The Book of Wanda, Volume Two of the Seventeen Trilogy Read online

  THE

  Book of Wanda

  SEVENTEEN

  VOLUME TWO

  Mark D. Diehl

  THE BOOK OF WANDA

  SEVENTEEN: VOLUME TWO

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © 2018 by Mark D. Diehl

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events, or places are purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people, or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-7328199-2-4

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  As resources are depleted and power is concentrated in fewer hands, hierarchical organizations are evolving into the world’s only consumers. We, as individual human beings, are merely raw material to be processed and utilized, and our survival depends almost entirely upon our employers’ judgments of our worth. Our organizations are claiming absolute dominion over us. Though some human bodies may ultimately survive this process, other aspects of what we now consider to be our humanity will disappear.

  “The individual cannot compete for resources against the colony, so in a world of colonies the individual cannot survive.”

  —Eric Basali

  “Human events are never as linear as people imagine.”

  —Gregor Kessler

  XVII

  VIXI

  (Latin)

  “I have lived”

  I

  1

  Zone IA1.24, formerly part of the Des Moines metropolitan area, now referred to colloquially as the Zone

  “Hey!” a voice said. “Break his ribs all you want, after we see what the pink shit does. Don’t fuck up my experiment.”

  Daniel “Mr. B” Martel became aware he had been kicked. His side ached.

  “Get up, Mister Bitch,” a different voice said.

  Spattering liquid. First it was a sound, and then a feeling. Warm. A fine, sour stream into his face.

  He shuddered awake and attempted to deflect the urine with his hands, but they were tied, spread apart near his head. “Tsshuwha!” He wiped an eye against a shoulder but that was soaked, too.

  Alfred.

  His memory was coming back now.

  It was Alfred, the manufacturer who sold bactrosynthesized street drugs to most of the gangs and dealers in this part of the Zone. Relatively average in build and smarts, the man managed to survive among the vast local criminal population simply by being one of the more psychotic ones.

  Mr. B was bound hand and foot with plastic rope, lying sideways on a shipping pallet in a loading dock.

  “Aw, see?” Alfred said, showing brown, rodent-like teeth beneath his mustache. “Mister Bitch likes that. You like that, Mister Bitch? The bactrohypnotics should be outta your system now.” Alfred zipped up. “You told us all about how you and Spooky were gonna set up shop, makin’ your own shit ‘steada sellin’ mine. Now he’s gonna get a big surprise just like you did. You shitheads really thought you could just cut me out? You go around askin’ for a strain, it ain’t gonna stay a secret.”

  Someone twisted Mr. B’s arm, veins-up, tying a rubber tube just above the elbow. The tip of a needle made its way along a vein as it was laid flat, and then punctured, stabbing up, shuddering along inside. He tensed and straightened his spine, pulling against the bonds.

  “I gotta tell you don’t break the needle?” Alfred said. “Hold still, Mister Bitch.”

  The needle and tubing disappeared, or maybe they only seemed to because the new sensation drowned out anything else. The dose stalked up his vein, its causticity giving the impression of thousands of tiny insectile legs. His vision filled with gray perhaps as much from terror as from the effects of the drug. Sounds became distant and distorted.

  “What the fuck?” Alfred’s voice seemed to echo to Mr. B from thousands of kilometers. It might have been seconds or hours since they’d shot him up. Someone may have been slapping and shaking him. “It just fuckin’ knocks him out? Maybe it’s not injectable. We’ll try the powder on Spooky Brian, see if it does anything when it’s snorted.”

  Mr. B tried to force his eyes open wider, but nothing came into focus. Some little part of his mind thought the conversation was important, but it couldn’t get other parts to listen. He realized he was not recovering from the dose. Rather, he was still in the process of succumbing to it.

  “What’re we gonna do with this shit if all it does is drop ‘em into a fucking coma?” Alfred said. “Anesthesia, maybe? Hey, do we know anybody who traffics human organs?”

