Book promo
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*
FROM D. LAWDOG AND CEDAR SANDERSON: The Ratel Saga.
All they wanted was to dig a pit trap and get a pet. The local African wildlife didn’t agree to either part of this plan…
A riotously funny activity book, field guide to (some)African fauna, and a story of growing up.
We strongly recommend that you do NOT try any of these things at home. However, you should definitely read where you can laugh out loud, as you should color outside the lines.
From the team that brought you Taskforce Chiweenie: The Poultry Liberation Front, The Ratel Saga is a (mostly) true story illustrated by a certified natural history illustrator who wants you to know this is moderately child friendly, even if the events depicted were a little hard on the adults involved .
Parental Supervision Advised
FROM L. A. GREGORY: Tidecall: A Novel of the Bitterlands
Otter survives by his wits and shapeshifting magic. So after enduring a bitter winter on the shores of an unfamiliar sea, he hunts for the source of the blight plaguing his homeland. But when something ancient and deadly stirs within the dark waters, he fears his power can’t match the threat.
Calling on the creatures he’s befriended for help, the determined young shifter descends into the dangers of the abyss. When he inadvertently rouses a horror from the ancient past, it tears into his allies with murderous intent.
Can Otter’s skill and compassion unravel the mystery, before the last acts of a long-dead people poison everything he loves?
FROM KAREN MYERS: King of the May – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 3)
MORE VALUABLE AS A WEAPON THAN A KINGMAKER, HE MUST MAKE HIS OWN CHOICES TO SECURE THE FUTURE.
George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, had hoped to settle into a quiet life with his new family, but it was not to be. Gwyn ap Nudd, Prince of Annwn, has plans to secure his domain in the new world from the overbearing interference of his father Lludd, the King of Britain.
The security of George’s family is bound to that of his overlord, and he vows to help. But when he and his companions stand against Lludd and his allies at court, disaster overturns all their plans and even threatens the Hounds of Annwn themselves.
George and his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, must survive a subtle attack that undermines them both. Other gods and gods-to-be have taken an interest, but the fae are divided in their allegiances and fear the threat of deadly new powers in their unchanging lives.
George and his companions must save themselves if they are to persuade their potential allies to help. But how can they do so, attacked on so many fronts at once? Will he put his family into greater jeopardy by trying to defend them?
FROM MARGARET BALL: A Child of Magic (Applied Topology Book 7)
An old enemy, a new threat… When their son Aleksi is kidnapped, Thalia and Lensky are left wondering if the reason is ransom (bad) or revenge (worse). It’ll take all Thalia’s genius for applied topology (aka magic) to retrieve their baby – and meanwhile, the other topologists are turning into cats, getting jailed in the eighteenth century, and otherwise keeping life interesting.
FROM CELIA HAYES AND JEANNE HAYDEN: Luna City X (The Chronicles of Luna City Book 10)
Welcome to Luna City, Karnes County, Texas … Population 2,457, give or take! Fugitive former celebrity chef Richard Astor-Hall has decided to make some serious changes to his life … and propose to his girlfriend, Kate Heisel. But the path of true love does not run smooth. Meanwhile, Jess and Joe Vaughn face impending childbirth, and Xavier Gunnison-Penn, the world’s most unsuccessful professional treasure-hunter marries his true love and sets off a family row, on the way to search for another treasure. Another chapter in the doings of those residents of Luna City, in this tenth visit to the most perfect small town in Texas.
FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: Dragons’ Fealty (Lisinthir’s Heirs Book 1)
A SPRING HOMECOMING
When he attended their wedding in summer, Lisinthir Lauvet Imthereli, Third of the Chatcaavan Empire, promised his cousins they would see him in spring for the birth of his heirs on Eldritch soil, and to attend the birth of theirs. He returns to a world and a people reviving from their long winter: a new navy; the rescue of their suffering acreage; and the burgeoning of a tenant culture revolving around the new communications and travel networks.
But a prince and a culture aren’t the only things making their return. When a mistake made in the summer season comes back to haunt them, Lisinthir will discover himself torn between warring allegiances… and someone else will have to pay the price. Will their enemies succeed in blighting the promise of the season?
