In the Fall (c) copr all rights reserved 1995 by T.J.Hardman, Jr. HTML version of In The Fall (c) copr all rights reserved 1996 by T.J.Hardman, Jr and TJH Internet SP. No part of this work may be reproduced, copied or distributed without the express handwritten permission of the author, with the exception of on-screen viewing.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to any persons living or dead are entirely coincidental. Some use may be made herein of real locations or institutions, but such use is entirely fictional in intent. Any use of tradenames or trademarks is completely accidental, and is not to be interpreted as any attempt to disparage or recommend.

Many thanks are extended to those who have been trying to keep abreast of issues and technologies which will be examined in detail in this story.

All medical or biologic concepts herein described are, where not presently under patent or copyright protection, to be considered as either the intellectual property of T.J. Hardman, Jr, or as extant espionage tools not protected by either patent or copyright law.

All menuing systems described herein, especially motion-control menuing systems, where not already under patent or copyright protection, should be considered the intellectual property of T.J. Hardman, Jr and are not to be duplicated in any manner whatsoever without direct contractual consent. Insofar as it is implied, all due credit is to be given to the pioneers of voice-recognition systems, particularly International Business Machines (IBM). All described original inventions and modifications to extant simple technologies, or combinations of advanced extant technologies into new systems are to be considered the intellectual property of T.J. Hardman, Jr. and may not be marketed for profit without contractual arrangements.

Some of the predicted icon-based task-programming systems are conceptually similar to a display motif of a product of the University of New Mexico called 'khoros', although to my knowledge, their scientific dataprocessing and visualization system was developed completely independently of my own concepts.

Part Five

They brought the madman in one month later.

Wilson and Roberta had been getting along rather well, though Wilson was still as standoffish as he could manage while still getting work done. An odd politness existed between the two, and Roberta didn't seem to mind. She simply tried to be "just one of the boys". She did an excellent job. The word had gotten around that she was slightly less warm than ice, and there was also a concomitant rumor that she was sleeping with Wilson, or at least had slept with him once, and for some reason this hadn't been repeated. This caused a bit of conjecture as to exactly why there had not been a repeat performance... but in the absence of any new grist for the mill, other more interesting sources of rumor got better airplay.

Such as the madman. Wilson hadn't seen him, nor had any of their clique, comprised mostly of the Army types who had once been in Jenkins' platoon, who tended to organize around Steuben, who had been promoted to corporal in Jenkins' absence. Steuben was evidently not as bad at following orders as Jenkins had intimated, and Wilson wondered what exactly that had been all about. A non-Army worker from Steuben's Caterpillar brigade had seen the madman, though, and he had told Steuben, and Steuben told everyone the morning after at breakfast. It was the first Wilson heard of it. Steuben was a bit of a rumormonger, though thankfully, he tended to only pass rumors on, and to not greatly embellish nor originate them. He seemed to occasionally investigate things, purely to be a better rumormonger. It didn't matter. The occurance was the talk of the canteen, and what Steuben was telling them was fast becoming general knowledge, whatever the accuracy of that knowledge.

"Foaming at the mouth, that's what he was, at least that's what I heard, jes' like a mad dog in August."

"Shoot, you ain't never seen a mad dog, Steuben, nobody's ever seen a mad dog. Ain't no more rabies."

"Well, that's what Arny Johnson said, and he is old enough."

"Hell, I reckon he is. Old as Satan, th' ol' coot."

"Shaddup, youse guys, let him talk!"

"Okay," said Steuben, relishing as always a position as center of attention. "Last night, about maybe three ay-em, he just come up outta the brush, walked on over to the road, and stood there in front of one of the big rigs. Arny damned near hit him, and when he jumped out of the cabin to cuss him out, the guy started shakin', jes' started shakin' and you could only see the whites of his rolled-up eyes, then Arny noticed his clothes was all funky, like he done messed hisself. Then he starts starin' at Arny between fits. Ol' Arny got on the 'com, and called fer security, and Squad "B" came on out in a hummer. Arny said they come on out, damned near drove on top of the guy, and all he did was sort of shake and drool, and stare at Arny like he was gonna maybe come on up after him, but was too hurtin' to get his shit together to do it. So Miranda, you know, the Mex corporal, come up to him and tells him to give up the OneCard, assume the position, and all that stuff. Guy ignores him, Miranda says, hey! and when he yells at the guy, he goes off into his shakes again. So Miranda grabs the guy, and he just goes nuts, grabs Miranda back, bites his arm. Miranda whips out the nine, and pistolwhips the guy, guy bites Miranda's ankle, but he can't get through the boot. Rest of the squad jumps out and they subdue the guy, takes all four of 'em. Of course they whupped up on him pretty good in the process. Then they take him to the brig, and slap him in a cell. One of 'em takes Miranda down to the infirmary, next thing you know, they have him in isolation, and then they go grab the guy. Grabbed the medics that sedated him and patched him up, too. All of them guys and the rest of the Squad "B" boys are all off somewhere in isolation, and word is they had a biohazard crew up to the infirmary, doing mop-up."

"Ew, so that was what that big-ass chopper was up here for!"

"Yes, indeed. Not fooling around, I don't guess, but I do know this," Steuben went on. "We're prolly gonna get yanked for night sentry duty, mos' likely in rotation."

Much grousing ensued.

Wilson absorbed all of this with much interest. When Roberta showed up, she listened intently to another re-hashing of the event. "What do you guys make of this?"

Steuben seized on the opportunity. "I think it's rabies."

"Can't be. Rabies was eliminated."

"Well, something that works like rabies. Central nervous system, um, whatcha call it, encephalitis."

"I guess. Where do you suppose he got it from?"

"Hell, I dunno. Maybe he was a bum, got to fooling around at one of the toxic waste dumps or something, got into some bad shit, um, 'scuse me, stuff."

"Yup, could be. Think there's any more like him out there?"

"I hope to God not! That's some kinda nasty. Hell, it took four guys to subdue him, and they all wound up getting taken away themselves!"

"Guess we'll find out what's up when they come back." Roberta finished her french-toast in silence, and then she and Wilson headed for work.

At the site, they first checked the various machines. All were running as intended. Two surfaced while a third was loaded by Moe and Miney. Eenie rested idle and recharged as Meeney changed his fluids. The telefactors came equipped with considerable self-diagnostic and self-maintenance procedures. Fairly serious damage was required to completely incapacitate one, damage such as destroying their brains. This was not likely to occur, and besides, there was massive redundancy of brain available. Most of their remote intellect was a cluster of four workstations operating in parallel, dedicated to the telefactors, but sharing idle-time with most of the beltcoms within a half-mile range, mostly providing "room" and hardconnects for various beltcom agents on their various errands. The workstations had plenty of memory. Each of them could probably have run twenty telefactors of Eenie's complexity, but for some reason, overproduction perhaps, the price of generic workstations had fallen to a new low, and the once-premium RAM from the orbital factories had saturated the world's markets to the point where most people had as much memory outside of their heads as inside.

Wilson finished the morning ritual of checking his beltcom for mail and such, which ritual had been interrupted by this morning's rumormill session. Finished, he approached Roberta, who set her beltcom on the ground, and pantomimed that he should do the same. They walked for a bit, then, headed for the nearest drop-ship site. Every hundred yards, so far as the eye could see along the roadbed, trailers and immense crates adorned the landscape. On the crest of a nearby hill, a sentinel stood cybernetic watch over the various crews' supplies. Occasionally metallic glintings peeked through the cover of the grasses in which it crouched, but otherwise, its camoflage was quite adequate to hide it from merely-human eyes.

"What's this all about, Roberta?"

"I think you know. What do we do about this?"

"What do you mean, what do we do? Not a lot that we can do. And besides, they med-evacked the guy, and everyone that he came in contact with! So there's no need for us to try to contact anyone or anything."

"I mean, what do we do so far as keeping an eye out for enemy agents?" Roberta looked oddly eager for some reason.

"Well, just keep an eye out for them, I guess."

"Well, how do we know, other than behaviorally, who they are?"

Wilson mused, "That's the ten-thousand dollar question. I don't think that we can know what they look like. I think that they'll probably just look like anyone. But we don't know that any are active here."

Roberta sort of smirked at that. "Of course they're here. This project has to be consuming almost all of the descretionary budget of this country! Anything this largescale has to have attracted some attention. Besides, there was that madman, and I know I've seen the exact symptoms that we heard described this morning."

