Biopunk – you heard it here first (I hope)

That’s right. I’m coining it right now, which means its been on the tips of literate tongues for at least a decade already. I doubt I’m the first person to say it; I’m just the first person I know.

And to tell the truth, I don’t get around much.

But the far-flung future of slinky girls with razor fingernails and mirrorshades is passe. People don’t interface directly with tech anymore. People are the new tech. Meatspace is getting meatier. We’re programming flesh itself. It’s already been happening.

Case in point: Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, mistakenly labeled cyberpunk back in 1997. It’s not cyber, oh no. It’s bio. People buy new genetic traits at the drugstore. The hero, Spider Jerusalem, keeps a prescription of anti-cancer in his medicine cabinet for guests. A politician complains of his rebellious teenage daughter, “I don’t see why on the worst day of my professional life my daughter couldn’t do me the favor of getting her genome reset.”

This isn’t cybernetics, it’s biology. Not cyberpunk, biopunk.

It’s been fermenting away for a long time now. Think back on the zombie boom. Zombies have been evolving as fast as bacteria. The shuffling undead have been replaced by The Rage, The Reaper Virus, and a host of biological nasties. Look at most of the science fiction to come out in the past decade or so. In the sorry, post-apocalyptic future of Children of Men, people stop having babies. In the shiny, Art-Deco hyper-future of Gattaca, the only babies allowed are genetically tailored designer babies. The future is not glowing green from DOS screens; it’s written in our genes.

Ex Man

As a teen, my favorite hero was Nightcrawer. In 1975 Stan Lee’s mutants got an international makeover courtesy of Len Wein, long before political correctness was the in thing. The new X-Men included an African woman, a Soviet farmboy, a Native American, a Japanese, a Canadian, and an Irishman, but my personal hero was the German.

While vets were being called baby-killers, my granddad still basked in the afterglow of World War II. If anything, the baby boomers were even more patriotic about their victory over the Axis, to compensate for the failure of their children in Vietnam. Most kids my age, baffled by the myth and misinformation of public school and fuzzy in the history department, relied on our grandparents’ reminiscences, which taught us that the Germans and the Nazi party were one and the same.

Maybe that was why Nightcrawler wound up being a shadowy, demonic-looking figure. While the rest of his teammates were varying sizes and shapes of porn-star gorgeous and endowed with superpowers, Nightcrawler had a couple of everyday mutations on top of the fairly useless ability to teleport over short distances in a reeking cloud of brimstone. He had the indigo skin of the Kentucky Fugates, and his hands ended in three digits, like Bobby Bernstein’s left hand.

The fingers on Bobby’s mutant hand were blamed on his mom, who had continued taking The Pill after he was conceived. The two fingers were thick as thumbs and longer than average, as if they had gotten fused in the womb. I would stare at Bobby, checking out his Nightcrawler hand every chance I could get. I made him uncomfortable. We never became friends.

Artist Dave Cockrum wasn’t satisfied with a couple of mundane mutations, and hit Kurt Wagner with the Devil’s fangs, pointed ears, glowing yellow eyes, and a spaded tail he could use like a grappling hook.

Cockrum’s idea was in the right place at the right time. Thirty years later, Nightcrawler might have been another forgettable product of Generation Angst, lurking in dark places with Hellboy and The Crow, bemoaning his Catholic upbringing. But Cockrum’s creation was a carnie, part showman, part clown, employing a sense of humor and a bouyant personality to get people over the speed-bump of his looks. He was liked. I wasn’t. And I didn’t look anything like Satan, or even Bobby Bernstein, being overweight and nearsighted.

Throughout high school I would cut classes to hang out in the Art room where I befriended similar losers. We were too chickenshit to hang out with the real headbangers. They and the punk rockers would get stoned on Smoker’s Corner, a wedge of earth in the shade of a tree left out of the high chain-link fence that surrounded Franklin High school. Smoking was not allowed on school grounds. Even though Smoker’s Corner occupied the same city block, it was technically not on school property. That was defined as anywhere inside the fence.

My brother was the nucleus of our family, blonde, blue-eyed, standing over six feet tall, a Varsity ball-player, and my savior. He came to my rescue whenever I was tormented by bullies, gave me rides when I was stranded by the schoolbus, and was the source of my entire wardrobe of hand-me-downs until, though I continued to catch up to his weight, I stopped growing height. His X-Men comics, starting with a reprint of Giant Sized X-Men Number 1, was my introduction to comic books. It seemed a natural progression that the first business to hire me was the video store where he had worked.

