Original Work Flaws and Features, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction (Finished)

Chapter Nineteen: 512,000,000

In the coming days, a pall of anxiety settles across Grand Royal Island and its survivor communities. Conditions remain fairly peaceful, save for intermittent artillery duels and occasional swarms of crude missiles, rockets, and suicide drones launched at equipment or defensive positions that were not as well-concealed or well-protected as they should have been. At night the residents occasionally glimpse odd shimmers and twinkles in the sky, where otherwise-invisible laser beams aimed at incoming ordnance catch on airborne particles.

The flight of four unmanned areal drones cuts across the water, skimming not over the waves but through the rolling troughs as much as possible. This is their best bet for avoiding the coastal patrol craft or the roving air defense batteries that protect the island and waters around it. They had been fast, long-range delivery drones in a previous life, meant to carry medical supplies and other small packages to residents of remote boreal villages. They have now been equipped with heavy machine guns or light rocket pods to hunt their former patrons.

Heather sees them coming first off the port bow. She screams a warning to the skipper, who immediately orders battle stations. He throttles up the engines and begins evasive maneuvers, his crew man the deck gun and prepare to engage, while Heather runs to the hold and grabs one of their new weapons, the signal disruptors.

Daniel had called them his “Tom Swift Electric Rifles” and meant to use them against nanite-infected humans. Among other things, they sever communications between the human servants and their master while rewriting mission objectives and action parameters. She remembered him saying that they might be partially effective against non-organic drones as well, and now is a good time to test that hypotheses. Glass breaks, someone yells, and a stream of bullets rivet the superstructure, the vessel seems to shift oddly as she climbs back to the deck.

The crewmen return fire. The skilled gunners loose a stream of 7.62×54mmR armor-piercing rounds, clipping one of the drones and sending it tumbling into the water. Rockets fall around them and the men hit the deck as the air fills with shrapnel and splinters. Designed to take the worst of what the stormy northern seas can throw at her, the steel-hulled little trawler will not sink easily. Fire or the complete destruction of the bridge and its controls, however, are much more pressing concerns, as is the fact that its occupants are not quite so bulletproof.

When the drones pass astern, Heather aims her weapon and fires, holding the invisible beam as tightly as possible on the target. There’s no sound of discharge, no lights or flashes or anything else to be seen or heard. Just the steady, optionally-mutable tone and LED display to indicate that a target has been found and engaged. The only evidence of any effect is that, when one drone turns to make a second pass, the other flies unresponsively out to sea.

The last one fires another short burst of rockets amidship, shredding the empty crew quarters but largely missing the bridge. It jinks wildly and pulls up high before flipping over in a dive and bearing straight down on the vessel, clearly intending to end with a kamikaze strike. Heather tries to aim and fire again, but she knows that she probably won’t knock it out in time. And to have the whole drone slamming home at that angle might well be enough to send them to the bottom.

There’s a low yet deafening buzz from the direction of the coast and the drone practically disintegrates in midair, with part of what must have been the propeller slicing through Heather’s backside and leaving a nasty-looking gash. She’ll keep the bloodied piece of aluminum as a memento. She looks to the water to see a zodiac craft approaching, the multiple spinning barrels of its mounted gun still smoking. In spite of the pain, she smiles in impish satisfaction.

Gatling gun. When in doubt, have someone mount a Gatling gun to something.

* * *

Now a' is done that men can do, And a' is done in vain.

The Algorithm tramples them down like wheat in a hailstorm. The mind-wiped minions charge unabated over minefields and barbed-wire, through bullets and gas, and straight into the foxholes of their opponents where they hold them down and force the needles into their arms, compelling them to join the horde. Some error in Daniel’s coding, some flaw in his design, it all proves to be the undoing of everything.

Aya Kato shrugs with disinterest and sips at her kvass as the hordes pour into her bunker. Ah well, she thinks, I’ve always wanted to see how the other half lives.

Daniel manages to somehow escape the calamity. He joins a small remnant band deep in the highlands, only to see them falling away, one by one, his earlier efforts undone. They can hide from the converted, but they can’t hide from the microscopic nanites. Every breath of air or drink of water will hasten the time of their own conversions. A few opt to die by their own hand, though now even their corpses rise again as slaves to the Algorithm. Eventually, the animals and even the plants show signs of infection.

In the years to come, Daniel wanders alone throughout the region, never turning and never stopping in the search for the last person he had cared for. He eventually finds what had been Heather McMillian at the very twilight of mankind, crawling through the ashy silver-dust landscape that had once been northern woodlands. Her body has grown bloated, distended and amoebic. Slimy grey goo runs from her mouth and nose and ears, thin metallic tendrils grow from bloody sores and tears in the rotting, rubbery fabric that had been her skin. Her head is denuded of its chestnut curls, he pulls it firmly into his lap and looks her deeply in the eyes. She stares unblinking into a silver-grey overcast, and he tries to convince himself that she had long ago lost the ability to perceive what had become of her. He thankfully sees no sign of awareness within, and he can remember the crystal-blue eyes that he had once marveled at by firelight so long as he ignores the quеer grey jaundice of her sclera. He holds against her tightly as the silver-dust ash continues to fall, as strange aeons follow one upon another, and as the planet hurls unimpeded through the void, devoid of higher life.

One of Dr. Kato’s henchmen wakes him up long before his shift. He thanks the man graciously, downs a cup of cold instant coffee, and hurries along with him to the radio room.

He spends the afternoon in stony silence, listening to reports from the trawler. They had been lucky, with only one life-threatening injury and no apparent risk to the seaworthiness of the vessel. But Daniel doesn’t think that it would be wise to count on more such luck. For the rest of the day, he throws himself into his work as a way to counteract anxiety. Most of Aya’s remaining henchmen busy themselves with the packing and loading of equipment, some destined for the bridle paths and some still bound for the sea lanes.

“Sea interdiction.” he states later. “That could be a real problem for us, considering how much we rely on the water for getting supplies out to forward positions.”

“We will have to up-arm and up-armor the ships as much as possible.” says Aya. “They should travel in convoys as well, though I suspect that we do not have much longer left before D-Day.”

“Will the fishing fleets attempt to intervene against the landings?”

“After much deliberation, they have decided to take a non-aggressive role in the opening stage of the invasion. It is an understandable course of action for them, as losses would likely be high and the island will need those vessels for food procurement.”

