet in the air, and the only ones left are missing their hands up to the elbow, there's no reason not to watch their last pathetic attempts to climb a tree.

I suppose you could look away, if you wanted, but I think the dark humor helps a little.

So yeah, I guess I'm reckless, but that's not my problem, it's just my job. And the job isn't the problem either. The problem is the reason I have the job.

I'm the only one of us left who can't outrun a zombie. When we started out, I had a little of my speed left from my days playing football, but mostly I had pathetic thirty-year-old-man arthritis from playing football. Now, with the knee thing and just the daily grind walking around all the time, what was left before is pretty much gone at this point. One of the decrepit shakies, sure, I'm faster than those, but if we get a live one, I have no choice but to turn around and fight it. If we get sixty of them, I'd still have to turn around. I'm the weak link. The flat tire. The anchor. And I don't mean the superstar stud runner who brings the baton to the finish line in the 4x100 relay. I mean the thing that holds you back. And our group has a rule: no weak links, no anchors.

It took us a long time to arrive at that rule. Months, maybe years. I lost count. In the beginning, we had kids with us, seven of them. Had, as in past tense. One of them, Liz, is still with us, although she was almost fourteen at the beginning and her mom almost made the Olympics in the 400 meter low hurdles. Liz was never a weak link. Now she's barely a kid.

The other six, we lost one by one.  After that, Emma (our official unofficial leader) made a rule that nobody's allowed to have more.  There was a huge argument when it happened, and it has been an ongoing source of tension ever since.  There were couples who were determined to repopulate.  I think Emma's right, though, that the apocalypse is not an appropriate place to bring your children.  For one thing, group morale goes in the toilet every time we lose a kid.  For another thing, we didn't just lose seven kids.  We lost them and a lot more good men and women determined to protect them.

I almost ended up on that list. This kid Chuck and his dad were off to the side of the group while the rest of us were setting up camp when a live one comes barreling out of the woods straight at them. It would have been the biggest human being I'd ever seen in my life, if it had still been human. I swear it was Shaquille O'Neal-sized. I was the first to react. I knocked it off a ten-foot escarpment with a running forearm shiver. It grabbed a handful of my shirt and pulled me over with it. I landed on its chest and just kept hitting it as hard as I could, until there was nothing showing on its face but cracked bone, and my good zombie-punching gloves were red all over. I came out with a couple of broken knuckles, plus half a dozen cracked ribs courtesy of undead fists the size of cantaloupes, but if it had landed on top of me...

By all rights, I should be dead today.

As I was climbing back up the little cliff, I heard footsteps coming toward me. “It's me!” I called out. I came over the lip of the embankment to the sight of three or four dozen people putting away bows and shotguns. Chuck ran up to hug my face and shoulders, which were the only things showing above the edge of the cliff. Chuck's dad was right behind him, trying to keep the little one away from the edge of the cliff. No sense knocking the frying pan down just to have the kid jump in the fire.

“That was amazing!” He told me.

“That was amazing!” Chuck echoed.

“Seriously, how can I repay you?” The father continued to gush. “There's no way I can repay you. If you hadn't been there...”

“Just doing my job,” I assured him.

“When you went over with the shaky, I thought you were dead for sure,” Emma said, in a tone that might have been curiosity. “That one was a monster.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Well, so am I.”

A week later, Chuck wandered off into the woods while we were asleep. We never saw him again. Now there are no more kids, or senior citizens, or walking wounded–aside from me. There's no back of the pack. Now it's just me, and nobody's here to protect me. I protect the rest. I clear the path. Because there can be no weak links in my group, my role in the group is to not be part of it. If there's a trap, I spring the trap. If I live, that's less danger everyone else has to deal with. One of these days, when they kill me, my job is to die loud.

I guess it's a lousy job. It's definitely a dirty one. I don't think anybody wants it to be this way, but this is the way it is. When I did that thing with the motorcycle, I got back to camp about six and a half hours late. The driving took time, and then there was the fighting, and then I had to walk back slowly enough that my footsteps would be drowned out by the sounds of moaning, writhing, dying shakies. When I did get back, almost everyone was happy to see me. A few of them were really angry at first, and then even happier, so I guess they were either worried, or upset that I came back and then overacting to fit in with the mood of the rest of the group. Emma was the angriest. She yelled at me for a good fifteen or twenty minutes. I guess that's her job, being leader. That's how I know she doesn't want to see me dead. It's just that the same way she doesn't want me to die protecting someone who isn't gonna make it, she doesn't want any of the rest to die protecting me when they should be running to safety. I don't want that either. It isn't fair. None of us like it, so we just don't talk about it. Every day, I wake up knowing, and not needing to be told, that I won't be part of the group that day.

At night, though, I am part of the group again. I am still a part of all the really important parts of group life: sitting around, playing cards to pass the time, singing old songs (because they stopped recording music on account of the event, the only kind of music there is now is old music), and trying not to think about the fact that life suddenly turned into a B-movie that didn't end after two hours like it was supposed to. Trying not to think about how B-movies inevitably end for characters as slow and ugly as me.

The fact is, they're too kind for their own good. I'm entitled to a share of any canned, freeze-dried, vacuum-sealed, or otherwise-preserved food we run across. Even after several years, that happens more than you'd think. The shakies are only interested in flesh, and almost all packaged food is edible way past its expiration date. Thank God for preservatives. But I turn it down, because they shouldn't be wasting food on a walking deadman like me. Since I'm out ahead, I come across a lot of mushrooms that haven't been stepped on and animals that haven't been scared back into the woods by the larger group. Sometimes there are berry bushes. I have plenty to eat from what I can pick and shoot. I took a beautiful old recurve bow out of a hunting cabin near the very beginning of this whole thing. These days, I get more and better fresh meat than I ever did in my old life. The extinction of humanity has been great for wildlife. I typically get about two deer a week, out of the dozens I see. I share with the group, because they're glad to have it, and because it would go bad before I could eat all of it anyway.

Occasionally we run out of the grocery-store stuff, and the whole group forages for food, the same as I do. They eat a lot of dandelion roots during those times. Trying to stay out ahead of the group on two bum legs and one knee that's flat-out injured, I don't really have any time for digging, but for their sake, I try not to step on dandelions. Someday, there probably won't be any more of the processed food left to find, and everyone will do a lot of foraging every day. Personally, I hope to live long enough to see those days, but for everyone else's sake, I hope they never come.

