David Edelman - Infoquake

Marcus Surina came to visit Natch one night towards the end of autumn. He drifted in the cabin door, tiptoed around a slumbering Horvil, and came to rest barely half a meter from Natch's face. In this ghostly apparition, the great scientist looked just as ruggedly handsome as he did in all the pictures and videos the boy had seen. Except the eyes, which had been wide and luminescent in life, were now cold and dim and utterly devoid of light.

Watch, said Surina.

Natch huddled into the corner of his bed with chattering teeth as dozens of specters paraded through the room, figures from history and legend frozen in grotesque positions of death: Julius Caesar, Tobi Jae Witt, Abraham Lincoln, Joan d'Arc, Tul Jabbor, his mother. Each figure wafted over to the boy in turn, mouth open as if to speak some horrible truth from beyond the tomb. Yet the ghostly figures remained stubbornly silent. Were they all withholding their secrets from him by tacit agreement? Or did they simply exhaust all their words in life, and now have nothing to say?

The parade continued for an eternity of midnight-time, despite multiple attempts by Natch to cover his eyes and will away his tormentors. He tried screaming, burying himself under the blankets, ignoring them, but the ghosts would not be denied. His efforts only succeeded in summoning more, until the room was thick with their gray, misty effluence.

Finally, after what must have been many hours, the shade of Marcus Surina floated up to Natch and hovered there, centimeters away.

Now, run! said Surina.

Too frightened to disobey, Natch arose and fled for the door. He stumbled outside into the deepening autumn and discovered that the entire camp was enveloped in the same stinging mist. Mist curling over his feet, wrapped around the wooden posts of the cabins, thick and sharp as smoke ... and full of voices.... The voices of his fellow initiates, yelling in confusion....

"Over here!" came a familiar nasal twang. Horvil. Natch felt a fleshy hand grab his shoulder and drag him outside the boundaries of CAMP 11 and up a nearby hill. Most of the hivemates had already assembled at a safe spot in the lee of the wind.

"What's happening?" said Natch sleepily. "What's that smell?"

"Smoke," replied Horvil with a groan. "The smell of initiation going up in flames."

The cabins themselves were not the worst casualty of the fire. Even frightened boys who had never spent a winter outdoors knew that trees could be chopped down and cabins could be rebuilt. Only six of sixteen cabins had burned down completely, while three had suffered minor damage. There was still plenty of room for all to find space indoors.

No, the real calamity was the destruction to their tool sheds and food supply.

One by one, the boys limped out to the fields, where most of their perennial crops now lay under a shroud of ash. Somehow, they had always known there was something unnatural about the variety of nutritious grains and vegetables that sprouted every spring, despite the harsh winters of the midwest and generations of inept teenage farming. Their ancestors had never had such a bounty of genetically engineered supercrops to sustain them. But now, staring at the remains of their harvest-not to mention the twisted ruins of two of the tool sheds and the charred silo containing most of their stored grain-the initiates knew that this game was no longer tilted in their favor.

The origins of the fire were a mystery. Most likely it had been the product of carelessness, someone forgetting to smother the dying embers of a torch. Perhaps back in the civilized world they could have scavenged for evidence and mounted an investigation, but here all they had was vague conjecture. Before long, whispers passed through Brone's side of the camp laying the blame on Natch's shoulders.

"Why would he do something like that?" exclaimed Horvil the first time he heard the rumor. "Do you even have the slightest bit of evidence?"

"The fire started near Brone's side of the camp," one of the boys told him. "Everyone knows those two hate each other. Natch was one of the last ones out, and his cabin is fine."

"That's totally ridiculous. That's not evidence at all."

The other boy admitted his theory had little in the way of factual support. "But come on, Horv-you're his best friend, right? Doesn't he scare you?"

Horvil bristled. "All I know is that Natch's test scores were higher than half the class combined. That means he's smarter than you. And that means he knows setting fire to the camp would hurt him just as much as Brone." The conversation came to an abrupt halt soon after.

There was much to do. The boys went to work right away, picking every edible seed, berry and root on the horizon, repairing and filling the well, making defensive preparations against unknown enemies. The boys of CAMP 11 spent their spare time in an engineering frenzy, attempting to coax the last bit of practicality out of the everyday items around them. A frayed rope strand and several bottles could be converted into a makeshift dumbwaiter. Broken glass could be spread along the roads as an early intruder alert system. Spare rolls of plastic could be conscripted to channel excess rainwater to the well.

After a week of trying to pick up the pieces and shore up the damaged cabins, it became clear to the initiates that all their preparations might not be sufficient for them to survive the winter. An argument sprang up about how closely the proctors were monitoring their situation here in the wilderness. If the situation grew too precarious, would the proctors come and rescue them? The Proud Eagle wouldn't just let dozens of its pupils starve to death out here, would it?

And then, without warning, winter descended upon them.

The snow marched into CAMP 11 under an imperious wind, eager to pound and break any human habitation in its path. Within days of the winter solstice, the boys had abandoned all non-essential duties to concentrate on the snow. But there was much more snow than hands to shovel it. Milky precipitation smothered the plants and killed off the remaining vegetation. The initiates soon discovered that, unlike the geosynchron-regulated snow to which they were accustomed, natural snow could sting and burn. Insulation against the cold became their biggest worry.

A debilitating flu hopped from boy to boy and gave the initiates their first taste of real illness. Back in the civilized world, OCHREs diagnosed all their ailments, and bio/logic programs automatically dealt with them by consulting the Dr. Plugenpatch databases. No more. "I remember reading that you're supposed to blow your nose when it gets clogged up like this," Horvil announced earnestly one day. "Does anybody know how to do that?" No one did.

The boys were startled to discover that even without OCHREs and bio/logic programming and Dr. Plugenpatch, the human body had a remarkable ability to heal itself. They came to realize that all the bio/logic technology society relied on for its survival had not been constructed out of whole cloth; it was patterned after cruder motifs passed down through millions of years of genetic heritage. Natch, Horvil and most of the other boys quickly bounced back from the flu and resumed their duties.

But a few of the boys lingered on in their illnesses, their bodies unable to fully repel the alien microbes wreaking havoc in their systems. The argument about proctor intervention flared up again. But if anyone expected the proctors to suddenly swoop down from the clouds and rescue them from their misery, they were disappointed.

And so, under a chill wind, the initiates all huddled in the center of the camp one afternoon and tried to hammer out a strategy.

Now, under the pressure of starvation and with the added encouragement of the arson rumors, the much-discussed antagonism between Brone and Natch surfaced with a vengeance. Natch declared that CAMP 11 was ruined, and their only chance for survival lay in finding one of the other encampments out in the wilderness. Some of these other camps had to have some stored food available, he argued, as theirs had upon their arrival. But Brone immediately raised objections to this strategy, his opposition all the more intense because Natch proposed it.