Mechanical Animals by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hex Publishing
Published: 2018-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

It was only fifteen years later when the journalist experienced a significant stroke and was rendered largely paralyzed, that he remembered the details of his brief capture, though what he was asked and how he was released remained lost to memory. “The journalist” wasn’t quite the right term for the man anymore—even college campuses hadn’t employed writers for their PR organs in years. Things had changed. First had come the major mechanimals: robotic elephants, and safaris that allowed tourists to hunt them down and keep them wound via the gigantic if purely decorative keys on their backs. As the animals died off, they were replaced, but not in the order in which the ecosystem was collapsing. The big ones were rolled out first, like cars used to be. Tigers and orangutans and wildebeests and great golden bears, those last beloved of Silicon Valley. Every seven-year-old scion of a techie family rode one to school. The bulletproof golden bears could eat rampage shooters, it was believed, though this feature was never widely tested in the field.

Only later came microdrones in the shape of perfect dragonflies and hummingbirds, then deer ticks. They worked in subtle swarms, their microsensors recording sight and sound, and even collecting and analyzing the molecules sensed by human olfactory and gustatory systems. All that was knowable was soon known, at least by some, and they used that information to multifarious ends. Nations fell. The economy collapsed, then harmonized. The average workday shrunk to four four-hour days, and much of that was spent on various personal WiFi-capable devices, buying shoes and trading quips and whatnot.

Then the ticks started infecting real animals, real people. One of the last professional acts of the journalist before forced into retirement by politico-economic forces he could barely comprehend was the coining of the term “Lymewire Disease”—a joke dependent on what was even then an aging reference—for the spread of Borrelia burgdorferi, which the micromechanicals carried more successfully than their organic predecessors due largely to their capacity to capture odor molecules and taste solutes. The microscopic pouches in which the mechticks seized the molecules were also breeding grounds for Lyme bacteria. Though lacking the ability to lower human resistance to B. burgdorferi spirochetes as organic deer ticks did, mechticks were so much better at evading detection than organics that their targets were repeatedly exposed to the bacteria, and infection was concomitantly more likely.

The journalist was an old man now, and suffered from Lymewire Disease, which was dramatic irony enough for him. And then, after his stroke—due to cerebral vasculitis caused by Lyme neuroborreliosis—well, he was upset as he was inarticulate. He was fetched by a Ganza, a peculiar aerial swing powered by a flock of automaton geese as in the famed early novel The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin, and deposited in a hospital to be, if not rehabilitated, at least kept alive so that he could keep sequestering carbon and thus help mitigate climate change.

The questions came flooding back.

Did Iglesias say anything

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