FROM ANNA FERREIRA: A Capital Whip
An invalid for much of her life, Miss Anne de Bourgh has precisely one accomplishment: carriage driving. She is proud of her skill with reins and whip, and justifiably so.
But when another young lady moves into the neighborhood, and challenges Anne’s place as the most accomplished driver in Hunsford, Anne must prove to herself, to her beloved horses, and to her family that she is worthy of the name de Bourgh, and she does not shrink away from a challenge.
FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: The Lone Hunter: Familiar Generations Book One
All Hunters have a Hunting partner, save for one . . . the Lone Hunter, the Hunter in Shadow.
Jude Tainuit Hunts alone. Exiled from the Clan, he watches over Dover County. A twisted beast and rumors of a new, powerful magic worker force Jude to emerge from the shadows.
A Hunter Hunts, even though it cost him his life.
A Familiar Generations short story.
FROM BLAKE SMITH: Lyddie Hartington: Galaxy Sleuth.
Facing poverty after a childhood among the wealthy and powerful, Lyddie Hartington decamps to Ceres, a newly colonized planet on the edges of the galaxy. Armed only with a change of clothes, a letter of introduction to the directors of the Andromeda Company, and a blaster, she is determined to make her fortune.
But Ceres is nothing like Orion-14, and before she knows it, Lyddie is witness to a murder- a murder that goes to the heart of the Andromeda Company and puts her life in danger. With the help of her new friend, an entirely too handsome captain of the Galaxy Watch, she must discover the murderer and solve the mystery of her family’s downfall.
If she can survive long enough to do it.
FROM STEPHANIE OSBORN: The Bounty Game
In Agent Omega’s worldview, certain things simply were not possible.
And the claim of this tall, imposing alien woman calling herself Myclestra, that she came from another universe, was impossible. Worse yet, Myclestra claimed to be a bounty hunter tracking an evil shape-shifting perpetrator who wielded real, powerful, world-shattering…magic. Not simple cantrips, but wizardry that could destroy a world…or a galaxy.
But as terrible as her perp was, it was the gigantic sword slung over Myclestra’s back that was the true threat to everything Echo and Omega strove to protect. A five-foot-long blade, forged from the heart of a neutron star, crowned with a hilt of fabulous gems and precious metals. A sword literally haunted by a spirit that could be the end of Galactic civilization in the entire Milky Way…and more.
FROM PAM UPHOFF: Murder at Kozlov House (Fall of the Alliance Book 4)
A Murder Mystery in the Fall of the Alliance series.
A Garden Party at Kozlov House, the Host murdered! Detective Inspector Smirnov is back to find the killer. Was it the angry Wife? A Political Rival? The son? The professor? Or . . . something more sinister?
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: Worm
According To Hoyt 
Edging into the cavern, the knight saw thousands of books on shelves and said “I guess this dragon is a Book-Worm.”
A rumbling voice replied “That’s Book-Wurm, Sir Knight. Are you here to borrow some of my books?”.
“Actually Lord Book-Wurm, I need to research some legendary monsters and thought you had some books on the subject. There are some reports of strange beings in the Wild-Lands.”
“I’ve heard those reports as well. You’re welcome to stay and study the subject.”
Worm. That’s what they called her.
She wriggled though the dust of the crawlspace under the tavern, a scarf covering her face to keep her from inhaling it all. She could think of a million different words to call herself- theif. Spy. Informant. But no, they called her “Worm.”
Said Justin Trudeau to his aid,
The truckers are causing me trouble.
My patience is becoming frayed,
They’ve pierced my protective bubble.
I’d better start being obeyed,
My mandates they’d better stop spurning
Send the RCMP on a raid,
While I to my dacha returning
To hide away, like a worm.
May the body of Trudeau soon feed worms.
“To review,” said Antoine, “I’m running across Ireland in the dead of night to help Mademoiselle Yeats fetch the worm that carved the Decalogue, so it can eat Samuel Beckett’s ‘L’Innomable’ before that book’s owner succumbs to Satan.”
“Precisely,” said Amélie.
