Before and After the Party
by Rudi Dornemann
Clara said she would do the final tidying herself. The apartment’s cleaning cycle wouldn’t finish before six, and that left less than an hour to decorate before the guests arrived.
The living room sang a chime of agreement; dust mice scuttled back into the baseboards.
While Clara cleared coffee table clutter, previewed panoramas on the walls, and pushed chairs into configurations that opened the floor for dancing without blocking easy passage to and from the kitchen, the local sun belched a wave of X-rays.
Some radiation made it through the city shield, but microscopic machines in Clara’s blood repaired the damage almost as quickly as it occurred, re-knitting DNA and patching leaky cell membranes. She put her feet up on the hassock for a minute, drank a lemonade the kitchen gave her, then realized it was later than she thought, and jumped up to change clothes.
The apartment was ready in time — so was Clara — and the party was a great success. Richard was there, and Mary Maddox. The McClellans, the Spenders, the Rosseters — they were all there.
No one noticed when, sometime after ten, another storm of X-rays overwhelmed the shield and outstripped the nanomachines’ ability to heal. Clara just had time to feel a wave of nausea before relays clicked in the walls and everyone was loaded up to their virtual backups in computers miles underground.
Radiation baked the city and seared the dying bodies of its inhabitants. (Clara lay in the doorway to the kitchen, one hand extended toward Richard.) The little mouse robots were busy all night with the ashes.
At dawn, when all the levels were safe and green, tiny machines wafted through the city like smoke, rebuilding from memory everything right where it should be. Relays clicked and everyone was loaded back into new-built bodies.
Clara woke and stretched, watching dust drift through a blade of sunlight that came in past the curtain, dust which, the morning before, had been her eyes. She got up, and asked the house to buy her flowers. The house chimed in answer.
Hornets the Size of Grapefruits
by Luc Reid
By this time the warehouse was overgrown with moss and filled with chittering, scampering, slithering, hissing, and buzzing life. I had beavers as big as football mascots, flowers that ate small lizards, and hornets the size of grapefruits. What I really needed, though, was a way to make the magic extend beyond the dirty concrete walls of the warehouse, to spill out into the greasy alley and burst forth into the city, to turn the streets into green, algae-choked rivers and the skyscrapers into trellises for brilliantberry and humweed vines. And I was pretty sure that feeding the live, virginal body of Rapid Man’s girlfriend Grace Angeline to the sorcerer plant would do it.
“Holy damn,” whispered Grace Angeline. “What is this place?”
“It’s the world as it was intended to be,” I told her. “A world that hasn’t been plowed under and burned and beaten back and poisoned by mankind. It’s humanity’s cradle … and soon it will be humanity’s grave.”
“You’re insane,” she said. “… and yet, I understand where you’re coming from.”
Then there was a shrieking sound, like the noise a bomb makes as it splits the sky, and the next moment Rapid Man was standing in front of me, all white and silver in his costume, his hand out in his trademark Rapid Strike pose.
“Put her down, Chancey Gardener,” he said.
“Wait … then you favor global warming?” I said. “Even now, colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctic are dying–entire colonies–because of melting ice cover. You’re all right with that?”
“What’s that got to do with …”
“Biomass, Rapid Man. For god’s sake, study your science! More plant life in the context of a balanced ecosystem of plants, animals, and microorganisms means less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and less global warming. If you intervene, it will be your fault that these plants can’t expand into what should have been their natural sphere, your fault that those penguins die.”
“But …” said Rapid Man, stymied for a moment. It was exactly as I had expected: no superhero can be seen as a penguin-hater. I pitched Grace Angeline toward the sorcerer plant and hummed a command to my hornets, who converged on Rapid Man like rain converging on a puddle.
He recovered quickly. Before the hornets had even reached him, he had run in a great loop and stripped off the wings of each, letting the poor insects plummet to the ground. He caught Ms. Angeline in mid-air, whisked her away so quickly I couldn’t even note his direction, and was back to snatch me up by the front of my shirt before I could sneeze.
Well, it had been worth a try, but obviously there was only one way to defeat Rapid Man. I wished my plants a silent farewell and detonated the nuclear device.