Sometimes, when someone else gets hurt too bad to outrun the live ones, they send him (or her) up ahead with me. That's the worst. I hate that. Emma has always told me I'm not allowed to protect anyone else who gets sent ahead with me, but, I mean, do you think I can help it? Most of these people are my friends, and even the ones I don't like, we've been through a lot together. A month or so back, I about damn near got my right arm torn off by a shaky I didn't see coming, because I was keeping another one off Chuck's dad. He didn't make it. Now I'm weak on the right side. I have to hide it from Emma, or she'd really let me have it. I do what I can, within reason, but sometimes there are just too many...

Like I said, now it's just me.

By all rights I should be dead today.

A few of the youngest guys in the group look up to me. I guess they see me as someone to be admired. Anyway, they call me “mini-Frankenstein,” and they're always telling stories about me, saying that I'll outlive all of us. If the population of Earth was seven billion shakies, they say, it would take seven billion and one to stop me. It can be fun to listen to, and I'd like to think it's true, but I know better. I've just been lucky so far.

I guess if we ever stopped to think about it, we'd realize how unlikely it is for any of us to be alive. For one thing, we ended up in the perfect location, up here in the mountains, with lots of good places to hide. If my boss hadn't sent me on a ski retreat, if instead he'd booked a luau somewhere in the tropics, where the populations are higher, I'd be shaking and eating people right now. Plus, disease doesn't spread so easily up at this altitude. We pretty much get a nightly freeze, which kills viruses and shakies. Now I'm imagining them out there freezing to death, shivering. I guess they wouldn't really look any different from regular shakies.

I told you the humor helps.

It would be bad back in that steamy excuse for a hellhole known as Florida, where my wife and I used to live. Where I tell myself my wife still lives. It wouldn't be quite as bad, though, because of the old people. I figure that when an old person turns, they never go through the jerky, frantic stage, and skip right to the stumbling and shaking. But I don't know for sure. I've never seen an old-person shaky.

So anyway, last night, a shaky snuck up on me way out in the open. We don't spend much time way out in the open, because even the regular shakies can surprise you there sometimes, but we were pretty sure we were hot on the trail of our best news all month. In the early afternoon, we came across a poster of sorts. It was very plain, no pictures or anything. It just said:

If you can read this, you are welcomed.

←

We followed the arrow, and before too long, we came upon a similar poster. This one had an arrow pointing right instead of left, and below the arrow, someone had handwritten, “If you know your ABC's, you will be welcome.” “ABC” and “welcome” had been underlined, apparently by the same hand.

I guess I'm not the only one who thinks humor helps.

Every few intersections, we came upon a new sign, indicating a new turn. One of them even had the same handwritten message as before. It was just getting dark when I found a sign that pointed up a dirt driveway that led back into the woods. I walked down the driveway. After a few steps, I could see the silhouette of a house. Not just any house, a big house. The kind of house that was the best out of a very rich person's several summer homes.

Then I saw another silhouette in the woods–a shaky, twitching and giving himself away. I could easily have plugged it with an arrow, but I decided that would be a bad idea. For starters, I didn't really want to risk losing the arrow. Sure, I break the points on them all the time when I shoot something and hit bone. Arrowheads I can replace. I make them out of old tin cans. They fly like crap and they break a lot easier than the nice ones I used to have, but at least they're lethal. The shafts, on the other hand, I can't really replace. I found a handful of really nice hunting arrows in the cabin with the recurve. The shafts on them were well-made–strong and durable and perfectly balanced. There were also some very nice arrowheads screwed onto those shafts, but the last of those broke apart on some shaky's skull a long, long time ago. I can put my shoddy-ass tin-can heads on the shafts and still hit whatever I'm shooting at, but I doubt I can make a shaft good enough to deliver the arrowheads I make accurately. So if shaky took a while to die with my arrow in him, I would be searching in the woods a good long time to get the arrow back. Plus, there was the off chance that I might hit shaky without killing him at all, and then later he could show up and surprise us in our sleep, and then I would have failed to do my job properly out of sheer laziness. That would be no good at all. I needed an up-close kill.

I took a couple steps into the woods, moving sideways, intending to get behind shaky for an easy kill, but then I lost shaky behind a tree. I could still hear it aimlessly brushing against leaves and branches, but I couldn't tell which direction it had moved, which direction he was moving. Risky as it was, I needed to get shaky to come to me. I looked down, spotted a twig, and stepped on it. The aimless, listless brushing sounds continued. No good. I took another step, this one onto a stick with a bunch of twigs sticking out of it. That was enough noise to get shaky's attention. The brushing became more focused, more urgent, more consistent. Now I could get a direction on it. I slipped behind a tree, reached up to the top of my backpack, and grabbed the handle of my aluminum baseball bat. I pulled it up and out as quietly as I could and got into a crouch. For a second, I thought about what my position in the group, living as human bait. That's what my life amounted to. What Emma had demanded of me, what she still demanded of me, it wasn't fair. I let my anger heat my grip on the bat from red-knuckle to white-knuckle. When shaky finally came around the tree, I let loose a long, looping swing. I heard a femur break. I felt a dull, hot, radiating pain in my right shoulder. I saw shaky do three-quarters of a flip over my bat and land face-up. It rolled over two times, then a third, coming toward me. Now face-down on the ground, it looked up at me, and I could see that it used to be a she. It pulled itself toward me with its hands. I stomped down on its head, as hard as I could. I heard a disgusting, crackling, crumpling sound. Shaky stopped crawling.

I made my way toward the house, taking the single shaky as a good omen. Even in safe places, a loner shows up every once in a while. A place so inhospitable that even shakies stay away is not a place I want to see. It didn't take me long to get to the front porch, but when I climbed up to the front door, the smell made me hesitate. The stench from inside was so strong that I could smell it a step away from the door. We had been sleeping more or less outside for the last month, so I thought that maybe I just wasn't used to the human smell of lived-in places. That idea stopped making sense pretty quickly when I stepped inside, looked around, and noticed some human skeletons stacked haphazardly in the corner. I couldn't tell exactly how many there were, but there was a pile.

I turned around to leave, but just when I got out of the door, I saw someone starting to climb the stairs onto the front porch. Someone not shaking. Human. Ana. Someone from our group. I stood in the doorway, blocking her.

“We're not going in there tonight,” I told her.

“The hell we're not,” she said. “It's late.”

“You don't want to go in there,” I insisted. “Trust me, you don't want to go in there.” But Ana was taller than me. She just leaned over my shoulder and looked in for herself. Then she leaned back. Her face turned white. She shook her head, and I shook mine in answer. At that moment, Emma joined Anna on the porch. “You don't wanna go in there,” I told her. “None of us are going to want to go in there.”