Antoine shook his head. “The lives we Nobelians lead…”
“It was a software worm,” Kimberly sighed in frustration. “They hid a device somewhere in the network-my bet is one of those concealed penetration-tools-in-a-power strip gadgets-and stripped all the data then took the device out when they were done. If I hadn’t done a deep dive in the network today because we were having that IoT issue…”
“Worm! Grovel before your betters!” The lady addressing Bill was dressed like a bad actress in one of his son’s B-grade fantasy epics, the ones so bad that they made the second DnD movie seem able to win an oscar for costuming. He glared at her briefly, then replied. “I’m an American, ma’am. I have no betters.”
A little over, but that’s ok. Queen Jadis of Charn arrives in America, rather than Victorian Britain.
Observations on the current crisis: Herd, not Horde
Written by Abraham Zolnikov, Walker Station, LEO, Year 7 after the Fall.
Civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:
Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to our nearest neighbor makes a damn good wall.
My distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity, I think. My inability to reach the com array means I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough here to claim them.
I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called “conspiracy theorist” in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. It wasn’t just a viral infection, it was a worm.
Human beings for the last sixty years have been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing mother and infant mortality by 33% at the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs.
The so-called “zombie virus” operates in stages. The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of suppressing the brain. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting such infections, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.
The problem comes in when the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.
Few, if any, recognized this at the time.
Modern disease theory stated that viruses tended to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person, according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.
Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they contacted. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have given rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”
Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.
Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey, without deviation. But along they way, something else happens.
Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, frontrunners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.
The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away, allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not seen as food, so hordes tend to stay on the move.
When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwards. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.
Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.
I am posting this essay to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my friends one more time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.
Five years is along time to spend in microgravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the lifeboat section, and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive, and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.
Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.
With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes,
Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov, February 13, 2732, seven years after the Fall.
Nomination time:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/22169253-march-2022
Let’s go fishing!
Ok. I bet I can find a worm or two in the garden.
Nah. We’ll need crawdads. I’m hungry for Mackinaw.
Oh boy oh boy. Let me grab my heavy gear. This is going to be fun!
Meet you at the dock. I’ll bring the boat around.
I rad that as let’s go fisking. It was ….. odd.
“But boss, they want platyhelminthes, and all we have in stock are nematodes!
“A worm a worm, so what’s the difference?”
“Uh boss, one of the many differences is the nematodes are round and platyhelminthes flat.”
“Oh easy money, hit them with a hammer and they should by platy enough.
Nigel’s lips twitched, as if suppressing something amusing. Ava felt like a worm.
“Who could possibly forget the gracious and lovely lady that persuaded you that you must have her hand in marriage? And at so young an age?”
Perhaps that was why he would never be king, she thought.
The ground was so wet that there were bound to be worms, thought Autumn. Which was the thought of a madwoman, when she was escaping that fell magic. Nevertheless, she thought it.
And then she noticed that there was no one else. Other dancers had to have noticed, and escaped.
The Persistence of Myth in our current crisis: Plague, not Magic.
Written by Abraham Zolnikov, Walker Station, LEO, Year 7 after the Fall.
Civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:
Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to our nearest neighbor makes a damn good wall.
My distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity, I think. My inability to reach the com array means I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough here to claim them.
I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called “conspiracy theorist” in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. It wasn’t just a viral infection, it was a worm.
Human beings for the last sixty years have been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing mother and infant mortality by 33% at the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs.
The so-called “zombie virus” operates in stages. The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of suppressing the brain. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting such infections, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.
The problem comes in when the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.
Few, if any, recognized this at the time.
Modern disease theory stated that viruses tended to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person, according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.
Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they contacted. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have given rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”
Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.
Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey, without deviation. But along they way, something else happens.
Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, frontrunners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.
The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away, allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not seen as food, so hordes tend to stay on the move.
When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwards. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.
Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.
I am posting this essay to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my friends one more time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.
Five years is along time to spend in microgravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the lifeboat section, and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive, and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.
Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.
With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes,
Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov, February 13, 2732, seven years after the Fall.
Observations on our current crisis: Herds, not Hordes. Social behavior exhibited post infection in zombie groups.
Written by Abraham Zolnikov, Walker Station, LEO, Year 7 after the Fall.
Civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:
Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to our nearest neighbor makes a damn good wall.
My distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity, I think. My inability to reach the com array means I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough here to claim them.