"Roberta, just exactly what do you know? I wasn't very well prepared for this, you know. I don't suppose they wanted to tell me too much, because of my known anti-Big-Brother tendencies, and probably, the less I know, the better off everyone else is. So out with it."

"Okay, Wilson. I'll talk, sort of. Trust me on this, what you said is right, you weren't told that much because, for one, there wasn't a lot of time to tell you, your degree of loyalty (to the secret services, not the country) is not yet known, and the less you know, the less likely you are to either get yourself hurt, or to get in the way of someone else's operations. I wouldn't have been told as much as you have been told, since my mental stability is highly questionable, for reasons I needn't explain.

"I know what I know, because, as a free-lance employee of the group, I needed to know what I was stealing, the kinds and relative degree of risks, and I had to have a certain amount of training to be able to operate the sequencers, and so on. I had a minor in biology, and so it wasn't that difficult to bring me up to speed -- but let me put it this way... you know only what you were told, which was not much, and probably tailored to get you into a desired mindset and attitude... On the other hand, I have a much wider view of the picture. I was actually in the facility where Dr. Chandrarmanya did some of his research. After debreifing the group, I went away... until this -" and she gestured down at herself, with a sour look on her face "brought me back to them. What I am saying is that I know what is going on. I know what the enemy have, or should I say, I know what the enemy had five years ago, and from that I can extrapolate what they can probably field against us."

"You weren't just a burglar?"

"Hell no. I was a spook, not the spooks that they grow out of orphans and outcasts. I'm not some standardized government throwaway proprietary mutant. Sometime I'll tell you more, maybe, but for now let's just say that I came from an alternative program, a different track from what produced the spooks. They have their ways, I have mine. Anyway -- that rabies, and that's what the man they're talking about had, well, it's devastating. Its incubation can vary, depending on the strain. They had bred several by the time we could get Dr C. out. The one I considered most dangerous was contagious, not infectious, which means that you can get it about like you could get a cold, and not have to be bitten. It's thankfully not quite as contagious as a cold, but it sure makes a great venereal disease. It has a slightly different progression than the rabies of old."

Wilson had been shifting from foot to foot, gathering impatience as she spoke. "Okay, so cut to the chase."

"You get it, it lays dormant for about a month, probably, and then it penetrates the brain. What it does there is also strain- dependent. It attacks specific centers of the brain! Dr. C developed it to cross the brain-blood barrier, and to die when exposed to certain chemicals emitted by the other organisms it was designed to operate with... for instance, believe it or not, technically, I 'think like a woman'. For certain gender- specialized structures to form, like the structures in the limbic- system that control whether you're attracted to males or females, it was necessary to destroy, very carefully, very selectively, specific other structures. Dr. C was able to determine the intron- activation and inhibition codings that cause the orderly development of specialized cells, in short, he discovered why cancer doesn't happen. The man's an intellectual behemoth standing on the shoulders of research giants."

She paused for breath, and Wilson saw written on her face: fear, admiration, disgust, and more fear. "And?" he said.

"And. What I mean is, to complete my example, he was able to design a system that actually ate away the male parts of my brain, and to regrow the parts that make females (and male homosexuals) attracted to males -- without affecting my memory. Even Dr C doesn't understand how memories are coded, not completely. But that's not the point, titillating as it may be to you. The point is, by now the HindAsians doubtless have equally specific strains that can attack other specialized centers. The few facts I could gather seemed to indicate that they were concentrating research on versions that would specifically attack the centers controlling vision, or coordination. Hell, our own boys had developed a version of e coli that produced MPTP, a Parkinson's Disease inducer, back in the late 1990s... but more frighteningly, the thing that made us push ahead Dr. C's extraction, was more destructive than a plague of blindness, or speechlessness, or paralysis. I stole a file of it, and viewed it.

"They developed a contagious pseudorabies that attacks only the semantic areas, the centers of speech, and one that attacks the cortex in subtle ways, and one that attacks the limbic system. I saw the result of one test... they'd given a condemned man everything that they had developed so far. All that was left of a man was something that walked upright, but whatever you've ever had nightmares about in terms of behavior, this was it.

"It couldn't speak. It didn't seem to understand anything, besides maybe tone of voice. And if you turned your back on it for an instant, it was all over you. They tossed it a condemned man, and it walked right up to him, offered him a handshake, and then broke his arm for starters, blinded him, slammed him to the ground, and then ate him... and tried to fuck him while it ate him. It bit chunks right out of the man, chewed, and swallowed as it ripped at his prison tunic. It couldn't get out of its own pants, though... it was that damaged. They sedated it, and carried the dead man away, and it licked itself clean, and then sat on the bench, like anyone might, smoothing its hair with its bloodstained hands, crossed its legs, and then sat there watching the com that they had on our side of the glass. It looked at us observers and the video with equal bright fascination, no evidence of intent, no malice, nothing. Not a goddamned shred of emotion, just drives. The drives of a reptile. Food, territorial aggression, sex... and it wasn't picky, and the most terrifying thing was, as they went forward with the battery of tests, it still had the intelligence of a man, sort of, once it was motivated... or maybe just the memories.

"It could turn a doorknob, but it had problems with keys. It could use a water faucet, and would shower, but showered clothed. It shat in its pants, because it couldn't figure out to work its zipper. It ate cooked food with a knife and a fork, but if you put anything live into the enclosure, it attacked it viciously, and ate it raw. I don't know what the hell it was, but I do know that it was the most evil result of biowar research that I have ever even heard of."

"I'd fucking say! But again, what's the point of telling me all of this? Especially since I was deliberately underinformed so that I wouldn't get in the way or anything?"

"Wilson, this was five years ago. They've perfected these strains by now, or so I believe. Did Dr. C show you the little clear cotton-candy hypos?"

"Yes, he did. Said we were to look for them."

"Okay, what if I tell you that it looks as if they've been updated so that they confer immunity to the various rabies strains?"

"You mean the HindAsians are going to release these rabies into the population at large? Except for people they've scheduled to be modified into god-knows-what?"

"I think so. So does the group. And you will remember that we have been immunized against the rabies variants, and the transposonation mechanisms as well?"

"Yeah."

Roberta's face creased in a most unpleasant smile. "You remember I told you that there were several variants of that pseudorabies? Each with different incubation times and effects and contagion levels?"

"Yeah."

"From the story Steuben told this morning, I think that man they took out of here at sunup had them all."

Wilson was completely speechless, for the full minute Roberta gave him to think this one through. She continued: "And how many people like him have encountered how many other people?"

Wilson goggled at her.

"And how much time," she finished, "do you think we have left before either the situation is brought under control, or the country goes down into hell? -- leaving us and a very few others unaffected, priveleged to watch it all, without there being a damned thing we can do about it except to try to survive."

In the alleys of Pittsburgh, he waited. It was dark here, lovely here, and he was alone, except for the rats. They didn't last long once he had caught them, and somehow, the rats knew by now that they died in this alley, and he was growing hungry. To be moving in his alley was enough to make him arise from his stinking pallet behind the dumpster, but to be hungry! He drooled and shivered, and then his vision was clear again, and the sound, the horrible sound of the door opening became a lovely sound, a beckoning strain of the most lovely music: a man's breathing, the slap-slap-slap of worn sneakers. The man rounded the side of the dumpster and said something to him. He couldn't understand anything, nothing but the fact that this was a living thing, and the living things had to be dead things. He didn't understand the difference, but he knew how to make one thing into the other thing, and he rose from his pallet, and as he always did, he cringed, and wobbled from foot to foot, and wrung his grimy tattered (and rat-bitten) hands, creased his face into uncomprehending drunken dismay, but as the man (who had just reminded him of what a worthless goddamn bum he was) turned away, he cringed more deeply, not away, but towards, sidling into a nearly knuckledragging lope as he leapt onto the man's back to slash, hack and jab with the bottle he broke over the man's head. He was gnawing at the man's cheek a few minutes later, when he heard footsteps which came to the door, and then retreated, and then returned with more footsteps.

He understood beatings, normally understood that he should just lay there and hope it stopped soon, but not tonight. They were in his alley, his, and he would not share his alley nor his food, not with anything, nothing that moved. He fought viciously, animal ferocity making up for the years of alcoholism and malnutrition. He sank his few snaggled teeth into more than a few legs before something brought the night sky down to show him the stars that he had not seen for years, and things faded to blackness, and the pain went away, and he was alone in his precious darkness once more.

