Division: A Collection of Science Fiction Fairytales Read online

  Division

  A Collection of Science Fiction Fairytales

  Lee S. Hawke

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. THE SOLDIER

  2. DISSIMILATION

  3. PLEASE CONNECT

  4. THE GREY WALL

  5. BEAUTY

  6. LEMURIA

  7. DIVISION

  Dear Reader

  Coming Soon

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  DIVISION: A COLLECTION OF SCIENCE FICTION FAIRYTALES

  Copyright © 2014 by Lee S. Hawke

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication in any form without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For more information, go to www.leeshawke.com.

  ISBN: 978-1-925299-00-7

  To my mother, for reading me stories.

  To my father, for giving me dreams.

  To my readers, for picking up this book.

  THE DIVISION

  Rain on the windows,

  creaking doors,

  With blasts that

  besom the green,

  And I am here,

  and you are there,

  And a hundred miles between!

  O were it but the weather, Dear,

  O were it but the miles

  That summed up all

  our severance,

  There might be room for smiles.

  But that thwart thing

  betwixt us twain,

  Which nothing cleaves or clears,

  Is more than distance, Dear,

  or rain,

  And longer than the years!

  Thomas Hardy

  Introduction

  Once Upon a Time, there were fairytales.

  Now that doesn’t tell us where. Or when. Or how. But wherever they were, they explored the things that matter. Like Beauty. Like grief. Like humanity and heroism and evil, or even just falling in love.

  The following stories are not Cinderella in Space, or Snow White with Robots. They are fairytales set in the apocalypse, or on a spaceship, or in virtual reality. But they still explore the things that matter.

  You can decide whether everyone lives happily ever after or not.

  THE SOLDIER

  Once upon a time, I got very, very sick.

  Everything that could happen to me happened. I got a fever. I got rashes. I vomited upon contact with anything remotely resembling edibles. I got aches in places that I didn’t know existed, and a cough that seemed to start from my toenails. By the end of the first week, I had gone from praying that my family wouldn’t get it to praying that I would die.

  My family got it. So it goes. They died.

  But I didn’t. Die, that is. At least not then. Instead, I got picked up by the military.

  * * *

  I learned as a kid that homo sapiens would rather fight other homo sapiens than microbes. For one thing, it’s easier. And there’s something satisfying about knowing somebody else is the bad guy and seeing them laid out on the street in front of you. Something human.

  Microbes? The little bastards just go hide, multiply, and come back to bite you when you least expect it.

  I was in and out of hospital a lot as a kid. Chronic recurrent multifocal osteomyelitis, also known as CRMO, also known as pain. It took them a while to figure out that my own bones were swelling up and attacking me, courtesy of some random gene that they couldn’t even identify. I don’t remember much, but what I do remember was that when I was stuck in a white room, I watched a lot of television. I saw the coolest and latest new toys the army was playing with, the dust in their arenas, the suits arguing over how much money they were going to throw at them. I found out later that over those same weeks, three doctors quit so that they could re-introduce themselves to their families, and one nurse quietly injected herself with ten times the recommended dosage of benzodiazepine. Turned out she’d gone so far into debt that she couldn’t see out the other side.

  She wasn’t alone. I went into remission. I grew up. I read the news like everybody else, poring over my smartphone on the train to work. I read about West Africa, about Vietnam, about Bangladesh. Places that seemed far away until they weren’t. It was right there in front of us, in black lines on white websites; we read and we comprehended the foot soldiers of the Apocalypse, and then we just put away our phones and logged into our emails.

  We might as well have just overdosed with sedatives.

  * * *

  Homo sapiens would rather fight other homo sapiens than microbes. But once we make up our minds, I don’t know if it’s all that different.

  I woke to a white room, on a stiff white bed. I craned my neck and blinked stupidly. To my right was a unit mounted on the wall that looked like a cross between a toilet and a fax machine. A small sink perched nervously above it, as if afraid it would fall in. Opposite that was a door, so finely cut into the surrounding wall that I saw only the eyehole at first. And then in front of me, squatting on its mount, was the television.

  I’d seen jail cells that looked more hospitable.

  Oh, and one last thing. There was a speaker in the right corner, far out of reach. It crackled as I stared at it, trying to convince myself that this was all a fever dream. Any moment now, I’d wake up to my mother rearranging the pots downstairs and my sister breaking the walls dancing to that ear-shredding stuff she called music.

  Instead, I got three seconds worth of static, and then a voice: “Tamun Jabbari. My name is Doctor Prasad. Do you understand me?”

  To my shock, I did. The fever had done odd things near the end, I’d been muttering to the walls about green unicorns and ham. I cleared my throat and it felt like scraping blood pudding off a china plate. I hurt everywhere, but as I did a mental inventory, I also recognised the feeling of lightness. I was getting better. I didn’t even remember how close I’d been to death. Only the old, metallic taste of it lingered, like cold iron.