I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called “conspiracy theorist” in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. It wasn’t just a viral infection, it was a worm.
Human beings for the last sixty years have been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing mother and infant mortality by 33% at the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs.
The so-called “zombie virus” operates in stages. The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of suppressing the brain. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting such infections, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.
The problem comes in when the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.
Few, if any, recognized this at the time.
Modern disease theory stated that viruses tended to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person, according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.
Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they contacted. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have given rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”
Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.
Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey, without deviation. But along they way, something else happens.
Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, frontrunners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.
The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away, allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not seen as food, so hordes tend to stay on the move.
When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwards. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.
Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.
I am posting this essay to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my friends one more time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.
Five years is along time to spend in microgravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the lifeboat section, and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive, and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.
Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.
With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes,
Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov, February 13, 2732, seven years after the Fall.
Civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:
Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to our nearest neighbor makes a damn good wall.
My distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity, I think. My inability to reach the com array means I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough here to claim them.
I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called “conspiracy theorist” in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. It wasn’t just a viral infection, it was a worm.
Human beings for the last sixty years have been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing mother and infant mortality by 33% at the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs.
The so-called “zombie virus” operates in stages. The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of suppressing the brain. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting such infections, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.
The problem comes in when the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.
Few, if any, recognized this at the time.
Modern disease theory stated that viruses tended to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person, according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.
Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they contacted. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have given rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”
Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.
Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey, without deviation. But along they way, something else happens.
Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, frontrunners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.
The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away, allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not seen as food, so hordes tend to stay on the move.
When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwards. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.
Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.
I am posting this essay to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my friends one more time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.
Five years is along time to spend in microgravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the lifeboat section, and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive, and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.
Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.
With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes,
Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov, Walker Station LEO, February 13, 2732, seven years after the Fall.
Huh. Think I’m hitting WordPress’ spam filter or something. If duplicate posts make it in, that’s probably why.
For which my sympathies and condolences — speaking as someone who’s tried up to 8 or 9 times to get past the ‘spam filter’ or ‘bowdlerizer’ or whatever it is (sometimes at apparent random) that condemns one’s posts to Moderation Purgatory, on occasion. (IIRC HerbN has experienced the same, and many others.)
Sometimes, small changes may avoid this — and sometimes, not.
Good luck… and Wille Pete Delenda Est in aeternam!
Multiple links trip it, I know for certain. It appears that single sentence and/or headers in the data or report style trip it. That or zombies. Zombies might be what is causing the WPDE hamsters to fall off their wheel.
Eh. Might be worth a good editing pass anyway. We shall see!
It really seems mostly random
I freed your latest.
You were hitting it on LENGTH. The thing with spammers these days is they write entire novels (mostly of naughty words) in comments. I suspect the filters (not set by me0 have a setting for “over x words goes in spam.”
Next time do it in three sections, and reply to yourself, maybe?
Seems like decent work, from late-night skim. Just long.
Length. *smacks forehead* Makes sense. Thanks, I’ll have to work on brevity maybe? I’ll do that next time.
Or do a set of posts. Eh. I wish they had a way to whitelist regulars.
Yeah, that would probably be better, given my bad habits. But whitelisting regulars? This is WordPress we’re talking about. That would make too much sense. Might cause some heads to explode, and getting blood and hair out of keyboards is a pain for the replacements.
My experience (experienced guess?) is that length over about 8 K characters trips the “awaiting moderation” thing — which can be evaded (I think I’ve found) simply by splitting our, ah, “big-nettes” into parts of somewhat less than 8 K (chars.) each. But beyond that, yes, it “seems mostly random” — sometimes it’s been possible to get pieces of a “magically objectionable” vignette / comment to post, because the “curse” only seems to attach to one of those sections… but it’s a very mischancy thing.
“Mistress..?”
She looked puzzled, bemused even. Which somehow annoyed Lady Charlotte all the more — despite what it connoted toward her yet-more-likely innocence.
“How dare you, Mademoiselle… how dare you enter my service simply to worm your way into my household?” And as she said it, Charlotte put the snap into her voice that cut sharp as a real whip, to 99% of maids.
