Infinite Day

Infinite Day

Jason Micheal Dunn

Copyright 2013 Jason Micheal Dunn

Smashwords Edition

Discover other titles by Jason Micheal Dunn at Smashwords.com:

Poems by Metazoan

Jason and the Golden Thesis

Philosophy for Depressives Against Empirical Vampires

Dirty Pure

Something I Wrote the Other Day

Ever Again

Sure Fire

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INFINITE DAY

A novel by Jason Micheal Dunn

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: A Mind as Divine

Chapter 2: The Snake Man

Chapter 3: The Vault

Chapter 4: Stranger

Chapter 5: Sterilized

Chapter 6: Illuminating

Chapter 7: R.E.M

Chapter 8: We Don’t Need Another Hero

Chapter 9: GUTs

Chapter 10: Nymphtastic

Chapter 11: Enantiod

Chapter 12: To Infinity

Chapter 13: Sabretooth

Chapter 14: The Mesh of Gems

Chapter 15: Bitch

Chapter 16: A Loss of Soul

Chapter 17: The Witch

Chapter 18: Must be dreaming

Chapter 19: Fear

Chapter 20: Perception as Voodoo

Chapter 21: Infinite Day

Chapter 1: A Mind as Divine

Storms, as if with minds of their own, train their pacific eyes on the steel and concrete bastions that are our major cities, though when these powerful beauties bat their wild lashes, said bastions soon are battered and smashed, their own properties dashed against themselves, succumbing as they must to these ecologically new implacable maelstroms of just repercussions. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the increasing cold induced by ash cloud cover, each city’s prodigal wealth of heat pollution shines like a colossally flagrant emergency flare spilling argents out and up, into the night, summoning doom home, just as light summons squid from the deeps at night, the heat of our desperation attracts the ardour of cold lovers-cyclonic titans from the days of creation, rotating their hips, howling all the world to an end.

Auto immune deficiency syndrome has, as indeed originally predicted, slipped beneath the radar of concern during the intervening decades of gestation only to resurface as the inexorable plague of the end of days. One billion infected, Africa is a giant AIDS colony, a dumping ground for every gutless nation to offload their recently infected.

The cure is as controversial as the virus and twice as expensive. Nanodes, synthetic microorganisms, have their RNA molecules programmed to search and disassemble any virus cell atom by atom in nanoseconds. Sufferers with credit enough to pay for the cure are injected with billions of nanodes with instructions to kill AIDS cells on sight. Each and every carbon tube enzyme is manufactured by an artificial process of evolution to be far more robust and reliable than regular microorganisms. While regular enzymes speed up chemical processes literally a million times over, a flood of nanodes are able to perform a slew of biological marvels with far fewer errors in just a fraction of the time. They simply take any and every virus cell apart atom by atom in a matter of seconds.

However, the debate as to whether such treatment should be legalized at all rages over dangers the likes of which are said to make the Fukushima depth charge look like child’s play, which indeed it may as well have been, considering the blinding interplay of pride, despondency, and international buck passing that led to the greatest ecological disaster the human race had ever seen.

In any case, the major controversy arises over the issue of overpopulation. Since nanodes were first envisioned at the dawn of the 20th century by the futurist Feyeraband, long before such speculative musings were considered in all seriousness, the equally unlikely danger of unstoppable self-replication was also prophesized. It was imagined that if one nanode could build another nanode out of the molecular material in its environment in just a single minute and each machine new and old assembled another in the next minute then such exponential growth could see the entire mass of the Earth eaten and transmuted into a massively dense devouring cloud in just three and a half days, provided they could in fact consume the molten core and survive. A moot point considering none would remain to witness the virtually impossible.

After thousands of years and dozens of civilizations achieving the halcyon heights of luxury in both quality of life and peaceful relations, able to partake in the wealth of education and superabundant opportunities to advance the betterment of all human life, time and time again, those with wealth and opportunity have turned their backs on humankind in order to daydream further and further into slave fuelled decadence.

The death of the oceans has come and gone. The utter homogeneity of edible varieties of grains is an uncomfortable fact in the making with millions dying in the bottom of the bell curve every hour. Human rights are cashmere baby blankets sold by Corporations who wield the only rights. They own the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the right to buy or sell anything under the sun. Freedom has a price tag and to live means to participate in the sale of your innate ideals while you purchase a portion of someone else’s freedom.

These were the only four fundamental factors bathing Odette’s burnished mind: ecology, pathology, technology, and morality. So many distractions had ceased to be for her, meditations on the spurious bleached from her everyday moment by moment, all but completely. Her tectonic passions, debilitating hypochondria, psychotic technophobia, her clinical depression, had been insurmountable, immutable constants in a universe of unfathomably pervasive distraction.

All gone.

The losses had been too many, the scrambling desperation that so marked her tortured teenage years, her twisted twenties, and dirty thirties, had left her scoured psyche free of purchase whatsoever. Her wide-open consciousness had been punished for being true and intelligent all her life, first bored out by the drills of rote learners, then sculpted by the failing planes of the human behavioural bell curve. There was no more room for mistake. There was no such thing as mistake. Her polished mind was a convoluted toroid smoothly finished by the song of the universe whistling through the wholes of her brain.