Guido, the cook, gave his statement to the cops. Another goddamned bum, gets his goddamned check, gets all fired up on that goddamned amphedorphin, goes psycho, thinks he's a werewolf or something. I send Johnny to take out the trash, I don't see him for, what, maybe ten minutes. I figure he's maybe doing a rusher or something, I figure what the hell, let him have his harmless kicks, better out there than in the bathroom with the customers or something. Still, I don't see him, I think, hey, maybe there's a problem out here, and holy shit! This guy's eating his face.

The cops have seen plenty of people go psycho from amphedorphin, a speedball combination of phenylethylamine and beta-endorphin. This sounds like a probable explanation, and so they cart the maniac, who is quite subdued by a probable concussion, to the hospital emergency room, where within three hours, he has managed to bite two nurses, an orderly, and a doctor. They curse their luck, and thank god for the AIDS vaccine.

On Spur 270, southbound for Frederick, Maryland, a trucker sees a car pulled over to the side of the road, evidently wrecked. A man, looking rather the worse for wear, stands by the edge of the highway, holding out his thumb in the ancient gesture of hitchhikers. The trucker winds his big rig down through the gears, and pulls it to one side. Parking, he dismounts carefully, and jogs back to the car, and the man, who is still holding his thumb out, facing traffic. Hadn't he heard the truck pull over? Not a backwards glance from the man by the side of the road. The car, on closer inspection, doesn't seem to be disabled, merely pulled hard against the guardrail, causing a lot of bodydamage, but not enough to cripple the vehicle. The trucker approaches, a bit more cautiously. He sees a body propped between the passenger and driver seats, and he can see in the headlight flash of northbound traffic that the person's face is a bloody ruin. He comes faster now, his footfalls lost in the sound of rushing traffic. The person in the car is shaking, in shock or something, he supposes. Still the hitchhiker hasn't turned around. The trucker is getting the creeps. Finally, at the car, he peers into the window for a closer view, and sees blood slowly pulsing from the neck of the woman, pulsing to a stop. She's well-dressed, this woman, beneath all of the blood, and that goes well with the model of the car, though the liquid red that shines with every northbound headlight clashes with the leaf-green interior. He looks up at the hitchhiker, who is dressed in old blue jeans, and a tattered T- shirt covered with blood and filth. He looks like he'd been in an accident all right, but not the accident that has killed this woman.

The trucker, a big man, and not afraid of much on two legs, approaches the hitchhiker, and dreading foul play in both past and future tenses, rests his hands on his Buck knife. "Hey! You!" He shouts, and the hitcher does hear him this time, and he turns. The trucker gasps as he sees that the man has one eye partially out of the socket, almost resting on his cheek, and it twitches from the action of some still-attached muscle as the man shows teeth through ravaged lips and reaches for him. The trucker snaps the Buck open, glad of all the moments he's spent snap-opening the blade of the archaic tool, gladder still of the keen edge that he has meticulously hand-ground. The hitcher is still coming, stepping out of traffic. The trucker tries to kick him back into the freeway, and the man falls back, but no vehicle is there to hit him, and back he comes. The hitcher steps in fast, and the trucker slashes upwards with the Buck, and it glides smoothly through the flesh of his upper arm, severing most of the bicep. That arm flops unnoticed as the hitcher slams the other open hand towards the trucker's neck, but the trucker gets his chin down in time, returns the blade from the slash, and stabs the man in the heart.

The man coughs blood, opens his chewed-looking lips and mouth as wide as he can, wide enough for the trucker to realize that the madman he's battling has evidently bitten through his own lips, a strand of which swings twitching as the man tosses his head and then brings it down into a bite. Again, the trucker gets his head down in time, and releases the blade, to heave with all of his strength. The man's teeth grip in his chin for a moment, and then with a tearing of flesh, he has broken the maniac's grip. The Buck knife hangs from the man's chest, and the trucker, in desperate inspiration, kicks the Buck with a really nice sidekick. The blade twists within the maniac's body, and blood erupts from his mouth like a geyser as he staggers back towards the trucker, mouth gaping wide. Brilliance grows in their lane, and the trucker looks left, and one more kick puts the psycho in front of a semi, which erases the man from existence, sliding down the road to fetch up to a stop behind the trucker's own rig.

Hunger! The wildlife here avoided him. He wandered through the forest, searching, and not finding. He couldn't think, only act, and that only between the shaking. He paused for a while to drool, as the spasms in his throat racked him with their waves. They came less and less often now, and at least he could drink water from the sluggish streams of water that pooled beneath rocks. He'd last eaten five days ago, in the delerium of the fever, a housecat. It had rolled on the ground in front of him, and he had walked cautiously up to it, and sunk his fingers into its softly furred belly, and squeezed with all of his force. It had squalled and clawed at him, feebly, until he broke its neck. It had been difficult to eat it, but with his teeth he had stripped away the fur, and its warm soothing blood had quieted the spasms that twisted his throat when he tried to drink cold water. The housecat was scarcely a memory now. He crept through the woods, searching. Where were more cats? Even dogs? The last houses he had seen were abandoned, still in good shape, but locked, boarded up. There were notices on the doors, but print meant nothing to him now. He had not been able to hit any of the squirrels he'd seen, nor the odd rabbit, not the way he threw rocks. He had difficulty even picking them up now. His hands didn't work properly.

A voice boomed, loud, electronically amplified. He ignored it, since to listen to it only made the spasms return to squeeze his throat. He kept on creeping through the brush, slinking lower to the ground. Whoever it was couldn't possibly see him.

The Border Defender sat in Rock Creek Park, slightly north of the District Line. It ranged a man-sized form approaching through the underbrush along the palisade on the west side of the creek. It had almost reached the District Line when the sentinel boomed a command to halt. It continued. It repeated its warning three times, and then fired on the interloper, illuminating it with kilojoule bursts of tactical radar. While the sentinel was equipped with much more powerful weaponry, it also had standing orders very high in its list of priorities -- preserve the District of Columbia. Starting a forest fire didn't seem to fall under that category. Enough of the District had burned back in 1999.

The living being was heated by the tactical radar's microwaves. The sentinel wasn't trying to kill the person, though it wouldn't be bothered if it did. It was trying to simultaneously conserve energy, and not start a forest fire, and block entry into the District. Short of marching over to the person, in which case it would have to abandon its position in the picket line enveloping the District proper, it had no other way of accomplishing compliance with all three directives. Its primary mission directive was to prevent the passage of anything living thing larger than a large dog from entering or leaving the District. So it simply applied enough energy to heat a mass of that size by five Centigrade degrees.

The living being stopped moving. The Border Defender turned up its audio gain, and determined that respiration and heartrate were greatly accelerated. It waited for them to stop. Eventually, they slowed, but did not stop, and so the sentinel requested an investigator unit.

The investigator unit was not long in arriving. It rolled down the bike path on its travel sled, and dismounted. The sentinel transmitted the exact position, and the investigator unit rolled off through the woods. It had the advantage of much lower weight than the sentinel, which was very mobile in most places, but was dense and massive enough that it mired quickly in mud and swamp. The sentinel remained on the bike path, a position from which it rarely stirred.

The investigator unit located the living thing, and illuminated it for visible-frequencies imaging. It was a human being. The sentinel composed an agent, and sent it hunting through the NETS for medical data. Why had the human ignored it? The sentinel noted possible reasons for its failure to comply with a direct order from a sentinel (who ordinarily gave no orders other than warnings to not cross borders, which were backed with instantaneous deadly force). The possibilities were mostly medical.

In 1999, as part of a takover plot perpetrated upon the District by several different inimical subcultures, a genespliced bowel parasite, a modified giardia, had been released into the District's watersupply. The organism itself had not been something that was tested for, ever, though had it been introduced in a normal form, it surely would have been noticed. Giardiasis was extremely incapacitating, causing headaches, nausea, incontinence, and a host of other symptoms. This parasite, however, had been so modified as to produce ergotamines as a waste-product. Infected persons shortly developed full-blown psychedelic disorders, generally similar to the dancing-manias of medieval Europe. They too often ignored the orders of Border Defenders, in fact, ignored almost everything outside of their hallucinations. The giardia plague had been largely dispersed, as had been the population of the District, and later, everything inside the Beltway... but the sentinels had standing orders to report all incidents which indicated a possible resurgence of the parasite. The sentinel made an association between most of the other reasons for ignoring a sentinel, and decided that the person was "sick" and needed a doctor. It requested a transport suitable for a sick human. Then it sent off another agent, requesting information on the handling of sick humans. It was still standing patiently half an hour later when the agent tried to download a Goedelized encrypt containing a very large portion of every online medical text. It examined the size of the proffered encrypt, and decided that it would try something else. It logged on to the NETS, and examined the names and mailaddresses of logged-on users, and interrupt-chatted several persons with "Doctor" appended to their names. The fourth was an actual medical doctor.