“Perhaps. Though if we lose all of our waterfront property then we won’t have much need for them, will we?” He sighs. “Part of me thinks we should have gone with the original plan and just tried infecting the opposing horde with anthrax.”

“Yes, perhaps. We certainly could have done that.” says Aya. “But they might respond in kind. And even if they didn’t, there would be a risk of the disease falling back upon us. We would need to produce enough Bacillis anthracis STI-1 and 55-VNIIVVIM strains to protect our own human and livestock population, and we would need to convince them to actually use it, and...”

“Yeah.”

* * *

“I suppose they’ve found a solution to the ammunition shortage.” says Kundar as he helps pull a crate of freshly-reloaded 30.06 bullets from the back of the waiting truck.

“Yeah, same one they found in Medieval China.” says Steve. “They’re going back to using black powder in as many roles as feasible. Not sure how well it’ll work trying to use that stuff in cartridge guns, but it beats trying to blast away at them with muzzle-loaders like my brother’s friend plans on doing.”

Kundar chuckles. While it is certainly possible to produce modern nitrocellulose and nitrocellulose-nitroglycerin-based smokeless powders in a field-expedient setting, and while several people on the island are doing it, it is not particularly easy nor safe, and the finished product is often of dubious quality. It requires lab conditions and a fairly in-depth understanding of chemistry.

Black gunpowder, in contrast, can be and often is produced at near-Stone Age level technology. It’s easier and safer only in a comparative sense, but anyone with access to trees, industrial waste, and manure has access to charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter respectively. Unfortunately, even much of that will be exhausted in just one large battle. Then it’s bow season forever, unless someone finds a guano deposit.

“Not so good for automatics, but it should be fine for bolt- or lever-actions.” he says. “Fact is, a lot of older ammunition types were once designed with black powder in mind: 30-30, .303 British and 7.62 Nagant among others. Weapons chambered in those rounds are still reasonably effective on a modern battlefield.”

“Fouling and corrosion are going to be big problems.” notes Steve sourly. “So will the familiar old problem of reduced visibility from all the gunsmoke.”

“The latter can be partially addressed with infrared thermal imaging.”

“So now we’re strapping thermal scopes to our charcoal-blasters?”

Kundar shrugs. “Why not?”

* * *

The train of pack donkeys carries their cargo to the top of the bluff. A machine gun nest has been hewed into a ledge halfway down, and the easiest way to reach it is from above by rope and ladder. A sturdy observation post sits atop the bluff, giving a commanding view of the nearest cove and the strait beyond. A distant trawler can be seen heading their way. Elena and Sarah offload their packages and rest for a time against the dry stone structure, with Sarah glancing inside and nodding her greeting to the watchman.

“This reminds me of the rock fort in the Swiss Family Robinson.” she says. “Have you ever seen that?”

“No.” says the teenager, opening a can of tinned mutton and passing it to Sarah. “It was a book though, wasn’t it? Inspired by Robinson Crusoe?”

“It was a live-action Disney movie, based off a book, yes. Modern audiences find it, how you say? Controversial?”

“Controversial? In what way?”

“Well, it was a 1960 live-action Disney movie, based off a book written in 1812, with an author who was considered a bit reactionary even back then. In the movie, the good guys are all sophisticated God-fearing European colonists and the bad guys are a scurvy crew of Chinese-Malay pirates.” Her lips purse into a smirk. “Yeah, controversial.”

“Oh… I can only imagine.” says Elena smiling. “Wait, is this the same film that has Asian tigers, African zebras, and South American anacondas all living on one fairly-small island?”

“The very same, which is something it has in common with the book. Anyway, I was thinking of the climactic final battle: the pirates swarm ashore and find themselves whittled down by the stalwart men and women and the ingenious traps they lay: crossbow traps, whip snares, concealed pits, landmines, rockfalls and rolling timbers, coconut hand grenades, firearms, and at the very end bare fists. Probably one of the most memorable battle scenes in cinema.”

“Sounds like a party.” says Elena between bites. “Sounds like a lot of what we’re doing. Though, from what I’m hearing, our own battle is going to look less like any Disney movie and more like Gallipoli, with a good dose of Vimy Ridge or Passchendaele on top of it.”

Elena rubs behind the ear of the nearest donkey, which looks at her with bored disinterest. The team is made up of older animals, most in their 20’s or 30’s or even older. Living that long isn’t uncommon for domestic donkeys, and these specimens are still sturdy in spite of it. Far from being stubborn or ill-tempered as commonly portrayed, they’re remarkably well-trained and helpful creatures, though their uncanny intelligence is sometimes a problem for human handlers.

The trawler is close enough to be recognized as the one belonging to Dr Kato’s organization. The signal lamp flashes and the watchman writes down the message before morsing his reply.

And then the shells start falling.

 

Chapter Twenty: 500,000,000

Flocks of rockets and guided missiles pass each other in the night, setting the skies aglow with their ephemeral smoke trails. Objects weave and dodge to avoid interception, with a constant twinkling of mid-air explosions to mark the ones that fail. On the ground, the long-range guns fire blasts of batteries and counter-batteries against each other. Exploding shells flash and thunder in the dark, to admittedly little destructive effect. The hearing of the defenders is saved by liberal distribution of earplugs, but there is no hope of getting sleep before The Longest Day, which seems to be the main intent. With the coming of the dawn, the explosives gives way to screening clouds of smoke. This is likewise only partially effective, with defending gunners having both the advantage of pre-selected firing positions and a fair amount of infrared optics.

The ships of the landing fleet pour in with the morning tide, practically blanketing the waters in their thousands. Sea mines tear open their bottoms, explosive shells reduce their hulls to splinters, and bursting clouds of gas turn the passengers into flopping, crawling, writhing invertebrates. Surviving vessels veer around the derelicts and try their best to avoid the worst of the toxic fumes. Their passengers pour ashore as soon as they draw near enough to row, swim, or wade. They ignore the burn on their skin and in their lungs, and they also ignore the streams of bullets that greet them. Many crew on the ships offer covering fire with small arms or crew-served weapons. The odds of the attackers actually hitting anything is ten thousand to one, but the number of rounds fired in those first few minutes number well into the hundreds of thousands...

