Sequence Six: The Cull

Protag was just sorting through a half dozen emur cartridges, inspecting each for damage and any identifying labels as to what they might contain, when the entire department was summoned. Everyone left his benches, enclaves, and recliners, and made his way to the open space at the front of the massive, otherwise cluttered room. The muttering and complaints started, a low murmur, as everyone was assembling.

This really wasn't the time for more exhortations and rhetoric-rich speechifying by Supervisor Gareth. Everyone was already working hard; today, like the past several days, was going to be unusually demanding. The week before, Search Team Six had found a wealth of emurs at a single site -- three crates' worth -- and just sorting through the find was a time-consuming business.

In the world as it once was, emurs -- or MRs, mind-recordings -- were little more than experiential trinkets, the direct-interface VR equivalent of home movies. Early critics of the technology had dismissed it as nothing more than hi-tech vanity: One technophobe had written in an editorial that emurs were nothing but "more ingenious pandering to the human flirtation with ego; indeed, this is nothing more elevating than the ultimate selfie."

Protag wasn't sure what a "selfie" was, but when he'd found that quote back in his days as a class-one data-miner picking through stacks of decrepit newspapers and magazines, he'd found it sufficiently amusing to scan and transfer it to his personal screen. It still hung there, in the corner, though buried under several other documents and images so that only a pale yellow corner showed.

Protag's work these days was considerably more time-consuming and arduous, a fact the supervisors didn't seem to factor into their quota calculations. Protag was quick at reading and parsing information, and his performance had earned him a promotion to the ranks of those who perused the old emurs.

But it wasn't as though one could simply scroll through mind-recordings. They were designed to be experienced in the manner of true life, and that could only happen in real time. If you were in, you were all in, because to engage in an emur was to assume the perspective, and the mental state, of the person who had made it.

Protag had never made an emur himself. No one had in over thirty years, since The Cull had driven humankind into underground communities like The Warren. Cartridges were single-use and could not be erased or overwritten; blank cartridges must still exist out in the ruins, but the search teams had never brought any back. Nor were there any recording cerebrates in The Warren, at least none that Protage knew about. The equipment he and his colleagues used were playback-only cerebrexes, at least according to the technologists. Protag supposed some recording models must still exist, and he sometimes wondered whether they were hidden or deliberately left abandoned. He'd heard a rumor once that all cerebrexes could be used for both recording and playback, but he'd examined his own equipment and never been able to work out how one might use it to make a new mindrecord.

In any case, the people of The Warren had little to document except the daily pressures of job performance and social conformity. Who would be interested in that? Life here was the same for everyone, all the time; it wasn't like surface life had been, with enormous living space and personal liberties to match. For the survivors who lived in The Warren, it was a matter of automatic reflex to monitor each other for signs of social deviation, not to mention any sign of the dreaded disease.

Rather, for any sign of any disease. Nobody knew exactly what The Cull was, and all that could be gleaned from the existing record was that there seemed to be no precise and specific etiology. The disease struck quickly and left its victims dead, but the symptoms and cause of death covered a bewildering range. In some instances, the progress of the affliction seemed to mimic a vastly accelerated course of congestive heart failure; in other cases, it was the renal system that broke down; and it wasn't unusual for victims to suffer some sort of senile dementia before slipping into a coma and then death. The records indicated that the affliction could kill in as little as twelve hours from the initial onset of symptoms, or leave a patient lingering for several months.

More than a few people questioned whether The Cull had been a rash of different health crises striking all at once; others wondered if it was really a disease at all, positing that industrial pollution of air and groundwater, or perhaps the destruction of the ozone layer, might have accounted for the sudden decline in human numbers. The Medical Authority insisted that The Cull was real and was a single disease, despite its many guises. Moreover, the Medical Authority had insinuated, more than once, that The Cull had not passed the survivors over. It was still waiting out there in the mostly-abandoned cities or perhaps latent within the bodies of the survivors. The Cull was certain to come back, the Medical Authority warned, and they had to have a way to fight it.

To date, this was only speculation based on scant evidence. The Authority's ministers stuck to their interpretation, saying it was the most likely explanation. But, they admitted, nothing could be known for certain until enough data were recovered, be it from cryopreserved tissue samples, literature review, or... the latest area of intensive focus... the old mind-recordings. Reviewing recovered emurs in the hope of finding some crucial first-person, direct experience of The Cull's initial outbreak was, therefore, a high priority.