He was online in Bethesda, at the National Institutes of Health, one of the few inside-the-Beltway facilities still operational. For the most part, the NIH campus had been mothballed, with the various sub-Institutes scattered across the country, generally to sites adjacent to teaching hospitals or university facilities. Similar scatterings of subagencies had occured throughout most of the Federal government as a part of the re-invention-of-government theme, well underway by the time the District was "destroyed". The trend was only accelerated by the attempted putsch of 1999.

The doctor requested a video patch, and got it. He began to instruct the sentinel and its investigative unit on procedures for handling the patient... and also requested that the patient be sent directly to the old Bethesda Naval Medical Annex.

By the time the patient had arrived, he was almost conscious, though his temperature remained high, his heartbeat weak, and his electrolytes were all out of balance. The doctor and some of his staff set to work on the man, and immediately noted the greatly enlarged salivary glands, and when the man feebly tried (and failed) to bite a nurse, they placed him in restraints. Work continued, and finally, they began to realize that whatever he had was something very similar to something not seen for many years. They placed him in isolation, and called the local Centers for Disease Control doctor. He came right over, and endless tests were performed. One of those was enhanced MRI scanning... and the doctors couldn't believe what they saw. Selective destruction of specific brain centers? All coupled with weak rabies symptoms? Judging by the immunoassays, the man was in a recovery phase. The secondary rabies symptoms were abating, symptoms such as inflammation of the salivary glands, and associated muscular spasms... but in the annals of medicine, there were perhaps three recorded cases of rabies survivals in humans. Knowing now what they might be searching for, the doctors and their technicians began filtration processes, and found something extremely similar to the rabies virus. They isolated it quite quickly. Pasteur's work on rabies control was in fact (along with Doctor Jenner's original cowpox/smallpox vaccine) one of the oldest technologies in modern medicine, the sort of thing that intelligent high-school students might in an emergency employ.

Within two days, they had fashioned an antivirus, one which should pass along the proteins needed to guarantee production of antibodies against this mutant rabies, and considering the reports now coming in from other cities, they released the antivirus, and shipped samples for release throughout the rest of the continent. New cases of the human rabies plague dropped dramatically, renewing public faith in the medical community's ablities to handle such problems as they arose. This was quite fortunate, since the numbers of these plague victims almost exactly equalled the capacities of the facilities required to house them.

It was such a pity, though, that the person from whom they obtained their initial sample was in the final phase of the slowest-onset element of the syndrome, which began to be infectious and symptomatic about the time that the other disease factors had already long finished their initial destructive work. All remained quite contagious until about the time that the more classic rabiform symptoms developed. They had spread, and having spread, began their work... silently, and without attracting attention as did the more noticable pseudorabies.

She had always been such a clean girl, and such a healthy one. Her health was, indeed, her primary selling point. She was damned healthy. She picked her customers, as a rule, from the better- heeled members of the working class, working out of bars and restaurants instead of walking the streets like a common flooze. She'd been working in a cowboy bar in Frederick, and when a trucker had taken the lure, she'd been quite glad to go with him to a nice clean hotel room. She'd made her money for the evening, and since she didn't do most drugs, she had easy hours. Besides, this trucker was one of the nicer ones, the sort who'd stop to help a disabled motorist change a tire, and she slept there with him for awhile afterwards.

Three days later, she heard the news about the new plague sweeping parts of the country. Local clinics were expecting the vaccinations, and she called hers, and a recorded voice told her that the shipment had arrived, and she went down to get her shots, same as she did every three months, but this time, she got another one as well as the anti-syphillis/gonorrhea and anti-AIDS shots.

She had great faith in medicine, required in her trade if one was not to be paralyzed by fears of antibiotic resistant or anti- immune viruses. The Human Immunosuppressive Virus mutated about every three months, it took them about a month to develop antigens for it, and the disease was so close to eradicated by now that even hookers practiced unsafe sex. Hell, everybody got their shots these days. After the catastrophic adult whooping-cough epidemic of 2003, even adults were damned careful about maintaining their boosters.

She never gave it another thought until she developed the headaches. They weren't bad headaches, they just never went away. She'd continued to ply her trade, of course. She loved her work. She might not have any fringe benefits, but she got to meet a lot of neat people, and as she was pretty picky, most of them gave as well as they got. She worked hard for her money, and her clientele was generally enthusiastic, and generally not into too much weirdness, being unimaginative teamsters' types.

These headaches got slightly worse, and after about three days, she made an appointment with her personal physician. If she'd called the clinic, she'd have gotten a recorded message, telling her to go to a hospital if she was experiencing troubles with headaches...

When her appointment came, two days later, things didn't make much sense to her. She got up in the morning, fixed her coffee, and drank it, listening to recordings downloaded from the various hitmaker services. Her computer must be on the fritz, or something, though, because it seemed to have selected only foreign music. It was funny, but the tunes seemed very familiar, but she couldn't understand the words. She decided to check the program later. She showered and dressed for the doctor, picking a nice dress that showed off her legs. Her doctor was someone she'd have gladly added to her client list, perhaps even actually dated, if she could work up the nerve to bring up the subject.

She hopped on the bus that spun by, and slid her OneCard through the reader, which promptly added the fare to her transit account, which would be reconciled against her account at the end of the month. It was standing room only. Everyone seemed to be fairly quiet today. The only people talking were the foreigners, for some reason. Spanish legals, she guessed from the sound of it, not willing to look around and stare. Sounded like Spanish, anyways, not that she could speak or understand it.

The bus slid downtown, passing the neat two-story storefronts that had filled up historic Old Town Frederick. She could have home- shopped just as well, but she was an old-fashioned girl, who liked to windowshop, to look at the passersby as she rolled along. There weren't as many people as she would have expected, and for some reason, there were a lot of cops out, not doing anything in particular, just standing around. She recognized the corner building where her doctor's office was located, and pulled the cord that rang the "stop-request" bell. It dinged, and the bus slowed to let her disembark. She waved at the driver when she left. He mumbled something she couldn't quite catch.

She entered the doctor's office, which was quite crowded, and smiled at the nurse. The nurse, who knew her by name, smiled back and made a note in the appointment ledger. She waited, examining her nails, which were of course perfect. But it couldn't hurt to check, and besides, the headache was more intense now, and she couldn't muster the concentration to read. She tried, though. She picked up one of the magazines, Newsweek, by the colored border, but she couldn't make sense of the lettering over the picture of a crowd of foreigners packing the streets of some foreign city. The lettering seemed to swim and shift, and none of it made any sense at all. She set the magazine back down, and resumed checking her nails.

Someone said something, something foreign, and she ignored it. It was said again, louder, more sharply, and it was the nurse, bending over the station, beckoning to her. What was going on here? The nurse knew her name! She got up, and went over to the nurse, ready to give her a piece of her mind, and the nurse said soemthing else, still foreign. The headache was much more intense when the nurse was speaking, and she pressed her hands over her ears. "Please don't talk so loud!" she said, or tried to say. When she opened her mouth, all that came out of it was a garbled stuttering mess. She tried to speak again, and nothing she said made any sense. Frightened, she looked around her. Some of the patients were staring at her, and some ignored her. The majority, the ones who were staring at her, generally gawked over open magazines, while the few who ignored her were generally examining their manicures, as she had been doing earlier, wincing as if from headaches.

She turned back to the nurse, pleading with her eyes, but the nurse was no longer behind the counter. She had come out into the reception room, and took Felice by the arm, and led her into an anteroom. The nurse talked to her softly, soothingly, and while it made no sense, she could tell that the nurse was trying to be nice. Still, her panic grew slightly, until the nurse displayed the thermometer unit and the blood-pressure cuff. This was ritual, this she understood. Meekly, her eyes assuming the timid demeanor of a lost lamb, she allowed the nurse to insert the thermometer probe, and to attach the cuff. The cuff puffed and deflated, and repeated a few times, and the thermometer beeped. She peered at the readouts, but they swam and shifted, and again her headache throbbed. The nurse smiled, with more compassion than Felice fancied she usually saw in her face. The doctor entered a moment later, and said something. Something foreign. He smiled though, and came over, seating himself on the table next to her, and felt of her throat, her head, under her arms. He smiled, trying to be reassuring, and then he asked her something, clearly a question. She couldn't understand a word. She tried to ask him what was going on, and she couldn't understand herself. Was everyone speaking a foreign language, herself included? Why couldn't she understand it then? The doctor couldn't understand her either, that much was clear; he frowned a little under his bedside manner, and wrote on his beltcom. He made a noise that she assumed meant for her to pay attention, and so she shifted to a more attentive pose, and he said something again, another question, holding his head, and making a pain-face. She smiled brilliantly. Perhaps this might get her somewhere! He frowned a little more, and then patted her on the shoulder, and turned and left, closing the door behind him.