Haunted

Thought I’d try to map out a haunted house tour of San Francisco, the site of numerous homicides, typically random gun violence on street corners. But the wounds in the world are still too raw. Nowhere near the macabre delight of your Victorian ghost stories.

Also doesn’t include the insult of the cretins who haunt the blogs. Mechthild Schroer 50 hit in the head by a stray bullet from the gun of Phillip Stewart 18, who was attending a party at 414 Mason street while the German elementary school teacher was walking in Union Square Plaza with her husband. A blog post written on the newspaper website reporting the murder suggested it was her own fault for not being armed herself. How she would have defended herself from the bullet of a gun shot from across the street, and not aimed at anyone in particular, by having a gun of her own, the poster didn’t mention.

Edward Howell 48, found in water near Pier 70 thursday week of 2008-07-06

Blair Henderson 26, shot at 55 Nocoma st 2:30 a.m. Sunday week of 2010-04-12
(follow-up Regina Mikell mother, Paulette Mikell aunt, Jerome Henderson younger brother, Ashley Mikell younger sister)

Lawon Hall 19, shot during a gunfight near Fisherman’s Wharf on 2010-02-07

Stephen Powell 19, shot in front of Pottery Barn on Market at Castro at 11:30 p.m. on “Pink Saturday” week of 2010/06/27

Charles McAleer-Bonilla 30, found bleeding from multiple stab wounds, died in hospital on Friday 2010-04-09. Trail of blood led from site of discovery to 300 block of 28th St.

Cameron Enis 19, found shot in drive-by near Plymouth Avenue and Broad street around 11:40 p.m. on Monday 2010-04-05

Barbara McIver 87, allegedly smothered to death by nurse Maximo Farjado, Jr. after two weeks of hire for convalescent home at 5767 Mission Street in full view of other patients and staffers at 10:00 a.m. tuesday 2010-03-23

Michael Bailey 26 shot 2009-10-06 shortly after 3 a.m. in Hunter’s Point at Alice Griffith housing project on Double Rock Street, died at San Francisco General Hospital. Bailey was a tourist from Louisiana, who was shot in an apparent robbery after being lured to Hunter’s Point by a woman outside the City Nights club in a good-samaritan scam.

Rodney Curiel 34, found dead in bed in his room at 10:00 a.m. Monday week of 2010/01/12 at 520 South Van Ness Avenue Mission Hotel. Autopsy revealed Curiel, a known drug user, was strangled.

Milk & Moscone shot to death in City Hall by Supervisor Dan White.

Numerous unresolved slayings in connection with Your Black Muslim Bakery

Peter Azadian 57, homeless, dwelt in door frame in Stillman Street Alleyway between 2nd and 3rd street, died on Friday week of 2009-02-28 after being beaten by four attackers

Levit Chavez 49, stabbed to death in home on Ceres St. @ Thornton by son Levit Chavez Jr. Survived by common-law spouse Nelsy Flores, also stabbed during attack. Witnessed by 8 year old child, half-brother of murderer.

Run

I run. The muscles between my legs stretch as I cast my feet upon the pavement below mw me, steps fleeting. As I swing each knee forward again, the sinews burn at their roots.

I jump, my organs and the bones in my ears floating as the ground below flies up to thrust my feet into my knees, a grueling second passes as my muscles bunch in order to spring once again into motion.

My entire frame tilts as I round a corner, my senses alert as I pass an elderly pedestrian, my shoulder just brushing his sleeve. I fly down the incline, cutting diagonally across the street, heedless of traffic, trusting my ears to warn me of oncoming cars, my senses sharp, my clothes clinging to my joints and flapping around my ankles, my shirt fluttering behind me, creating drag. I am not aerodynamic. I am fast enough to notice the difference.

I am cold, the wind I generate pulling at rivulets of sweat spreading into the fabric of my garments, blowing through my hair and chilling my skull. My footsteps thrum in my ribcage, drowning out my heartbeat. I am speed, and clarity, and adrenaline.

I dart left, my ankle obediently grinding to pivot the length of my form to a ninety degree angle. I mercifully step off it and let the other complete the turn, then throw it against turf, scrambling up a quarry in between houses, aiming for an open window. Maggie’s apartment. She’s at work, and she’s left it open again. I slam it shut and lay on the floor beneath the sill.

