In the moment of the test departure, those dancing corpses came out again, screaming and running towards us. Mack was flying low in the sky, looking down. The machine worked, leaving trails of blue light behind it in whirling vapours. Mack smiled and gave us the thumbs up to say that everything was okay. He flew a little lower, getting ready to find some open ground to land on.
Our host collapsed into thousands of tiny bodies, trying to restrain the living dead’s nanosystems. They surged and came forward, crying out and scurrying across the floors of the world, with many thin and angular limbs. Like undead spiders, with big, bulging eyes and tiny, puckered lips.
The planet shook; the radio systems picked up. It was all one voice now, the voice of Shadrim, that zombie planet that wanted us to stay here and be assimilated into its nightmarish ecosystem. The voice of the planet spoke in strange tongues and the nanomachines obeyed. We tried to get Mack to land, to drop down something we could cling onto and escape. He only hovered low, a look of shock and horror on his face.
The dust of the world poured into us. Living things, tiny AIs, pieces of that host that kept us here for so long. Mack just circled about and watched as we were disassembled, our parts and pieces connected to the ruins, now. They strung up our bodies like art, our intestines and bones collected with bacterial computers and small nanomachines, that somehow preserved us and made us do what the world told us to.
In our minds, we could hear it all the time. The thought, running through our veins like the whispers of space. Commanding us. Telling us what to do. Our We had gotten bigger, engulfed us. We had one mind now, the mind of the world. The mind of the ghost planet. It sang in our skin, set our nerves on fire.
And now we danced. We danced and our voices broadcast from those old radio waves. This was the radio song, the voice of Planet Shadrim. This was us and who we were. Mack sped off and we would have, too. But now we were dancing, our corpseskin cold. Soon, we would transcend. Transcend and be like our host, postflesh.
THE LIBRARY TWINS AND THE NEKROBEES
By Martha Hubbard
Martha Hubbard lives on an island in the North Baltic Sea. For thousands of years a place of strange gods, mysteries, tragedies, and wonder, Saaremaa Island provides the perfect bedrock for a writer of dark fantasy. Previously, she has been a teacher, cook, stage manager, dramaturg in New York City’s Off-Off Broadway community, a parking lot company bookkeeper, and a community development worker. Recently, she put aside some of these activities to concentrate on her writing, but is still the Consulting Chef for the local Organic Farmers Union. Her story, “The Good Bishop Pays the Price”, appeared in Innsmouth Free Press’s anthology, Historical Lovecraft, and “I Tarocchi Dei d’Este” is in their Candle in the Attic Window.
For Catie
ALL AROUND THEIR hiding place, towering stacks of books careened upwards, their tops vanishing into murky darkness. Iris and Thyme Carter were on a late-night stakeout in the National Library of France because something was disturbing their books after hours, making them whimper and cry like hurt children. During the day, automatic lights flashed on if any moving object larger than a butterfly intercepted the infrared sensors. At night, these were switched off to save money, which meant that any creature entering these cathedrals of dust and paper then had to navigate in the dark. This was no problem for the ‘library twins’, as one of their genetic abnormalities was ultra-keen night vision; darkness was their friend. Now, at almost 23:00, the twins were hiding in a section reserved for French and Italian fiction.
One of Iris’s sometimes-disturbing genetic gifts was the ability to hear the voices of inanimate objects. Chairs, plants, street lamps, and bridges had, at one time or another, spoken directly to her. The pitiful moaning of tortured books had been disturbing Iris’ dreams for days. When the painful cries of her precious charges finally made sleep impossible, she insisted that Thyme join her in uncovering what was distressing them.
Iris was slumped on the floor, her back against a shelf of Italian mysteries, a first edition of Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin on her lap. Wearing disposable, white, cotton gloves, she was turning the brittle pages one by one, trying to discern any changes in the text as she remembered it. Lately, some of her favourite novels had begun to seem strangely…different.
By the end of the 21st century, most reading material was read on electronic devices, when it wasn’t injected directly into the neurological pathways via learning tubes. Real books, of cloth and paper, were the cherished artefacts of a vanished era. To preserve these, librarians had gathered most of them into a scant handful of libraries in the Western world. The BNFP (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris) held works from Continental Europe: France, Italy, the Low Countries, Greece, and Germany. Harvard held American and Canadian literature, and technical and early medical texts. Berkeley—Micronesia and Australia, Maori and Aboriginal; The British Library—British and Russian—a bow to Karl Marx; the National Library of San Paolo—South American, Mexican and Spanish. There were smaller collections in Helsinki for Nordic works and Budapest for Central European. Reprieved from destruction at the last possible moment, these were considered the foundation blocks of Western thought.
Human hands were not normally allowed near any of the books protected in these specialised archives. Scholars who had been able to demonstrate a need to consult the originals used hermetically-sealed, climate-and-light-controlled boxes. Inside these, internal robotic fingers turned the pages, when instructed via touch pad. It wasn’t like holding a real book in your hands, but it was better than having the pages disintegrate from careless handling.
Curator of this section, Iris was one of the few allowed to touch these books. While they waited for intruders, she methodically reread the pages of her children for anomalies. Possessing photographic recall, she remembered by ‘seeing’ things—pages of books for example—in her mind-viewer, and could instantly detect any textural alterations. As the minutes ticked towards midnight, she was wondering if it had all been a bad dream. “Great Goddess, how did we get here?” she whispered to her sister.
Good question. As the famous frog once said, “It’s not easy being green.” While not green in appearance, the twins had grown up profoundly committed to the repair and protection of the environment.
By the middle of the 21st century, any thinking person, by then a declining species, understood that the pernicious effects of extensive agribusiness farming was transforming the residents of wealthy countries into slow-moving, cancer-ridden, dull-minded robots. The proliferation of foodstuffs assembled from refined corn syrup had created a sub-class of citizenry no longer able to discriminate healthy food from toxic. Soya derivatives mixed with reconfigured corn syrup, flavoured by e-numbers, were mashed and extruded into an endless variety of products. Diets consisting of little more than sugar, cellulose and food colouring made consumers sluggish and unhealthy. Sugar-induced torpor meant that, as people moved less and less, bones became dangerously brittle. Physical education programs in schools had long been abandoned because even the youngest children could not run or jump or risk the fractures that ensued from the smallest of accidents.