But this Karrie looked only a little (more) crestfallen and puzzled. One coal-black brow rose in what looked genuine half-astonishment. (She was surely not elegant or beautiful, but she was… presentable. Wholesome, even, without being at all refined. And thus decoratively useable.)
“Mistress Darling, it’s certain I have no understanding what you mean. I came to your door openly, I provided my references, I have worked as you, and all your delegates, have said.” And she spread her hands, widely and wide open. “And it is sure, upon my h-” (skipping only an instant) “h-ope of salvation that I have never lied to you or played you false. Or lodged any plot or ill intent toward you or any of your House.”
And Charlotte’s blood ran a little colder. This was not the demeanor of a spy; she’d seen a few of those caught, over the years. But it was also not the demeanor of a true serving-woman; such would be, in all but a bare few cases, almost liquefied in terror of being disqualified from the work they did, everywhere; almost always the only good work they could do.
This was the demeanor of someone who was being unassertive, agreeable, in all ways deferring… but also someone something like an equal. Which was in any sane universe, literally inconceivable, unless…
“Then explain yourself!” Charlotte swept off the silver lid of the silver serving platter, upon which rested… a battered old lock-case, open with some odds and ends within it, the sort of thing a girl might have. (Were she a rare and special sort of young girl, of course.) Drama, pardonable.
Karrie’s eyes went wide. “You went through my stuff…” (not accusing but more half-amazed). “Oh, there were those huge silver spoons missing, a day or two ago, and of course you did.”
Again… what serving-girl would ever think to be surprised, at such?
“‘Of course’ we did, Karrie.” (For once Charlotte bothered to give the old-Oz pronunciation to her name she’d always used, rather than simply ‘carry’ as most people here did.) “But what do you have here? Trinkets these all may be, but surely a few collectible and pawnable ones.”
Charlotte touched a few of them with a finger. This one was an insanely small blur-field generator, barely the size of a signet ring… or had been back in the Old Days centuries and centuries ago. That one was…
“Mademoiselle Raleigh, you need to tell me about this. Now, and starting with your real name.” She was surprised her own voice was level, calm.
“Karrie Raleigh is my real name, Madame. Just not all of it. But if you truly want to have this conversation, now, I ought to do… this first.”
And she reached out and touched that blur-bauble, as Charlotte had. But when her finger touched it, there was a sound like an absence of sound, something like the lightest of fog came and went in a heartbeat; and if the room was much as before, sounds came a little muffled, and light was not exactly true in its falling. A blur-field, using starship technology the same as the ones she’d used — only a ten-thousandth the weight.
Her artificer, the one who’d used an old ‘energy pulse exploit’ to open the case, had told her those powered themselves turning traces of water vapor into traces of oxygen and helium… femtotech, from the Old Days.
“Karrie is my nickname from the cradle. Rayleigh is a name mine by right, from all the way back when Thomson figured out why the day sky is blue. But if you want to know the one most would know me by — that would be, and apologies for any discomfit to you, Lady Charlotte, Karen Biajjina Elisabeth Traherne. Of House Traherne, long respected and now most direly hunted.” And she bowed to her, eyes never leaving Charlotte’s as she did.
Bowed, like a noblewoman. Not curtsied, like a maid or a tradeswoman.
And she reached out and touched the silvery engraved coin, sign of favor of House Traherne, like a half-dozen from others like her own Darling.
And as she did the engraved crest lighted up golden. Metalloluminescence, again familiar, again what should have needed a backpack-full of art. At her touch, knowing her for its own… and she’d pulled the pins from her hair, undone the tight updo the servants mostly wore, and now the raven tresses tumbled halfway down her back. As she held herself like herself.
Amazing, in retrospect, how it was not utterly obvious at the start.
“House Traherne, and here in my own house..!” Charlotte found her voice at last. But could find little more to say with it.
“Yes, Lady Charlotte, and I understand that the innocence which was your shield — and of course mine — is now gone. I understand that you’re not political, that you shy away from all such things as a horse does a lion.
“And I can only repeat that I never lied to you, upon my honor and that of my House, and only Our direst need drove me to come here as I did.”
Charlotte’s sixty-odd years of life and experience came suddenly to the fore, with perhaps more than a little instinct mixed in. “Then perhaps next you ought go to my cousin Alexander. He has both a taste for these ugly rancid things political, and some additional resources I do not.”