While pressed against the wall, I look across and notice the aquarium is empty, the lid askew. Stupid snake got out again.

I can’t stay here. Keeping close to the wall I turn over onto my knees and scramble backward into the kitchen. I don’t know where my pursuers are, whether they saw me dive into this apartment building. I retreat to Maggie’s forest of potted plants and try to catch a glimpse through

Eat At Gil’s

so what I ought to be writing is something that makes you, the reader, want to do something. Typically, to buy what I am selling. And what do you need, reader? What would reach your target demographic? Are you a man in search of porn, a woman in search of cosmetics, a boy in search of gadgets or a girl in search of… cosmetics? Are you a senior citizen trying to extend your meaningless consumer existence? An infertile couple in search of a way to propagate their own genes with no interest or care for the thousands of children abandoned daily?

I’m in a bit of a surly mood.

Maybe I just want you to eat at a particular restaurant.

I work at a restaurant.

I want you to eat at my employer’s restaurant.

“Why should I?” you ask. Because I work there, dammit. Because it’s the only place in J-town where you can get a decent burger for a decent price. One-third pound monster patties for under eight bucks. Because the garlic fries are better than any fast food joint. Because you’re sick of fusion cuisine and mediocre sushi. Because not on thing on the menu is vegetarian, not even the vegetables. This ain’t Japanese food; it’s American diner fair with a hawaiian flair. Solid eats, nothing pretentious.

Eat there for the spam musubi. The Loco Moco.

Eat there for the Taiyaki. If you’re craving these crisp, golden Japanese street cakes consisting of filling pillowed in a fish-shaped buttermilk waffle, May’s is the only game in town. Come on the weekends for them hot and fresh all day long. Or grab one of these new-born fishies to go with your coffee in the a.m. Get them by the dozen and to freeze at home and enjoy later hot out of your toaster oven. They’re even delicious served cool; steam softens the dough so you get a moist and airy pancake consistency. The taiyaki are grilled fresh every morning on an old gas-powered cast-iron monster from the land of the rising sun herself. The expert operators who work the grill describe the experience of cooking taiyaki as a form of meditation.

Drink our coffee. A buck twenty-five gets you a hot mug of good old Columbian joe and a free refill. After that you have to lay out a quarter per extra refill.

Doomsday

Thanks to Neil Marshall, Zombies on Mars is up for a rewrite. I started swearing three seconds into the matinee showing of Doomsday this afternoon. By the time they introduced Malcom McDowell’s character I ran out of four letter words, so the only thing left to do was spend the next hour and change telling myself over and over what an idiot I was. For the millionth time since deciding to write this book, I regretted ever conceiving it.

Joseph Campbell says follow your bliss. I was supposed to start this story because it was something I enjoyed. The ideas just float to the surface and I write ‘em down, that’s all. They’re products of my environment. The world is more wired together than ever; it should come as no surprise that other folks’d react to the same stimulus.

So there’s a bad guy named Kane in Doomsday. That shouldn’t bother me. Kane was the first bad guy in biblical literature. Everybody’s got a bad guy named Kane. So did I. Trevor Caine. Funny thing is my Caine was a swish. I named him after Kayne Gillespie, one of the designers competing for cash in a program called Project Runway. His Christian name came from those Harry Potter books. Remember the toad?

Next, there’s this novel written by Charles Dickens called Hard Times. It’s his shortest book. Excepting Oliver Twist, the other novels are six-hundred page mammoths. Hard Times was actually the first of his I’d ever read for that reason. It takes place in a fictitious industrial settlement named Coketown for its coal refinery. I’ve been using the name Coketown as a working name for the bankrupted martian settlement that was cut off from the rest of the sponsorships following a convenient outbreak that occurred after the company funding it went bankrupt. Sure, changing a character’s name, easy. How do I replace this?

That’s not the worst of it. Let’s be honest right now, the movie’s crap. Highly entertaining, action packed crap, but crap nontheless. Take Doomsday’s survival scenario. Inside the containment zone, civilization is reduced to Burning Man versus Renaissance Faire. All the fuel’s supposed to be used up but they’ve got enough gasoline to power a biker armada. All contact with the outside world has been cut off, but there’s no shortage of electrical clippers, Aqua-Net, bleach or Manic Panic to keep them in mohawks.