Progress was slow despite everyone's best efforts. There were hundreds of millions of emurs, and the search teams could only bring in so many at once; each excursion to the outer world was highly involved, taking weeks of planning and heaps of special equipment.

But the resource expense was not questioned. The Cultural and Historic Authorities had as much invested in the emur review program as the Medical Authority did. Cerebrex technology recorded not just the sense impressions recorded by the users, but their entire mental process, which academics called the mindbase: The sum of an individual's attitudes, memories, feelings, and influences. Entering into recorded experience was, in effect, temporarily becoming the person who had created the mindrecord.

Academics got almost teary-eyed when they expounded on the possibilities for recovered human knowledge of all sorts. Even a wedding emur, or a mindrecord of a birthday party, a bar mitzvah, or a quincea�era celebration might contain hundreds, if not thousands, of clues about pre-Cull humanity, an affluent and technologically sophisticated era full of paradoxically superstitious and vacuous people. The desire to understand pre-Cull culture went deeper than a wish to resurrect lost art, music, literature, and scientific knowledge; there was also a thought that something in the mentality of the age could provide illumination. There was no Sociological Authority -- yet -- but there were still sociologists, and some among them believed that The Cull might well have been a psychological phenomenon akin to mass hysteria, in which the bulk of humanity had simply perished due to a critical mass of disillusionment, ennui, hopelessness, or some other emotional malady.

Perhaps it had even been a toxic combination of many psychological factors: Too much time spent in "cyberspace" (which Protag only fuzzily understood as some sort of communally experienced virtual reality environment). A lack of religious faith (which struck Protag as ludicrous: From what he knew of religious faith, he thought it an illness in and of itself). Loneliness. Familial disintegration. Too much processed food. (Protag took this as rhetoric from fanatics seeking to ban cooking.) Loud music; violent movies; online dating. (Protag had no idea what that last item might have been.) The mass media of the time was full of commentary and analysis about these things. No one who wasn't a sociologist took these notions seriously, either back then or even now, but still the question lingered.

There were whispers that the Defense Authority had a vested interest in the program. The Warren was not the sole remaining repository of human survivors: Other bands were out there, too, some of them even living on the surface, whether in the woods or in the derelict cities. If The Cull had been a result of some sort of advanced weaponry, none of those other pockets of survivors could be allowed to acquire it. Who knew what they might do? Everybody knew that the surface dwellers were mad: Religious zealots, most of them, preaching about Apocalypse, and Judgement, and God's Wrath. When search teams didn't make it home, it was the zealots who were blamed. The unspoken, but abiding, belief was that the zealots were cannibals.

***

"You really need to look at this," Anaxis had said, pressing a cartridge into Protag's hand. It was against regulations, but it was an irresistible perk to the job: Anaxis and Protag passed especially juicy sex emurs to one another, or shared other kinds of recorded experiences they found especially meaningful. Anaxis loved emurs that documented hiking trips, skiing expeditions, snorkeling adventures, anything outdoorsy; Protag, in turn, loved records that preserved practical knowledge: A carpenter building a wall, a potter building a bowl out of clay, or an archaeologist carefully scraping away layers of earth to reveal lost secrets. But with so many newly arrived emurs to review, there wasn't going to be time for any such extracurricular pleasures.

"Take it," Anaxis insisted, undeterred. "You really need to plug into this. You really do. You have to trust me, it's important."

That had been yesterday afternoon. This morning's assembly, called by Supervisor Gareth, turned out to have a resonance with that moment: Once everyone was gathered, he announced that Anaxis had died the night before. A collective gasp shuddered through the personnel. Several people near Protag turned their eyes in his direction, knowing they'd been friends. Gareth kept on: There were no details, he said. Some sort of accident, he said. That was all anyone knew, or at least all the Authorities were willing to share at the moment.

After a moment of reflective, respectful stillness... shocked silence, really... Gareth added, "No one would understand better, or be more pleased, than Anaxis if you were to honor his life and work by redoubling your own efforts rather than allow yourselves to be distracted at this crucial time. Remember: The Cull is out there. We have to be prepared."

