After a couple of hours on the operating table, Huw has discovered that half an hour can be a very long time indeed when your only company is a demented quack and you can’t even scratch your arse by way of entertainment. And his arse itches. In fact, it’s not all that itches. Up and down his spine, little shivers of tantalizing irritation are raising gooseflesh. “Shitbiscuits,” he mumbles as his left hand begins to tremble uncontrollably. The nanobots have reached the swollen, damaged tissues within his cervical vertebrae and are busily reducing the swelling. They’re coaxing suicidal neurons back into cytocellular stability, laying temporary replacement links where apoptosis has already proceeded to completion, and generally repairing the damage Huw’s supine spinal cord has received. For which Huw is incredibly grateful—if Doc were as nuts as he seems, he might have injected an auto engine service pack and Huw might at this very moment be gestating a pile of gleaming ceramic piston rings—but it itches with the fire of a thousand ants crawling inside his veins. “Balls on a tea towel,” he says. And then his toes begin to tremble.
By the time Doc reappears, Huw is sitting up, albeit as shaky as an ethanol addict in the first week of withdrawal. He moans quietly as he accepts a chipped mass-produced Exxon mug full of something dark and villainous enough that it resembles a double-foam latte, if the barista substituted Gulf crude for steamed milk. “Thanks,” he manages to choke out. “I think. I hope Bonnie comes back soon.”
“That godless sinning harridan?” Doc cranks one eyebrow up until it teeters alarmingly. “Naw, son, you don’t want to be going worrying about the likes of her. She’s bad company, her and her crew—between you and me, I figure she’s in league with the space bats.” He chuckles. “Naw, you’ll be much better off with me an’ Sam. Ade told us all about you and what you’re here for. We’ll set you straight.”
“Ade. Told you.” Huw’s stomach does a backflip, which feels extremely strange because something is wrong with his body image. It feels all wrong inside. He clears his throat and almost chokes: the alien whistle-thing-communicator is gone! Then his stomach gives a warning twinge and his momentary flash of hope fades. The godvomit has simply retreated deeper into his gastrointestinal tract, hiding to bide its time like a bad plot twist in a Tamil robo-apocalypse movie. “How’d you know him?”
“’Cause we do a bit of business from time to time.” Doc’s eyebrow relaxes as he grins at Huw. “A little light smuggling, son. Don’t let it get on your nerves. Ade told us what to do with you, and everything’s going to be just fine.”
“Just fine—” Huw stops. “What are you going to do with me?” he asks.
“Ade figures we oughta deliver you to the Baptist temple in Glory City—that’s Charleston as was—in time for next Thursday’s memorial service. It’s the forty-sixth anniversary of the Rapture, and they get kinda jumpy at this time of year.” A meaty hand descends on Huw’s shoulder and he looks round, then up, and up until his newly fixed neck aches at the sight of a large, completely hairless man with skin the color of a dead fish and little piggy eyes. “Son, this is Sam. Say hello, Sam.”
“Hello, Sam,” rumbles the human mountain. Huw blinks.
“You’re going to hand me over to the Baptists?” he asks. “What happens then?”
“Well.” Doc scratches his head. “That’s up to you, isn’t it?”
“But this anniversary. What do you mean, they get jumpy?”
“Oh, nothing much. Just sacrifice a bunch of heretics to make God notice they still believe, that kinda thing. You got a problem with that?”
“Maybe.” Huw licks his lips. “What if I don’t want to go?”
“Well, then.” Doc cocks his head to one side and squints at Huw’s left ear. “Say, son, that’s a mightly nice ear you’ve got there. Seeing as how you’ve not paid your medical bill, I figure we’d have to take it off you to cover the cost of your treatment. Plus maybe a leg, a kidney, and an eye or two. How about it?”
“No socialized medicine here!” rumbles Sam as a second backhoe-sized hand closes around Huw’s other shoulder.
“Okay! I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” Huw says.
Doc beams amiably at him. “That calls for a shot of shine,” says the medic. “I knew you’d see sense. Now, about the alien space bats. We’ve got this here telescope that Sam liberated when they were burning the university—hive of godless heretics—but we don’t know how to work it proper. Have you ever used one? We’re looking for the bat cave on the moon. ...”
Welcome to the American future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Over the years and decades since the singularity, the ant colony has taken the entire Atlantic coast of the United States, has marched on Georgia and west to the Mississippi. It is an anarchist colony, whose females lay eggs without regard for any notional Queen, and it has just entered its fiftieth year of life, which is Methuselah-grade longevity by normal ant colony standards, but may be just the beginning for the Hypercolony.
The God-botherers have no treaty with the ants, but have come to view them as another proof of the impending end of the world. Anything that is not contained in chink-free, seamless plastic and rock is riddled by ant tunnels within hours. They’ve learned to establish airtight seals around their homes and workplaces, to subject themselves to stinging insecticide showers before clearing a vestibule, to listen for the Tupperware burp whenever they seal their children in their space suits and send them off to Bible classes.
The ants have eaten through most of the nematode species beneath the soil, compromised all but the most plasticized root systems of the sickening flora. (The gasoline-refining forests are curiously symbiotic with the colony—anarchist supercolonies like living cheek-by-mouthpart with a lot of hydocarbons.) They’ve eaten the beehives and wasp nests, and they’ve laid waste to any comestible not tinned and sealed, leaving the limping Americans with naught but a few trillion tons of processed food to eat before their supply bottoms out.
The American continent is a very Grimm fairy tale that the cloud dwellers review whenever one faction or another doubts its decision to abandon Earth-bound humanity. The left-behinds there spend their lives waiting for an opportunity to pick up a megaphone and organize crews with long poles to go digging through the ruins of civilization for tinned goods. Presented with their opportunity in the aftermath of the Geek Rapture, they are happy as evangelical pigs in shit—plenty to rail against, plenty of fossil fuel, plenty of firearms.
What more could they possibly need?
Once it becomes clear that Huw is prepared to go to Glory City, the doc comes all-over country hospitality, and details Sam with the job of getting him properly lubricated. They watch the sunset through the tupperware walls of the doc’s homestead, gazing out at the thick carpet of ants swarming over the outer walls as they chase the last of the sun across the surface. When the sun finally sets, the sound of a billion tromping feet keeps them company.
“Well,” says Doc, nodding at Sam. “Looks like it’s time to hit the road.”
Huw sits up straight. Glory City is not on his agenda, but if he’s going to make a break for it, he wants to do it somewhere a bit more crowded and anonymous than here, right in the middle of Doc’s home turf. Plus, he’s still weak as a kitten from gasoline-tainted corn mash and the nanos knitting busily in his guts.
“We’ll take the bikes,” Doc says with an affable nod. “Go get ’em, Sam.”
Sam thuds off toward an outbuilding, the plasticized floors dimpling under his feet.
“He’s a good boy,” says Doc. “But I figure I used too many cognitive enhancers on him when he was a lad. Made him way too smart for his own good.”