  “Doc,” I said. I sounded ninety years older, a hundred. “Where am I?”

  I couldn’t see her, but I heard it in her voice: something relaxed. “My name is Doctor Prasad,” she said again. “And you’re safe. But your mother and sister are dead. And so is young Ms. Colier, who sat across from your cubicle. And the shopping clerk who handled your groceries on Tuesday the 2nd. And his daughter. And the girl she rode with on the bus to school. And half of her teachers.” She paused her machine-gun fire for a moment and aimed for the heart. “All up, 47 deaths in under a week and another 359 believed infected. But you’ve survived.”

  A minute passed.

  “Mr. Jabbari?”

  I stared at the palms of my hands. The world behind them was hot with guilt and horror, filling up the holes the fever had left in my skin. “Mr. Jabbari,” she said again, and now she sounded severe, impatient. I heard it through a thick mist of fog. People were dead and I had killed them. I didn’t even know how I’d first gotten sick. It could have been Jack’s cough when I saw him two weeks ago, but something sat wrong in me at the thought. He’d been walking around, not a mess on the bedroom floor like I’d been. It could have been…

  “Mr. Jabbari,” she repeated. She was definitely annoyed now. “I’m telling you this so that you can help people.”

  My hands dropped. I saw the four white walls enclosing me through blurred
eyes. I was now almost positive that one of them was a one-way mirror. I stared at it and imagined white faces. “How?”

  * * *

  I flunked biology in high school. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. I loved knowing how things worked, and given my history of chronic illness, it felt a little like self-preservation. But I could never get a hold of the right names, let alone draw the diagrams in the exams, and so I ended up dropping it and taking up history instead.

  Still, I remembered enough of it to understand that what Dr. Prasad was telling me didn’t make any sense.

  “Could you go over that again for me, doc?”

  She hissed in impatience. The microphone must have been top quality, it seemed to pick up everything. “It’s Doctor Prasad,” she snapped. “And look,” she said, switching to what must have been her equivalent of baby-talk, because everything was under seven syllables: “My team have never seen anything like your immune system before. Your innate immune system is so aggressive that it probably exacerbated your CRMO. And your adaptive immune response is tremendous. Most pathogens successfully hide from the human body until it’s too late by switching or mutating their protein IDs. It’s called antigenic variation. But your system isn’t fooled. There’s something in your cells that recognises the pathogens and goes straight for their weak spots. They think that you can fight off a lot of things if we give you the right treatments, and even more importantly, that we can manufacture treatments for other people from you at the same time. You could save a lot of lives.”

  She left it unsaid, but I heard it anyway. To make up for some of the ones that you killed.

  I took a breath. It still hurt, but it was hurting less. I guess I had to thank my Special Forces immune system for that. “So you want me to fight off things,” I said slowly. I tried to think through the headache, still malevolently pulsing in my temples. “I’m guessing that means I need to get infected first.”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about that for a while. “You want me to fight off things, plural,” I said. “So you want to infect me with a lot of different things.”

  I could almost hear her sigh. “Yes.”

  I thought about that for a little while. “Then I’ll probably die at some stage, won’t I?”

  “Yes,” she said, and this time she couldn’t leave it there. “Of course there are risks. You could get sick flying on a plane, or you could die from a car crash. But this… this will mean something for generations. You could change the course of history.”

  She believed it. I could feel it coming from that white speaker, on that white wall, the passion and the intensity of it as blinding as the sun. And I wanted to believe in it too, but I wasn’t quite sure what to believe in anymore. “If I say no?”

  Her voice became clipped, disapproving. “You’ll remain here for observational study.”

  It wasn’t really a choice, but I felt better that I could pretend to make it. “Well doc,” I said, trying for geniality. “You’ve convinced me. I’ll do it.”

  I guess you can’t use anti-tank missiles or drones against the one enemy that doesn’t care what colour your skin is, or who you pray to, or what is or isn’t between your legs. But you can still use kamikaze soldiers.

  * * *

  They started me on Ebola.

  It was too late for most of the world, but it might still help someone. I hoped it would, at least. The good doctor was dressed up as if she was about to spacewalk through a volcano, which wasn’t all that comforting.

  “There,” she said. She had so many layers on that she was still speaking to me through a mike, her voice coming from the speaker on the wall. She stepped back. Something crossed her face behind the black glass of her helmet. “Try to relax, Tamun. You’ll be under strict observation. We’ll do our best.”

  “Thanks doc,” I said. I watched her stiffen with annoyance, and then walk away. Before the doors closed behind her, I saw a map on the wall outside. My room was at the end of a long corridor, guarded by three decontamination stations marked in red. I got up on shaky legs and turned on the television to distract myself from what that meant.