  Dobo Protein Refinery, The Zone

  “Someone’s here, sir.”

  Mikk Evans sat up, groggy but wary. It was his wife and office assistant, Kym, on the speaker. She knew better than to wake him without a good reason.

  The office had been a gas station at one time, a little glass island at the back of a concrete slab. Now the space was fenced off and piled high with dead roaches, shit, cadavers, pets, and other assorted waste, waiting for its turn to be fed into the extractors and exported out as the raw amino acid building blocks used to make sterile nutrients for bacterial synthesizers.

  “Chips?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How much in total?”

  “They’re claimin’ four hundred, but I only saw two.”

  He’d started making Kym confirm that potential buyers actually had casino chips after an unpleasant incident occurred that taught her a lesson about junkies and their fucking drama. Kym picked it up quickly. Not once had she failed to check for chips via camera since the day she’d watched Mikk beat that begging, sobbing idiot to death.

  Two hundred. Hardly worth lifting his head for. He checked the screen: Two little punks. They’d just been here last week.

  Still, if these kids moved small quantities with a fast turnaround, they could be worth something to him. With a few more in the chain moving product like that, he’d be able to pull in more serious weight. He stood and cracked his neck, stuffing his handgun into the front of his pants and shuffling out past Kym in the slightly bigger glass box attached to his office, and out to the gate. Shells for the clunky, old-fashioned .44 revolver were worth their weight in gold coins, but it was handy for dealing with nuisances.

  The whole place was surrounded by electric razor-wire fence with auto-aiming guns, and the gate was a thick piece of steel. He checked the screen next to it to be sure there were still only two of them out there, and then slid open the gate to peer out. A knife blade shot in through the opening, obviously trying for Mikk’s throat but cutting deeply across his forehead, instead.

  He snatched the gun and turned toward the screen again, but he could barely see. He tried wiping the blood from his eyes with the back of his hand, but it continued to stream from the wound. He managed to block the flow a bit with the web of his hand against his eyebrows. The two kids, maybe late teens, stood glaring at the gate. He remembered the patches. Apparently showing membership in whatever piss-ant gang they’d formed, the kids had sewn on capital letter Ds cut from old printed fabrics, turned rounded side up. There was one hoodlum with lighter hair, who looked scared, and one with darker hair, who looked angry. Scared ones were often the more dangerous, and Mikk noted that one was holding the knife.

  “Hey, fucker! We want our fuckin’ chips back for this!” the angry one shouted. He held up a baggie of powder. “Stepped on so much it’s worthless. We got nothing out of this bag, asshole! Nothing!”

  Mikk had wondered whether this might happen. His supplier, Mr. B, had disappeared. To squeeze as much profit as possible from his remaining stash, Mikk had cut it almost to half-strength. These two had bought a good-sized bag of the mo
st stepped-on shit he’d ever sold.

  Using the screen to aim, he fired once through the steel gate, hitting the knife-wielding one squarely in the chest.

  “I don’t give refunds. Get away from my employer’s property.”

  Amelix Integrations, Central Business District

  “Dr. Chelsea, ma’am?” Wanda Kuon called. “I have an important observation to report!”

  Wanda waited as the younger woman turned slowly toward her. Chelsea had the same dark hair and the same grayish blue eyes, which were now looking Wanda up and down, but she wasn’t the person she used to be. When Wanda had first known her, she’d been Zabeth Chelsea, eight years Wanda’s junior and eager to be trained in biochemical lab work. That had been before her reconditioning and subsequent status as an Accepted, which had unlocked the doors to promotion and further education. Upon earning her Doctor of Corporate Sciences degree a few years ago, Zabeth Chelsea had become Dr. Chelsea, Wanda’s supervisor.

  “Wanda!” Dr. Chelsea huffed. “How many times do we have to go over it? The lab is not a place for excited outbursts. Your choice to stay stagnated forever at Tech Two is no excuse for childish behavior in our place of business.” Her voice had the Accepted speech pattern, enunciating every syllable in a haughty and hypnotic roll.

