The mining mogul, a Boaz Tibon story to Michael Mangual’s Shattered Citadel Universe

Shattered Citadel

Every crisis has them, every war, and every nightmare: Buccaneers in the 17-century, arms dealers during the Cold War, and mining moguls in the mid 21^st century. Revered; despised; controversial to the very end, the bitter end.

But Willie Wanka was in class of his own.

No one knew where he came from or what his real name was. Even those who did not recognize the origin of his name (from a 20th century satiricalnovel) knew it was a fake.

Everyone who met him understood very quickly that he could not be trusted, yet he got away with everything, everything!

   When he got started he wasn’t much different from many other youngsters. In the emerging mining industries of Mars of the early 2040’s he was just another drifter looking for a bigger buck. But by 2051 he had a small fleet of mining drones cruising the Asteroid Belt ahead of everybody else. Including those that have been there since the 30’s. And when hell broke-out on Earth he made a killing, over and over again. Before and after a major offensive, by either side, his line of credit skyrocketed. “All the way to Sedna and beyond” the saying went. By 2065 he was the biggest independent employer in the solar system, (In a business of 30 drones per person).

  

When the course of the conflict changed, the Chinese decided to shut down his business. They reinforced the Russian battle group in the Asteroids Belt with two more Russian battle groups, one from Mars and one from the moon. Backed by 2 Chinese cruisers, they patrolled the belt for 3 years with no results. Wink was in the Saturn system. Later it was found that 3 high ranking Russian space corps officers were on his payroll.

He had his charm, his foresights, his speed, and a mysterious edge from a past life shrouded in obscurity. Good guy or bad gay he was an ace.

His private life was the most annoying mystery. No one knew if he was a homosexual or did he had a girl in every colony. Most of the time he was alone, just himself and his “Twinkies,” as he affectionately called his drones and other Robots.

Like many other such individuals through out history, he was flamboyant and eccentric. And he had his weakness. A mysterious cocktail of gas he loved to inhale. When a disgruntled business associate tried to poison the container, the stuff got spoiled, but so did the poison. Wink survived unharmed.

And as for the business associate?

He vanished a year later while mining the atmosphere of Venus.

When the war on Earth ended, reconstruction was a reasonably good source of income. Then the dispute between Earth and the colonies exploded into a new war, and everybody expected the mining moguls to get even bigger. Instead they went bankrupt.

In that conflict the space engineering corps of both sides used IREDs, (Instant Resources Extraction Devices) across the Asteroids Belt and in other parts of the solar system. The colonists had the best devices; Earth had the biggest fleet. And the mining moguls were useless, obsolete.

One by one they faded away, retiring or choosing sides. Some became annoying pirates that were dealt with easily. But Willie Wanka, Wink, vanished as if he never existed.   

Later, decades later, bits of information gathered by government agencies and individuals with a fascination with this horrific era, produced a probable picture. He pulled a Lorntz. Slowly, even before WW3 ended, he built a space ship able to reach a speed of more than 60% the speed of light. And according to the Einstein Lorentz equation that means his personal time is moving a lot slower than the rest of universe. If he didn’t blew up somewhere outside the solar system he could be back in a hundred years or a million. Depending how long and how fast he is traveling. With this conclusion interest was lost and he was forgotten.

500 years later, in what was just another busy day at Earth’s space harbor an unidentified autopilot vessel docked unannounced. Scanned instantly by the A. I. it was classified and treated as a safety hazard. Identification of the lone passenger came later, much later. After all the safety hazards were dealt with, and he was slowly pulled out. Somewhere in the huge memory bank a rarely used record of other nutcases that tried to pull a Lorentz spelled out his name.

In search of an expert a lone historian was ushered from Earth on a quick notice. Teamed with the medical technician they looked at him through the scanners and viewers of the medical tube he was placed in.

“Anything else?” asked the med-tech.

“No.” The historian approached the local communication unit and activated it by touch. On the screen appeared the logo of Earth’s treasury department. “Anything?” a faceless voice of an impatient man asked.

“Maybe” the historian gave a reply people of power hate to receive. “You will have sent your people to Tyche to find out”

“Tyche?” the voice exclaimed, “there is nothing out there, it had been searched countless of times.”

“In the right coordinates, transmit the right message and it will come to you.”

“What?” the voice held back it’s impertinence, but it was felt strongly in his tone.

“Him. Probably,” the historian replied.

 “What?” this time it was a voice of a woman, younger then the other voice.

“He downloaded copies of his personality to his drones and robots. That was his secret, thousands of little him.”