She fretted. What was going on? This was like a story she sort of remembered from the Bible, not that she read it much. She couldn't think of the name. Come to think of it, she couldn't remember the doctor's name, or the nurse's name, not even her own... she was trembling, not knowing what else to do, when the door opened, admitting the doctor and a policeman. The cop had a wary expression, but the expression softened when he saw her trembling tearfully. The doctor came in, and said something to her, something she could not understand, and she tried to speak, but could only moan. She burst into tears. The doctor approached, and held out a bottle. He opened it, and shook out two tablets. He motioned for her to take one. She did, and it tasted of aspirin. The doctor pointed at his head and made a pain-face again. She understood that he meant for her to take them for her headaches.

The confusion on her face was clear, and the doctor took the bottle of aspirin from her and unzipped her beltpack and placed it within. He rummaged within, and pulled out her OneCard, and the officer took it from the doctor and slid it through his beltcom and read the beltcom. He talked to the doctor, and though she could not understand their speech, their faces spoke volumes. The officer took out a marking pen, and reached for her arm, and she shivered as he took it. He had not reached for his handcuffs, and so she was not afraid of him, just afraid of the entire world. He made marks on her arm. They seemed to move and shift, a jumble of patterns that meant nothing. When he was done, he took her hand and led her away.

As she sat weeping in the back of his squad car, he called the station. "Another one," he said, when the dispatcher responded. "Request authorization for a trip by her house."

"Authorization confirmed," said the dispatcher. A map of Frederick appeared on the cruiser's display. He pulled away from the curb and followed the map.

At her apartment, she led him to the second-floor suite, and pulled out her keys, and opened the door. She looked to him for guidance, and he led her to her own closet, and then to the bathroom. She selected another nice dress, and some jeans, some tops and underthings, and a nice fall jacket from last year. In the bathroom, she gathered up her few medicines, and stuffed all of this into a backpack. She brought some cosmetics, the minimum needed to get by, and then the officer, who watched all of this, waved his hands as if to say, enough. She picked up her travel toilet, basically full of toothpaste and such, and he looked inside, and pointed to her bag. He looked around the apartment, and gestured questioningly, and she ran over an grabbed an old family photo, from when she and her folks had still been speaking, and she grabbed the one thing that she figured she'd never have use for, but still wanted to have, to retain for her very own, an O-ROM chip with her three unpublished romance novels. The cop ushered her out, and as she really let fly with the tears, locked her door for her, and slapped some sort of notice up onto the door, covering the lock, and part of the frame as well as the door. She couldn't read it, of course, but she knew it must be a notice of quarantine.

She wiped her eyes enough to follow the cop down the stairs, and then let sobs rack her as she rode with him, otherwise silently, to a local school, which had been appropriated to house the overflow from the hospital. The gymnasium was half full.

Wilson and Roberta watched the news broadcasts religiously now, trying to glean meaning from the bits of information that were coming through the otherwise seamless web of propaganda and half- truths that filtered down to the public level.

There was an initial plague, one of rabies. There was a secondary plague apparently developing, one which physically was rather harmless, but one which seemed to be taking fairly large numbers of people off of the street. Nothing was said as to the nature of the final effects of this plague, but there were advisories that people experiencing headaches for more than a few hours should immediately seek professional help.

Isolated as they were, the Roads crews continued their tasks. Protected by their isolation, and the security surrounding their sites, they remained fully functional, and the job progressed towards completion, though in many places, the construction forged ahead one lane at a time, instead of the multilane total rebuild which had characterized the initial phases. The largely automated production systems of the various refineries and factories which produced the parts, tools, and material for the crews continued to run, for the most part, and besides, they'd been running at full capacity for some time now, and a great deal of finished product was in the pipeline, waiting only for transport to site. In Texas, the DuPont processes were running in thirty-five percent of the factories, and in the robotics factories, in the heavy equipment factories, in the factory factories, spare parts were being made in abundance. The factories that made telefactors were already entirely automated, as were the orbital refineries that made the silicon that ran the world.

It certainly appeared that the country was going on a war footing.

Ubiquitous computing, pioneered by Xerox in the early 1990s, had placed processors of varying sizes and complexity practically everywhere by the time the new millennia rolled into being. Run- down tenements had fuzzy-logic controllers instead of thermostats, and even clothes-irons had brains. The various utility combines had started installing optical fiber anyplace conductors were run in the mid-1990s, and the cost-savings of site-located cheap silicon cooperating with other processors in massive networking greatly outweighed the costs of retrofitting entire production systems, finer control being cheaper than redesign of process. Optical fiber had become extremely cheap, less so than was conductor, and where phone lines could be replaced by optical fiber, they largely were, all by 1997, the year that the Federal Government finally passed the Ensured Data Access Act, later amended to the Constitution, which had created the National Electronic Teledata System. Then-President Bill Clinton had campaigned with the slogan "Information Superhighway", but it was the Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, who had made it law, providing extremely cheap InterNet E-mail and files-access through terminals emplaced in all Post Offices and most libraries. Everyone had ensured access to the NETS, so long as they had a OneCard, that is. Wilson had studiously ignored this development, for the most part, since he was, at that time, boycotting the system.

Between OneCard, the NETS, ubiquitous computing, and the sudden availability of ultra-pure Lunar silicon, refined by the orbital factories, computing had become not only affordable, but inescapable. Everything which could be digitally controlled, was... even defense, perhaps especially defense. The most obvious symptom was, of course, the Border Defenders, which were practically a real-life allegory for the entire shift away from a mankind whose evolutionary niche was superior brainpower, into a race utterly dependent upon systems of machines.

War simply moved too quickly these days for mortals to be involved. Oh, surely there were the manned border incursions, border actions where groups of daring men or women transgressed, or fought off transgressors. These took place only in third-world countries. In the rest of the world, such activities were only ever terroristic, and not military in scope or execution. Criminals might still score into the big money through the daring of a few men or women, but, as the sealing of the American borders proved time and again, any number of human beings could not possibly compete against machines which carried directed-energy weapons. One might hope to prevail against the persons directing those machines, through the use of gas or biological weapons, but in even the simplest case of human beings versus self-directed automated heavy armor, the humans hadn't a chance.

Modern war moved as a blast of protons moving at fifty-percent of the speed of light, or as light itself, coherent, focused, deadly. Sometimes, though, war moved at the speed of light in different modes, dataworms propagating through the various communications satellites, or undersea trunks of optical fiber six feet thick.

Most Americans in the latter half of the twentieth century had lived under the looming shadow of the bomb, cast by the specter of intercontinental thermonuclear war. The emergence of extremely highspeed high-energy switching capabilities, coupled with high- temperature superconductivity and pocket fusion (which everybody knew existed, but was not ever to be available to anyone but duly-regulated-and-taxed utility companies. Intimating that one knew the operational secrets was call for a visit by the special police, who also supposedly didn't exist) allowed the development of extremely efficient and powerful directed energy weapons. The atomic bomb was no longer a threat. Sure, it might be possible for a terrorist group to smuggle one in, but not likely. Night-flyer smuggling operations collapsed almost overnight as the Border Defenders came into their own. You couldn't fly low enough to evade orbital surveillance, and trying to dodge faster than light was a simple impossibility. No matter the awesome power of nuclear devices, they could not be delivered to targets defended by interception systems operating at relativistic speeds. The borders and airspace were so well sealed as to destroy the traditional smuggling industries. Most recreational drugs were made within the country, an ever more bizarre array of bioengineered products such as the amphedorphin, or rushers, or odd fungally-produced designer psychedelics.

What did work in these days of relativistic warfare were such strategems as looping a cloud of birdshot (a huge cloud, to be sure, and more likely tailings from the orbital refineries) beyond the moon, destined to rendezvous with a defensive deflection mirror at cometary speeds. Another strategem might be to fire charged-particle beams at laser mirrors, which would of course tend to reflect laser attacks. Of course, such attacks could only open a temporary window-of-opportunity, as remaining mirrors and lasers would target the charged particle projector that had destroyed the mirrors. The CPB projectors were generally massive things, but railguns, miniature versions of the massdrivers that launched lunar ore into earth orbit, were not very large, and could be snuck into orbit rather handily.