A few people shook their heads in disgust at Gareth's exploitation of the tragedy to put in another plug for increased productivity, but everyone set to work, including Protag. It was a relief, after the jolt and grief of such tragic news, to lose himself in the mindrecords he encountered that day: A Passover dinner. A fiftieth anniversary celebration. A zoologist's foray into a lion preserve to observe and record his sense impressions of a pride of big cats. The mauling the zoologist suffered ended the emur on a dismal note that made coming back to Protag's own sense of loss all the more acute.

That was when Protag remembered the cartridge Anaxis had pressed onto him the previous afternoon. What had he seen that he simply had to share, despite the pressure everyone in the lab felt to work at maximum efficiency to discover any useful clue?

Protag snapped the cartridge into the cerebrex. Machine and medium interfaced, and the data began to load. The cerebrex tied into Protag's synapses, and then...

He wasn't Protag any more. He was Daniel Exup�ry, director of the U.N. Biological Threat Commission. Exup�ry and his wife Therese were frolicking on a beach in Mallorca: Clear teal water, faultless white sand, exuberant blue skies, and such a sun! They played with their young children, building sand castles and then watching them melt into the surf. Two hours went by, then another twelve minutes or so, and that was when Exup�ry received a call on his PCD.

The tiny video screen lit up with the tense face of Exup�ry's right hand woman, Emily Duvore. Emily was saying something about a plague -- a wave of death that had been mistaken for a widespread outbreak of swine flu but then suddenly surged in severity. The illness wasn't located to any one nation: It was already appearing around the globe in a way that seemed to have no discernible pattern. Just that morning, hospitals in most of the world's major cities had become overrun -- not so much by the stricken, most of whom were dying more quickly than they could be helped, but rather by panicked healthy people who feared they might have been exposed to some sort of contagion.

Protag came out of the mindrecord, blinking and thrilled: He'd found it! Anaxis had hit upon exactly what the Medical Authority was so anxious to find!

But... why hadn't he turned the mindrecord in? Why had he given it to -

Exup�ry was in his lab, fumbling with the cerebrex he'd rapidly donned and talking to Emily. "I think this will work. I paused the recording session when I got the call, and that was about four hours ago. That shouldn't affect recording should it? -- It's a brand new unit and the power cell is still more than half charged... Do we have any cerebrex chargers around?"

Nothing. It was like peering into static. Worse - the eye could discern, or invent, fleeting images in static. No such suggestions of coherence jumped out of these data. What Exup�ry was seeing here was pure, maddening chaos. The world outside the medical research complex was quickly sliding into a similar state of riot and mayhem; something had to be done, some answer found, and soon.

Protag surfaced in his comfortable chair, a recliner scavenged from a derelict department store and thoroughly decontaminated before being brought into The Warren a few years before. He'd heard of these kinds of emurs, which contained multiple mind-recordings. Everything he'd surveyed until now had been single-experience records; Anaxis had encountered a couple multi-entry mind records, and had told him it was jarring to play them back. There was a gap between each recording that allowed users to resurface to their own identities for a few moments; would the cerebrex engage him once more with new thought records? Or was this all Exup�ry had managed?

Even if this was all there was, the information was invaluable. Protag was no scientist, and certainly no epidemiologist; but Exup�ry had been, and Protag had absorbed enough of the man's expertise to grasp, roughly, what the data had been telling him. The experts would glean even more -- and, importantly, retain even more after encountering the mind-record. The technical details were already evaporating, like a dream, from Protag's memory, since he had no comparable knowledge base of his own to anchor them to.

Something more: The experts who would review this record would also taste the fear and horror that Exup�ry had been feeling. Protag's thoughts switched from elated to appalled, recalling what it had been like for the poor man, there at the beginning of The Cull. It --

Exup�ry brought his hand down from the cerebrex, which he had just taken off pause. Then he focused once more on the image he wanted to record, an image captured by a scanning electron microscope and enhanced by a sophisticated computer program.

"Mon Dieu," he breathed.

"Mais non," she said.

Protag startled out of the mindrecord with a gasp, struggling to hold on to the flash of insight that had come to Exup�ry all those years ago. It was fading, and Protag knew it was essential, crucial... shattering...