And what’s Marshall’s end-of-the-world virus? His doomsday epidemic? The Reaper Virus. Fuck me in the ass. I spent weeks agonizing over the Ripper Virus. It couldn’t reference frenzy, fury or anything close to Danny Boyle’s Rage Virus. But when it came down to it I wanted my twin viruses to represent duality. One way to show that was the American two-party political system. Both parties equally sick, just exhibiting different symptoms. The Sleepers, originally the Dormants, were the Democrats. The Rippers punned the Republicans. It kills me. It just kills me.

At least this damn thing will never see the light of day. I can take comfort in that. Even if it ever got published, it’d be decades after Marshall’s pulp piece is long forgotten. So ripper and reaper sound alike. So Kane and Caine have the same name. So Marshall’s gotta a quarantine zone and I’ve gotta quarantine zone. His ain’t on Mars, is it?

A Complete Synopsis

When I first began writing The Epidemic, before I lost my manuscript, I had luckily written in a separate notebook an archetypal version of the story in which the nature of each character could be easily conveyed without a lot of exposition.

The heroes, villains, beautiful maidens and mysterious wizards of myth and folklore carry with them centuries of development.  If I tell you about a scientist who invents a virus that can rewrite DNA, I have to fill in all kinds of blanks in order for you to accept my story.  But if I tell you about a wizard’s magic spell, the tradition of the fairy tale fills in those blanks for me, so I can get onto the real task; telling the story.

More.

Felix Harmon

“Sleep during the day. When the sun’s out. When it’s warm. When a handful of change can buy you a seat on a bus or the train. Lots of people fall asleep on buses, on their way to work. It’s more respectable than holing up in an alley or on a doorstep. As long as you don’t stink of piss.

“At night, when it’s cold, that’s the time you should be active. Stay on the move, keep walking. It’ll warm you.

“When you sleep, your metabolism slows and your body temperature drops. This time of year, sleeping in the open is a good way to kill yourself.”

Late afternoon. Winter. The approach of sunset. Seen at a distance, Felix Harmon’s figure. Scarf, corduroy jacket over a fleece pullover. Narrow cut of jeans emphasize a thin build, reflected in hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. Scuffed toes of secondhand boots emerging beneath the cuffs. Walk past a Serv-Cam. No man’s land, the old rail depot.

Harmon breathes plumes of steam in the evening air as sunset feebly warms the cold sky. Walk beyond the boundaries of a poor residential zone bordering on the empty industrial district, neglected, falling into disrepair.

Stroll past that last operating camera, withdraw blue-tipped fingers from a pocket to draw out the contents of a plastic drugstore bag dangling from the wrist. Pause to pop out five or so tablets from a blister pack. Palm the pills, resume walking. Crack the seal on a bottle of water and unscrew the cap. Toss the pills into the mouth, drink them down.

A broken camera hangs blindly from a street lamp perched on a slope. Grass, brittle with frost, crunches as it breaks under Harmon’s boots. He pauses on the slope and turns to the setting sun. Solitary silhouette, casting a long shadow. The figure falters and collapses as the daylight fades. An icy breeze picks up the wrapper tumbling from open fingers, toys with it. Help-U-Sleep.

What Makes A Zombie? …and other questions

I’ll begin with the third question: of what sort are the “zombies” in this story?

In a Japanese action film a few years old, a gang of mobsters had routinely disposed of their rivals in a forest for its seclusion, burying their firearms with them. Afterwards they discovered it was the sacred Grove of Resurrection. This became the setting of a gun battle between living and dead yakuza in the cult film Versus. When the gangsters’ young boss arrives he turns out to be a warlock, converting his surviving thugs into unkillable martial arts monsters. The director Ryuhei Kitamura here coined the term “Hyper Zombie” to describe his creations, and to distinguish them from the George Romero’s shuffling horde of cannibals.

The hyper zombies appeared again in the more recent British film 28 Days Later. These zombies weren’t undead, but victims of a disease called “The Rage”. Its sequel 28 Weeks Later took place after all the infected had supposedly starved to death. But by the end of the film the disease has moved beyond the relative geographic isolation of the British Isles to the European continent.

The definition of zombie here follows less the idea of reanimation than of debilitated intellect. Even the undead masses that descend on a mall in Dawn of the Dead satirizes the mindlessness of consumerist tendencies. I’m more concerned with corporate mind control and the deprivation of free will than with the visceral thrills of blasting the head off an already-dead corpse. The infected here are people, and they’re sick, so there’s a moral dilemma that comes with the decision to kill. Particularly if, like Doctor Ravesteyn, you happen to be the one who made them sick in the first place.

