Lateral Thinking (Non-pony short story!) · 10:39pm Apr 16th, 2019
Author's Note
I wrote this story a few years ago in response to a then-common...let's call it "writing prompt", on 4chan's /tg/ board, called Humanity Fuck Yeah (HFY). Basically the premise of HFY is to present humans as "special" or to play up some actual advantages of humanity, compared to what the creators of the prompt viewed as the tendency to portray humans as being the weakest race in the galaxy always curb-stomped by aliens, or being good at something vague like "diplomacy" or whatever. To be honest, the whole thing is largely a "reaction" to nothing at all; I think some of 4chan's crowd just didn't like Avatar and blew things out of proportion. Also given that this is 4chan your typical HFY protagonist is a big strong while male radiating MANLINESS and so is obviously better than the xeno scum.Lotta 40K fans in the HFY crowd. Just an observation.
Still, it was a writing prompt and I decided I wanted to take a crack at it, but approach it from a different angle from playing up something like "Earth is a death world" or "humans breathe oxygen which is a poison OMG!!!". You do sometimes come across these more "comfy" HFY stories that aren't just about humans being the eldritch horrors scaring the pants off of other creatures with our incredible ability to drink water or withstand ordinary sunlight. I prefer those HFY stories.
Anyway. Enjoy!
Liu-Mei Banarjee – a human with brown skin, black, straight hair, and dark and narrow eyes – sat back down in the co-pilot’s chair beside me, careful not to spill the cup of coffee she’d just gotten for herself even as she handed the other one over to me. And what happened next had to be on purpose.
“Okay then, Thriik,” she said, after sipping thoughtfully on her coffee for a moment, “there’s sixteen zombies on the way up from the cargo pod and a malfunction that means that we can’t just vent them into space. What do you do?”
What I did was nearly spit the coffee all over the control panel in front of me. It took three arms and a supreme act of will to keep everything inside. “What?” I demanded after managing to swallow.
Banarjee looked me up and down. Mostly down, humans are generally taller than dethek. “Zombies,” she repeated. “Uh...I don’t think there’s a word in Standard for them. Walking corpses, dead but not dead, hunger for brains and the flesh of the living? Do dethek not tell stories about those?”
“We call them kthazzzashh,” I answer, and pointedly don’t note that movies with them used to always scare me shitless as a grub. “Why the Hell would you ask a question like that?” I ask, hugging myself with all four arms and hoping that humans don’t have a similar somatic gesture.
If they do, Banarjee lets it slide, at least. She lets out a sigh. “We’re the better part of a day out from a safe warp point and have clear vacuum all the way there. We’re basically just drifting, no piloting needed. I’m bored.” She sat up a little straighter, looking at me eagerly. “So. Zombie apocalypse. Sixteen of them heading up to us. What do you do?”
“Die, probably,” I note, trying to focus on my controls and not on the movies I shouldn’t have watched when I still needed four of my six limbs to walk. Unfortunately the drawback of compound eyes is that I can still clearly see that Banarjee’s own haven’t left me, plus Banarjee is right: there really isn’t anything to do. “Why sixteen?” I ask at length. Humans generally prefer to casually express numbers that are evenly divisible by five or ten, I’ve noticed, since that’s how many fingers they have between their two hands. Dethek are the same way with three and twelve.
“Because there’s eighteen of us on the crew,” Banarjee replies, though she takes a moment to think. “Though I guess not all of them will be turned...still, let’s call it a worst-case scenario. There’s only you and me left.”
“I think a worst-case scenario is a hull breach that sucks the two of us out into space,” I note. Banarjee lets out another one of her long-suffering sighs, and I manage to resist letting out one of my own. It’s funny, how similar body language is across sapient species. The form may differ, but the intent is generally the same.
I do spare a moment to take in my co-pilot for this shift. Humans are new to the interstellar scene, having only achieved warp space flight about eighteen Moraal years ago – something like forty-eight or sixty or something Earth ones. Their home system of Sol has three habitable planets – Earth, their homeworld, and the terraformed worlds of Venus and Mars. The three together formed the Solar Commonwealth that had expanded into the relatively empty nearby space and now counted eight major colonies and a host of minor ones, fairly respectable for such a new species (though personally I’m pretty sure the fact that they’re in a galactic backwater region helps).
They were expanding more than just their borders, though. Humans had spread throughout known space with the kind of zeal that all up-and-coming species do, eager to get their hands on new technology, new resources, new markets, and new experiences. I’m certain that Liu-Mei Banarjee falls into that last group. She’d joined Vashi-Tenet Shipping, Inc. eighteen months back and had boarded the S.S. Chuvanah when we had made a supply stop at Aita. VTS doesn’t have much in the way of high technology – just enough to get the job done – and unless we hit a warp flow that carried us to an uncharted and exploitable system, landing us a generous finder’s fee, then she wasn’t going to get rich running cargo and data between contract systems. So she had to be here for the experience, the chance to meet new species and go to new places.