She knew exactly what to do and she was certain that the emerging results would be beyond the human capacity to reasonably expect. There was nothing this world could offer her. It had failed her so utterly she looked instead toward the next world, the world she had imagined since she was little; the world that had evolved to keep in tune with the soundness of her developing logic and in sync with the immutable rhythms of her idealist heart.

I will immerse myself in the nanode bath waiting for the near death state of lowest metabolic rate to be fully induced. You two will monitor my condition from this control room. Odette was a striking woman, petite, long straight black hair recently all shaved off, skin white as white ever so lightly freckled across her cheeks, and cold as cold. Her demeanour would best be defined as imperious. Too many heart-breaks had interred her smile in the grave of the future. She wouldn’t allow anyone, especially a man, see her lips alive with mirth, they might get the wrong idea, as they are certainly wont to do. She was no longer given to heartless dalliance, nor was she taken with flippant or inane concerns. She couldn’t care less for fashion, nor art, both having ceased to serve any true function. For the most part style had become a tumescent malignancy swallowing its own dwindling substance. Or so she told herself. Her mind, able to deny excess in an artefact whilst simultaneously embracing its essential conatus, its human striving, was able to gently touch upon the least part, which was paradoxically the forgotten whole.

So if you don’t survive denaturation and we are unable to revive you, we should depopulate. He was referring to the nanode population in the bath. Lance had given up normal human affectations in Odette’s presence. Her unresponsiveness had murdered his regular ebullient charisma halfway through the first day of working in their cramped lab. There was still a certain pleasure he gained from their mutual sterility however. The absence of humour and any warmth whatsoever provided their interactions with an unadorned familiarity. Their often unspoken cooperation in close proximity made their terse trade in data and eye contact somehow open, engendering an unvoiced and unacknowledged loyalty in him. Somehow her impeccable manner had robbed him of desire whilst stealing his eye simultaneously.

That’s right. Also…? She tilted her head just so, as she always did when testing his procedural knowledge.

Slade fielded the question, If the nanodes reach an over-population threshold we are to flood the vault with neutered disassembler nanodes. Unlike Lance in an abundance of ways Slade was still professional having long since given up criticising the project and its superabundance of what-ifs. Where Lance was swarthy and unmarried, Slade was almost pink, an albino, even his wife was an albino, and they were truly in love. They’d met at varsity while finishing their PHDs in Microbiology. Some people had all the astronomical luck. All new alabaster Ken and Barbie!

And if I do survive denaturation…? Lance and Slade flickered a glance in each other’s direction, neither had got used to Odette’s neutral attitude toward what Slade had once called, the nerdiest suicide he could never have even imagined. He had called it that to her face, and he had done so with fiercely controlled vehemence. Odette’s unreactive mien had absorbed his abhorrence like the angelic visage of a statue, seamlessly flowing on to elucidate eloquently if soullessly on the finer grain of her ingenious process, finishing with the disclaimer contract and exorbitant rate of remuneration.

That was the third day we had all worked together, the third day of induction through the tiered stages of her process, and the first day the pieces of the puzzle had begun to be put together in their uncanny tessellation. It was just after Slade’s shock and then dismay that his mood had also been murdered. Something about Odette and her lone genius stripped personality of the extraneous, like an autoclave. That was her nickname when she was out of ear shot. "The Autoclave wants nano-feed synchronized to inject at upwardly graduating increments in order to elude residual immune response resulting in toxic shock and death. Are you sterilized by that, Slade? I’ve never been more sterilized in my life, Lala. The question is does that sterilize you? Hey, I was born sterile. Your mother’s sterile." Eyes grinning if not their mouths they carried on in that fashion tirelessly.

It had only been three months of instruction, drills, and test runs and since then life had lost meaning in the most meaningful way previously unimaginable. They were clean, as if they had been junkies or something, but what had they been strung out on?

If you survive, we should receive confirmation from you…and…continue to monitor the data even as we absorb the content of your relay. Slade’s moribund tone betrayed his lack of conviction. Odette, as always, surged onward, immune to attitude.

Get a good rest. Tomorrow we begin. Remember not to go to bed too early Lance, you have second shift tomorrow.

Yes, yes, Mistress Clavicus. Thy will be done. And her face betrayed a delightful hint of amusement, a miracle, her inhumanly blue eyes shone with warmth that suffused her unmade up face in a naked beauty neither of them had ever seen her reveal. She was a fucking unattainable goddess. Even when the invisible smile vanished into the compressed blue ice of her eyes, her chill had taken on sardonic hues they couldn’t quite be sure were actually there. The guys shared another knowing glance, not hiding their own amusement. She was happy, and just smiling at her was teasing enough for them.

This might actually work after all. We might not be accomplices to murder. For a timeless second the glint in each other’s eyes swore the impossible, forsaking the all but forgotten likelihood that they would have to follow procedure and sterilize the Autoclave. Killed by her own failed ambition, fools easily manoeuvred into the corner of such a morbidly lucrative and inevitable eventuation, she tasked them to get rid of the evidence.

Every single