“With 21^st century technology?” the man at the other end found it difficult to believe.

“They knew the basics” The historian gave a rationale explanation.

“In theory” the woman said in an unconvinced tone.

There was a brief pause of silence.

“What about capital, heirs, secrets, anything of substance?”

“Sir, I was lucky to find this much. As for offspring, we can delete that option.”

 “How come?” they both asked, “well…” the historian was stepping outside his field of expertise, “according to the A. I. here someone took care of that when he was very young, someone professional”.

“Was it medical,” the woman asked,” abuse?  The DNA must have told you something?” She was now as puzzled as him

 “Sorry.” He said. “All it told is that he is some kind of a union between a hi-tech dynasty and a showbiz dynasty. The exact distance hasn’t been determined.” For a moment he spoke as if he was from the early 21^st century. They new riddles reawaken his old fascination. Bureaucrats however hate riddles; even the good-looking ones. From their end the link was severed.

“If he’s that important,” asked the med-tech, ”I know some alien technologies that could revive him for a while.”

For a moment or two the historian pondered the suggestion.

“And then what? You’ve heard the A. I.; his body is full of trashed nanobots. The G force made a mass out of them and his internal organs.”

“The nanobots were supposed to help counter the effects of the G force, and hold his inner body parts together” the A. I. spoke softly and slowly.

“Yea, yea, I gather that, and they failed,”

“Not quite” the A. I. continued unmoved by his impatience, “the failure was in correlating the strength of the G force and the length of the journey with the endurance of the nanobots,”

“And now they are a part of one big mess of goo and metal.” The historian made a long story short.

“In a matter of speaking;” the A. I. sounded offended.

In the silence that followed the med-tech looked at him waiting for a reply. But all he did was to stare at the tube. In his mind he saw that era coming to life with all its horrors.

“No.” he concluded, “whatever demons are chasing him, they need as much a rest as he does.” And left.

War World Z, epilog and prolog

They never thought it was a bug, an insect, when they called it a bug they meant bacteria, because to them it was either that or a virus. It did make a lot of sense when we think of this now, after all, all those people before dyeing and turning into zombies, were sick, very sick. And an insect is surely something that would have been seen.

What humans have seems to forget is just how huge, diverse, creative and cruel the insects’ world is, but mostly how unknown in it is to them. And to this particular parasite nature gave the prefect hideout from their inquisitive and sometimes paranoid eyes. It gave the ideal size, just between the very small and the microscopic.

For millions of years it had housed that niche, feeding off the bigger more familiar more visible insects. Its life cycle is very simple, or so their science knows so far. Science had identified two distinct conditions, named yellow spurs and red spurs.

Pale yellow spurs lived in the open, hiding in the dirt, in the dust of eroding rocks, or the bedding of rotten leafs, waiting for its would be host, a bee, a fly, a mosquito, a worm, whoever the unfortunate to came its way was. As a quiet swarm, they hid as one, rose as one, settled on the living skin of a passing by insect as one and penetrated it as one.

Inside they rested at once, then, slowly, changing, metamorphosing into the insatiable red spurs. Creators that could not live in the outdoors – but the inside were a buffet. There they ate, first in small bites, as small as their numbers, but as one meal was finished ten folds of them sprang out, hungrier then the spurs they emerged from, charging at their host with greater ferocity, crippling it until it couldn’t move, and growing inside it until it died. Only by then the spurs were still hungry, so they took control of the insect motorize functions, an exhausting task that made them hungrier, and with its body they charged at other members of their host species, and fed off them until they had finally fed their hunger to the point of satiation, gathering enough energy to transform themselves back into yeloow spurs, a thousand fold then the original numbers, just as the hosting corps disintegrated.

Occasionally, science had stumbled onto this, dismissing it as a rare case of cannibalism in the insect world. As for of the bigger creators their skin was to thick to penetrate, and if rarely an accident would have happen, and through an open flesh wound the pale yellow spurs would have found themselves inside a mammal or a bird, the splash of blood would have been enough to throw them out, even if they had stayed inside and transformed the worse they could do was to create a local infection, one that would have killed them long before it could damage their unsuitable host. When each swarm is very small compared to the size of all members the non-insects world the damage they could do was manageable. Even small lizards and rodents were safe from them. The only way they could harm was if an infected insect was eaten in whole. But most animals it seems knew to avoid them. Except for one species of intelligent mammals, usually protected by its rather large measures and aggressive digestion system. Usually protected, but not always and not that day.