Thud! The bullet makes a strange sound as it enters the embrasure of a pillbox, takes a defender in the skull and shatters it. Hair and scalp and bone spray across the confined space in a warm welter which his trench-mates barely notice. Alisha and Justin continue firing down upon the landing zones with an ancient Maxim gun taken from God only knows where. They wear their masks as much for the steam and burning powder as for any fear of backwards-drifting gas.

“How many more!?” screams and motions Justin as Alisha loads another belt. She points to the fresh belt in the gun, points to the ammo box, and extends four fingers from a bandaged and bloodied hand. Even through the translucent lenses, he can see the desperation in her eyes.

Four more belts. A thousand rounds. All of two minutes worth of continuous gunfire.

* * *

In the defensive lines before the pillboxes, Lisa prays the box of crude homemade grenades won’t explode in her hands or else fail to detonate at all as she throws them one after another from her trench and into the advancing zombie horde.

In this case they really do look like Hollywood zombies: shambling out of the chemical mist as blood and vomit and mucus stream from gasping throats, some dispensing with their weapons and clawing forward blindly. Very few have proper respirators or protective gear, but their analgesia serves them well in this instance. The sight is so unnerving that many defenders run away in terror.

Gerald quickly empties the rifle that had once guarded ground zero of the cataclysm, then fires his World War surplus Lee-Enfield into one as it scrambles over the tangle of abatis and barbed wire before his position. The high-powered bullet tears through its body and violently staggers it, but fails to stop it right away. He curses aloud, wishes for more STANAG magazines, and frantically chambers a second round as the twitching, blood-covered apparition raises its own piece in response. They fire at about the same time, his round slams into the jaw, exits through the spine, and almost decapitates the target. He cycles the bolt a third time and scans for more. More accurately, he tries to decide which of the thousand before him should be his next target.

The forward march continues. Barbed wire channels their forces and slows them down while hopelessly entangling many, landmines and bear traps and other pitfalls take their toll, but it’s all little more than sponges against the rising tide. The islanders are forced back in short other, with Gerald joining the others in retreat. He suddenly stumbles backwards and crumples to the ground in agony, body growing weak from blood loss and brain only now deciding to inform him of the bullet in his gut.

* * *

Elena had always wanted to be an ambulancier, an aspiration seemingly forestalled by the mandates and her family’s exile into the deep forests. Or so she had thought. Now, it almost seems fitting that she finds herself guiding a donkey and a modified game cart along the gravel trail as they carry the wounded away from the fighting. She tries not to think too much about the mangled, moaning cargo behind her, just as she tries not to think too much about the collapsing battle line only a little further back.

She leads the cart into the field hospital, and the likely quality of their healthcare system does little to raise her spirits. It could be worse of course, they do at least seem to have a decent store of antibiotics, antiseptics and anesthetics. They have electricity, which means they have refrigerators and surgical lighting and somehow even X-ray machines. They have most of the essential life-saving equipment that a modern hospital should have. It won’t end up looking like some nineteenth century abattoir, where severed limbs stack up like cordwood and the wounded rest beneath the shade of the flies. They should be able to avoid that so long as the people working there know what they’re doing. Problem is...

The head surgeon is a retired veterinarian who has to be pushing eighty. His immediate subordinates are his three grandchildren who are only a few years older than she. In the time before the battle, pretty much anyone who could hold a scalpel steady and not faint at the sight of human carnage could get a job at the operating table. It had to be that way of course; the government had gone out of its way to make sure that medical specialists of any kind would get their dose of zombie juice, pursuing the ones who tried to resist or evade with particular ferocity. In the nineteenth century, combat casualties suffered and died as often from the poor training and experience of their healthcare providers as they did from the primitive state of medical science. What is healthcare going to look like now that most of the nurses and doctors are either coughing up their lungs on the beaches or running inland and ripping apart her neighbours?

She was still thinking about that when she noticed a rustle in the nearby shrubbery. The plants were thrust aside and one of the Horrors came lurching forward. Its outstretched fists clench and unclench in a ripping motion. Matted, mouldy green-black hair veil a gasping face with lips flecking blood and vomit. A squad of its comrades follow unsteadily behind. Shots ring out and one of her escorts falls screaming to the ground, the other raises his sub-machinegun and sprays into the group. Elena is so paralyzed with shock that for a long time she doesn’t even think to reach for one of her mom’s spears. Others turn about and open fire as the bullets zip around her.

* * *

It hurts more than the drone shrapnel did. It doesn’t hurt as much as it looks like it should, though it probably will in time. Heather’s wrists bleed from multiple lacerations, both of her arms tingle from where the 3D-printed carbine had exploded in her grasp. No severed arteries or missing fingers by the looks of it, and that makes her luckier than some. She glances down at the smoking ruin of metal and plastic and curses. Gоddamned glorified zip-gun.

It’s like Karyn’s campground all over again. Heather once more finds herself among the reserves, again hoping that desperation will make up for shortcomings in weapons and capability. It had been expected that the forward beach defenses would fall, but it was happening faster than the planners would have wanted and they aren’t sure if the attack can be checked. Her company is deployed in a counter-charge to allow the others time to rally and reestablish their defenses.

They move forward in steady skirmish lines, diving for cover as they must and firing on their foes with whatever weapons they have. Before long they’re fighting hand-to-hand. Heather hopes that her backup firearms won’t fail her so painfully, though she expects the use of them to be at least as dangerous.

She brandishes the two flintlock pistols and fires one at the nearest enemy. The .490 caliber ball slams into the chest and the explosive core blasts a crater of blood and fire where the thorax used to be, killing it instantly. The one following is a large, flabby, long-haired trollish figure. She fires her second round at a distance of less than five paces. The ball tears through the top of its shoulder and exits without exploding, but the ensuing cloud of burning powder catches in the mat of greasy hair and sets it aflame. Two down, innumerable to go.

Pistols spent, Heather sidesteps a club-wielding foe and unsheaths her lawnmower-blade machete in time to hack at its neck. She narrowly avoids a thrown stone that could have crushed her skull, a comrade on her left is brained by the swing of a shovel. The battle devolves in a matter of minutes from industrial to medieval to primeval, and at every stage the enemy remains unrelenting.

Then she hears the noise of an approaching engine.

* * *

The Antonov An-2 biplane was arguably obsolete even when it first flew in 1947. It’s a large, slow, single-engine aircraft originally meant for agricultural, forestry, and utility work. One of the most successful designs in history, with tens of thousands still flying after eight decades of service, easy to maintain and capable of landing on short improvised runways or on water, it’s almost the perfect bushcraft. Hard to pick up on radar, North Korean commando teams still use it for covert insertion into enemy territory, and even those operating far abroad find it to be remarkably versatile.