The Border Defenders themselves depended rather heavily on their own ultimate weapon, a lightweight railgun, extremely efficient due to the high-temperature superconductor. There were exactly three secrets in America these days that were guarded so closely that nobody knew the entirety and exactitudes of the processes. Nobody. One was the manufacture of the high-temperature superconductor which operated up to about 320 Celsius. Another was the final assembly process and bootstrapping recipes of the Border Defenders. Those who had created them had gone to their graves guarding their various contributions to the process, with the exception of ancillary contributors. The third secret was, of course, pocket fusion.

Pocket fusion, based upon the nearly successful researches of German scientists of the late 1920s, Utah researchers of the 1980s, and subsequent experimenters, was finally realized. The publication of the process would have created an economic calamity of incalculable proportions, and so production of of pocket fusion reactors was enabled with great safeguards surrounding the process. All that even the technicians could tell you was that you put water in one end, and got power out of the other. Border Defenders generally guarded the fusion plants, and anything that could incapacitate the Border Defender would certainly destroy the fusion generators, which were rumored to be small and rather delicate.

Border Defenders manufactured themselves out of premanufactured parts, most of which were available commercially. They bought random batches of sub-assemblies, things that could have a thousand other uses, ordering by modem as did everyone else these days, routing deliveries of chemicals and assemblies to seemingly random assembly points. Several shipments would arrive at an otherwise empty warehouse, and one of the shipments would unpack itself, and begin assembling other units. Border Defenders would shortly emerge, dragging after them a supply of superconductor. They made great batches of it. The first use to which they put it was the making of pocket fusion reactors. Next, they wound the superconductor coils that stored the reactor's power for their weapons systems. Then they wound and installed the railguns that made them such effective defenders.

Three great secrets that made America powerful, and rich beyond dreams of avarice... and the hate-icon of the rest of the world.

Half of the oil markets in the world disappeared when America stopped buying foreign oil.

Five-eights of the world's copper and silver markets disappeared when America stopped needing vast amounts of high-quality conductor for electrical-power distribution. A strand of superconductor the size of a human hair could carry power enough to light a city.

Half of the heavy military equipment markets disappeared when it became obvious that America had a weapons system that could dance around all other heavy armor, and carried a railgun which delivered output at the same intensity as a charged-particle projector which would be (without the American high-temperature superconductor) a quarter mile in length, massing a thousand tons.

America found itself in possession of the most resources, the highest energy-density, and with Sphinx and other NETS entities correlating data and results (and assisting the design of ever more efficient and modern technologies) exporting assembled tech that couldn't be matched elsewhere. North America had the lowest population density of all of the continents, and half of the world's grain production... and nobody had anything that was worth trading for any of that. America had moved into a period of isolationism in a world which had, due to population pressure and universally nuclear third-world powers, mostly become a standing-room-only Global Village full of stinking illiterate peasants.

As America withdrew into a profitable and nearly orderly process of cleaning house and reinventing itself, the rest of the world went through monumental changes, few of them for the better.

In 1995, over one tenth of the African continent had been infected with Human Immunosuppressive Virus, type HIV-III, a disease characterised by high communicability and slow onset of symptoms. African nations had very underdeveloped health care systems, other than the deployment of effective immunizations programs. Also, they had the lowest annual per-capita incomes in the world, and as a rule, could not afford large, centralized health care systems. Certainly they could not afford to provide medical care for terminal patients numbering in the tens of millions. They were also burdened with a combination of the highest fertility rates, youngest average age of first pregnancy, all in a culture where slash-and-burn agriculture was the norm, upon rain-forest lands which are classically low in nutrient concentrations. The continent raged in wars throughout the period of 1970-2010, neatly destroying whatever gains had been made by the introduction of post-stone-age technologies. Universities seemed to mostly serve as hotbeds of insurrection, Marxist propagandization, and further stratification of society into tribal factions, the roads and airports were increasingly given over to solely military traffic (or destroyed repeatedly to disrupt that traffic), and in Zaire (congo after 1997), Rwanda, Tanzania, Nigeria, and even Kenya, insurrections, wars, ethnic conflicts and simple yet immense famines did the work that the HIV-III plague left unfinished. By 2020, Africa's population had been, for the most part, been reduced to pre-1800s levels, with the few survivors of the devastation being those who had religiously adhered to ancestral values and remained far from the "technicals", whose weapons and ways of life had spread death so far and widely.

Europe had fared rather better, with the emergence of Common Europe, which had evolved over the period of 2000-2010 into a unique flavor of federal democracy, where the larger federal body was indeed a tool of state's rights, rather than the American Federal system, where the states had been relegated to a role where they were simply the organizational body which lay between the counties and the Nation. In Europe, the various countries still had the ability to determine local language requirements, preserve local cultures, and control their borders. In practice, as a rule they did none of these things, and with the final removal of international (within the Community) trade and travel barriers, they came to dominate world trade, as America had largely removed itself from the global markets.

The Balkan states had finally destroyed themselves, to all intents and purposes, bombing themselves back into the Stone Age, along with the entire Persian Gulf region. There would be no ship plying the Aegean Trades, nor sailing into the Black Sea, not for years to come. Millions had died in World War Three, not in the long- expected intercontinental shootout between the Communists and the Capitalists, which never did materialize, but in the first nuclear exchange between Third-World extremists, in 2002. The Muslim world, outraged by the genocide of the Bosnians by the Serbs, established a massive blockade-running pipeline, travelled by terrorists and their plots as well as by munitions of escalating caliber. Finally, the white muslim world of the former satellites of the Soviet Union were able to assemble nuclear components salvaged from war-torn Chechnya, and some of these components came into the hands of the outraged survivors of Serbian "ethnic cleansing". It was most unfortunate that similar backpack nukes had been obtained by the Serbs, and the factions organized suicide missions which were successful enough to draw their immediate neighbors, also secretly nuclear, into the conflict. Caught in the middle of a cloud of fallout from their traditional enemies, the Israeli were not about to sit still for this, and they began using their own very advanced technology to blast neighboring states. Every tribal splinter-group which had long waited for a chance to rise and smite their oppressors took this as a sign, and some of them possessed their own secret weapons of mass-destruction.

From the western edge of the Balkans to Afghanistan in the east, south to Palestine, the cradles of civilization were again ruins, as they have been so very many times. The Euphrates dams had been destroyed in the wars, blown by Kurdish terrorists... who surely must not have known that the floods would not only sweep the rivers clean of their Iraqi oppressors, but would also engulf several clandestine nuclear and biowarfare research facilities and stockpiles, which had been emplaced by the ever-popular (if mad) Ba'ath Party dictator Saddam Hussein in his massive-if-understandable paranoia of America. The Fertile Crescent would not be safe for agriculture for perhaps centuries to come.

The peoples of the steppes, and the survivors of the various nuclear and biowar disasters fled ahead of the winds, generally not quickly enough, but they travelled east as far as they might, where they fetched up in a human-wave collision with the established overpopulations of the Indian subcontinent. Those who travelled most quickly, the educated, the professionals, the monied aristocracy of the oil-rich states were welcomed into the teeming mass of humanity that was Pakistan and India at the start of the 21st century. It was most unfortunate that the less- educated brought with them only such of their harvests as they could glean as they left their dying farms, bearing with them a plague that would eventually destroy the high-yield monoculture rice that was the most common commercially-farmed rice in India and points east.

In India, 2001 C.E., they already had problems of their own, with Sikh revolutionaries, Tamil separatists, and the eternal class antipathies of the various Hindu sects and castes. As if there were not enough calamities in the world at this time, the monsoons came quite late in 2004, and then came with a vengeance, with three successive typhoons close upon their heels, and the yields of the algal blooms which fed the newly-established foodfactories were reduced by an order of magnitude. Bangladesh was nearly submerged by the rain and tidal surge, and half of the Bangladeshi were drowned. Those who survived marched north in a totally ragtag civilian mass- exodus, where they were met and mostly destroyed by the Indian army. The remnants fled east into Burma, itself seething with excess population and a repressive government. The fighting was largely hand-to-hand, and unconditionally vicious. Bangladesh's military unwisely tried to launch a SCUD-type nuclear-tipped missile from Dacca at Calcutta (which might have been a good idea) but unfortunately, the missile was defective, arcing at over 100 degrees from its intended course. The bomb was not defective. It was very dirty, and detonated near Rangpur, at the foot of the Himalayas. Had it been possible to open a path through India into the Himalayas, there might have been less loss of life, but the Bangladeshi were largely bottled up within the seaboards and riverenes, and there they carried with them not only the classic plagues of the refugee, but also the mutated pneumonic Plague that had resulted when fallout from the defective missile swept across the slums and flooded-out swamps where the pestiferous plague was endemic. The plague killed nineteen of twenty in the fleeing mob, and close to half of the populations in the invaded areas. India was forced to use neutron-device sterilization to contain the plague, and every disaffected splinter group took this opportunity to revolt. Teeming Calcutta fled west en masse, taking with them a thousand ills on twenty million feet, to meet the encroaching human wave of refugees from Mesopotamia.

