Generation A (25 page)

—You know, Connie, people are probably wondering why we’re speaking the way we’re speaking right now.

—You mean, speaking like people did at the start of the twenty-first century instead of the modern way of speaking based on text messaging?

—That’s right, Connie.

—[giggle] It’s because the only people watching this prerecorded broadcast are those that never adapted to the new language and were left behind after the Rapture.

Language has come a long way since then, Ed.

—And has it!

—In the old days, people worried about words and grammar and rules.

—And it was a horrible mess, wasn’t it!

—You said it, Frank. And not the kind of mess you can remove with some club soda and a bit of elbow grease.

—[all chuckle]

—But once people smartened up and began speaking the way they texted and began shrinking language back to its origins in grunts and groans, people became more primal, more elemental . . .

—More
real
.

—
That’s
the word I was looking for, Connie. More real. More
authentic
.

—and once people became more authentic and more interested in using noises and sounds instead of words to communicate with others, their interior lives changed. The endlessly raging self-centred interior monologues came to an end. A holy peace and dignity fell over their lives. They accidentally became closer to God.

—and now they’ve gone right into God’s lap.

—where we are now, too!

—So farewell from eternity, you sticklers who remain behind.

—Saying good night from the Channel Three News headquarters, I’m Ed.

—I’m Connie.

—and I’m Frank.

—[all] Wishing you a happy forever!

DIANA

I looked at Julien. “Well. I didn’t see
that
coming.”

“The role of the artist is to shock—but not too much or else he’ll have to get a day job. Are there any more wasabi peas?”

“Later. It’s my turn to tell a story.”

Beef Rock

by Ms. Diana Beaton

The gourmet scout party from Gamalon-5 had pretty much given up on the planet Earth when it finally discovered a rare mammal called human beings, which were actually quite delicious. They’d tasted all the other animals, as well as pretty much everything in the ocean, but those very few humans hunkered in their caves were so rare that they had slipped under the tasting radar until the very end. Yes: people were undeniably . . .
scrumptious
.

“Commander, we’ve got to figure out some way of making these things multiply if we’re ever to secure a meaningful supply.”

“Lieutenant, that’s your job, not mine. Have they discovered hunting yet? They’ll never get to farming until they kill all the big, easy meat around them.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, you have your work cut out for you, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

The lieutenant and his squad went back down to Earth and handed the few scrawny humans they could find some stone arrowheads and some flint. They had to give hundreds of demonstrations of hunting and roasting before the humans could do it on their own.

And then the aliens sat back and waited for humans to wipe out all the megafauna—the mastodons and the moa birds and the sabre-toothed cats—after which they turned their attention to smaller creatures such as bears and buffalo. After all the large animals had been hunted into extinction, humans were forced to adopt agriculture.

“Commander, sir, there really is nothing like agriculture to make a species multiply, is there?”

“Indeed. It’s nice that the universe has at least
some
constants. What’s next in store for these tasty morsels?”

“We think they’re almost ready to learn to count and learn about ‘zero’—as well as metallurgy. But they’re still pretty primitive.”

“All in good time, Lieutenant.”

And so humanity was given mathematics and knives and ploughshares, and human numbers grew, but not quickly enough to please the hungry aliens.

“Lieutenant, this is taking forever. Stop trying to foist chimps and gibbons on me. I want
humans
. I want them to multiply, and I want them to multiply
now
.”

“Yes, sir.” He suggested the phonetic alphabet and the printing press. “That way, they can at least stockpile their intellectual ideas so that they don’t have to start from scratch all the time.”

“Let’s try that, Lieutenant.”

Printing presses—and hence books—accumulated. The industrial revolution became inevitable and, finally, humans went spawn-crazy. Lo, the citizens of Gamalon-5 began to truly gorge on massive quantities of rich, delicious, succulent human flesh. Life on Gamalon-5 became a gourmet nirvana.

One day the lieutenant made the observation that human beings who read large numbers of books tended to taste better than humans who didn’t. This intrigued the commander: “I’m listening, Lieutenant.”

“Sir, when the humans read books, it gives them a sense of individuality, a sense of being unique—a sense that something about their existence is special or, as they like to say, ‘magical.’ Reading seems to generate microproteins in their bloodstreams, and those eons give them that extra-juicy flavour.”

“Hmmm . . . well, whatever it takes to get the job done. But for Pete’s sake, stop harvesting so many humans near Bermuda. They’re beginning to catch on. Also, could you get these humans to introduce more nicotine into their systems? My wife loves the flavour it gives them, but she’s sick of marinating them all the time.”