This one was originally fitted with rocket pods and machine guns, and it could carry heavier ordnance in the form of improvised barrel bombs. It would have been fairly effective in naval interdiction or ground support. Instead, it’s stripped of non-defensive weapons and loaded with a powerful set of cellular-radio frequency transmitters. From high above the battlefield it blasts out its electronic music, drowning out the pied piping of the Algorithm and forcing the possessed to heed its call for several seconds. That’s all it needs for most. Aya Kato converses with her radioman and motions to Daniel. An artillery shell bursts some distance outside their dugout, one of the last of the battle.

“Reports are coming in, first signal seems to be effective! Our people report automatons going down all along the line of contact!”

Good news, thinks Daniel. If all goes well, it’ll take a long time for the enemy to even know what hit them. Considering how long it took for them to realize that humans under its control have a need to rest, heal and to bathe, maybe it will never figure out what happened.

Then again, that’s a dangerously optimistic prediction to make. It’s just as likely that the machine intelligence that is the Algorithm will quite easily put 10 and 10 together and come up with 100.

There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't. That was the only joke Daniel had ever shared with Aya that she found funny.

“Shame we couldn’t do this at the start of the battle rather than at the end.” he says to her. “How many people do you think we drowned, bombed, shot or gassed, who could have been saved?”

“Well gоddamn, man, I ain’t happy about that either!” says Aya, in a tone surprising for both its vernacular and for sounding almost as kindly as angry. “But you know as well as I why it’s gotta be that way: we can’t have them only partially commit their forces, get an idea of what they’re up against, and evacuate the beaches so they can try again later, possibly with better protection against it. We have to hurt them as badly as possible now, make a clean sweep if we can.”

Battle stress must be getting to her. She had placed the bulk of her Koreans at the most prominent, and the most vulnerable, point in the defenses: just beyond the remnants of the stone causeway. The enemy had come at them with pontoons and bridge-laying equipment to span the gaps caused by the cratering charges, but they made little headway against the withering fire of the well-trained, heavily-armed and fanatically-motivated commandos. Enfilade fire from their position had taken a heavy toll on nearby landing craft, and their forces upon disembarking made a special point to envelop and suppress this aggravating thorn in the side. Before the arrival of the seaplane, they were massing all around to storm the position and crush them decisively, and that’s right where she wanted them. Rather than hopelessly surrounded, she prefers to think that they find themselves in a target-rich environment.

Their enemies crumple to the ground as the airborne transmitter draws near. They twitch and jerk much as they had done three months ago, though with eerily little screaming or outward displays of discomfort this time. Aya strides from the bunker and fires off orders to the handpicked men and women of her taskforce. They file in behind her, and Daniel does as well, ignoring the uncertain looks spared him. I must not look like much of a commando to them, he thinks. And I don’t look like a lab researcher anymore, either. Aya grabs two electroguns and passes one to him.

“You sure you wanna do this?”

“Sally forth into a horde of zombie gunsels and hope that I really can change the channel on them with my glorified TV remote? No, I don’t want to do this, but what would it look like if I didn’t? Can’t have people thinking that I don’t trust my own product, and dying in battle beats Hell out of having to admit that I screwed up afterwards. You’re not exactly a formal OCS graduate yourself; I’m going out there for the same reasons you are.”

Aya nods with understanding. She reaches the parapet, puts a whistle to her mouth and blows. Up and over!

* * *

Sarah motions to Kundar, who points his disruptor at a figure standing among the twitching fallen. A few of the zombies, the unusually tough or lucky or sometimes the badly injured, hadn’t been knocked unconscious by the first signal, and of those a few were still dangerous. He squeezes the trigger and his target falls in an instant like a puppet with the strings cut. It’s still surreal to see a weapon striking down enemies without a sound, and without causing any visible damage to the target.

He closes the distance and proceeds to tag each of the bodies for good measure. Sarah follows behind and places colored ribbons as a form of triage for the medics and stretcher teams: green ribbons for minimal medical care, yellow for delayed care, red for those needing immediate attention, grey for the dying or those unlikely to survive, black for those already dead.

It wasn’t an enviable task to make the call between yellow and red and grey. The line between what was or wasn’t survivable had become a very broad spectrum indeed: gut shots and lung shots and penetrating head wounds were very bad news, so was gas inhalation and full-thickness burns. But all could be survived, assuming supplies and equipment hold out, and assuming someone has time and skill to use it, and…

...and assuming the patient doesn’t die anyway from complications brought on by thirst, starvation, exhaustion, infections and sepsis, diarrhea and dysentery. Captured zombies had been found with signs of scurvy, beriberi, rickets, pellagra, and xerophthalmia. And, ironically enough, they’ve become an eager breeding ground for every disease and infection ever known to man. They typically don’t stink as much as would be expected, or perhaps she can’t notice anymore, but they’re still a horror to look at. She wears her MOPP gear for fear of lice and fleas as much for fear of the still-present gas.

Sarah had once heard that, in the Middle Ages, besieging forces would sometimes catapult plague victims into hostile cities. But at least back then they had the good grace to kill them before sending them.

Better out here than back at the aid station, though. Elena was a psychological casualty now, having brought in first her father and then her uncle and then a brother when his 3-inch mortar burst. They had diplomatically lied to her about Gerald’s prognosis, she had watched the surgeons saw Steve’s foot off, then held them at spearpoint when they wouldn’t try to sew Joe’s head back on. Poor girl; that was going to leave a mark.

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won

The counter-attack is a solemn, almost somnolent affair. Scattered shots ring out in the distance, but resistance remains minimal all the way to the shoreline. There’s no sign of any foes escaping across the strait, and the island’s fishing fleet has already disembarked a shore party to seize and return with whatever they can of the enemy artillery park and staging equipment. Once zapped with the disruptors, the formerly hostile units very quickly reactivate and return to life as obedient servants of free-thinking humanity. They assist in the mop-up with a minimum of prompting. It’s a triumph for the island, though much too good to last.

 

Epilogue: 500,000,001 (suck it, Guidestones!)