Out of the chaos, out of the starvation, out of the howling masses of the small brown descendants of a hundred such conflagrations, in 2006, from Sukkur in Pakistan came a man like any other, but a man whose voice, whose message, whose power, was such that people listened when he spoke. He started with organizing the people who who had banded together in small groups for common defense, plague survivors all, and forged them into larger groups.

His tactics were of Muhammedian simplicity and power. He simply started a line, and marched forward, killing most that he encountered. His people were now immune to the plague, and they spread it before them, and all who were captured were deliberately exposed. As to the sword, women under twenty-five and female children over the the age of eight or so were the only ones to be spared, and these were put to work at the rear of the lines, harvesting fast crops where possible, if they survived the plagues.

He preached a modified version of Islam, a heretical faith that acknowledged Allah as supreme deity, but included as a subtext several Hindu heresies, such as the veneration of Kali through human sacrifice in war. As time went on, the Islamic tenets became subsumed within the Hindic heresies, and elaborated by a twisted Darwinism. He preached a modified psuedo-scientific doctrine of the emerging master race, evolutionarily superior beings whose military superiority and biological superiority was demonstrated by survival of plague and carnage, and addled people who had survived two or more years of catastrophe, carnage, disease and ofttimes cannibalism heard a message of salvation that not only forgave but glorified their past misdeeds, and they rallied around him as if he were the prophesied messiah.

Conversion was a requirement for life where he had passed. Where his lines had passed, the population was down to about 10 percent of the previous population, at the level where the land he had taken could easily support human life with the most basic agriculture. This was one of his better selling points, living room, room for crops and cattle, room for the surviving convertee, the victorious conqueror alone to again overpopulate the Hindic subcontinent with the children who alone were true human beings, who were alone able to reincarnate. The unbelievers were animals, soulless, to be killed wholesale until their numbers were low enough to allow them to be penned and used as animals should be used. He was so successful, and left such blood-fertilized ground behind him that within a year of the start of his march, fresh well-fed and newly healthy fighting men marched forward from the rear they'd held. They expanded rapidly in an arc to the foothills of the Sulaman Range of Baluchistan, beyond which began the great westwards poisoned wastes where human life was not possible. They marched south to Karachi, and north and eastwards along feet of the Himalayas, killing or absorbing all whom they met. Great Russia, the Himalayan states, and China alone could withstand their advances, especially once they had seized a few of India's fast-breeder reactors. The plagues they spread before them were their main weapons, annihilating all opposition until vaccines and novel antibiotics could be developed to deal with the mutant plague. At this point, America got involved, shipping a few Border Defenders overseas to help control the major mountain passes until the Russians and Chinese could establish their own automated border-control systems, supporting the Border Defenders with the NATO Orbital Defenses. Burma, Laos, Campuchia, and Vietnam resisted well, until the plague the invaders promoted brought them also to wholesale destruction.

The Prophet had, midway through his sweep across HindAsia, begun a process of sending new converts sufficiently far to the rear so that (should they survive plague exposure) they could recuperate while assisting farming, eventually graduating from weak farming-assistants to military training, gaining strength and faith in the new system, the system that had rescued them from otherwise certain death, and nurtured them into strength. Their faith and loyalty were absolute. That of their children would be even greater.

One of the psuedoscientific tenets of Dionesian expansionist ideology was the idea that the region had undergone such hideous hardships for many reasons, foremost being racism and inbreeding of the various cultures, combined with splintering of the humanities into a welter of culturally homogenous opposition groups. The Prophet proposed that hybrid vigor be sought, through forced intermarriages, and it was certain that he was well on the way to creating one uniform overculture, which would, under its quasi-religious umbrella, integrate all of the various subcultures into one cohesive whole, with his Imams and Qadis and Califs in council selecting which cultural precepts were to be spread as law throughout the Union, and which would be repressed as deadly heresies. He was not going to make the error that the Pol Pot regime had made in Campuchia, though... wherever possible, he preserved the educated, and the intellectuals, so long as they had been plague survivors. He also impressed upon them, most forcefully, that while their intellectual capacities were most desirable, the natural intellectual predisposition to rebelliousness and debate would under no circumstances be tolerated.

In the wake of his passage, the aggregate population of the Indian subcontinent was reduced to about fifteen percent of what it had been... but a full seventy percent of the survivors were women of prime childbearing age, and they had food aplenty, and they'd already survived every natural disease and a few unnatural ones. By the time he'd reached the South China Sea, and been stopped by the natural barrier of Ocean and the manmade barrier of Indonesian and Australian nuclear submarines shelling everything that floated, the population was exploding again. By 2020, nine-tenths of his population were under the age of twenty, with the median age being something like thirteen (and excellently armed and well-drilled), and the total population was close to what it had been in 2000. Approximately one tenth of the children were entering their mid-teens, and all had been raised as faithful HindAsians, swearing by a prophet other than Muhammad. They had been raised in an expansionist militaristic society that put primary emphasis on a high reproductive rate, excellent if restrictively directed educations which specifically did not teach critical thinking, and a xenophobic religious hatred of all other cultures.

Australians remained largely isolationist, adding very high technology to their lifestyles, and not much else. Since their colonial days, they'd had a fairly low population with fairly high technology, and they made a good thing ever so much more so. They took a good look at the world around them, decided they were self- sufficient enough, and took their traditions of rugged independence to extremes. Like America, they sealed the oceans around them, though they traded well with their neighbors, the Indonesian Confederacy. The Australians, the Canadians, and the Indonesians were some of the few countries with which America would trade as equals. To these powers, America released significant quantities of superconductor, in pre-cut swaths and pieces suitable for high-speed computing and high-energy switching. When the Prophet and his human wave approached the Isthmus of Kra on the Malay peninsula, the Indonesians and the Australians combined forces to create a miles-wide canal, detonating subterranean fusion warheads as an excavation tool. The great Malay Canal was not used for shipping, the tides were too great... but that was the whole point of the exercise, to stop an invasion.

As Common Europe developed trading relationships with Great Russia, Siberia fell into a deeper alliance with the East, notably shipping through Vladivostok to Japan and the Koreas (Once the North Korea found out exactly how profitable was trade with the rest of the world, the last Communist Wall fell). Besides, considering the intensity of the Siberian winters, it was easier and more profitable to ship raw resources to the efficient refineries of the old free world than to the mostly delapidated factories of Great Russia. Hong Kong had reverted to the mainland Chinese, and the monied population had moved, for the most part, to the transnational industrial enclaves of Vancouver and Seattle, and there they plowed their vast fortunes into an already booming shipping and assembly industry.

Mainland China had, in the 1990s, taken to the concept of profit with an avarice and acumen which would have done the Han emperors proud. They were finally able to combine Maoist regimentation with capitalist industrialism, and they traded heavily with the rest of the former Third World. They had embarked upon an auspicious and totally necessary program of population reduction in the late 1980's, and by 2020, they had succeeded in nearly halving their population, but it was not enough of a cut to allow them to continue to industrialise while growing enough food to feed themselves. In the year 2012, they began to trade light industrial tools, high-level tech, and excellent Chinese doctoral degrees with the HindAsians, in return for rice. The HindAsians, with their dramatically reduced population in an extremely fertile area that had mostly lain fallow for five years or more, became the favored trading partners of the Chinese, whose tendency to use convict and slave labor in industrial facilities caused them to be regarded as something of pariahs by most of the fully-developed nations. Both regions prospered, in an uneasy alliance. The Chinese were not about to open the mountain passes to allow the HindAsians to immigrate, carrying with them the remnants of unknown plagues along with an ideology known for internalizing and subverting whatever opposing ideologies they encountered. The graduate students they took on were subjected to the greatest quarantines imaginable. The HindAsians were aware of their international reputation as the carriers of plagues biological and ideological, and gloried in it.