  Wanda stood rigid and straight but averted her eyes, as Dr. Chelsea always insisted she do. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I have what I feel is an important observation about your special project.”

  Dr. Chelsea stared a moment, apparently utilizing her Efficiency Implant, the interface between her brain and the Amelix network. She spoke, using the EI’s communication link. “Dr. Synd, do you have a moment? Wanda has something to share. We’ll come to your office.” She gestured to Wanda in the direction of Jeremy Synd’s door. Jeremy and Wanda had gone through undergrad together at Zytem University, so he would always be “Jeremy” in her mind, even though he, too, had changed after reconditioning. They made their way through the busy laboratory to a pair of smaller labs along one wall, each cordoned off with walls of transparent bioplexi. In the far corners of each office were piles of equipment shielding from view the most unsettling project Wanda had ever seen.

  Wanda had grown up hoping a science career might allow her to work with animals. She loved the parts of her job that let her care for the rats, watching their little personalities interact as they wrestled and chased each other. Some were shy, while others were fearless. Some were affectionate to other rats, and others were stand-offish or even hostile, even though they all had the same background, having been born in standardized laboratories like this one. She could swear some of them actually giggled when she tickled them. The rats in every lab, even those who were suffering, all displayed more variation in personality and were infinitely more relatable than the Accepted humans she worked with.

  Wanda had learned as much from her grandmother long ago. Her grandmother was non-Accepted, but had been allowed to share a corporate housing unit with Wanda and her parents. Wanda had many strong, warm memories of her. The last such memory was especially vivid. Her grandmother had secretly borrowed rats from the lab she cleaned and brought them home for Wanda to play with. “Accepted are nothing but machines, you know, and that’s all we have around us, anymore,” she’d told Wanda. “I brought these rats home so you could have the chance to connect with a real life form, to experience natural play, and maybe we can balance out the machines’ influence just a little. These are the first I’ve been able to access that don’t have to be isolated and sterile. Remember that they’re small but they’re alive, and they’ve had a tough life. Be very gentle and let them decide when they are ready to interact with you. I’ve worked quite hard to teach these little ones that not all humans will hurt them.” Wanda had sat with the animals for almost an hour (an unheard-of stretch of unoccupied time for an eleven-year-old at Integrations Elementary), letting them approach each other and learn to play, and then finally, slowly, they had come to her and poked tentatively at her fingers. Eventually she’d been able to gently touch them back, feeling their warm, soft fur and long, twitchy tails. Then Wanda’s father had come home unexpectedly, and her grandmother had swept the rats back into the crate before he could see them. As an Accepted, her father would have been compelled to report her grandmother if he’d known of her actions.

  After that day the world looked much different to Wanda. She felt she understood now what it meant to truly be alive, to be one unique organism in a dynamic universe comprised of different types of organisms, all interacting with each other. Her outlook began slowly shifting, in all parts of her life, leading her to recognize how sterile and un-alive her Accepted parents seemed, and her friends, and everyone else around her. Her grandmother soon disappeared. The memory of her, and that of the little rats freed from their cages for that single hour, remained as the only examples of natural, independent minds Wanda had ever known.

  Those had been ordinary rats. The rats in this project were different. In fifteen years as a lab tech, she had never seen anything like them.

  This entire end of the office suite radiated a sinister, chilling energy. Every step closer to the animals made something inside her recoil and squirm. They were locked away, sealed behind multiple encapsulations of bulletproof bioplexi, on a sealed air source, and she knew they couldn’t touch her. Still, her breath shortened, and her lips and fingers went numb.