But why, she asked, did her own voice quaver just a smidgen? (One of the Trahernes had died of an antimatter bomb… along with everyone else for a block, and probably hundreds more of eventual cancer from the radiation. But, then, ‘ugly rancid things political’ in a year named by a number.)
“You should be most careful, Lady Charlotte. Perhaps I could re-set this little device here, to know you for its own as well, for a time..?”
No, she was not a spy, whispered that cold and objective little voice in the back of Charlotte Darling’s head. Nor any kind of agent, really.
But she was learning. By the Good Lord and his Knights of Saint Michael, this one in front of her was learning fast… and hopefully fast enough.
She stared up at the arched roof. They might end up food for worms, even if the wizard acted in good faith. But, she reminded herself, they might foil Madame Nyx this way. To leave her seething rather than pleased when either way might mean death. Rosine closed her eyes.
Herds, not Hordes: Observations on the social behavior of infected individuals in the years 2025-2032 from Walker Station in LEO.
Civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:
Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to our nearest neighbor makes a damn good wall.
My distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity, I think. My inability to reach the com array means I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough here to claim them.
I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called “conspiracy theorist” in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. It wasn’t just a viral infection, it was a worm.
Human beings for the last sixty years have been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing mother and infant mortality by 33% at the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs.
The so-called “zombie virus” operates in stages. The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of suppressing the brain. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting such infections, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.
The problem comes in when the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.
Few, if any, recognized this at the time.
Modern disease theory stated that viruses tended to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person, according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.
Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they contacted. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have given rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”
Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.
Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey, without deviation. But along they way, something else happens.
Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, frontrunners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.
The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away, allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not seen as food, so hordes tend to stay on the move.
When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwards. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.
Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.
I am posting this essay to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my friends one more time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.
Five years is along time to spend in microgravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the lifeboat section, and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive, and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.
Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.
With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes,
Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov, Walker Station LEO, February 13, 2732, seven years after the Fall.
It was only when the music began that he realized Toni had put the CD in the boom box out here. God, but the nasal whine of the prosecutor’s fake upper-class twit British accent was grating on his nerves. If he heard “Worm, Your Honor” one more time, he was going to throw that boom box straight out the window.
“Toni, can that please wait until after supper?” Cather’s voice started to rise with irritation and he lowered it by main force of will.
“I need to get through the block.”
“Yes, but right now I’d like a quiet family dinner.” Cather rummaged around the fridge for some salad fixings to complete the meal. “Pretty soon Jase is going to be old enough to start eating solid food, and it’d be really good to get him used to the habit of us all sitting together at the table when our schedules can handle it.”
“All right.” Yes, Toni did sound annoyed, but then he had no idea what her family’s mealtime practice had been.
Well, it’s come to this. My last post on the system net. Seven years since the fall. Seven years of homo zombicus wandering the globe. And everywhere else in the solar system, I imagine. I don’t know for sure. But there has been no indication of other survivors on the ‘net.
Perhaps they don’t have wifi. The hypothetical survivors. Not the zombies.
Civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:
Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to our nearest neighbor makes a damn good wall.
My distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity, I think. My inability to reach the com array means I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough here to claim them.
I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called “conspiracy theorist” in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. It wasn’t just a viral infection, it was a worm.
Human beings for the last sixty years have been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing mother and infant mortality by 33% at the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs.
The so-called “zombie virus” operates in stages. The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of suppressing the brain. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting such infections, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.
The problem comes in when the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.
Few, if any, recognized this at the time.
Modern disease theory stated that viruses tended to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person, according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.
Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they contacted. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have given rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”
Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.
Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey, without deviation. But along they way, something else happens.
Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, frontrunners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.
The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away, allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not seen as food, so hordes tend to stay on the move.
When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwards. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.
Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.
I am posting this essay to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my friends one more time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.
Five years is along time to spend in microgravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the lifeboat section, and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive, and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.
Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.
With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes, this has been Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov. Walker Station will be abandoned by sapient life soon. One way or the other.
Well, it’s come to this. My last post on the system net. Seven years since the fall. Seven years of homo zombicus wandering the globe. And everywhere else in the solar system, I imagine. I don’t know for sure. But there has been no indication of other survivors on the ‘net.