"A few minutes more is all the cassette has room for, and the power is running low," Exup�ry said. "I will be brief and to the point. Please save questions or argument for after." He was full of anxiety that this final recording be as clear, as complete, and as definitive as possible. He stood at the head of a long table, a projector remote in his hand. The screen behind him was filled with animated imagery of tables and diagrams, numbers and maps.

"That, my friends, has been the entire human race for most of the history of the human race," Exup�ry continued, thumbing the remote and scrolling through the related graphics. "Only in the last couple of centuries have delayed marriage and later-life parenting become the norm, and then only in wealthier nations and prevalently among the better-educated. Their lineages are not yet affected, because they have not yet reached the terminus. Understand me clearly here: The fuse is not longer in their cases; the burn has simply been slowed and the detonation delayed. But in two, maybe three more generations... " Exup�ry lost his voice. His throat had constricted; his knees grew weak, and he reclaimed his seat. "It's the end," he said, barely able to speak.

The mindrecord ended. The cartridge's gel crystal could contain nothing more.

Everything he had ever been told about The Cull was false. Protag stared at his surroundings, his shock heating into panic and then rage as he suddenly experienced his own revelation: The Medical Authority had known all along. The falsehoods were not simply the result of ignorance and error, but had been carefully constructed to obscure the truth. Protag and the other archival researchers were not just the reviewers who sorted through the old records; they were the disposable first layer between the elite and the real world. Anyone who stumbled onto the truth, as Anaxis had done, alerted the Authority to the existence of inflammatory evidence that disproved the official lies. Luckless souls like Anaxis... or maybe Joris, the year before, or Amelle and Briony, three years before that... anyone who discovered the truth could be eliminated before word got out, the evidence gathered and suppressed, the people kept in fear and ignorance. The elite would remain coddled, protected, and lawless.

Protag's mind reeled, but he knew he had to steady himself and apply his wits to the problem, just as Exup�ry had done.

There was no other recourse, he realized. His assumption that the elite were simply preserving their own cushion of privilege probably had some validity, but there was more at stake.

There might have been other ways to do it, but the only constructive response to the truth was to tell a lie. The Cull was not a plague waiting on the surface or in some reservoir located in the cells of a luckless Patient Zero. The Cull was part of every human being, and always had been. Just as a single person aged, fell ill, and died, so the race in its entirety was languishing, succumbing, slipping into mortality. To tell the truth would be to crush hope, sow madness and social incoherence, and steal the one slim chance humanity had: The hope that with enough information, and enough focused research, a solution could be found.

Two or three generations, Exup�ry had said. That had been a generation ago. No wonder the Authorities were so keen to have people delay marriage, so insistent that scarce resources and controlled apportionment dictated a deliberate and restrained birth rate. And the program to bank frozen ova and sperm --�was it the fail-safe the Medical Authority had claimed, just in case The Cull came rampaging back? Or was it a hedge against the blank wall of the forty-two-thousandth generation toward which every family line was headed?

A man could offer billions of sperm, but a woman had only a few hundred viable ova throughout her life. How long could the human species be sustained using the genetic material of The Warren's inhabitants, which numbered less than two thousand? Would the search teams become raiding parties, seeking out and abducting genetically viable members of other communities? To what other extremities might they have to resort? Cloning? No one had attempted human cloning since before The Cull; records suggested that attempts at human cloning failed most of the time, and the fetuses that survived to term usually had some sort of physical or mental defect. Religious and moral outrage had stalled the necessary research almost before it even began, in the late 20th century; any modern cloning program would have to start from scratch, taking years or even decades to launch. And it wasn't was though The Warren had the equipment or expertise on hand to re-create and improve upon lost cloning technology. Even if time were no object, resources were already stretched.

There might not be any way around this, Protag realized. The same thread of terror that had writhed and snaked through poor, long-dead Exup�ry probed along his own nerves and veins.

Protag was no longer sure what his role in all this would be, but he knew what he had to do. He had to turn the emur in; the Authorities must already know it existed, because they had eliminated Anaxis. They'd eventually find their way to Protag in search of the emur. But if Protag went to them first, and made it clear he understood the larger goals behind the lies and the killings, maybe he could buy himself the time he needed -- if not for justice, then for this shabby, rotten plan of theirs to work.

The only plan they had left. The only plan they were ever going to have at the end of the world.

For Nick.