From the beginning, ships which docked at HindAsian ports were commandeered by HindAsians, and sent to spread the Word and the Plague. By 2009, the rest of the world was aware of this, and blockaded the shores of the Arabian sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the South China Sea. In the process of total enforced isolation, they forced the HindAsians into near-total self-sufficiency, not that the HindAsians would have had it any other way.

Once, the Prophet, by now an ancient old battlehorse, wizened but not mellowed, made one of his pontific statements, which, according to the custom, became both law and long-term strategy: "We are the Survivor Race. We are the superior beings. We are the vanguard of Evolution-in-Process. We are not perfect yet, though.

"Most people who have ever lived are now alive. There is greater genetic diversity now than ever before, but many of these genes are defective! We must, for the glory of our God, winnow out those who can be winnowed, and then those who survive can be considered as members of our Survivor Race. These poor genetic misfits who have not undergone God's Threshing Floor have no chance to be redeemed, not unless they too can prove, by living, that they too are Survivors. We must give them the opportunity! Once they have become a Survivor Race, they can join with us, and the genes that God will select as preferred in them can complete the pattern that He has preferred in us! And thus we will move closer to the Divine Plan, whereby God has used Evolutionary forces to attempt to create fitting companions for Him in His lonely Divinity."

It should not need to be said that the Prophet, for all that he was still in his prime insofar as strategy and retention of power went, was quite mad... but to hundreds of millions, he was possessed of divine infallibility. And so they massed on the natural borders that divided their little hegemony from the rest of the world, occasionally making forays up the slopes of the mountains that contained them to the north, restrained by the Chinese Wall of Death to the east.

The Chinese had extended and fortified the ancient Great Wall, combining the ancient ramparts with the not-inconsiderable output of their military factories. Their weapons systems were second only to those of America, having long outstripped Great Russia during that nation's industrial near-collapse in the 1990s. Russia had created its own great wall, seeding the passes of the Hindu Kush with radioactive wastes and other passive defenses which would tend to dissuade the HindAsians from attempting a march north through the war-savaged remnants of the old Turkmen SSR.

This did not dissuade the HindAsians, who had massed in 2018 in northern Pakistan, from trying a march across the Khyber Pass, to Kabul, to Muzar-Sharif, along the old Silk Road, and down the Oxus towards the Aral Sea. They came, and came, and still they came. Napalmed en masse, still they came. Dusted with heavy metal isotopes, they still came. Neutron-bombed to the point where the corpses would not rot, still they came. What finally killed them, after Great Russia had nearly exhausted its supply of ready weapons (it had long ago sold most of its fissionables for foreign exchange, or converted them for power generation) was one of the harsher Steppes winters on record. Huddled for warmth, the HindAsian masses, scarcely an army (for they had mostly pointed sticks and clubs for weapons) had frozen in their hundreds of thousands. Grass grew in green profusion as they fertilized the soils at springtime, and vultures feasted as well. The Aral Sea stank for a year afterwards, when the snowmelts flooded the Oxus with the thawing dead.

The Prophet (his original name was unknown, and mattered not at all; he was simply the Prophet) did not consider this war. Hardly even an invasion. This was merely another factor in the grand scheme of evolution. When the few survivors returned from the ill- fated "popular migration", bearing the news of total obliteration, he simply accorded them signal honors by conferring the right to breed one hundred women each. The women's desires were not considered at this stage of HindAsian cultural development. The survivor's desires were also not considered, they were simply milked, and the women were artificially inseminated. It was the Prophet's idea that those who survived beyond any reasonable hopes had something special to contribute to the race, and perhaps he did have some basis for this belief, but whatever special genes these survivors might have had were probably somewhat damaged by the radiation exposure the gene-bearers had undergone during their ill-fated migration.

The Prophet also believed truly in his heart that this something, for which he had no ready name (though he often preached for hours straight on the subject), was something that God respected. He believed that God had abandoned the various peoples who now had mixed into the rising generation of the new HindAsian breed, because they had been living too softly, and that with the past calamities, they had remitted the sins of soft living and associated devolution. He also believed that the fully-developed nations had embraced the sins of decadence, cultural, social and genetic, to the point where there was almost no hope of redemption. As the earthly mouthpiece of the Almighty, he called for a Holy War of redemption.

His unique view was that such redemption was not possible through conquest, which he felt conveyed no moral victories. Conquest proved only that one group of men was stronger, more organized, or better supplied than another group of men. Better it was in the eyes of the Almighty, he believed, to contend against natural forces. Evolutionary superiority was not expressed by belonging to some group or nation through accident of birth or choice of real- estate, but by a broader spectrum of successful immunological response, a greater tenacity for life. Perhaps he also had a point here.

He felt that the outside world, with their excessive reliance on vaccinations and antibiotics, was promoting an increasing decadence of heritable immunologic responses. No matter that vaccination activated the same responses that would have been activated by direct exposure, at a less destructive rate, no matter that the most dangerous diseases, immunosuppressive retroviruses, attacked the immune system directly. He insisted that one could not be considered a superior being, and true human, a non-animal until one had demonstrated one's belonging to the true path of genetic diversity combining in hybrid vigor, tested by trials equivalent to those which had originally produced humanity. Again, he might well have had a point, but the inhumanity of subjecting entire populations to trials of fire, sword and disease never entered into his considerations, except when he considered the inhumanities which had led to his own people's survival of such trials.

By this time, the fully developed world had been able to sample the various plagues which had Winnowed his Flock on God's Threshing Floor, and they'd devised various immunoactivation viruses which they promulgated worldwide. These viruses carried proteins on their surfaces which led to the development of effective antibodies to harmful viruses, and bacterial vaccination technologies had mostly kept abreast of this viral-medical technology. These preventative diseases provided quite sufficient immune challenges, preventing deterioration of immune responses. The Prophet was not about to let this insult to one of the central tenets of the belief system which held his people together go unchallenged, even fifteen years after the war that had made it palatable had ended, also ending the reasons for the emegence of this odd cultural precept. He had ordered, long ago, the development of new biowarfare Flails of God with which to Thresh his human Grain, and remembering the plagues which had so effectively destroyed the monoculture crops, he resolved to not only thresh the grain, but to scatter new breeds of seed.

Also, since he envisioned a new wave of reproductive frenzy being necessary to replace the people who must inevitably die due to inadequate standing in the eyes of God (for which read: succumb to plagues), and those who would simply die in battle, he foresaw the need for a great many more females than were presently available. He had ordered certain researches, and satisfied with the results, he experimented further still.

It had once been necessary, in a population seventy percent female, to glorify the male, in order to promote more male births, to generate an army. He had been more successful than he had imagined, achieving in the second generation a 70%-30% male-heavy balance. Part of the glorification of the male had been, of course, the denigration of the female, whose sole glory was her ability to bear and raise more and better males. This had been carried a bit too far, with the standing of a woman of the Faithful being only a bit higher than the standing of the Animal- Men, the non-Survivors. They had no vote, and little voice. The sparse educational resources available to his regime had been lavished exclusively on male children, and few of those. His new technology would make it possible to provide ultimate rewards and punishments, creating women in a society where they were relatively scarce (unless one wanted to go into the parent generation, by this time, generally not so desirable after an average of nine children), and the potential to change powerful males into chattel females. Properly-leaked news and demonstrations of this ability only enhanced his power.

In mainland China, there were many similar cultural precepts, such as the desirability of male children, a history of female infanticide, and a Marxist predisposition towards the acceptance of pseudoscience, the more elaborate the better. China had indeed succeeded in halving its population over a thirty year period, levying heavy fines and even jail time on those parents who had more than one child. They also, once the money from their venture into international capitalism began to flow, paid cash benefits to women who acceeded to pressures to accept sterilization. Almost unnoticed, women had their one child, generally male (pre- conception gender-selection is an ancient technique), and went off to get sterilized. By 2010, more than half of China's women of childbearing age were sterilized, and had one male child. By 2020, most of the rest of the women, in an odd revenge against the Maoist overlords, had their one child, also male. Without a massive influx of women, China would suffer a quiet peaceful population collapse, sometime in the next generation.

The Prophet had contacted the Maoist overlords, and provided demonstrations. The Maoist overlords, determined that their culture, ideology and family lines should not vanish from the earth, entered into new, secret agreements with the HindAsians. The Chinese probably could have developed the technology on their own, but having little to lose and not much time, began to adjust the aim of their missiles, to refine their lightspeed strategies, prepared their dataworms, and waited for a propitious moment.

Go to In The Fall: Part Six.
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