“He's not in the group,” Emma said to Ana. “He doesn't make the decisions.” Ana, still white-faced, just looked Emma square in the eye and shook her head. Emma raised an eyebrow. Ana shook her head again. Emma tried to push past me to look, and tried to look around me, but I was taller than her and pretty much as wide as the doorway. I wasn't going anywhere.

Finally, Ana found her words. “It's dead people,” she said. “Dead people live here.”

“What do you mean?” Emma asked.

“There's a pile of skeletons in the corner,” Ana answered. “Nobody's going to want to stay here.”

“At this point, what the others might want is irrelevant,” Emma said. “It's already dark. Too late to turn around and go anywhere else.”

“Are you sure there's nowhere else?” I asked her. “It wouldn't have to be anything great to be better than that,” I said jerking a thumb back over my shoulder to indicate the macabre, haphazard décor.

“I wish,” Emma answered, shaking her head.

I cursed myself, cursed my vain insistence on outsmarting shaky, cursed my greed at sacrificing crucial minutes to save an arrow-shaft, cursed the anger that was satisfied little by all the cursing, and much better by killing shakies up close and personal. If I'd just put a broadhead in shaky's eye from fifty feet, something I practiced doing every day, I would have reached the house sooner. Then I could have run back to intercept Ana before we got here, told her the house had burned to the ground, and found somewhere else to stay. Sure, running meant I would have had to wake up an hour early just loosen up my legs enough to walk in the morning, but I doubt the group would think one of my arrows and an hour of my sleep are worth the anywhere near the price they were about to be charged for them.

“It's not your fault,” Emma said. “You did the smart thing. You made the right tactical choice, because you assumed we were going to be staying here. Unfortunately, you were right.”

“It sure feels like my fault,” I told her.

With that, I turned back into the house and reached into my pack for my thin bedroll. I used the blankets to cover the pile of skeletons. They couldn't quite do the job. I kicked the bones at the edge into a more compact pile, doing my best not to think morbid thoughts about it. I made a mental note to keep the side of the blankets facing down now on the outside when I slept in them, at least until I made some blankets out of deer hide to replace these ones. I made a second mental note to do that soon.

I barely finished my work and my mental notes before the bulk of the group arrived. A few young men charged in the door and made straight for the kitchen while Emma, Ana and I were still doing a sweep of the house. There wasn't any food in there, but they did find some alcohol. They invited me to drink with them, but I turned them down. When even the oldest people you know are five years younger than you, but they think they're ten years younger, they look fifteen years younger and they feel twenty years younger, it's probably time to stop partying.

The boys didn't let it stop them, of course, and I didn't blame them. We all live the kind of life that requires unwinding from. It can be kind of amusing to watch them at it. We all have our old phones and iPods with music on them from before the event, and we all guard them with our lives. Ana even made a pedal charger for them. She's good at that kind of thing. It's heavy enough that I have to carry it, but it works. So when the guys have a party, they're usually passing a bottle around, drinking from the same one, but they're all dancing to different music. To me, it's kind of funny to watch. The parties I remember worked the opposite way.

I'm not a big fan of the music those guys listen to when they party. They guard their players jealously, but they'll share half of their headphones with you for a while. Not that they have to share long. I get sick of that new (well, newer) stuff pretty fast. Of course, the people who played the music I grew up with are all in the AARP now. Or they would be, if they weren't zombies instead.

While the guys were enjoying the kitchen, the rest of the group headed upstairs to get some rest. The smell wasn't as bad up there. There was still a smell, but it wasn't as bad where the group slept as it was right next to the pile of skeletons. In fact, the whole night turned out to be a lot better than I expected. Everyone was disappointed to find that all those signs just led to an empty house, but it wasn't from the same high to the same low that I feared. I had gone from the primal feeling of accomplishment that comes from killing a shaky all the way down to finding a mass grave without the grave. They went from exhausted and hopeful to exhausted and holding their noses. The guys in the kitchen went from exhausted and hopeful to drunk, and as far as they were concerned, that wasn't even a step down. It's fair to say I went to sleep feeling better about the evening than I'd felt about it while I was still awake.

-------

I awoke very suddenly this morning. It came so suddenly that it was not as much morning as it was still night. The sound of something pounding on a wood door woke me. It was coming from the basement. I was sleeping in the front room. That's part of my job. Wherever zombies are most likely to come into camp, I sleep closest to it. When camp is some CEO's summer house, that's the front door. I remembered that Ana had told me the night before that there was a basement, and that there wasn't a whole lot in the basement but a heavy wood door that was locked securely from the inside. I wasn't sure who or what was doing the pounding, and I couldn't think of a good reason why they would be pounding on that door, but I was pretty sure they didn't have a check from Publisher's Clearinghouse. It seemed like the kind of thing the rest of the group should know about.

“Wake up!” I shouted at the top of my lungs as I gathered my weapons. “Weird noises downstairs! Gonna check it out!”

To emphasize my message, I took the stairs to the basement in leaps, five at a time, stomping both feet as I landed. I heard loud popping, creaking and groaning sounds–but that was just from my knees. The creaking and moaning of the wooden stairs was drowned out by the hollow, bass-drum booming of my feet landing hard on the stairs. When I got to the bottom, I noticed two new sounds. The pounding on the door had changed. Now it was the sound of pounding on a door that wasn't going to hold up for long. I also heard, very faintly, the sounds of shaking feet on a dirt floor.

Having a good idea of what was about to knock that door down, I decided to speed up the inevitable. I kicked the door as hard as I could. It slammed into whatever was on the other side with a dull thud and then vibrated on its hinges, half-open. Now I could definitely hear uneven, unsteady, disorganized footsteps. I grabbed the door with my right hand and pulled it most of the way shut. My left hand went for my recurve bow. I nocked two arrows, one to either side of my bow, and fired. Then I fired two more, and another two more. I could still hear feet in the dirt, but the sound was more distant now. I opened the basement door all the way and stepped in.

The sight that greeted me was like none I had seen before. There wasn't actually a dirt floor in the room. It was a finished basement, with a floor mostly covered in dirt. The dirt was from a hole toward the back of the room. The hole was more or less round, probably deeper than the average man is tall (it was definitely deeper than my height) and almost twice that large in diameter. There was a big crowd of shakies in the hole. A big crowd.

“So that's what a million shakies looks like!” I shouted, relaying the situation to Emma and the rest, hoping they heard.