Now I can answer the question, “Why Mars?”

The geographic isolation of the Martian sponsorships is a more perfect containment of any rampant virus than any place on earth. Should a zombie, or a “Ripper”, as the characters of The Epidemic refer to them, ascend to the planet’s surface, the low-pressure environment would cause their blood to boil in spite of the freezing temperatures. (The warmest Mars gets during its summer season is about 15 degrees celcius or 60 degrees farenheit). Even beneath its surface, without the concrete water collection bunkers serving as shields overhead, solar radiation can be fatal because the planet has neither atmosphere nor a magnetic field to repel it. Artificial heating and cooling systems are required to raise the underground temperature to survivable levels. These can be shut off as needed. This makes for a tidy horror experience, one with no loose ends or sloppy mistakes, except for the ones committed by its characters. And there are plenty of those to follow.

The Ripper outbreak and Ravesteyn’s survival are only the beginning of the story. The bulk of it takes place after the outbreak is brought under control and the Rippers are suppressed. To achieve a quick and controlled suppression, an isolated place where only the smartest, the strongest, and the healthiest people are gathered is the ideal setting.

Another reason for the kind of isolation only a planet like Mars can provide is that each sponsorship is under corporate ownership. As a publicly funded project, only NASA’s colony, located in a relatively fragile series of surface structures, is subject to Earth law. It requires massive conglomerates with the kind of money that can be poured endlessly into their projects to establish a sponsorship. All people who live at the Janusco sponsorship do so at their employer’s good graces. It’s the idea of the Company Store; they pay rent to Janusco landlords, they buy food from Janusco grocers, and they work for Janusco, Inc. This means the company is beholden to no law except the bottom line.

But when a neighboring food manufacturer goes bankrupt, they can’t even afford to send their residents back to Earth. So wealthy sponsors like Janusco and others are asked to take on the burden of its refugees. To refuse would be bad press, but this places a strain on the life-support functions of each sponsorship.

Up to this point, Ravesteyn has been partnered with a brilliant gene therapist, Doctor Isobel Venticello, wasting her talent working on fairly bland cures to mundane illnesses like leukemia. Venticello’s work, so far theoretical, involved extracting DNA from a patient in remission, repairing the infected sample with gene splicing, then programming the Blank Virus with the patient’s corrected DNA to rewrite the cancer out of existence. But with no sick people on mars, and test animals in high demand, the experiment is limited to frozen samples and tedious labwork.

But Venticello’s understudy, a Doctor Young, showed promise with more interesting experiments. Ravesteyn reads Young’s theory on human hibernation, and considers it a possible solution to a different sort of problem — the unassigned refugees littering the streets, many begging for food or shopcards.

Finally, how is the virus transmitted.

This prototype strain of the Blank Virus is fairly contagious. It can be found in any body fluid; tears, sweat, saliva, urine, blood, etc. If a Sleeper (I’ll explain briefly) has sweaty palms when you shake his hand, you’ll want to wash them before you eat your french fries. Kissing is risky. Some hysterical types even project that the water vapor humans exhale could be antigenic.

Enter Hawkmoor

*Bows with deepest respect as he hurries into the study with an armful o’ charts, scrolls, and writing paraphernalia… dumps all on the nearest flat surface and heads for the coffee machine lighting a small cigar as he doth so…*

Greetings my friend; trim the tapers and light the lamps…! Let’s be about it shall we?

If I may ask several questions o’ thee first:

1) Why Mars?
2) Thee doth mention “viral” in thy synopsis. Esp. the “blank” virus – how doth Ravenstyn’s virus tie in with the Martian expedition?
3) The term Zombie generally refers unto the corpse o’ a deceased person re-animated by supernatural means or agents… doth the victims o’ thine “epidemic” neede be dead afore they become inflicted?
4) If they neede not be dead then by what vector is the virus taken in – contact absorption; airborne etc.?

I would also recommend several resources (that thee may already be aware o’)
The Kim Stanley Robinson series o’ novels dealing with the colonisation o’ Mars : titles art: Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars (from memory)

Also: Movies… Red Planet and Mission to Mars
To an extent also; the film Total Recall

At thy leisure Sir, would thee care to flesh out thy synopsis a lyttle and please, use me as a research assistant… tell me what thee would have me investigate for thee.
With compliments,
H