I

As the tide turned against his troops, Nate the Nodemaster responded to the reports with resigned indifference. Ah well, he had lost nothing that either couldn’t be recovered or that he wasn’t planning to get rid of anyway. And those strange signals they deployed against his force! Better to learn about that when the renegades use it in defense of their own island than when they decide to launch an assault upon his territory.

It would have been ignored, had it been successful, but the Algorithm seemed very unhappy at his launching such a massive undertaking without asking for permission first. But the voice of command grew fainter in his head every day… and you know what? Fuсk the Algorithm. It hasn’t done anything worthwhile for him recently, and all it ever wants to do is take more of his hard-earned citizens or other possessions and waste them in pointless battles on the far side of the planet. He doesn’t need the Algorithm to help him run his fiefdom anymore, and if he ever does need to bleed off a bit of excess population then there are people right next door who will happily do it for him.

But he doesn’t think that’ll be necessary in the near future. Quite the contrary, he needs to stabilize and maybe start regrowing his population. It might not be a bad idea to enact some changes in their living conditions. If he plays his cards right, he has everything he needs to build his own personal kingdom from the ground up. And judging by the actions of other nodemasters, it seems obvious that a lot of them feel the same way. How ironic it will be that a change originally meant to foster the collective oneness of humanity will instead usher in a world of fractious autonomous despots.

Although, as much as it pains him to think of it, it might be a good idea to open a line of dialogue with whatever remains of the neighboring forest barbarians.

II

In theory, the humans could now swarm into occupied territory and perform technogenic exorcisms to their hearts’ content, until all of New Ireland is completely free of the Algorithm, all of its nodes and all of their units. Realistically, there are quite a few reasons why that wouldn’t be feasible for the exhausted and depleted human survivors, latest of which comes in the evening when the Antonov is shot down and its transmitter destroyed—not by enemy action, but by the undertrained and overeager gun crews of Grand Royal Island. Aya Kato is surprisingly undismayed by the event—she has a second non-operative aircraft and she expects to get at least one of them back into the air ‘ere long.

“It is for the best, I think.” she tells Daniel days later as the two of them seek to improve upon the disruptors. “Becoming overly expansionist is not a good policy for us at this time.”

“Yeah, probably shouldn’t be too quick to spread beyond this island.” he agrees. “We grow too fast, get too big, take too much without also building up the power to defend it… then something much bigger comes along and destroys us.” He holds up one of the disruptors. “And anyway, these things aren’t working as well anymore. I doubt the transmitters will either, once we get another one.”

Our wonder-weapons aren’t so wonderful, and the possessed are starting to clean up their society, literally. They’ve rediscovered soap, and vitamins and nutrients and reasonable working and sleeping schedules. They’re taking steps to minimize casualties in those cases where our forces and theirs come into conflict. Whatever controls the things over there, it apparently decided to preserve what manpower remains for it. Here we had thought that it was too stupid to properly care for human slaves, now it seems that it just didn’t care to, until absolutely necessary. Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by malice.

As the guns fall silent, the survivors bury their dead and return to their old lives. Summer soon blossoms brilliantly upon the northern land. No midnight suns at this latitude, but the longer days and typically-pleasant weather are a helpful boon for the fishermen, farmers, orchardists, loggers, and all those others working at their trades and preparing for the inevitable return of winter.

Weeks after the battle, someone notices odd transmissions on the low end of the FM radio band. A voice is speaking in a rapid and continuous gabble, the oration seemingly a product of organic human lips and yet lacking of anything that would make it human.

“and-so-we-wish-to-address-our-friends-on-grand-royal-island-in-an-effort-to-foster-positive-empowered-cooperation-and-to-optimize-our-efficiencies-so-that-we-might-jointly-stay-ahead-of-our-mutual-competitiors-we-must-think-outside-the-box-and-do-away-with-old-ideas-and-the-curent-modus-operandi-so-that-we-can-drive-innovation-and-streamline-core-competencies-in-the-coming-paradigm-shift-and-find-value-added-solutions-for-our-holistic-approaches-in-an-effort-to-foster-an-environment-of-team-players-who-are-respectful-of-the-diverse-cross-section-of-our-corporate-family-and-we-ask-that-our-friends-on-grand-royal-island-please-contact-us-at-your-conveingience-so-that-we-may-be-proactive-and-not-reactive-in-adressing-world-trends-and-internal-needs-we-hope-to-improve-teamwork-and-collaberation-with-the-goal-of-maximized-cooperation-and-communication-with-your-future-family-collegues-to-meet-our-ultimate-objective-for-a-better-tommorrow-as-long-as-it-takes-”

Heather looks like she’s about to laugh. Daniel rubs his eyes and massages his temples as he sits in front of Steve’s old radio and slogs through the auto-repeating monologue. Lisa, who had never quite experienced the world of corporate jargon and gobbledygook, is even more unpleasantly affected.

“Oh mother of God, what is that,” she asks shortly before excusing herself, “Skynet as presented by Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss?”

“That… sounds oddly familiar.” says Heather. “Like, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that voice somewhere before, and I know I’ve heard the tone. Oh God have I heard the tone... I used to work at a place where our managers would unironically speak of ‘positive thinking’ and ‘empowering positivity,’ in the same way that they would have spoken of ‘leveraging our synergies’ a generation ago.”

Steve chuckles and shifts slightly on his peg leg. Daniel continues to listen intently before making his declaration.

“They want a cease-fire, I think. A cease-fire, maybe even alliance. That makes sense, I suppose. We’ve been hearing reports around the world that major military operations have ceased, and that groups of the possessed are attacking and fighting with other groups of the possessed. The Algorithm as a coherent global network is breaking down and splintering. This is the new world we’re in; we’re no longer prey to be hunted or renegades to be subjugated, we’re just another faction to be... interacted with as our neighbors deem appropriate.”

“If that’s what they’re getting at, then why don’t they just say that?” asks Steve.

“I don’t think they know how. They haven’t learned how yet. I mean, listen to that broadcast, there’s no evidence of conscious thought having gone into it. It’s like duckspeak from George Orwell’s 1984.”

“The novel that everyone wants to talk about, but no one seems to actually read?” asks Heather, looking up with a smirk.

“I… I actually never read it.” said Steve. “Cliff Note version, please?”

“Duckspeak is the art of making articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres.” says Heather, “It’s useful for anyone who wants to make a living by speaking eloquently without saying anything: corporate managers, clergymen, MLM marketers, TED Talk speakers, political demagogues or their spokesmen. It’s one of those artforms that you never really master unless you’re at least a little stupid.”