Exactly when that day occurred had long ceased to be important to them, but the overall conditions correspond to what they have learned recently from captured sea zombies and from reexamined CPZPs - cryogenically preserved zombie parts.
Global Worming created ideal conditions for some of the insects to flourish, what was ideal for them was much better for those who fed off them, and at least in one place they became the dominate life form. With what history calls the recession affecting every corner of human lives, people needed a free source of food and with wild-lives nearly gone a deceptive picture of a flourishing bugs paradise would have been a vary tempting free meal. It is an agreed consensus among zombieists and historians alike that the natural habitat raided by the villagers form the yet unidentified Village Zero was completely contaminated. The villagers must have picked a lot of near death bugs thinking they got lucky. They didn’t, whatever was the amount of red Spurs they got inside their bellies, computer models vary, it was large enough to survive the onslaught of the body’s enzymes, adapt, grow, and feed of this new environment.

Medical experts are incline to believe that at that stage, when the spurs could have caused a minor stomachache an enema would have been enough, but zombieists doubt that. Without doctors to identify the problem in the first place, this recently new debate in human society is indeed pointless, as retired civil recovery expert Dr. Maharub Roshpal had pointed out, even if the best doctors with the best equipments were available on the spot in the first days of contamination, they would not have identified the cause on time. Not knowing what to look for - it is almost certain they would have fail just as they tragically did in the world’s best laboratories, in New York, Moscow, Paris and Sidney, and a few private ones in Japan South Korea and in the American Midwest.
What is agreed on is that by the time medical experts did reach the infected village it was too late, and spurs were fighting the human body as if it was a regular insect, and no medical procedure would have helped, even those known today. For the spurs themselves the new adaptation (mutation or otherwise) was far from perfect. They were still in a body they were not evolutionary designed to live from. They found ways to feed of the human body and cooperate in it in mega numbers, astronomically higher then before, but the human body was still too big for them to hold on too. Once it died they could make it move, but were unable to complete their life cycle and become pale yellow spurs again. Mathematical calculation had showed that a single infected corps, a zombie, would have to eat 500 live humans in order to fill its hunger and accumulate the necessary energy supplies needed for the transformation. And that without including the energy wasted in chasing the pray. True, zombies never got tired, but the red ooze that run in their system, a.k.a. the red spurs, did get hungrier, and feeding of the dead host was not an option.
Their problem was that this new type of host, the entire human race, was a trap, a very cruel one. Because once a human got beaten, he or she got infected, and after been very sick – zombies – new ones. Which meant one less source of food and an extra mega swarm to feed. Since humans fought back this was the dominant occurrence. This is the one part in these new revelations that humans have difficulty to accept, that it was a lose - lose situation for both sides. The more bodies they tried to eat the more bodies got contaminated, the more bodies their d. n. a. directed them to take control of, increasing their numbers into astronomical levels.
These new finding cleared out a lot of mysteries regarding the zombies, the no legged zombies that moved faster on two hands because the spurs inside them had two less limbs to control, blowing up heads did not prevent them from controlling the various body parts but it did prevent them from eating, which had a life threatening result for the spurs in the rest of the body, they starved to death. The famous “the perfect army for a total war” description of the zombies’ in mass attack, when an entire organism is committed to attack/eating, was something that existed in the insect world, as many entomologists noticed in the days of the ‘Great Panic’ and since, but didn’t connect the dots. The zombies ability to go through water, caused by the spurs original attraction to wet environment. Indeed, what led science to this long delayed revelation was the most puzzling mystery of all, the almost prefect adjustment of the zombies’ corpses to seawater. As it turned out, their flesh of those bodies was mummified by a preserver created by an interaction between the seawater and the red spurs secretion, what was known in popular culture as brown ooze or poop ooze.
As Captain Li Kuan Rui, who commanded the largest pre ‘Great Panic’ enclave wrote in his memoirs “There was nothing irrational about the way the zombies behaved, everything they did made perfect sense, we were just too irrational to figure it out”.

Now what is left for humans to find out is has any of the decomposing zombies produced pale yellow spurs, because if such spurs exist they undoubtedly carry a brew of every disease that have plagued humanity; and who are the natural enemies of these spurs.
As the famous historian who recorded the first accounts of the war commented: “We got all our fears answered, and all our fears revived.“

---

Author’s notes:

Max Brooks made a fine work in ‘War World Z,’ though as an Israeli who feels towards his politicians the same way many Israelis do, I find it odd the idea that of all the nations on earth Israel will be the one to take all the right measures in face of such global crisis. I wrote this piece just to say insects make a better explanation for zombies then germs or viruses. Though it has its own scientific problems.