Weather Monsters wasn’t bad either: the game threw extreme weather events at your player – a puny human avatar of either gender – and you tried to see how long your player could survive them. With points won, you could purchase tools for your avatar: boots that allowed it to run faster and jump higher, lightning-proof clothing, floating planks for floods and tsunamis, wet handkerchiefs for covering its nose during brush fires, Joltbars for when it was trapped under a thick wad of snow due to an avalanche. A shovel, some matches, an axe. If your avatar survived the giant mudslide – a killer event – you’d get a whole toolbox and a thousand extra points for your next game.
The one Zeb played the most was called Intestinal Parasites – a nasty gucklunch the biogeeks thought was hilarious. The parasites were truly ugly, with rebarbed hooks all around their mouths and no eyes, and you had to nuke them with toxic pills or deploy an arsenal of nanobots or moteins before they could lay thousands of eggs in you or creep through your brain and out your tear ducts, or split themselves into regenerating segments and turn the inside of your body into a festering patty-melt. Were they real, or had the biogeeks made them up? Worse, were they gene-splicing them right now as part of a bio-weaponry project? Impossible to know.
Play Intestinal Parasites too much and you’d get nightmares, guaranteed, said the game’s running slogan. So, never one to do as he was told, Zeb did play it too much, and he did get nightmares.
Which didn’t stop him from creating an alias of the game, then reworking one of the hideous mouths so that it functioned as a gateway. He stashed his code in a triple-locked thumbdrive for safekeeping, then parked it at the back of his supervisor’s desk drawer in a nest of rubber bands, used nosewipes, and orphaned cough drops. No one would ever look there.
Bone Cave
Cursive
Toby is at work on her journal. She doesn’t really have the energy for it, but Zeb went to all that trouble to bring her the materials and he’s bound to notice if she doesn’t use them. She’s writing in one of the cheap schooltime drugstore notebooks. The cover has a bright yellow sun, several pink daisies, and a boy and a girl, rudimentary figures of the kind children used to draw. Back when there were human children – how long ago? It seems like centuries since the plague swept through. Though it’s less than half a year.
The boy has blue shorts, a blue cap, and a red shirt; the girl has pigtails, a triangular skirt, red, and a blue top. They both have smudgy black blob eyes and thick red upcurved mouths; they’re laughing fit to kill.
Fit to die. They are only paper children, but they seem dead now anyway, like all the real children. She can’t look at this notebook cover too much because it hurts.
Better to concentrate on the task at hand. Don’t brood or mope. Take one day at a time.
Saint Bob Hunter and the Feast of Rainbow Warriors, Toby writes. This may not be accurate, time-wise – she’s probably out by a day or two – but it will have to do because how can she check? There’s no central authority any more for days of the month. But Rebecca might know. There were special recipes for the Festivals and Feasts. Maybe she’s memorized them; maybe she’s kept track.
Moon: Waxing gibbous. Weather: Nothing unusual. Noteworthy occurrences: Group pig aggression displayed. Painballer evidence sighted by Zeb’s expedition: piglet shot and partly butchered. Discovery of a tire tread sandal, possible clue to Adam. No definite sign of Adam One and the Gardeners.
She thinks a minute, then adds: Jimmy is conscious and improving. Crakers continue friendly.
“What are you making, Oh Toby?” It’s little Blackbeard: she didn’t hear him come in. “What are those lines?”
“Come over here,” she says. “I won’t bite you. Look. I’m doing writing: that is what these lines are. I’ll show you.”
She runs through the basics. This is paper, it is made from trees.
Does it hurt the tree? No, because the tree is dead by the time the paper is made – a tiny lie, but no matter. And this is a pen. It has a black liquid in it, it is called ink, but you do not need to have a pen to do writing. Just as well, she thinks: those rollerballs will run out soon.
You can use many things to make writing. You can use the juice of elderberries for the ink, you can use the feather of a bird for the pen, you can use a stick and some wet sand to write on. All of these things can be used to make writing.
“Now,” she says, “you have to draw the letters. Each letter means a sound. And when you put the letters together they make words. And the words stay where you’ve put them on the paper, and then other people can see them on the paper and hear the words.”
Blackbeard looks at her, squinting with puzzlement and unbelief. “Oh Toby, but it can’t talk,” he says. “I see the marks you have put there. But it is not saying anything.”
“You need to be the voice of the writing,” she says. “When you read it. Reading is when you turn these marks back into sounds. Look, I will write your name.”
She tears a page carefully from the back of the notebook, prints on it: BLACKBEARD. Then she sounds out each letter for him. “See?” she says. “It means you. Your name.” She puts the pen in his hand, curls his fingers around it, guides the hand and the pen: the letter B.