Perhaps they don’t have wifi. The hypothetical survivors. Not the zombies.
Civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:
Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to our nearest neighbor makes a damn good wall.
My distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity, I think. My inability to reach the com array means I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough here to claim them.
I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called “conspiracy theorist” in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. It wasn’t just a viral infection, it was a worm.
Human beings for the last sixty years have been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing mother and infant mortality by thirty three percent at the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs.
The so-called “zombie virus” operates in stages. The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of suppressing the brain. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting such infections, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.
The problem comes in when the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.
Few, if any, recognized this at the time.
Modern disease theory stated that viruses tended to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person, according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.
Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they contacted. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have given rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”
Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.
Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey, without deviation. But along they way, something else happens.
Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, front runners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.
The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away, allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not seen as food, so hordes tend to stay on the move.
When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwords. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.
Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.
I am posting this essay to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my friends one more time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.
Five years is along time to spend in micro gravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the lifeboat section, and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive, and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.
Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.
With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes, this has been Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov. Walker Station will be abandoned by sapient life soon. One way or the other.
Well, it’s come to this. My last post on the system net. Seven years since the fall. Seven years of homo zombicus wandering the globe. And everywhere else in the solar system, I imagine. I don’t know for sure. But there has been no indication of other survivors on the ‘net.
Perhaps they don’t have wifi. The hypothetical survivors. Not the zombies.
Civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:
Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to our nearest neighbor makes a damn good wall.
My distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity, I think. My inability to reach the com array means I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough here to claim them.
I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called “conspiracy theorist” in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. It wasn’t just a viral infection, it was a worm.
Human beings for the last sixty years have been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing mother and infant mortality by thirty three percent at the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs.
The so-called “zombie virus” operates in stages. The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of suppressing the brain. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting such infections, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.
The problem comes in when the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.
Few, if any, recognized this at the time.
Modern disease theory stated that viruses tended to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person, according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.
Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they contacted. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have given rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”
Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.
Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey, without deviation. But along they way, something else happens.
Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, front runners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.
The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away, allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not seen as food, so hordes tend to stay on the move.
When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwords. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.
Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.
I am posting this essay to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my friends one more time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.
Five years is along time to spend in micro gravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the lifeboat section, and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive, and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.
Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.
With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes, this has been Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov. Walker Station will be abandoned by sapient life soon. One way or the other.
Well, it has come to this. My last post on the system net. Seven years since the fall. Seven years of homo zombicus wandering the globe. And everywhere else in the solar system, I imagine. I don’t know for sure. But there has been no indication of other survivors on the ‘net.
Perhaps they don’t have wifi. The hypothetical survivors. Not the zombies.
Civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:
Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to our nearest neighbor makes a damn good wall.
My distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity, I think. My inability to reach the com array means I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough here to claim them.
I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called crackpot in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. It wasn’t just a viral infection, it was a worm.
Human beings for the last sixty years have been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing mother and infant mortality by thirty three percent at the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs.
The so-called “zombie virus” operates in stages. The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of suppressing the brain. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting such infections, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.
The problem comes in when the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.
Few, if any, recognized this at the time.
Modern disease theory stated that viruses tended to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person, according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.
Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they contacted. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have given rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”
Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.
Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey, without deviation. But along they way, something else happens.
Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, front runners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.
The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away, allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not seen as food, so hordes tend to stay on the move.
When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwords. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.
Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.
I am posting this essay to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my friends one more time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.
Five years is along time to spend in micro gravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the lifeboat section, and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive, and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.
Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.
With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes, this has been Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov. Walker Station will be abandoned by sapient life soon. One way or the other.
Well, it has come to this. My last post on the system net. Seven years since the fall. Seven years of homo zombicus wandering the globe. And everywhere else in the solar system, I imagine. I don’t know for sure. But there has been no indication of other survivors on the ‘net.
Perhaps they don’t have wifi. The hypothetical survivors. Not the zombies.
Civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:
Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to our nearest neighbor makes a damn good wall.
My distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity, I think. My inability to reach the com array means I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough here to claim them.
I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called crackpot in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. It wasn’t just a viral infection, it was a worm.