Generally, I didn’t mind her. Humans have pretty good hand-eye coordination and spatial-temporal reasoning, as well as excellent stamina, a consequence of their evolution as spear-throwing endurance hunters. She made a good pilot and held up well to long shifts, and certainly got along well with the rest of the crew. Plus she’d convinced the crew to replace the company-provided stim drinks with something that she called instant coffee and most of us called liquid sex (okay, it’s not that good, but it’s far and away better than the dreck that VTS was giving us). But sometimes she’d ask the strangest questions, even taking her species’ newness to known space into account.
The newness and eagerness can be endearing, though. At length, I let out that sigh I had been holding back. “Seal the cockpit,” I say. Banarjee looks at me funny, and I look back. “If kthazzzashh – that’s what my species calls them – are coming up here, then I’d seal the cockpit. Kthazzzashh are stupid and slow, they won’t be able to get in.” I open my elytra a bit and spread my mandibles wide.
Banarjee’s own mouth had its corners turn up in a smile, the human equivalent to my own expression. “Okay,” she says, “so we’ll imagine they’re shufflers, then. Fair enough. But that still leaves sixteen zombies wandering around the ship. What happens if they break something important?”
My mandibles click shut as the vestigial wings beneath my elytra buzz in annoyance. “You want to kill the kthazzzashh?” I demand. “How? The only weapons on the ship are two decks below us.”
Banarjee tapped the side of her nose, her smile not leaving her face. She then points down. “Maintenance crawlspace,” she says. “Back in Sol we call them Jeffries Tubes. The one below us connects all the way to deck three.”
I look down at the access hatch for the crawlspace. She might have a point, but I look back to her, then back to the hatch. “You’re too big,” I say. “You wouldn’t be able to fit.”
“Yeah, so you’d have to go,” she responds, as though it should be obvious. “I’d stay in the cockpit – ”
“Safe and sound,” I note with some dismay.
“ – and distract the zombies,” she finishes, then looks around the cockpit a few moments. “Mmn...there. Ramij forgot the mop up here again. I’d leave the door to the cockpit open and shout a bunch, get the zombies’ attention so they’d come to me. Then I’d close it up. Any of them that got in, I’d be able to fend off with the mop. Break it in half and I could probably use the now-pointy end to destroy their brain, putting them down.”
I click my mandibles a few times at that. “You could, could you?” I ask incredulously. Banarjee did practice martial arts for exercise, but I also know that she’s only a hobbyist. Of the five sparring matches she’d had with Ramij, she’d only won one of them, by outlasting the varjren. But apparently in this scenario Ramij would be a kthazzzashh. They don’t get tired. Probably.
Banarjee only shrugs, however. “Well, seventeen zombies instead of sixteen isn't that much more for you to deal with. Your chances are probably the same either way.”
“And what if I’m attacked in the crawlspace?” I ask, suddenly remembering that I’m only the second-smallest member of the crew. “Tehcual could fit in there. He’d fit better, even.”
“You’ve got better reach and an exoskeleton for protection,” Banarjee points out. It isn’t really an exoskeleton, but I don’t correct her. She was glancing around, though this time in order to keep an eye on VTS-mandated cameras in the cockpit. After a few moments of checking them and where they were looking, she unzipped her flight jacket and surreptitiously showed me that, tucked inside, she had a large, wickedly curved knife of some kind.
I recoil at the sight, naturally. “That is a weapon on the cockpit,” I note. “There are so many regulations...pretty sure you’re not even allowed to have a knife that big on board…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Banarjee says, waving me off as she zips her jacket back up. “It was my grandfather’s. He was a Gurkha soldier in the Tibetan Republic, before the family moved to Mars. I wasn’t gonna just leave it there. And if a zombie apocalypse happened...or, let’s be realistic, something like chalak pirates – it’d be real useful to have, right?” She nodded at her own logic. “In any event, I’d give it to you before you went through the crawlspace.”
“Thanks…?” I ask, pretty sure that I’m not at all thankful. “Okay, so after cutting up Tehcual in close quarters without looking into his eyes while he screams – ”
“Huh?”
“That’s how kthazzzashh turn you into one of them.”
“Oh. In Sol it’s if they bite you, like an infection. You just have to not look directly at their eyes? Shouldn’t that be easy?” My mandibles clack and wings buzz in annoyance at that, as I use all four hands to point to all four multifaceted, compound eyes, blinking my transparent eyelids for emphasis. To her credit, the human catches on pretty quick. “Ah, right. Sorry.”