“Worst lottery ever,” I muttered under my breath.

At that moment, a live one crawled out of a big, broken pipe entering the back side of the hole. They must have crawled up that pipe and broken up through the floor somehow. They must have killed the people who had lived here before, the ones who had put up a sign. Somehow, one of those people must have escaped and come back to seal the basement before crawling away through the pipe, hoping to save anyone who stumbled across the house. It had almost worked. I wondered why that survivor hadn't then made his (or her) way through town to take the posters down. My wondering was cut short when live shaky climbed up out of the hole.

Enraged that I might die for my anonymous predecessor’s laziness, I put my bow down behind me and pull out my battle-ax. I let that anger build. I'm not Luke Skywalker. I'm allowed to release my anger. I release most of it into a feral swing of my ax. The long blade goes straight through shaky, sort of cutting him in half and sort of pulverizing him. Behind him, the hole is filling up even more. The shakies are packed so tight inside that they're starting to climb on top of one another. For the ones on top, the hole is only waist-deep. They're struggling to climb up out. Two more live ones pop out of the hole, and a pack of the regular ones stream out slowly behind them.

“Who wants a bite?” I ask them, blustering a battle cry at the top of my lungs. “I'm not going anywhere!”

By all rights, I should be dead today.

Are/Was (Short Story)

We are our bodies.

The science is increasingly clear on this. I can try to dispute it rationally. I could even rail against it, confirm to the world that I'm the madman some folks already think I am. I don't, because I don't see the point of it. New studies on the matter seem to outnumber new days anymore, and each one is stronger proof against me than the last.

Nevertheless, my experience is somewhat different. I'm not alone in this, either. In the bigger cities, there are support groups for folks like me. Apocryphally, we make up our own demographic, complete with stereotypes. I first learned of this as an undergraduate, when a classmate told a joke about professors who feel their bodies are just transportation for their brains. Up until I heard that, the idea that that was a feeling at all, let alone the kind of thing that might be discussed and even disagreed with, was completely foreign to me. I guess I had just assumed that the stark separation of body and brain was the human experience, like free will, and science be damned if it proved something different.

Of course, free will has been conclusively disproved, and that hasn't stopped people from experiencing it. I suspect even as science continues to cement the importance of everything that connects the body to the mind, and even as discoveries minimize the importance of things like the blood-brain barrier separating them, that I will continue to experience what I do. It's an experience that others continue to be confused by and I continue to have difficulties describing. I guess the best way to explain my relationship with my body is to cite an avid motorcyclist's relationship with cars: at best, they're mildly unpleasant but potentially useful vehicles, and at their worst, they are like prisons.

Getting out of this particular prison isn't as easy as pulling onto the shoulder and opening the door, of course, though luckily I've always lived in a world where the prospect of doing so is promising. When I was young, they only had the cybernetic enhancements, which were interesting and occasionally fun, aftermarket accessories for my cage, but not a solution. Plus, I had to wait about twenty years just to start getting them–my parents wouldn't sign the bodymod form, and they certainly weren't going to pay for anything of that nature. Thanks to a promotion in my career, I was able to get in on the second generation of the android blanks, and when they came out with the server conversion, I was one of the first to try it.

It's better. It really is. The interface they set up is too robust and too graphical for my tastes. I guess it's to avoid shocking people who are used to living in a physical world. So I'm still moving through spaces, but now they're fundamentally intellectual spaces, with no precise physical corollary.

Unofficially, I guess, I'm still moving through spaces. Officially, I don't exist anymore. Officially, I'm dead, and there is no “me.”

I was my body.

Tanner, or The Desert Island Question (Short Story)

My name is Tanner, and as far as I know, I am one of the last six people living on the planet.

The rest of the world, the part with contiguous land and registered travel and regular shipping routes, experienced an event. I do not know exactly what the event was, because of the spotty signals and static in my part of the world. I'm sure the slipshod reporting and government censorship in the rest of the world played a part, too. The rest of the world called it "the event," for guinessakes!

In my part of the world, though, they call it "the second event." The first event was the rapid capsizing of a luxury vessel.  To my knowledge, only thirteen people on board survived. Adrift, six of us reached this little island. I feel it must be the most isolated bit of land on the whole planet. It was once a volcanic hotspot, but it cooled long ago.

The stories I've read say that this island was once much larger, and that that it was only the last in a chain of many. The stories make it sound like it was a nice place at that time. I guess it's a nice place now, too. Especially when you compare it to the alternatives. Our coming here and the things that led to it are known here as "the event," because we need no other name.

Whatever happened to the rest of the world is called "the second event" because we know no other name for it. Most of what we do know about it is no more useful than the name. We know that it seemed frightening at first, and then it seemed like nothing, and then it was rapidly destructive. This is from the spotty signals Jaysin managed to pick up on the radio. We know that scientists in our area concluded that it was the will of Jahweh. This is from the last leaflet that somehow blew its way out the window of a superluxury cruiser and onto our little island. And we know that it destroyed the nearest branches of the civilization we left. This we know from the fact that the spotty transmissions and the leaflets don't come anymore.

I guess that there are other people in some other isolated part of the world who survived the second event. I know we all hope so. None of us are willing to admit any hope that we will meet those people, not anymore. But we hope they live anyway.

To be honest, I never did hope to meet them.

That isn't because life here is perfect. For one thing, this island is not all that big. Surely it's far more space than the six of us need by civilized standards, but it's surprising how quickly I became acclimated to the elbow room and started to feel crowded. Plus, everyone works three jobs, although the hours are surprisingly reasonable. Jaysin and Lee are hunters, carpenters and shoemakers, though Jaysin is just learning shoemaking now that his electronics business is obsolete. Morgin, Alex and Emma all spend most of their time gathering things, but Alex is our elected president, and Morgin and Emma are both clothiers.  Alex and Emma are responsible for our rainwater system, and Morgin is the closest thing we have to a chef. As for me, I am our toolmaker, our fire-keeper, and our veterinarian.

That last career choice was pretty unpopular with the rest of the people here. I guess that's not surprising. We don't have a herdsman or a dairy farmer. And when they found that I was pilfering food to feed a small flock of magpies and the feral cats on the island, I thought they were going to kill me. They probably would have, but Alex stepped in.

That surprised me a little bit. I thought Alex was pretty disappointed with me. I'm non-reproductive. There haven't been any children yet, but the two couples are trying. I've been intentionally avoiding any attempt. I was offered Alex, the president, as a mate. Though not quite attractive enough to be a screen star, Alex is the best-looking of us. I did notice that. At first, they assumed I am a homosexual. I let them assume. Eventually, someone asked. I am not.