Human beings for the last sixty years have been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing mother and infant mortality by thirty three percent at the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs.
The so-called “zombie virus” operates in stages. The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of suppressing the brain. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting such infections, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.
The problem comes in when the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.
Few, if any, recognized this at the time.
Modern disease theory stated that viruses tended to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person, according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.
Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they contacted. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have given rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”
Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.
Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey, without deviation. But along they way, something else happens.
Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, front runners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.
The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away, allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not seen as food, so hordes tend to stay on the move.
When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwords. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.
Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.
I am posting this essay to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my friends one more time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.
Five years is along time to spend in micro gravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the lifeboat section, and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive, and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.
Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.
With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes, this has been Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov. Walker Station will be abandoned by sapient life soon. One way or the other.
Well, it has come to this. My last post on the system net. Seven years since the fall. Seven years of homo zombicus wandering the globe. And everywhere else in the solar system, I imagine. I don’t know for sure. But there has been no indication of other survivors on the ‘net.
Perhaps they don’t have wifi. The hypothetical survivors. Not the zombies.
Human civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:
Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to our nearest neighbor makes a damned good wall.
My distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity, I think. My inability to reach the com array meant I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough to claim them here.
In the beginning, I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called crackpot in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. Everyone else was puzzled by the speed of initial symptoms, the bizarre aggression, and the drastic weight loss. They never could nail down a person who was only mildly infected- only uninfected or completely zombified, nothing in between. Because it wasn’t just a viral infection. It was a worm. A digital worm.
Human beings for the last century years have all been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy, and even at this stage they improve general health. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing mother and infant mortality by thirty three percent at the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs in addition to traditional food sources.
The so-called “zombie virus” operates in stages. The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of suppressing and changing the brain. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting infection, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.
The problem comes in when the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case, leaving the body extremely vulnerable to the virus. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.
Few, if any, recognized this at the time.
Modern disease theory has stated that viruses tend to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person even from the first cases identified according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off as they trip certain hardware limits. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.
Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they contacted. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have given rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”
Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.
Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey, without deviation. But along they way, something else happens.
Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, front runners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.
The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away, allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not seen as food, so hordes tend to stay on the move.
When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwords. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.
Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.
I am posting this essay to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my friends one more time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.
Five years is along time to spend in micro gravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the lifeboat section, and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive, and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.
Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.
With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes, this has been Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov. Walker Station will be abandoned by sapient life soon. One way or the other.
I’m not usually a fan of zombie stories… but more please. And. I hope he finds survivors. Real ones.
2,000 words into a… sequel? Epilogue? Chapter 2? This is extremely pantsed. And very alpha at the moment. I’ll try and post something up later today, if I can.
Next Part is up. Another one in progress.
*scampers off to read*
Yes, this one was definitely worth the wait. Somewhat reminiscent of both “Legend” (Matheson) and “The Sky So Big And Black” (John Barnes, not strictly a zombie story, but techno-close). So, and recognizing how it is to be a (fellow?) “gateway writer” doing what one thinks is a one-off… is there gonna be more?
I have absolutely no idea where this is going, as I didn’t need (or expect) a zombie story to spring up just then. Got 2,000 words of… something bodged together. There might be an update later today. Just gotta hammer those words out a bit more.
Chapter up. Next one in process.
I give up. WP does not like zombies. Or maybe it was immigration controls. Or viruses. Or immune response. Something like that. My site works, but WP does not want it posted for some reason. Ah well.
“I would have refused,” said Rosaleen. “I don’t have to marry him. I could run away and become a scullery maid and marry the prince there after I went to the ball three times.”
Lady Gillaine raised an eyebrow.
“Not even if he fought a wyrm!”
“That might be wise.”
“Don’t you dare cross my threshold.”
A cocked pistol emphasized her dissuasion, so I stepped back.
“I only came to talk.”
“More like, worm your way into my life again. No effing way.”
“That was twelve years ago, Bess.”
“Twelve years, twelve lifetimes.” She shrugged. “Leave now, or I shoot.”
I don’t know how I got here, and I don’t even know where “here” is. There’s just a shaft of sunlight streaming in from a square in the ceiling, and no door, no window. And a big, grated drain the floor. And the scratching, coming from the walls. It’s here.