“Yes, sir.”

By now, the food vendors of Gamalon-5 had gone into competition with each other in the burgeoning human flesh trade. Their nickname for Earth was “Beef Rock,” and the money was terrific. The lieutenant’s nephew generated catchy sales slogans:

OUR HUMANS READ MORE BOOKS!

INDIVIDUAL HUMANS—UNIQUE FLAVOUR!

ON SALE THIS WEEK: PHDS FOR 30 KROGS A POUND;

POSTGRAD STUDENTS 15 KROGS A POUND.

NEED A TASTE OF MYSTERY? TRY OUR “FILET OF CRIME

NOVEL ADDICT”

But then, in the 1990s, the quality of human flavour began plummeting. The commander consulted the lieutenant. “What is going on here?”

“Sir, as an unintended consequence of reading books, humans have made the next leap and have invented digital communications.”

“They WHAT!!!”

“I’m
so
sorry it happened, sir. We were on holiday, and it just sort of swelled out of nowhere.”

“So are they now using digital communications to conduct commerce, distribute moving image files and keep in contact with former schoolmates?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So they’re reading fewer books?”

The lieutenant sighed. “Yes, sir.”

“Then the situation is truly dire.”

The lieutenant asked, “Is there anything else, sir?”

“Just everyday worries. My teenage daughter has announced that she’s gone Spam on me.”

The lieutenant smiled: “going Spam” was a trendy phase among the teens of Gamalon-5, who thought eating humans was cruel. They opted instead for cans of Spam imported from Earth; nothing so closely approximates the oily, salty taste of cooked human flesh as the hammy goodness of Spam. “I’m sure it’s just a phase, sir.”

“Tell that to my wife, who has to put two different meals on the table every night.”

The next afternoon the commander was going through his files and summoned his lieutenant. “Lieutenant, it says here that book sales are higher than ever as the humans are using a technique called Amazon-dot-com to purchase them.”

“That is a deceiving statistic, sir. Amazon increases the need of humans to own books, but not necessarily to read them.”

“Drat.”

Time wore on and human meat became ever more unpalatable and consumption dropped dramatically. And after a point, the government of Gamalon-5 refused to subsidize the import of humans and soon barred the practice altogether. The lieutenant sighed as his ship flew away from Beef Rock one last time, leaving the humans to themselves and whatever gruesome fate they might cook up. He heaved a guilty sigh, turned around and scanned the universe, looking for new sources of meat.
Farewell, Beef Rock!

HARJ

“Ah. Such a bittersweet story, Diana.”

“Thanks, Harj.”

Everyone was mellow. The fire was down to embers, and a general tone of drowsiness prevented us from stoking it. Serge was frantically scribbling; Zack asked what he was writing.

Serge said, “You people are saying the most amazing things without even realizing it.”

Zack made a strange face and Sam asked him what was behind it. He said, “When I was growing up, whenever a teacher wanted to get me out of their classes, they’d always tell my parents how ‘amazing’ or ‘gifted’ I was, and that I ought to be in a different, better, more challenging school. So whenever I hear myself described in such a way, my antenna goes up. Serge, what is it about these stories of ours that’s so amazing?”

Serge looked a little bit as though he’d been caught with his pants down. After a few
ums
and
ahs
, he said, “In some ways, you’re telling the same story in different manners. And in some ways, you’re all telling a larger story without knowing it.”

Sam asked, “What story is that?”

“You’ll find out if you keep going.”

I said, “I think it is now my turn to tell a story—perhaps the last story of the evening. But before I do so, someone must place another log on the fire. I am still not used to the sensation of cold. As you all seem equally lethargic, I advise you to use rock paper scissors to select the stoker.”

Diana lost. She went to fetch a log and the others rearranged their blankets. Once everybody was again comfortable, I said, “I am also a good private investigator. You see, this afternoon, I was online and digging about, and this investigation led to my next story.”

The Liar

by Harj Vetharanayan

There was once a young scientist, and he must have been very smart indeed, because he worked for a large pharmaceutical company in a gracious and magical kingdom called Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, a place where style and intelligence lived side by side with great amounts of flair. When this young scientist first arrived, he was young and full of wonder, and he was assigned to work on a drug belonging to a new family of drugs—and new families of drugs don’t just pop up when you want them, so this was a big deal for the young scientist. What did these new drugs do, you ask? These drugs were designed to alter a person’s sense of time. The thinking was that there would be no immediate effect after swallowing a pill, but over a long period of time one would have the sensation that time was moving more quickly. If you were lonely or in prison or working in a call centre or working an assembly-line job, the drug would be a blessing—a boon to both commerce and a grossly overloaded penal system.