  * * *

  Do you know what it’s like, when there’s something looming over the horizon that scares the living excrement out of you? Like an exam you’re afraid of. Your father dying slowly of Alzheimer’s. Your kid rocking up late from school, all milky-eyed and giggly. Being sent to the frontline for the first time. Actually, no, being sent to the frontline every time. You know, all the little nightmares that make up our lives.

  I lived in that world for three days, waiting for one of the bloodiest diseases we knew of to come disintegrate my body. When the virus finally hit, it was almost a relief. Almost. I woke with a stabbing pain in my head and a fever so high I thought I could see starlight. “Doc,” I said. “I’ve got it.”

  The speaker crackled to life immediately. She didn’t even bother to scold me about her name anymore, I liked to think it was a sign that we were becoming friends. “We’re on it, Tamun.”

  I lay back, my job done. Well, not really. Now I had to stay alive. I stared at the ceiling, imagining the virus sweeping through my bloodstream, arching out like a horde of snake demons. They left burned cities in their wake, sparking my fever higher and higher. The ground was wet with death, and my head ached with it. And my immune system ran around like an army without a general, watching everything burn.

  More people in spacesuits came in. In my semi-delirious state, they looked like they were made out of bubbles. They linked me to fluids, checked my temperature, wiped me down. Then they left.

  They came back when the virus launched a two-sided assault, vomiting and diarrhoea so intense that I couldn’t make it in time to what I had discovered was the disposal unit. By that point, I didn’t even care anymore that there was a one way window to witness my humiliation. Ebola took my ability to care, then it took my dignity, and then it took my consciousness. Just before I went under, I imagined a helicopter coming in, flying low and black across a bloody horizon. The Special Forces were here.

  * * *

  When I woke up from the coma, I spoke first. “How’d it go?” I asked the wall.

  “You’re alive,” Dr. Prasad said. Her voice was warm, it almost sounded like she cared. “Well done, Tamun, this is a very good start. We’re analysing your blood at this moment. I’m very hopeful.”

  I slumped back on the bed, wondering about the definition of alive. I could still feel it. The virus had left its calling card, my body was a battlefield littered with piles of corpses and the scars of still-burning cities. There were hills and lumpy knots of swelling and aches that didn’t feel like they would go away. I’d never seen my body as a bag of meat and bones, but now I could feel it.

  I sank into my pillow and breathed, closing my eyes against the lights. There was no sense of achievement, just a stupid gratefulness that I was still breathing and a soul-eating fear of going through that again. “What’s next?”

  “Malaria,” Dr. Prasad said crisply.

  * * *

  I realised pretty quickly why they’d given me the television. So I could watch the news. Whatever had taken my family out was licking down the continent. And over the last few decades, a shift of just a couple of degrees had bred fertile new mosquito territory there, along with a fertile new form of the disease that had decided to strike while everyone left alive was still reeling. So it goes. Apparently the experts weren’t surprised, but everyone else was. Humanity had always been a few steps behind in this war.

  If Ebola was snake demons, then malaria felt like an army of goblins. My body ran out of cities to burn. I’d been so afraid of bleeding with Ebola, but now an army of parasites was marching through that blood and firebombing my cells. When I wasn’t shivering I was convulsing, in spasms and shakes that left me a tangled mess on the bed. And the fever came back, this time a low, dull ache that felt like huddling in an irradiated bomb shelter.

  Dr. Prasad was stuck on acti
ve shift for twelve hours, watching me. When I slept, somebody else replaced her, but I never met them. Perhaps they weren’t real. Given that I was drifting in and out of consciousness, I imagined that both of the good doctors, real or not, would have had some pretty disturbed sleep patterns. For some reason, that made me vindictively pleased. At least I wasn’t going through this hell alone.

  Wait.

  “How many?” I asked Dr. Prasad one day, after another round of convulsions had left me vomiting.

  Her voice came back short. She sounded tired. “How many what?”

  I lifted my head slightly, tried to eyeball her through a wall. “How many people do you have like me? Anomalies? Foot soldiers?”

  It was as if I’d asked for a million dollars and chocolate ice-cream. Her voice hardened in shock. “Drop it, Tamun. I’m not at liberty to tell you that.”

  A shard of pity crawled up in me. She’d probably worked hard for decades, studying and clawing her way up, only to wind up having to babysit me. And since I was awake and she was on shift, I had all the time in the world to whittle her down.

  Well, all the time in the world until I died.

  I uncurled from the bed, blinking sleepily at her, trying to look unthreatening. “Come on, Doc,” I cajoled. “Who am I going to tell?” I knew she was looking, so I gestured at the four walls surrounding me, my own little prison of disease. “My pillow?”

  She snorted. But later the next day, when I was about to drift into another state of unconsciousness too light and weak to be described as sleep, she said, “Five.”

  I fought my closing eyes. “Five what?” I asked.