James Decker - Fallout

“It all comes down to your eye.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

I threw my hands up, then put them down on the table.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s have it.”

“You know about the accident.”

“I read about it. I didn’t realize you were so badly hurt.”

“I was very badly hurt, Sam, but as you probably also know I was quite drunk at the time, and the other driver did not survive. Nor did his child. If not for my father’s considerable connections, I would be in prison.”

He caught me a little aback, there. I’d been ready to throw that in his face, and he’d just offered it up. He looked sincere, too.

“It helps having friends in high places,” I said.

“Yes.”

He grabbed another of the fish treats, and I decided to try one too. The rice felt sticky, and when I sniffed it my nose filled with a faint salty smell, along with a tang and something sharp.

“Go ahead,” he urged.

I stuffed the whole thing in my mouth and chewed until the sticky, slightly tangy rice mixed with the soft, oily, salty fish. As the flavor flooded my mouth, I felt my whole body shiver and I reached for the last one. I stuffed it in with the first one and worked it into my cheeks, sucking the tasty oil from my thumbs. I felt embarrassed by my lack of control. I felt like I should apologize, but Gohan seemed amused to watch me eat.

“That accident was the defining moment of my life,” Gohan continued. “Though not for the reasons you might think. You see, in addition to the superficial damage, I also suffered damage to my right parietal lobe. It caused a condition known as unilateral neglect, which is to say I do not see objects on my left side. It’s why I no longer drive myself, and it makes navigation on foot through Hangfei very difficult.”

I sighed. “Look, Gohan, I’m sorry about that, really, but like you said… the other guy and his kid won’t ever be navigating through Hangfei again, right? Meanwhile you get flown around eating better than just about anyone in the city.”

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” he said. “You’re not, and neither am I.”

When there was room in my mouth, I took a small, oval piece of green fruit from a small cluster of them. When I bit down on it, it popped into a payload of soft flesh and sweet liquid.

This is heaven, I thought, tapping my feet on the floor. The whole thing was intoxicating. It seemed unreal to me that Gohan got to eat like this all the time. He watched me chew for a while longer, then tapped another contact and a second panel next to the fridge hissed open to six plastic bottles, all full of liquor.

I started to reach for one of the bottles, but then thought better of it.

“I think I’d better keep a clear head,” I told him. “Thanks. You know how to live, though. I’ll give you that.”

“It must disgust you, on some level,” he said. It did, but I didn’t say. I’d have felt like a hypocrite, at the moment. “Still, these pleasures, they aren’t what’s important. The accident made me see that.”

“Yeah?”

“You see,” he said, “the injury to my brain carried an additional side effect.”

“And what’s that?”

“I can see the haan.”

I almost choked on the mouthful of food I’d been working, spraying juice across the table. Gohan’s strange grin widened, still not touching his eyes, but I could see he’d gotten the reaction he’d been hoping for.

“What do you mean, see—”

“You know exactly what I mean,” he said. “Chong was in constant contact with me, remember? I know what you saw in the ruins underneath Shiliuyuán. I know that, while you can no longer see through their illusion, you know the truth about them. It’s why you sought to find a way to cut the haan off from Hangfei’s power grid in the first place, so everyone may see. Chong was a natural place to start since he’d worked inside Liàngzı chuán Relay and Power and had already attempted an intrusion into their systems before. Since I convinced him to see the light back then and to not attempt to steal from my father, when he was approached for a second attempt he came to me with it.”

“So why didn’t you turn us in? Were you just giving us enough rope to hang ourselves with?”

“No. I want you to succeed.”

“But why? I thought you worshipped the haan.”

He waved his hand again, that dismissive gesture that I’d already begun to hate.

“Worship isn’t really the right word,” he said. “I’ve been able to see the haan for what they really are for eighteen years now, almost as long as you’ve been alive. At first, it was difficult. I wasn’t sure it was real, or some hallucination brought on by my injury. I even entertained the idea that it was punishment for what I’d done. As time passed, and I realized the truth of what I was seeing. I thought I might lose my grip on my sanity.”

I think that ship might have sailed, I thought, but just nodded.

“Eventually, I came to see the beauty of them,” he continued. “They really are quite remarkable, much more so than the sanitized form they’ve chosen would imply. They can assume almost any shape. They can, and sometimes do, combine several together to create larger forms that they sometimes maintain for years. They are physically quite different from us, but there is no question which race is superior. They’ve achieved a level of evolution that without them we would probably never reach.”

“Without them,” I said. “You mean Sillith’s virus.” He nodded.

“Oh, yes. I know about that too, of course. I saw the first human change almost half a year ago, and since then I have seen more and more of them on the streets of Hangfei. It’s funny… they often don’t even realize the change has taken place. They sometimes cling to their old identities for weeks, even months, before they realize what they’ve become.”

“That’s funny all right,” I said. He ignored my sarcasm, and smiled. “You know they’re eating us, right?”

“Oh, they’re eating us, of course,” he said. “They’re multiplying, and they have to eat something. Xinzhongzi was meant to be a safe place where they could do that, until things get back under control.”

“So LeiFang does know.”

“Of course. This is all part of an agreement with the haan, to help defuse the situation Sillith created. This progression, this transformation needs to happen much more slowly so that we don’t end up falling upon one another.”

“But even if it happens slowly, and we all end up as haan—”

“A form of haan,” Gohan corrected.

“That would still be millions of haan, all with huge calorie requirements. They’d need to eat something.”

“Yes,” Gohan said, “but the foreigners. Not each other.”

I just stared at him. His eyes twinkled.

“You can’t be serious.”

“It’s an elegant solution,” he said. “Humans would evolve, and the overpopulation problem, over time, would be solved as well. The haan could spread out, expanding their field as they went, evolving the best specimens and eating the rest. Eventually the planet would return to sustainability.”

“When you can eat a problem, you solve two,” I said.

Gohan clapped his hands together. “Exactly right.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Well, it’s not as though there’s much choice,” he said. “The accelerated radioactive decay of this universe will kill us all within a few hundred years anyway, if we don’t do something.”

“It’s true, then?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. They’ve been preparing for it for years now. The haan alterations were planned to extend to certain humans, animals and plants in a sort of ‘ark’ moving forward, though of course Sillith’s actions threw that plan for a loop.”