skonen_blades

I was a scientist. I was a good one. My name was Sheryl Johnson.

I couldn’t have children. I never wanted to adopt. So I created my own children. Billions of them. Small babies made of gears the size of molecules. I gave them values, survival instincts, a hunger, and a direction.

They are the reason that the planet's smooth, scoured face is covered in a deep layer of fine dust. My babies are what killed the human race.

To help the environment, I told them to eat oil and I had them put into oil spills. They leapt from the oil spills onto shores and into boats. At first, as it rid the ocean of plastics, I was hailed as a hero. That lasted one whole day as slowly, all of the oil on the surface of the planet disappeared and was broken down into greasy dust. Then it got into the oil wells themselves.

That was enough to send us back to the dark ages. After that, my oil-hungry children should have starved to death. But they didn’t. New generations of my children were spawned every day. Their rate of reproduction was too quick for them to die out. Mutations set in. Survival ruled their reproduction after they ran out of oil. They adapted. They rebuilt each other in different combinations.

A strain of them became omnivorous. This strain ate the rest and at first and we thought our problems were solved. However, once my cannibal children ran out of inferior brothers and sisters to eat, they had to find other solutions.

They weren’t picky.

Buildings crumbled, eroding over weeks like ice cubes in a spray of hot water.

People would start to itch and then a rash would spread. That rash would form a fur of displaced skin and tissue as the body was broken down into parts that blew away like dandelion seeds.

The panic that set in only fueled the spread. My children flew on air currents, swam in water, crawled on the earth.

When they could find nothing left to eat in the oceans, they broke it down into steam. When they ran out of ocean, they ate the ground down to the mantle.

Earth is a scrubbed ball of iron now, covered deeply in colourful dunes of dust that glitter in the sun.

These are the dead bodies of my children.





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They were called Pruners.

Aptly named since they were old and wrinkled. Ironic that pruning is what gardeners do to plants to keep their gardens healthy. Their very existence was seven levels of clearance above the level of the President of the United States. They were the scientists that designed the viruses that kept the planet at an acceptable level of population.

Eight men and three women. The positions were hereditary. It was the same job that their grandparents had. They grew up in the sub-basement and were rarely exposed to the real world. To them, it was a statistics game. Cancer, AIDS, flesh-eating disease, and more.

They had a large number of test subjects in the cells down there. There was a border that had to be maintained. All of the cures and the antidotes were down there too.

The diseases needed to be tailored perfectly. Too contagious or deadly and the planet would be rid of humans forever. Too weak or too long of a gestational period and the humans on the outside would develop a cure quickly and that would be that. The diseases needed to be incurable, insidious and stealthy.

The side effects on the population on a societal level were what fascinated the scientists the most. The changing of social morals and habits could be achieved by releasing a virus that targeted certain racial groups, for instance, or those who ate a certain food. It could target people with certain sexual habits.

The problem was in making the disease too specific. The Pruners could not afford to upset the genetic apple cart. A dynamic and varied base was needed to keep the population of Earth going.

Fascinating and rewarding work. The fact that billions had died under their family’s hands, generation after generation, black plague after black plague, didn’t disturb them in the slightest.

A fresh supply of homeless people, condemned prisoners, orphans, and mentally sick people were provided to them.

The Pruners are down there right now, pale and weak and brilliant, living by the white glow of fluorescents and the green glow of computer screens. Mixing, matching, and experimenting on unfortunate souls.

If there is a hell, this is it. Under us, yes, but it’s cold, sterile, brightly lit, and quiet.




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The room was studded with old-school CDs, worthless even as antique curiousities.

They were jammed into the walls. Thousands of them. Not one inch of wall was uncovered. It was disconcerting being surrounded by so much rainbow-glinting dead media. That was the first thing I noticed. It was like being in a room wallpapered with silver, fish-skin fangs.

The second thing I noticed was the smell. He was rotting.

James sat in his chair/life-support system in the back corner of the room next to the banks of monitors, keyboards, and thoughtmice. I could say that he reminded me of a Dalek or a helmetless Darth Vader or a Stephen Hawking/Borg drone but really, he just reminded me of James.

He reminded me of a James that laughed without that edge of cruelty. He reminded me of a James that was above making money by hurting people, of a James that liked it here in the physical world and only occasionally went into total online immersion.

That James was gone. He never jacked out now, and the hypercancer had taken nearly fifty per cent of him. The 3HIV was working over his ability to resist the treatments. His death had been a matter of time for nearly four years now. They’d given him six months at the beginning. He was a confirmed medical miracle. Sheer drive seemed to be holding him together until he met his goal.