“All of your best political commentators are doubleplusgood duckspeakers, or doubleplusungood duckspeakers if they happen to disagree with you.” comments Daniel. “It’s one of those rare Newspeak words that could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on context. I always wondered what it might really sound like, in spoken form.”

“You did, eh?” asks Heather cheerily. “Well, you should have watched more TV. I’ll bet a week of whatever medium of exchange we’re currently using that Sean Hannity is out there right now, running a node of his own.”

Daniel laughs out loud at the thought of Rupert Murdoch’s Buzzword Machine resurrected as HZIC of Long Island. It would fit him, moreso than anything he ever did as a free-thinking human. Daniel wonders once again how many people would have taken their shots even if they had known full well what it was going to do to them. Quite a few, probably. If you’re never going to use the gooey stuff between your ears, why not let someone else use it? Most people really are natural-born robots.

Which begs an uncomfortable question: is he really so damn butthurt at the algorithm for what it did to his species? Or does he, like Dr. Aya Kato, merely disagree with its managerial policies?

Bailey enters the room and gestures to Steve in very a simple sign language. He smiles and kisses her on the forehead, then gently caresses the growing bulge of her lower belly. Daniel looks at Heather, her sharp clear eyes and her rose-flushed face, the barely-perceptible changes to her body which show that she isn’t far behind.

On second thought, perhaps it is better to be among the free-thinking remnant.

“TV, huh…” says Steve absently. “Hey, that gives me an idea! You know how this is broadcasting on 87.75 megahertz, which is below what most modern FM radios typically receive?”

“Yeah,” says Daniel, “It’s below the FM radio band. That’s why it took everyone so long to notice it.”

“Well… 87.75 megahertz is technically in the VHF range, meaning analog television, that’s TV Channel 6.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning we’re picking up just the audio on radio. If someone was to find an old TV and dial it in to Channel 6, we just might put a face to those words. Meet our enemy face to face, or as close to it as we would ever want.”

III

If any sociologists had still been alive and unpossessed, they would doubtless write many articles on the intersection of DIY libertarianism and Backyard Furnace communism.

When the harvests are in and the wood is chopped, the islanders set about to cottage industries and various home projects. Aya’s cadre of technical advisors often aid in these pursuits, being especially helpful in the local pharmaceutical industry that produces drugs, antibiotics, medical supplies and other therapeutic biologics. They even produce vaccines for those diseases which are actually dangerous enough to warrant vaccination against, vaccines of an open-source and pointedly non-gene-editing, non-mRNA variety. They follow the same mandate policies as the Old Order Amish: some people make use of them and some people don’t, and somehow their community manages to avoid any overly terrible epidemics.

Pierre Jr. arrives just before the first freeze. The delivery had gone well, complications had been minimal and mother and son were both in good health, though both self-isolate for several days thereafter. “Perfect” is the only description Kundar can manage as he runs his finger across the tiny pink palms and digits, softly caresses the back of the sleeping form, and gently lays him in the wooden crib that the Cansonnis had made for him. Sarah’s “Frank Castle Special” is nailed to the wall above the crib, having never been used in battle. Kundar thinks of Gerald, then he thinks of Pierre. He knows he can never truly replace his old friend, but he vows that he’ll be everything the boy could ever want in a father.

Kundar and Sarah are still at an odd place in their relationship. They’re husband and wife for all practical purposes, and largely saw themselves as such. Sarah had returned to Catholicism, though not quite the hardcore Tridentine form that her neighbors followed. They had both been in firm agreement that none of their children would be circumcised. She didn’t mind him chanting the Mul Mantar or reading the Guru Granth Sahib over his children. He didn’t mind Pierre Jr. having a Catholic baptism, nor would he object to having it performed for the future children they wanted to have. Their kids would get the best of both worlds and ultimately choose for themselves which faith, if any, to follow.

Elena is doing better now. She met someone at group therapy and it seems to be serious. Heather is due in a few more weeks, Alisha at about the same time. Bailey had just given birth to a healthy daughter with no sign of abnormalities, though Cailey had regrettably not survived her pregnancy. Sarah has been the forebear of quite the trend it seems, though it really isn’t surprising, Birth-rates typically go up in the aftermath of cataclysms. Even Aya Kato has come to realize that she isn’t getting any younger; she finally decided to consummate her relationship with her turkey baster and let the next generation worry about engineering the Indigenous Ainu master race.

IV

“And except those days should be shortened,” quotes Daniel, “there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.”

“You’re not getting religious over there on me, are you?” asks Heather, rolling out and up from the bed-rugs and orienting herself ponderously. Daniel takes a moment to admire the radiance of her sleepy smile and the taught dome of her belly pressing against her nightgown. He shakes his head dismissively.

“No, not really. Maybe I should though, you know as well as I do that atheism is a luxury of the overcivilized. And this isn’t an S.M. Stirling novel, so I really don’t think Wiccan Celtic Paganism is going to fly.”

Heather frowns theatrically. Daniel had been a good sport and helped her in trying to build a sacred fire for Samhain, and hadn’t even galled her when a sudden squall came out of the ocean and doused it. Maybe that was a sign? Yeah, a sign that weather in this region is unpredictable.

The weather is cold now. There will be snow tonight, possible blizzards tomorrow. There’s a good chance they’ll only travel by snowshoes and skis by the end of the week. Elena and one of the local midwives will be coming in the morning, the former staying with them in the event of an early delivery. Daniel looks out into the darkness, and then looks back to her.

The possessed populace on the New Ireland mainland had largely left them alone that summer. They never responded to any attempts at communication and never offered any more of their own beyond the auto-repeating TV broadcast. No one knew why they would think it wise to use such an antiquated method of making contact—one that could have easily been missed entirely—but then the possessed were never known for logical thinking. Or for thinking at all, depending on how one defines “thinking.” And according to Sarah and Heather, Nate the Assistant Head Manager had been very much like that even when he had still been human.

“We’ve been lucky so far, you know.” says Daniel. “Do you have any idea how lucky? Four strong walls around us, a dry roof above us, a warm bed and full bellies. The fact that most of us get to go on about our lives without knowing what horse, dog, or cat tastes like is a pretty good sign of just how lucky we’ve been up here.”