  Jeremy came up from some other part of the lab and accessed the security mechanisms to open his office door. The machine took his iris and palm scans and required a code entered mentally through his brain’s EI. Wanda and Dr. Chelsea were admitted separately, via EI identification only, once he had unlocked the door. It closed and locked behind them as they entered. Wanda’s eyes reflexively turned away from the corner where, sequestered behind equipment, cordoned off and sheltered under a fume hood, were the sealed bioplexi cages of the Rat Gods.

  Wanda had been here the day Roger Terry had treated them with the symbiotic fungus, forever changing them into… whatever they were now. After that, the project had quickly disappeared to a clearance level unreachable for her job description, though as the Senior Tech Two she was still sometimes brought into proximity with the animals.

  “What is it, Wanda?” Jeremy asked. There was an edge of annoyance to his voice.

  “Well …” Wanda sought the words.

  Dr. Chelsea’s head cocked slightly and her eyes widened. Her lips formed an increasingly thin line.

  “I brought the requisitioned chemicals into the project workspace in Dr. Chelsea’s lab,” Wanda said. “As you know, the cages are transparent but at opposite ends of the two labs; the rats can’t see each other around all the equipment.”

  “Yes,” Jeremy said.

  “The chemicals were still sealed in Mylar bags,” she said. “As I entered the area, the rats there both stood on their hind legs, at exactly the same time. They froze, staring at me, which isn’t unusual. But the reflection in the Mylar showed the same thing was happening over here, in your office, Dr. Synd, sir. At the instant Dr. Chelsea’s rats stood, Dr. Synd’s rats did, too. Exactly the same motion at exactly the same time.”

  “They heard you come in, and they stood,” Dr. Chelsea said. “There is nothing strange about that; you said so yourself.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But the others, the rats here in Dr. Synd’s office, couldn’t have heard me. The offices are separated by ten centimeters of bioplexi. They might have caught a glimpse of me between pieces of equipment, but by the time I reached the back corner there had been plenty of time and opportunity for them to react to my presence over here.”

  “You think they’re communicating,” Jeremy said.

  “Yes, sir. And there’s more. After I observed the phenomenon I turned to look at the ones in your lab, sir. I had to bend down to where the Mylar had been because that is the only spot in Dr. Chelsea’s office from which they can be seen. There was a pause, as if maybe the rats were trying to decide what to do. The
n they dropped down to four legs and started doing what I can only describe as a little dance. They were lifting and lowering each of their legs, one at a time, proceeding in a counter-clockwise direction: front leg, front leg, back leg, back leg, and then around again, both rats lifting the same leg at the same time.” She swallowed and blinked, struggling to keep her voice steady. “I turned back, and the ones by me were doing it, too. The same feet, touching down at the same time. Counter-clockwise.”

  “Well,” Dr. Chelsea said. “You’ve certainly made a detailed and potentially important scientific observation, Wanda. I will go note that in my journal.” She stood.

  “There’s something else,” Wanda said. They’d probably have her evaluated for mental instability for saying it, but she was duty-bound to do whatever was in Amelix’s best interest. Her voice was softer than she would have liked, but she got it out.

  “They made me sick.”

  “Sick?” Jeremy asked.

  Wanda nodded. “Yes, sir. I know they’re sealed up. I know there’s a chance I was just over-stimulated. It was a disturbing thing to witness, after all. But still, I think it was connected to that dance they did. Somehow it felt invasive, like some sick energy was radiating from them, targeted right at my brain. I became dizzy and nauseated, and an incredibly strong impulse kept flashing through my mind, telling me to attack and destroy the rats any way I could. They’re an Amelix priority, precious to our institution and dangerous to the world, but all I could think of was how I might kill them. Only my sense of duty to Amelix helped me resist sealing the air filters and suffocating them. I even felt an urge to push the cage over the burners and cook them to death. It was a desperate, terrifying feeling, and I came so close to actually doing it. I ended up running out of the lab.” She gave her superiors a shallow smile, gesturing toward the other lab, the casualness of the act making Dr. Chelsea’s nose wrinkle. “You can see I left the cart there. I’m sorry about that.”