It's just that out of all the species on this island, I don't have much interest in seeing humanity survive.

In Vino Veritas (Short Story)

Updated 12/15/2014

Would it surprise you to know that I am not human? Most people are not surprised when I tell them that. They just think I am insane.

I wonder what it says about me that people are never surprised to find that I am insane.

When I found out, surprise is more or less the furthest thing away from what I felt. Instead, it was closer to validation. If I were a human memoirist, then the sentence “I guess I had always known” would no doubt appear in this paragraph. But I am not human, and I guess whatever I am instead demands more self-honesty. I have not known for very long. I had, however, suspected.

My earliest memories, or what I spent many years believing were my earliest memories, were of being strange, of not truly fitting. I never had the least bit of interest in what the boys were doing. It was only very moderately more interesting than doing nothing at all, and that margin, slim as it was, is why I went along. That, and I was almost certain that if I just kept doing it, I could learn to fit.

I even wondered if all of them experienced the same disinterest. After all, they treated one another the same way they treated me–almost. The voices, as well as the gestures and the physical violence that accompanied them, were a little more emphatic, almost as though they were meant to be final, rather than to invite a response. The words those voices spoke, though, were the same.

Of course, the truth is that the words and the actions that came along with them were meant to be final, because against me, they were truly meant. I only learned this much, much later, when I saw a psychiatrist for my not fitting in.

For a while, I decided to experiment by spending time with the girls instead. This was very, very moderately less interesting than spending time with the boys, which I eventually went back to.

After this experiment, the treatment I received from the boys became quite noticeably different. The physical violence they directed at me went from leaving visible results to leaving injurious results. Once, the people I believed at the time to be my parents were worried that an injury I sustained might be life-threatening. They became quite agitated.

Though this fact was of no comfort to those two humans who raised me, I just barely noticed a difference. I have always been detached from the physical world around me, even more than from the people. It wasn't that I didn't feel anything. There are people like that. They have a condition called CIPA, and they do not feel any pain. I do. It just doesn't feel like my pain. It's a little like I spend my whole life playing a video game with a controller that vibrates when I make a mistake or when someone else attacks me. There's definitely a sensation. It's undeniably negative, and at times it's even startling. It just feels secondhand.

Eventually, the boys' behavior more or less returned to what it had been before my experiment. It felt familiar. Of course, even in my earliest memories, I recall that the behavior of other boys seemed familiar in some way. I always assumed that I had simply spent my days with those boys for some time before I managed to create a long-term memory of it.

I'm sure I did, but I'm also sure that it wasn't that simple.

In any case, the old but ill-fitting state of normalcy returned for a number of years, before it was forever altered by two incidents that were far more permanent and far more profound than a couple of months spent among the females of the human species. The first was that my brain quite suddenly began to work much faster. It had always worked faster than those of the boys and girls I had assumed to be my peers. I was far ahead of them in all of our subjects of mutual study. At night, while they slept, I studied a number of additional subjects that I'm sure they had never heard of. (That was another way in which I never fit in. I have never needed, wanted, or even understood sleep. To this day, I have no idea how it is accomplished.) Yet, as I did all this, I could not shake the feeling that the electrical impulses my neurons generated were moving through some sort of mud or sludge, that I was meant to think much faster and about so much more. The fact that I knew what neurons were at all was evidence that my brain was fine, and better than fine, by the standards of my peers. Still, it took me nearly thirteen years on earth to shake the feeling that there was something holding me back.

With a whole world in front of me, and a suddenly improved capacity to think about it, I quickly stumbled upon a second realization: that however little I fit in with other boys, I fit in less with the adults in my own home. Each of them had interests, and antipathies. Each of them had a passionate reaction to both. While it was true that there were some subjects of study which I found moderately more interesting than the others, I never experienced a visceral reaction to any of them. I can't imagine how one would accomplish that, nor why they would want to.

Some of the interests or passions my caretakers shared were the same as those of boys: television, movies and cars, for instance. However, my parents had a whole additional set of interests that were collectively referred to as “nice things.” They encompassed clothing, furniture and money, among other human inventions which have already become too tiresome to list.

There was a time when I could learn from these “nice things.” Money, for instance, has no use of its own. It is simply a symbolic stand-in that represents “nice things” in general, which can be carried easily or converted into something more specific. It also tastes somewhat more pleasant than the most of human cuisine. Clothing is only considered “nice” once it includes bland, nonfunctional decorative elements. If it is purely functional, or if its shape or coloring is unique enough to attract the eye, it is considered to be “low class.” Additionally, the more clothing discomforts the wearer and restricts his or her movements, the “nicer” it is considered. As for furniture, some of it is considered so “nice” that it is not fit to perform its standard function at all, for fear of ruining it. These facts all strike me as being somewhat banal, and in fact I'm quite sure that you are familiar with all of them. Nevertheless, these proved somewhat useful in my continuing study of anthropology.

Any details beyond these were somewhat immoderately less interesting than doing nothing at all. In fact, my caretakers' discussions of these things brought me the closest I have ever come to experiencing a visceral reaction. Indeed, I felt quite strongly that I must leave at once, and so I would always excuse myself, either to spend time with the boys, who mercifully showed as little interest in “nice things” as I did, or else to continue my studies.

As a result of this, I grew to consider myself somewhat distant from my parents. The psychiatrist I have mentioned came to the same conclusion, and to one more. He believes that my parents could not possibly have failed to notice, nor could they have succeeded in ignoring, this growing distance. In fact, they probably realized it long before I did.

It is to their credit, according to the psychiatrist, that they did not react to the change with any sort of violence or other juvenile behavior. Indeed, they continued to provide for my extracurricular education as reliably as they ever had. Eventually, about two or three years before I left their immediate care, they did cease all attempts to engage me in conversation. I found this development to be neither a relief nor a disappointment.

As it turned out, it was that parting of ways that brought the whole situation to a head. During the same period over which I became more distant from my caretakers, the boys I knew were growing very interested in ingesting a number of psychoactive substances. The psychiatrist has told me that it would have been quite natural for me to join in, and I did–exactly one time. I found the effect to be entirely unpleasant. It was uncanny how it mirrored the prevailing sensation of my youth, of something gumming up my ability to think. Though asked over and over, I always refused to repeat this experiment.