I shake my head. “Okay, so after that, they still leaves me alone on the ship with nothing but a knife. With you most likely having turned.” She frowns at my estimation of her odds, but I press on. “Even if I get to the armory, get in, and arm myself, it’s me against sixteen kthazzzashh.”
“Right,” Banarjee confirms. “So, what do you do?”
I think a moment. “Die,” I conclude. Before she can object, I press on. “But assuming I don’t...sixteen-on-one isn’t good enough odds for me to stand and fight, so I’d try and lure them into the cargo pods. Probably by a lot of running and screaming. Then I’d jettison the pods. And then I’d get fired for wasting company property and cargo.”
“But,” Banarjee points out, holding up one finger, “you’d be alive.”
I shrug, conceding that point. “What would you do?”
“Basically the same thing,” Banarjee responds, “only I don’t fit in the crawlspace so I’d have to go out into the corridors, be real quiet until I could arm myself. Avoid fighting. I’d turn off the atmosphere recyclers so my scent doesn’t spread, too. With me being the only one left breathing I wouldn’t have to worry about running out of air for days. Longer if I get into a space suit.”
I cross my arms in thought, two fingers bouncing off my mandibles. “Of course, then there’s cargo pods with kthazzzashh floating around in space. That must be a navigational hazard of some kind. What if someone picks them up? And we don’t have weapons to destroy them.”
Banarjee smiles at that, jerking her thumb backwards. “There’s no such thing as a weaponless starship,” she says. “Just point Chuvanah’s ass at them and crank us up to maximum burn. The fusion torch will burn the pods to liquid metal.”
That would work. Starships wrap bubbles of proto-warp around themselves for sublight maneuvering to get around pesky things like relativity, allowing for far faster speeds than a simple rocket would allow, but actual acceleration was still handled by a fusion torch. “We could also save fuel and just nudge the pods into a planet,” I point out, calling up the local system chart. “There’s a gas giant only a few million kilometers away. Set them up to intercept it and be crushed by the gravity, assuming they don’t just burn up in entry.”
Banarjee nods a little. “That would work, but I’d rather waste the fuel to be sure with zombies. You don’t take risks.”
She’s not wrong. I lean back in the pilot’s chair, considering. “What brought this on?” I ask.
The human woman shrugs. “Like I said, it’s something to talk about,” she answers. “Back in Sol, emergency response teams, the military, and so on, occasionally do ‘zombie apocalypse’ drills. It’s basically just a big game, but the idea is to encourage outside-the-box, lateral thinking, getting people used to coming up with solutions for problems they might not otherwise consider. Plus, it’s fun.” She looks to me. “Do dethek not do that?”
I’m not and have never been in the Moraal Defense Force, so I don’t know for sure...but I’d certainly never heard of it happening. Nor any other species performing it, for that matter. Sure, our troops and emergency teams and so on train for a variety of scenarios, but “kthazzzashh apocalypse” wasn’t one of them, or anything similar. They were always the plausible, if not probable, rather than the fantastic. “No,” I answer at length, “but maybe we should.”
“Maybe,” Banarjee says. We drink our coffee silently for a few minutes, letting the kilometers drift by as we coast through vacuum, before she speaks up again. “Okay, so a godlike alien whisks us all a thousand years into the past. What do we do?”
I laugh, but this time I don’t try and avoid the subject, and instead start thinking. I doubt any of this will ever come up. We’re just bulk freighter pilots and data mules, after all. But it certainly passes the time. And if it does come up somehow, against all odds? Well, thanks to this human, we’ll be ready.
That was nice :D Really fun!
From the HFY theme I did not expect anything good, but that is probably because a story like that on this site is usually just someone stroking their own ego. This one was almost as good as your other stories. Only almost because of the absence of pony.
Humans: Not the strongest, not the smartest, not the fastest, but where else are you gonna get theoretical discussions about zombie apocalypses?
Fun. Thanks for sharing
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You'll be interested to know, I think, that I deliberately posted this yesterday as I was already contemplating A Foreign Education's fix-fic in anticipation of where the story was going to go, and I wanted to get my fix-fic credentials out there. I wanted to show that I can take the basic premise of something I consider bad (HFY) and still produce something that I think "fixes" it without necessarily stomping on and deriding the thing I'm fixing while still honoring the original premise in spirit.
Which isn't to say that I don't go for a few light jabs. You'll note I noted that the typical HFY human protagonist is a big strong white male badass soldier in the vein of Master Chief or something...and I made the human protagonist of this story a half-Indian/half-Chinese space trucker woman who sits around talking about zombies.
Also I don't want to suggest that my fix-fic for A Foreign Educaton is necessarily going to be sunshine and rainbows the way this story was. Hang on...
Also I think this story marks the very first time I have ever typed the word "cum" (there's the second!), and the context is Cheval telling Flurry that she smells because she's covered in blood and cum (the third!)