However, as though blessed by a wizard’s spell, the drug turned out to have unexpected properties. It gave its users a sense of calm individualism almost identical to that achieved while reading a novel. This news was exciting, indeed—science had created an antidote to the daily barrage of electronic information so common to the era! And as an extra magic bonus, the drug tended to keep people locked in the present tense. It removed from its users the burden of overthinking the future, which is, of course, a well-known cause of anxiety. Most magically of all, the drug’s users
stopped feeling lonely
. So many of life’s problems fixed with one pill! The young scientist felt like a pig in clover—and not only this, the scientist and his company were poised to become profoundly rich.

However
 . . .

. . . The drug was incredibly difficult to make in large quantities. But over the years, the scientist and his friends began making relatively significant leaps in the amount of drug they could produce in a day. And the more of it they made, the faster honeybees near the facility began to vanish.

As the drug finally became cost-effective to make in bulk and began to spread and enter the world at large, bee populations continued their quick decline. And it wasn’t just bees that were affected—other insects, too, after extended exposure, disappeared. Of course, the scientist and his co-workers eventually figured out that it was their highly profitable drug that was causing the bee trouble—but because it had required a decade of work and massive capitalization to put it into full production, they kept this secret from the world. They must have felt truly guilty for what they had done to the planet, yet they also wanted to get their costs back, and, being human, they weren’t happy merely to get their costs back—they instead chose to earn staggering profits. Bees were surely a small price to pay for a drug such as this one.

By the time the drug was in full production, bees were almost extinct; by the time the drug reached the global market, bees were gone, and the scientist and his co-workers had become crazy-rich. Insanely rich. More-money-than-the-gods rich.

One of the drug’s side effects was that its users became quickly addicted. They felt like they needed no other people in their lives—they left their spouses and families and the places where they lived. They stopped dating and voting and seeking religion. Even if they wanted to quit the drug, they couldn’t: quitting was impossible, physically and emotionally. The drug scarred users’ brains, rendering them permanently in need of more—a terrific thing for the drug’s makers, as it guaranteed perpetual sales. The scientist and all of his co-workers were as addicted to the drug as any of their customers. So while things were terrific, they were not so terrific at the same time. The gods are pranksters, indeed.

Then the young scientist—now not quite so young—heard of a young farmer in the middle of nowhere who had been stung by a bee in a highly visible manner that seemed entirely calculated to ensure that the world knew bees were still around. And then a young woman on the other side of the planet was stung in a similar highly visible manner. And then three more people were stung, one of whom later had a shock reaction to the scientist’s magical drug simply from opening a box containing it. It was the first time a person had experienced a shock reaction to the drug. It spurred the scientist and his colleagues to do all they could possibly do to figure out what was happening with these five bee people—they could be real trouble. Their systems likely contained something that resisted the new drug—antibodies so powerful that those few rogue bees that remained alive were drawn to sting these people in order to give humans hope and encouragement.

The scientist wondered if he could use these people to create an antidote to the drug, something that might lead to a cure for the addiction. That way drug-makers could have it both ways: money from getting people hooked; money from getting people unhooked. A bonanza. A gravy train.

So the scientist, who now essentially ran the company, used an almost unlimited amount of money and many of his firm’s connections to gather and isolate each person who’d been stung, telling them that he was looking for a way to bring back the bees.

The scientist placed his subjects in controlled environments for several weeks, where he and his team were able to extract body fluids at will. These fluids were checked for all sorts of minor proteins created by the subject’s mood and state of mind.

He then craftily persuaded the five bee-stung people to join him on a remote island, giving them the illusion of sanctuary. On that same island, he also began conducting an undercover study on the effects of his drug on a tightly knit tribe of non-users who had lived on that island for thousands of years.

The stung people trusted the scientist completely, and were they to find out what he’d been up to, they’d be shocked. The gods were certainly shocked! And the gods certainly had no idea what would happen to our scientist when the five test subjects learned the truth about their captivity.

Fortunately, one of the stung people was a lighthearted character who most people assumed was harmless and clueless. In fact, he was a good observer—good at locating patterns and assembling odd facts to reveal a larger picture. This subject was happy to be with a new family, but like the gods, he was unsure of what would happen next.