For a while, I was able to simply avoid any exposure to the stimulus, and even to people who would try to stimulate my interest in it. I took so many classes as an undergraduate that I literally had no free time to do anything else. Graduating in record time was an unintended and somewhat undesired side effect of this approach. After this, I did study for an advanced degree, but unfortunately, they actually forced me to spread that work out over a three-year period, setting the stage for the return of free time. Still, the other boys took my constant answers of “no, thank you” at face value. At least, they did for a while.

That answer stopped being good enough for my social cohort exactly twenty-one years after the official record of my birth. Apparently this day is considered to be of some import by humans. In any case, my “friends” insisted that I accede to the consumption of intoxicants. I insisted otherwise. Eventually, one of the other boys just grabbed my face, squeezed my mouth open, and jammed the open end of a bottle of foul-tasting liquid into it. I felt gravity push the fluid deeper and deeper, toward my throat. At this point I decide that, objectionable or not, a choice between temporary stupidity and permanent death wasn't much of a choice. I felt a burning sensation as I swallowed.

Apparently, this particular liquid was a far stronger intoxicant than the first one I tried. It took no more than a few minutes for this intoxicant to render me even duller than youth had. It also had the strange affect of making some heretofore-silenced corner of my brain go crazy for more to drink. Most of my brain, the smarter parts, were against this notion entirely, but unfortunately, I had become stupid enough that the smarter parts were no longer active enough to mount an effective defense.

After that, the night turned into a slow-moving blur of things I wish quite fervently to forget. But I remember.

I remember laughing for the first time. I remember being unable to walk properly, and being unduly amused by it. I remember speaking in incomprehensible gibberish, and thinking myself brilliantly clever for it.

I remember regurgitating. While there are humans who react to this act as though it has humor value, I can't say I find it to be anything other than repellant and unpleasant.

I remember engaging in the human reproductive act, or at least attempting to. I'm not certain I know the entire procedure. For some reason, the boys had strapped a cellular communication device to my head. “Pork that pig!” a voice in my ear said, before making a few animal grunts and then breaking down into laughter.

Mostly I remember asking for more to drink, receiving more to drink, and then drinking it.

The last thing I can remember that happened that night was falling to the ground outside an acquaintance’s house. A crowd of people gathered around, some of them familiar, some of them strangers. But all of them, every single one, pointed and laughed. I remember the feeling of fatigue, and of darkness approaching.

Eventually, though, I remembered something else from a very different night, much longer ago than that one.

“I can't believe you grew a disguise,” a voice said, the sounds foreign but their meaning unmistakable. “I can't believe you know how to grow disguises. That's pure spytech.”

“I can't believe you did such a good job on it,” shouted another voice, using the same language.

“I do a lot of things you wouldn't believe,” a third voice responded. “Now you two close it back up. I have something to do.”

I could not see any of the speakers, but I could hear them moving around. Somehow, I could sense that there were more than three of them.  I had no sense of where they were, though. I felt crowded, but only in the same way one feels crowded on awakening from mostly asleep to half-asleep, when the sizes of things, and the distances between them, and even one's own body dimensions all become illusory.

“I think he's waking up,” a voice said. “Stick him again.”

The conversation faded , but eventually returned.

“What are you doing messing with those?” asked one of the voices.

“What do you think I'm doing?” the cocky voice retorted.

“Come on! That's dangerous. You have no idea what they'll do.”

“I know exactly what it'll do. This is for beast control, designed to slow down brain function so that it can't formulate or carry out any actions. But he's no beast, so this will make him just dense enough to pass for a child on this worthless rock.”

“Don't you need one of them for all of the rest of humans, though, so that they'll actually believe it?

“No, no, no need at all. I'm pretty sure they're dumb enough to fall for it as is. The caretakers and a few others will need some false memories, but that's it. The human capacity for delusion is quite boggling.”

“Won't the implant wear out?”

“Eventually, yes. But it's good for two generations of warbeast, which is close to four of our cycles and a little bit over twelve of theirs.”

“But it'll still wear off?”

“So what? That's after he's more than halfway out of his youth. Do you honestly imagine him getting that far without someone deciding to kill him first? I mean, I want to kill him right now, and he's unconscious. But I wasn't unconscious, not all the way.

Apparently this phenomenon is called “state dependent memory.” I don't know enough about human neuropsychology to say whether it's a real, scientifically-measurable thing, but I'm certain that I have experienced it myself.

In fact, I have pursued it many times since my first recollection of a life before my time among humanity.  With my most important questions about myself answered, a new set of questions arose. Foremost among them was to wonder what to do about it.  As much as the sensations I must experience in order to do so disgust me, I repeatedly enter a state of intoxication seeking additional memories, new information, anything more.  I repeatedly gain nothing more than my original insight.  I have now experienced that same memory countless times.  It is always identical, and I learn no more from it.  I still have not ascertained how to remove the disguise.

If you have any idea, feel free to pass it along.

The Transplant (Short Story)

Updated 2/21/2014

Would it surprise you to know that I am not human?

I suppose that depends upon where you are reading from. Most of the democratically-governed world seems to be familiar with posthumanity. Or with, as it is known legally, alternative personhood.

I know that in other places, where religion's or superstition's influence outstrips technology's, people like me are considered sinful and unnatural abominations. For people in those places, the fact that I am not human is not just surprising, but shocking and disgusting. I have learned not to be bothered by those attitudes, but if you are one of those people, I would advise you to stop reading. You might learn something you don't want to learn.

For those of you still reading, my transition to alternative personhood came five years ago today. Perhaps some corner of this artificial brain is still capable of sentiment, and perhaps that is why I am writing this today, on the fifth anniversary of the day I became other than human. I read that it is a long procedure. There's a legal obligation to research the transplant before undergoing it. The journal articles I read all put the average length of the procedure at somewhere between seventy and seventy-two hours. I experienced none of that. As far as I know, and as far as I can remember, it happened in an instant. I closed my eyes. I went to sleep for a blink. I woke up outside of the body I had inhabited for a little less than thirty-six years.

I also woke up outside the brain I had inhabited during those years. I don't know exactly how it works, but neurologists can map a person's personality while (s)he is unconscious. The doctors stored mine in what was at the time a very innovative piece of computing technology. These days, regular people can go down to the nearest box store and buy one just like it, but five years ago it was top-of-the-line. I requested that this computer be placed at the helm of what was, five years ago, a rather innovative two-wheeled motorcycle drone. Even today, it is a pretty powerful piece of machinery, at least when I'm outside. Indoors, it runs on an electric motor that seems a little dinky and underpowered, although I suppose that is the point. In the past five years, I've learned how to get the most out of it.