Heather chuckles nervously. “Still not sure about horse. Mutton and rabbit for the other two, respectively. And I never resorted to Long Pig but, believe me, if I ever have to and if I can be sure of cooking out all the zombie juice... then…” she trails off, and Daniel doesn’t doubt her. In truth, he suspects that the only humans still alive and unpossessed at this point are ones willing to do anything imaginable to stay that way. Gonna leave a heck of a mark on the cultural mores going forward.

“...yeah.” he says uneasily. “zombie juice, GMO’s, corn syrup… not exactly Grade A Certified there; you would be lucky if eating that did nothing more than turn you into a wendigo.” He grinned emptily. “Though, history does show that it’s an easier taboo to break than people like to think it is. You ever hear of the Custom of the Sea, or read about what happens in a standard Old Testament siege or famine?”

“A little about the latter.” she says. “You will eat your babies?”

“You will eat your babies.”

Daniel glides over to the edge of the bed. Heather makes room as he sits, and he begins to run his fingers through her shining chestnut hair. She lets herself rest against his side, and for a long time he holds her. The horrid old nightmares are mostly gone, albeit replaced by those common to first-time fathers.

“Speaking of unpleasant mythologies with which to terrify innocent pregnant women…” she says sleepily, “are you familiar with the story of Sleeping Beauty?”

“The American Disney version, or the Italian necrophilia-and-cannibalism version?”

“The French necrophilia-and-cannibalism version, actually. Although no cannibalism, that came later. Sarah told me about it. In the original Perceforest, a 14th century courtly romance, princess Zellandine isn’t saved by true love’s kiss. She’s saved when the hero Troylus ‘follows the urgings of the goddess Venus’ and impregnates her. Nine months later, she gives birth in her sleep to an infant boy who seeks his mother's breast and suckles her finger. He draws out the poisoned splinter in her finger and Zellandine returns to life. It’s set in an ancient period, around the time of Alexander. Their son becomes a valiant knight and a distant ancestor of Sir Lancelot.”

“That would explain Venus” says Daniel. “Pagan gods were allowed to make physical appearances in medieval works so long as the setting was ante Christum natum. No cannibalism, though?”

“Not in that part, no. The whole... ‘angry spurned wife who tries to feed her philandering husband’s own misbegotten children to him?’ That was thrown in some time around the 16th century, weirdly enough."

The time of the Renaissance and Reformation, thinks Daniel with some irony. Also the time of the Werewolf of Dole, the Werewolf of Bedburg, and the near kilo-killer Christman Genipperteinga who by some accounts ate his own children. Not a pleasant era for the common people of Central and Southern Europe. Heather continues,

"Troylus and Zellandine had been in a relationship before she was enchanted, he wasn’t just some creepy rando sleeping with a coma victim. He didn’t want to do it at all until the Goddess of Erotica personally hit him with a horny spell, and even then he felt conflicted about it. Tres progressif, oui?”

“Yes, I guess so. And it relates to us because…”

Heather looks at him for a moment.

“...nefarious enchantment counteracted through pregnancy and childbirth.”

Daniel thinks about that and, in another moment his memory brings back a small, soft, scared crash-landing victim and briefly superimposes it on the form of his lover. Miriam Baker’s community had made contact just before the weather turned. She was alive and well and the mother of a baby girl, despite almost certainly having been fully-vaccinated as a requirement for flying. That was someone he would like very much to see again, just as Heather and Sarah want to see a friend of theirs, the widow of a coworker who had joined them in their first refuge and managed to escape its destruction, fleeing all the way up to Newvinland.

His mind turned to Sarah, she who had also been saved from possession of the evil nanite demons through the intercession of her unborn child. It seems that there are many Zallandines living in this era, and that is very interesting. Could it be that forgotten wisdom was to be found in those ancient stories?

Heather sighs, and Daniel slides into the bed alongside her. The wind howls outside and flurries start to fly and a wolf howls in the distance.

 

References:

I. Case Study: Population Growth of Humanity

1804- 1,000,000,000
1927- 2,000,000,000
2023- 8,000,000,000
????- ?

II. Hypothetical Function: Exponential Decay in Months After “the Event”

y=ab^x

a=8x10^9
b=.4

Where x is number of months, and y is number of living, unconverted humans left on the planet.

It is of course unlikely for depopulation trends to follow such a clean formula in any real-world extinction-level event. But this serves us reasonably well for narrative purposes.

0- 8,000,000,000
1- 3,200,000,000
2- 1,280,000,000
12- 134,218
13- 53,687

Humanity would fall below minimum viable population within 16 months. Total extinction of unconverted humans within 26 months.

III. Case Study: Population Growth of Reindeer on St Matthew Island, Alaska, 1944-1966

1944-29
1957-1,350
1963-6,000
1966-42; one male, likely infertile

In memory of...

Pierre Nkurunziza, President of Burundi, 1964-2020
Ambrose Dlamini. Prime Minister of Eswatini, 1968-2020
Jovenel Moïse, President of Haiti, 1968-2021
Hamed Bakayoko, Prime Minister of Ivory Coast, 1965-2021
John Magufuli, President of Tanzania, 1959-2021

...you are not forgotten, nor are those who killed you.

 

Afterward

I.

Zombies. What’s so great about zombies?

They’re grotesque, I suppose. A zombie apocalypse would be yucky, no doubt about it. But a lot of things in real life are grotesque. Frogs, lice and flies are grotesque too, but I’ve never seen anyone try to write a frog or lice or fly apocalypse, at least not since the Book of Exodus.

They’re not dangerous. I mean, not really. If you have a rifle, and you’re facing something that can be killed with rifles, and it responds to rifle fire by groaning loudly and slowly shambling in the direction of your rifle, then you are not dealing with a dangerous enemy. Not unless you face a lot of them, but then how did something so weak and so stupid grow so numerous in the first place?

Some would say that I’m confusing features for flaws here. Zombies are weak and stupid, and yet somehow capable of turning the majority of humanity into themselves, because zombie fiction is the domain of escapist fiction written for bloodthirsty adolescents (of any age) who need a moral fig leaf to imagine a world in which it is acceptable to open fire on large crowds of unarmed and minimally-threatening human beings.

I’ll admit that’s a part of it. It’s a big reason for me being here, though at least I am willing to admit it. But I think ubiquity of the zombie in Western pop-culture strongly suggests of something deeper.

II.

