‘It will work,’ said Rhine, ‘and I can prove it.’
Saul nodded and turned to Hannah. ‘A theorized warp drive is what he means. We’re talking about inertia-less flight, faster-than-light travel, and everything that entails.’
Zero Plus One Month – Earth
The sun was shining on massive activity within the Aldeburgh Complex. Aeros were taking off and landing, personnel were disembarking or boarding. A couple of big heavy-lifter aeros were delivering a fusion reactor and, even as Serene stood there taking it all in, a scramjet shot overhead. There was no indication at all of the grim horror that lay just a few kilometres inland, except the smell.
Serene took the nasal spray out of her pocket, gave herself a shot up each nostril, and the putrid smell went away. Right at that moment, factories in Britain, Germany and Portugal which previously manufactured nasal inhalers for a particularly virulent herpes sinus infection, were mass-producing these devices. Even so, supply was struggling to keep up with demand, especially from those working the in-field clear-up teams. Serene turned to gaze at a distant pillar of black smoke: the pyre taking in the dead from Aldeburgh and from the hordes of zero assets lying beyond. It had been burning for ten days now.
Serene grimaced then headed towards her own aero, Clay walking beside her and the rest of her security staff and her PAs following behind. When she arrived, two guards boarded ahead of her, one turning to help her up the steps. She entered and went through to sit in the pilot’s chair, Clay coming through next to occupy the chair beside her.
‘We have a pilot on hand,’ Clay noted.
‘I like to keep in practice,’ she replied, strapping herself in then starting up the engines. ‘A lack of self-reliance can kill.’ She took the vessel up into the sky and tilted it nose-down towards that pillar of smoke.
As they flew over Aldeburgh, she noted the huge activity in the streets. The only people visible down there were the infield clear-up teams clad in bright yellow hazmat suits as they collected bodies that the heavy machinery swarming below couldn’t reach. The motorways in both directions were also crammed with convoys of trucks.
‘The cargo-rail networks?’ she asked.
‘They’ll be up and running tomorrow.’
She nodded. This was a microcosm of what was happening all across Earth, though in some regions they were using different methods of transport and disposal. One example immediately sprang to mind: in South Africa they had built ramps down to the sea and were using telefactored bulldozers to shove the corpses into the waves. Apparently the sea along that coast was alive with surviving sharks drawn in from the deep; even two killer whales, thought to be extinct for over twenty years, had been spotted.
‘What’s that?’ Serene asked, noticing something below, in the zero-asset sector beyond the city’s centre, and bringing her aero lower.
‘The river Alde,’ Clay replied, his voice neutral.
Only its movement showed that water ran between the carbocrete banks and under the enclosed walkways penetrating the rust-stained concrete wall to the rear of a megaplex. Its snail-pace crust consisted of corpses, to which the flow seemed to impart the illusion of life: here an arm flopping over, there a boot kicking defiantly at the sky, there a head jutting up with eyes white and tongue protruding cheekily. Serene could think of no explanation for why so many of the dead had ended up in the river. Perhaps something about the Scour drove them to water, or perhaps this was part of that same instinctive drive that had originally impelled so many zero assets towards the sea. She took the aero back into the sky, and continued towards the smoke.
From the residential perimeter of the city, factory complexes extended for ten kilometres to tall security fences. Again there was movement but little of it from living human beings. Here auto-trucks were being loaded and unloaded, while occasional chimneys belched smoke or steam. Not so much of a corpse problem here, since this area was mostly automated, and the problem only became evident in the agricultural land beyond the fence. As soon as the aero cleared the factory complex Serene gazed in numb awe at what she had wrought, then abruptly decided to land the aero. When he realized what she was doing, Clay reached for his nasal spray and took a couple of hits. Serene could hear the others behind doing the same.
Serene landed, the aero’s feet settling with a soggy crunching audible to all inside, and she shut down the engines. After a moment she checked her instruments, for it sounded as if something was still running, then she realized the noise was coming from outside. It penetrated as a droning massive din, as if from some ancient computer room with its switching of relays and hum of transformers.
Certainly there was movement here, what with the filthy seagulls and a scattering of crows, but they only complemented the sound. The view also didn’t seem clear, as if there were smudges on Serene’s sunglasses. She slid a pack of wipes from her top pocket, took off her sunglasses to wipe them, then realized the haze obscuring the view before her was not due to them. Both haze and noise had one source and it was flies: trillions of flies swarming in great foggy clouds over the hectares of corpses.
Good, she thought. At last.
‘They dropped even while they were on the move,’ said Clay. ‘It’s weird.’
The scene reminded her of pictures she had seen of the Tunguska meteorite impact, where trees had been felled evenly in one direction by the blast wave. Or perhaps a better analogy might be the passing of a harvester of GM bamboo, neatly cutting down and laying out the stems ready for the big collectors that conveyed the harvest directly to a nearby biofuel power station. A wheat crop lay before her, trampled flat by the advancing horde, all heading in one direction; and then the largest proportion of the horde felled while stubbornly refusing to change direction. All of them collapsing, all of them lying with their heads pointing towards the sea which, even though almost devoid of life, could be glimpsed sparkling merrily in the sunshine, between the tower blocks of Aldeburgh City.
‘We were thinking it would be better to use one of the big automated ploughs here,’ said Clay, then pointed: ‘we are already doing some clearing at the perimeter.’
In the distance a massive dozer was heaping up corpses, then scooping them onto the back of a long flatbed agricultural trailer.
‘They’re going to the fire?’ Serene indicated the pillar of smoke, which was considerably nearer now.
‘To the fire, yes.’
‘When will that all be finished?’ she enquired.
‘It will need to burn for three months,’ Clay replied.
‘What about burial?’
‘Every piece of earth-moving equipment available is at work, even the old ones that require drivers. All the biofuel power stations on Earth are currently running on zero-asset corpses. And every five kilometres, along all coasts, we’re making ramps to push the mounds of corpses into the sea – just like in Africa. The estimate is that we’ll manage to dispose of just ten per cent of the dead before the remainder are only bones.’
‘Surely we have more efficient methods?’
‘When we’ve finished security-checking Govnet, and can start running the robots, things should improve for the in-field teams as regards moving the dead.’ He shrugged. ‘But where do we move the corpses to?’
‘Our agricultural land is no longer at a premium, therefore much of it can be used.’
‘As we are doing,’ replied Clay.
‘It’s a short-term problem which nature will eventually solve for us,’ Serene stated.
‘Nature already is solving it for us,’ said Clay, indicating with a nod the masses of flies settling on the aero’s windscreen.
Serene smiled briefly, and resisted the temptation to apprise him of a reality recently detailed to her by a taphonomist – a man whose discipline was the study of decomposition. A hundred years ago such masses of corpses would have been much further along in decay after one month. That so many of them were still intact here after so long was due both to a severe lack of all the microbes and insects that had served as Earth’s undertakers, and to the sheer number of corpses they now needed to deal with. That was perhaps one of the best indications of the present state of Earth’s biosphere she had heard.