But I have to be honest with you. Today is only the fifth anniversary of my legal posthumanity. It might only have been five years since the world began to recognize me as an unusual brain inside a motor vehicle, but I have never known myself as anything else. The old motor vehicle had a very different propulsion system, what with those unwieldy arms and legs doing all the work, and the new one is certainly much more powerful, but it was only an upgrade, not a a truly fundamental change. And the brain? The brain! The new one works faster, and it remembers more, but it still feels like me. It is me. It's just better.

In fact, having the old brain transplanted into an artificial humanoid body was an option. That was the earliest form of alternative personhood conceived by science, and it's a whole lot cheaper. Getting the chip instead of keeping my fleshy brain doubled the price, and the motorcycle doubled the price again. I had to wait another seven years and save a lot more money to get what I wanted, but I wanted to make sure that the world would stop seeing a body and identifying that as me. What is outside of me is still not a true reflection of what I am, but at least the falseness of the reflection has become obvious to the world at large.

I am not myself, only closer.

I am still myself, only better.

They Grow Up So Fast (Short Story)

Written: 12/21/2013       Edited: 4/2/2017

The history of bioeletronic implants began well over one hundred years ago, with the invention of rather primitive cochlear implants. These devices, even in the late 1950s, could restore some semblance of a sense of hearing, to the amazement of many and the consternation of more than a few. It seems that bioelectronics has always been a controversial field, even before it was called bioelectronics.

For the first few decades, these cochlear implants were the only bioelectronic implants that existed in the mainstream. Research progressed beyond that, of course. The chief areas of interest in the field were to restore function to other senses and to limbs. However, it was a long time before any of these devices could be refined beyond the experimental stage. At the turn of the century, though, the field of bioelectronics turned a corner. The second half-century of research proved much more fruitful than the first half, and a much greater variety of devices became widely available to patients of even moderate means.

My birth came near the end of that period, and so I do not really remember any of it. Perhaps I remember family vacations from that time, or birthday gifts, or an especially bad skinned knee. Then again, perhaps those are only invented memories. In either case, as a child of that age, I did not know the first thing about bioelectronics, and so of that, I have nothing to remember.

My recollections span a different transitional period. Even when I was young, bioelectronics were being implanted as early as birth. These were optional procedures to fix certain congenital defects that were discovered during pregnancy, or even to enhance certain talents if parents had the inclination and the resources. There were even a few devices that had been developed as “safety features” to protect other people from a misbehaved and destructive child, though I can't imagine what kind of parents would have chosen to install such a thing in their newborn baby way back in the 60s. At that time, the mere mention of bioelectronic implants was enough to provoke outrage in certain people. That was only a vocal minority, but they were registered and avid voters, and they were very vocal.

By the time my two boys arrived, bioelectronics were standard, as much a part of childbirth as the Lamaze method and the Apgar test.

My two little boys: Phil, age six, and Dirk, age five. They are part of the first generation of children to go to school in a classroom full of cyborgs, although it's hard to think of my own children that way. My two little boys: Phil and Dirk. They mean so much to Alex and me that it's hard to think of them as normal. But that's what they are: perfectly normal. Or at least they were, up until a year ago.

It was around that time that their teachers began to notice that their development had slowed somewhat. Their homework was sometimes being returned incomplete, and sometimes they had trouble answering some of the teachers' questions. Though it still seemed to me that they were growing up so fast, they were no longer growing as quickly as most of the other children. Phil and Dirk had always hovered around the 60^th or 70^th percentile for both height and weight, but had slipped from above-average to below-average. Now, both of them are the smallest in their class.

Eventually, the school advised that we take Phil and Dirk to see a doctor, so of course we did. The doctors couldn't find anything wrong with them, any underlying cause. They were perfectly healthy boys (and they still are), they were just not developing as quickly as their peers. The doctors told us that sometimes this just happens, for no particular reason and with nobody in particular at fault. I myself had been the smallest in my class until a late growth spurt at the age of 19, and Alex is still quite small. Neither of us were scholarship students, either, although I was a late bloomer academically, too. If this is who Phil and Dirk are, neither of us will love them any less for it.

So the doctors sent us home, and that was the end of it, as far as they were concerned. There was no injury or illness, which meant there was nothing for them to worry about. Just not being average, all by itself, is not an abnormality. The teachers, who had a more personal relationship with our boys, were only mostly reassured by what they heard from the doctors. They were still a little bit concerned. Just to make sure, they set up a visit from Children's Services.

It wasn't intended to be a surprise visit. They told us that when they got here, although after what transpired, we didn't really believe that. It turned out that the notice had somehow gotten lost in processing, and ended up arriving two weeks after the social worker did. When the doorbell rang, Phil and Dirk were sitting listlessly in front of the television, Alex was watching them, overcome by loving adoration, and I was in the kitchen with flour all over my hands.

Alex let the woman from Children's Services in, and her eyes fell immediately upon Phil and Dirk. “They just fell asleep in front of the TV after a long day at school,” Alex told her. “Don't turn it off or you'll wake them up.” The lady picked up the remote control and turned the television off. Neither Phil nor Dirk stirred. Now the woman started to say something, but Alex interrupted. “I think it would be better if you didn't disturb them. They need their rest.”

The woman from Children's Services hardly paused a second before bending down to about eye level with the children. “Phil.” she said firmly. “Dirk?” Neither one stirred. Now the woman moved to touch the boys.

“Do you have to?” Alex asked. “They're just so beautiful when they sleep. Couldn't you just leave them be?” The woman put one hand on each boy and shook them lightly by the shoulder. Still, neither one woke. Dirk did slump forward, though, revealing the back of his neck–and revealing that neither of the boys was asleep at all.

Strictly speaking, they had been 'turned off.'

This bioelectric implant was originally one of those optional safety features that had been introduced back in the '60s. The idea was that it would be a non-injurious way of calming a destructive child or restraining one in a self-defense or a police arrest situation. And in fact it was non-injurious. Studies have repeatedly shown that turning a child off does her no harm at all.

There have been a lot of studies, too. There is a lot of data available. While this particular safety feature had originally been created for the benefit of others, almost every parent today uses it exclusively for the benefit of the child herself. The switch on the back of the neck has become a detour around any sort of painful or traumatic event in a young child's life, the kind that has the potential to affect the child psychologically. People who are 'turned off' don't remember a thing. Even into adulthood, the switch is useful for keeping injured people from struggling against painful but necessary first-responder treatment, or even just for preventing them from injuring themselves further in sheer panic.