A fairly common premise in zombie fiction is to imagine a slightly-fantastical version of the modern world where zombie as pop-culture archetype doesn’t exist. I didn’t do that, because I don’t think a culture like ours could exist where the concept of zombie doesn’t. Not zombies as in “cannibalistic walking corpses” necessarily, nor even in the sense of victims of Haitian Voodoo magic, though I’m a lot more partial to that kind. But shiftless human automatons deprived of will and freedom? Or large groups of weak individuals turned dangerous by force of number?

Yeah, someone would come up with that eventually, even if no one thought to call it a zombie.

And I have to wonder if the deracinated, flesh-eating “Hollywood freakshow zombie” is deliberately popularized by Corporate Media and lazy video game designers as a way to diminish those deeper themes of existential dread, societal alienation, and the fear of losing control over one’s own body, mind, and soul. They’ll let us think about the zombie, but they would rather we forget about the bokor, the wicked witch-doctor who created them. Who is he? Why is he (or she) turning people into zombies, and to what end are they compelled?

III.

American novelist Zora Neal Hurston studied the Zombie phenomena, in the original sense of the term, while she lived in Haiti. She wrote of this in a chapter of her 1937 anthology, Tell My Horse, and was inclined to believe that such beings actually existed. This might seem surprising for a woman known to ground her worldview in materialism and scientific rationalism, and though the book itself is admittedly not an easy read, her reasoning is not easy to dismiss.

She described Zombies as “bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were dead, and after that they were called back to life again.” The fear of Zombies was “real and deep” among even reputable and educated Haitians, and sightings of zombification victims common. At the hospital at Gonaives, Hurston herself has a chance to meet, examine, and even photograph an alleged Zombie.

She describes the complex methods and rituals by which a voodoo bocor (witch-doctor) supposedly steals a person’s soul, rouses the body from the grave, wipes the memories of its premortem life, binds the human body to a loa (minor god or spirit), and forces it to serve either himself or a paying customer as a menial laborer or sometimes as a sneak-thief.

The Haitian Zombie is a figure of tragedy as much as horror: robbed of the love and friendship it had known in life as well as the peace and repose it had known in death, forced into an unnatural state of unending drudgery and stripped of the intelligence and willpower that would ever allow it to break away from bondage. Remember here that Haiti is a nation created by liberated slaves, remember also that the power to reason and rebel is argued by many as the very thing that sets human beings apart from animals.

The living dead of Haiti are not dangerous in and of themselves, at least no more so than the living living. Nor do they appear as grotesque walking corpses, except that their hygiene and grooming might suffer, and that their lifeless eyes and vacant facial expressions are often unpleasant to look upon. Indeed, embalming the dead (rare in 1930’s Haiti) was said to prevent a corpse from returning as a Zombie, as was the injection of poison or the inflicting of any postmortem wound which would prove fatal to a living human. And while Zombies never show discontent at their workload or living conditions, they do still require food and rest in the same way that a living human does.

While it is possible to see all of this as evidence that folk-belief in zombies—much like European folk-belief in vampires—may partially derive from the horrors of premature burial, Hurston had another hypothesis:

“We went to a more cheerful part of the hospital and sat down to talk. We discussed at great length the theories of how Zombies come to be. It was concluded that it is not a case of awakening the dead, but a matter of the semblance of death induced by some drug known to a few. Some secret probably brought from Africa and handed down from generation to generation. These men know the effect of the drug and the antidote. It is evident that it destroys that part of the brain which governs speech and will power. The victims can move and act but cannot formulate thought. The two doctors expressed their desire to gain this secret, but they realize the impossibility of doing so. These secret societies are secret. They will die before they will tell.”

Zombies were not created by ritual ceremonies or magical necromancy. They were victims of some chemical or mechanical process not understood by the science of the time, and perhaps still not understood by the science of today.

At least, not officially.

IV.

The US military held unrestricted control of the nation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. A couple of decades later, within Zora Neil Hurston’s own lifetime, the US government would use the power of drugs, behavioral conditioning, hypnosis, and other forms of “black psychiatry” against their own servicemen and unwitting civilians, seeking to reprogram them into unquestioningly-loyal thralls for the purpose of interrogation, espionage, homicide, and control. Project MKULTRA and its abuses are fairly well-known these days. A better-kept secret is the contemporaneous Project MKOFTEN: the study of black magic, voodoo, demonology, psychics, and other aspects of the occult.

While great deal of material relating to the MKULTRA project has been declassified, it only pertains to those parts proven NOT to work, or those parts that didn’t work well enough to be worth using. The CIA will tell us that those parts are the only parts, that there was nothing else to declassify and that, anyway, that all happened a long time ago and they’ve quit performing experiments on humans in search of a way to turn them into mindless automatons robbed of will and independence. And considering how little has been said of MKOFTEN, we can thus infer that little if anything was discovered in those studies.

That’s entirely possible. The people who rule you sure want you to think think so. Our corporate elites and our government intelligence and law enforcement communities can all be trusted these days, they don’t even massacre church groups in Texas, firebomb Philadelphia townhouses, or leave unsuspecting Black men (and some of their spouses and unborn children) to die of untreated syphilis anymore! Anyone who thinks otherwise is an antisocial paranoid who thinks the government is out to get him and who needs to be monitored, silenced, ostracized, and eventually eliminated by the government. So I will therefore speak no more on the matter.

V.

You might be surprised that I dedicated this work in part to Will Smith. He did get a fame-boost for the wrong reasons lately, and I think we can all agree that you’re not supposed to openly assault people at highbrow public events when there’s a lot of other people around and the cameras are rolling.

What you’re supposed to do is rape them at private events when no one else is around and it won’t be caught on camera. That’s how Harvey Weinstein rolls, and how many years did it take for anyone to care what Weinstein does?

Were movies like “Men in Black,” “I, Robot,” and “I am Legend” really nothing but consumeristic vehicles for product placement, or were they trying to tell us something about secrecy gone amok, technology gone amok, and medicine gone amok? Was Will Smith the most deceptively perceptive social critic of our era? Was he and his wife’s son blinking at you in Morse Code whilst his adrenochrome-chugging overlords rape another starlet and try to convince you to get your latest booster shot and drink more bugmen juice?

Probably not. But it is fascinating to think about.

 

About the Authors: Anton Donbass is a grouchy communist from Eastern Europe, Fangorn Monsato is an unstable hillbilly from Appalachia. Neither of them have myocarditis.

 

PDF file.