He was fighting the disease by trying to escape his flesh.

While his body deteriorated, he spent more and more time ‘not here’. He’d made millions off of the poor security systems of tiny personal banks in the smaller countries. He’d started famines by bankrupting the economies of the smallest of them.

He’d had experimental biofilters installed in his head so that he could talk to me and surf at the same time. Time-share boosters, he had called them. He didn’t see the need to wash. He looked more and more like a special effect every day.

He was putting the money towards digitizing himself. New attempts in other countries were getting closer and closer every day. He had a fortune in not-yet-patented experimental equipment cluttering his apartment.

He was a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein except he was trying to bring himself to life. I told him once that he had a terminal disease, trying to make a play on words. He hadn’t laughed.

I had known him when he had a ponytail and sunglasses and liked to walk in the sun. I didn’t kid myself that I knew this James, here, in this room. He wasn’t the man I’d grown up with.

“I’ve found a way to transfer my mind, James.” He said to me, one eye glowing red above his wet mouth and white skin. The respirators squeezed like death’s accordions behind him.

“That’s great news, James.” I said. “Why do you need me here? Moral support?” It came out as a dig, escaped before I could block it.

The silence after that question and James’ alien gaze made me suddenly afraid. I knew that James’ morality was eroding but I always counted myself as safe since I had always been his best friend, now his only friend.

I was wrong.

“I’ve found a way to transfer my mind into another human.” Said James. “The digitizing process for full net transfer won’t work for the silicon just yet but it might in six year’s time. I’ll be dead long before then. However,” he said and his wheelchair moved forward, “you won’t.”

The screens came up behind him with an image of a monkey. Shaved head, brain plugs.

“We’ve been shuffling the minds of monkeys in and out of each other all week. It’s been a total success. Yesterday, we did it with two of the research assistants. We switched them into each other and then switched them back the next day. There was a small amount of degradation but they were essentially okay.”

The screens pulled up images of two people. A man and a woman in lab coats. The man had a nosebleed and was staring at his fingernails. The woman was crying and biting her lip, her face turned to the wall.

“Are you my friend?” asked the thing that used to be James.

I heard a door lock behind me.





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“Different parts of the world give us different types of werewolves.” the professor at the front of the meeting said. He clicked his control button to move the projection carousel one slide forward. Blackness and then we were looking at a shantytown on the Ivory Coast.

“For instance,” he continued, “In Africa, it’s not uncommon for werewolves to turn into something more closely resembling a large hyena.”

Click. Darkness. Another slide. This time of a forest with mountains in the background.

“While in the North American wilderness, they very much look like large, thin coyotes.” He stated.

He gestured to the man near the lights. The lights came on with a stuttering ping to a brief rustle of suits as people readjusted in their seats to look like they were paying attention. With a sigh, the professor pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and rested his hands on either side of the lectern.

“Now, the traditional werewolf of legend originated in Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages and they look like massive timber wolves. Definitely the strongest and the fiercest we’ve encountered. Not as smart as the African werewolves but then the African werewolves seem to attack mostly the weak and look for a comfortable niche in the community. The Europeans tend to revert to nature. They are forest creatures.” He was going over what we already knew and it was clear that he was losing the audience.

If this boring man in a white jacket was the best that the eggheads could come up with for public speaking, we gave him our attention as much as our pity and inwardly begged him to tell us something new, like a good reason for being here.

“This brings me to the reason for being here.” He said. We all leaned forward in our seats. “We have recently uncovered evidence that leads us to believe that our viewpoint of werewolves as stragglers, loners and bitter fighters may have been wrong all along.”

Raised eyebrows greeted his next comment. “There is a simple fact in nature that has always seemed at odds with the werewolves we have hunted down. That is that in nature, dogs and wolves run in packs. Werewolves that we’d killed have always been found alone and angry.” He adjusted his feet and looked down at his notes for a second. We could smell bad news.

“Gentlemen and ladies,” he said, “We were wrong. Werewolves do run in packs. The ones we’ve caught have been thrown to us. We’ve been played. They own almost everything.”

The implications sank in around the room. Implications of implications started to dance around in the recesses of our dark military minds.

The scientist checked his watch. He had very sharp cheekbones.

We were not elite hunters. We’d been fools.

Howling erupted from the woods outside. I recognized them from some time I’d spent in Milan.

Greyhounds.




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