There's no logical reason to use the switch on someone who is just lounging in front of a television, of course. But it turns out that life is not always logical. People certainly aren't. So one day almost two years ago, when Phil and Dirk were sitting in front of the TV watching football and arguing about the relative merits of Barcelona's club and New York's, I mentioned that they were growing up so quickly. Was it then logical for Alex to grow morose, agitated, and then finally angry about how soon they would be moody preteens, and then independent upperclassmen, and then finally leave altogether? It probably was not. Was it logical for me to turn them off when I realized we were about to have an argument? I would like think so.

I'm not sure if the idea to leave them off was logic, or mere desperation. When people are 'turned off,' their bodies enter a state of very minimal activity. In that state, they don't have enough metabolic activity to grow. The reduced metabolism also slows aging. Turned off for half of every day, a person's childhood would double in length. That was the idea. And Alex looked so happy just to watch them. I didn't have the heart to quit.

Once the Children's Services woman had calmed down a bit, there was nothing I could do but confess this to her. That of course got me sent up for a little while, but they're letting me out today. The switch is completely harmless, so my repeated use of it doesn't meet any legal definition of abuse. Once the state determined that, they had no choice but to declare me innocent of any wrongdoing and secure my release.

I'm not sure what I'll do now. Children's Services has ordered me to comply with a newly-created set of emergency procedures for using the switch, and the law against ignoring orders prepared by Children's Services is very clear.

I'm afraid that Alex and I will both miss watching them sleep.

They're going to grow up so fast.

Pantsless Planet (Short Story)

Written 11-15-2013,  Updated 12-15-2014

I really don't feel like having pants on right now. That's one of the perks of having your own place...sort of. What I mean to say is that it's only sort of my place. I definitely don't have any pants on. I'm not going dissy yet.  I'd rather not go dissy.  Hopefully writing this will help.

Technically, I'm living in the cooperative multi-governmental Coalition for Intensive Extraterrestrial Research's place. (They insist on pronouncing it like “seer,” obviously.) These crawlers were not cheap, and getting them here was really expensive. They would have been cheaper if they didn't have to hold people, but they would not have been cheap.

The governments, of course, really wanted them to hold people. India wasn't part of the last Coalition, and no Indian has ever landed on another planet. They didn't want to be left out. The US, and a couple of other Coalition nations, put the Coalition on their tax forms as a voluntary contribution. Apparently it's much harder to get voluntary contributions for this sort of thing if no people go, especially in the States.

The engineers justified it to themselves by saying that the presence of an emergency human operator could help save or salvage equipment that would have become disabled or been destroyed otherwise. They also told us that even with all the censors on the exterior of the crawlers, and even with the cameras taking pictures with a dozen different filters, it's possible that a person might see something that would otherwise be missed. They say that humans are better at seeing patterns than almost any kind of human technology. “They” being people in general. I'm sure the Coalition's engineers said it, too, while they were having to build life-support into the crawlers.

So the Coalition is putting me up in the tiny little cabin of this bigger-than-it-had-to-be crawler, and I technically live on government property. Still, I'm a significant fraction of the government presence on this planet. I can see the crawler to the right of me and to the left of me easily. A few hours ago, I could see another on each side if I strained. Still, they don't have a lot of authority over me. They probably don't even speak the same language as me. Even if they do, it's not all that likely that either of them is one of the officers. Even if they are both officers, the radios are only for emergencies. Keeping battery power in reserve on a spacecraft is expensive. Hell, I bet those guys probably aren't wearing any pants right now, either.  There's probably not a man on this planet wearing pants.

They might be, if they're armed forces guys. Those AF guys tend not to think creatively until something goes wrong, and being uncomfortable never counted as something going wrong to AF guys. But most of us are just civilians who passed the tests, and were willing to accept the risks and the inconveniences if it meant getting to hold a non-firing, do-nothing job for most of the rest of our lives. They tested us for vision, to see if we're observant, and to see if we could function on very little sleep. They triple-checked the records to make sure we weren't running out on any dependents. Most importantly, they tested us to see if we can be alone and uncommunicative (except for listening to a disembodied computer voice that refers to us as “human life forms”) for most of a year without forgetting who we are, or where we are, or becoming irrational or destructive–you know, going dissy.

They also scored our handwriting speed, because the most important part of our job is to record our observations, and it turns out that it's more efficient just to send a high-tech pen and a big stack of paper than it is to send any sort of computer with the input systems and batteries it would take to run it. I graded out as “exceptionally overqualified” on handwriting speed, and that's why I can write this.

That and the fact that there isn't much to see. In the briefing, we were told that the areas that we were mostly likely to find life were in the equatorial zone and about three-quarters of the way to the opposite pole. Right now, we're only a little more than halfway to the equator from the near pole. The Coalition would have preferred to start us out on the opposite pole, so that we would reach the hotspots when we were saner and our senses were keener, but it turns out that landing on that pole is somewhat problematic. There are systems to return the data to the ship, and perhaps even rescue the people, without a landing, but landing was obviously necessary to deploy the crawlers.

But to be honest, I really don't know if we're going to find anything or not. I'm not a biologist. They don't send scientists out in these things. Sending a really good scientist would be too big a risk, and sending lesser scientist would kind of defeat the purpose of sending one. The scientists they need are the ones who know what to do with unfamiliar data, the brilliant ones. I do remember ten years ago, when a crew came back from a planet that everyone said looked a lot more promising than this one. Before landing, they sent back pictures of a beautiful green marble. And all they found there was some CO₂ vapor and enough copper to put every hobo back home out of business permanently.

This planet is not considered as promising as the green marble was. We aren't here because it's one of the most promising known planets. It's not. We're here because it's one of three planets we believe are possibilities, that can be reached with the technology we have. Truth be told, almost all its water has drained into the vents in the crust, and we knew that before we got here. The media was billing it as “ancient Mars” when the project was preparing to leave. I imagine the media will wish they'd run a campaign to slowly lower expectations before we return. Then again, who knows? There used to be life on Mars.

What I do know is that if you're reading this account, the project has ended. Either it ended in discovery, and you are one of a billion people reading a wildly successful bestseller, or it ended in disappointment, and you somehow dug this up out of the biography section, which is little-browsed even by the standards of web libraries. I hope we found something. With the money from a bestseller, I could get my own place again, and I wouldn't have to wear any pants if I don't want to.