The parachute harness she hands him is incredibly smelly—evidently its last owner didn’t believe in soap—but its flight control system assures Huw that it’s in perfect working order and please to extinguish all cigarettes and switch off all electronics for the duration of the flight. Tight-lipped, Huw fastens it around his waist and shoulders, then follows Bonnie to the back of the bridge and down a rickety ladder to the bottom of the gas bag. There’s an open hatch, and when he looks through it, he sees verdant green folliage whipping past at nearly a hundred kilometers per hour, hundreds of meters below. “Clip the red hook to the blue static line eye,” says the harness. “Clip the—”
“I get the picture,” Huw says. Bonnie is already hooked up, and turns to check his rig, then gives him a huge shit-eating grin and steps backwards into the airship’s slipstream. “Aagh!” Huw flinches and stumbles, then follows her willy-nilly. Seconds later the chute unfolds its wings above him, and his ears are filled with the sputtering snarl of a two-stroke motor as it switches to dynamic flight and banks to follow Bonnie down toward a clearing in the mangrove swamp.
The swamp rushes up to meet him in a confusion of green, buffeting him with superheated steam as he descends toward it, so that by the time the chute punches him through the canopy, he’s as steamed as a dim sum bun. Bonnie’s chute speeds ahead of him, breaking branches off and clattering from tree to tree. He tries to follow its crazy trail as best as he can, but eventually he realizes, with a sick falling sensation in his stomach, that she’s no longer strapped into it. “Bonnie!” he yells, and grabs at the throttle control.
“Danger! Stall warning!” the parachute intones. “Guru Meditation Code 14067.”
Huw looks down dizzily. He’s skimming the ground now, or what passes for it—muck of indeterminate depth, interspersed with clumps of curiously nibbled-looking water hyacinth. The tree line starts in another couple of hundred meters, and it’s wall-to-wall petroleum plants. Black leafed and ominous looking, the stunted inflammabushes emit a dizzying stench of raw gasoline that makes his eyes swim and his nose water. “Fuck, where am I going to land?”
“Please fold your tray table and return your seat to the upright position,” says the parachute control system. “Extinguish all joints, switch off mobile electronics, and prepare for landing.” The engine note above and behind him changes, spluttering and backfiring, and then the damp muck comes up and slaps him hard across the ankles. Huw stumbles, takes a faltering step forward—then the nanolight’s engine drops down as the chute rigging collapses above his head and thumps him right between the eyes with a hollow tonk.
“What you’ve got to understand, son,” says the doctor, “is it’s all the fault of the alien space bats.” He holds up the horse syringe and flicks the barrel. A bubble wobbles slowly up through the milky fluid. “If it wasn’t for them and their Jew banker patsies, we’d be ascended to heaven.” He squeezes the plunger slightly and a thick blob of turbid liquid squeezes out of the syringe and oozes down the needle. “Carbon traders damned us to this living hell.” He grins horribly, baring gold-plated teeth, and points the end of the needle at Huw’s neck. Huw can’t move his gaze from Doc’s mustache: it’s huge and bushy, a hairy efflorescence that twitches suspiciously as the barefoot medic inhales with sharp disapproval.
“Carbon traders?” Huw’s voice sounds weak, even to himself. He stares past the doctor at the peeling white paint on the wall of this sorry excuse for a medical center. “What have they got to do with—?”
“Carbon traders.” Doc nods as he rams the blunt end of the quarter-inch needle against Huw’s jugular. Machines whine and click, and the side of Huw’s neck goes numb. “Once the children of Mammon started floating credit-default swaps against carbon remediation bonds, the whole planet became worth more if it was on fire than if it was fulla trees. So now you’ve got all these trillion-dollar bets that’ll go bust if the polar caps don’t melt, and it wasn’t long afore the polar caps were worth more melted than intact, and well, the market provided the incentives. Now look at us.”
Huw tries to swallow. The plunger is going down, and white goo is flooding into his circulatory system, billions of feral redneck nanomachines bouncing off his fur-lined arteries in search of damaged tissue to fix. His mouth is parched, his tongue as crinkly and musty-dry as a dead cauliflower. “But the, the alien—”
“Alien space bats, son,” says Doc. He sighs lugubriously and pulls the syringe away from Huw’s neck. “With their fancy orbital Fresnel lens. They’re behind the global warming thing, y’see, it’s nothing to do with burning oil. It dates to the fifties. Those closet Commies in with their astronomy toys, they were smart—using tax-funded astrophysics instruments to signal the space brothers! Seeing as how God made us a strongly anthropic universe to live in, it stands to reason there must be aliens out there. It’s a long-term plot, a two hundred-year Communist plan to bankrupt America. And it’s working. All those deserters and traitors who upped and left when the singularity hit, they just made it worse. They’re the savvy ones we need to make this country great again, rebuild NASA and Space Command, but do it right, pure American, deep background checks and purity oaths, and go wipe those no-good Ruskie alien space bats and their Jew banker patsies from the dark side of the moon.”
Oh Jesus fuck, Huw thinks incoherently, lying back and trying to get both eyes to focus simultaneously. He still feels sick to his stomach and a bit dizzy, the way he’s been since Bonnie found him neatly curled up under a gas tree with a huge lump on his head and his parachute rigging draped across the incendiary branches. “Have you seen my teapot?” he tries to say, but he’s not sure it comes out right.
“You want a cup of joe?” asks Doc. “Sure, we can do that.” He pats Huw’s shoulder with avuncular charm. “You just lie there and let my little helpers eat the blood clots in your brain for a while.”
“Bonnie—,” Huw whispers, but Doc is already standing and turning toward the door at the other side of the surgery, out of his line of sight. The blow from the motor did something worse to him than concussion, and he can’t seem to move his arms or legs—or neck. I’m still breathing, so it can’t be that bad, he tells himself hopefully. Remember, if you break your neck during a botched parachute landing and then a mad conspiracy theorist injects black market nanomachines into you, it’s highly unlikely that anything worse can happen before sundown, he tells himself in a spirit of misplaced optimism.
And things are, indeed, looking up compared to where they were an hour or two ago. Bonnie had found him, still unconscious, lying at the foot of a tree that was already dribbling toxic effluent across his boots. The teapot was screaming for help at the top of its tinny electronic lungs as an inquisitive stream of brick red ants crawled over its surface, teaming up to drag it back to one wing of the vast sprawling supercolony that owned the continent. The ants stung, really, really hard. And there were lots of them, like a tide sweeping over his body. It was Bonnie who’d signaled Doc, using some kind of insane spatchcock mobile phone jury-rigged from the wreckage of her parachute harness to broadcast on all channels for help, and it was Bonnie who’d sat beside him, whispering sweet nothings and occasionally whacking impudent Formicidae, until Doc hove into view on his half-rusted swamp boat. But she’d vanished, not sticking around to explain to Doc how come she and Huw were at large in the neverglades—and the doc seemed mad about that.