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  Special thanks to Hugh Howey, who lets me play in his worlds.

  The Soulless:

  A History of Zombieism

  in Chiitai and Mihari Culture

  by Lesley Smith

  Monsters exist in all cultures but the zombie—a Terran designation referring to re-animated corpses popularised in local media towards the end of the pre-Contact period—is a prevalent one. The Union has its monsters and medical science is often to blame, as is the case with the Soulless.

  What began as an attempt to end a terrible war decimating the Chiitai Conglomeration would ultimately be used by the Mihari Empire in its own machinations for power across the known galaxy, the ripples still affecting both Union and non-Union worlds alike.

  - From A Medical Examination of Genetically-Manipulated Drones in Chiitai and Mihari Caste Structure (Doctoral Thesis), Sandis Mythreia, School of Medicine, Arcadia.

  * * *

  SANDIS WAS ONE OF THE FIRST to stumble into the classroom. The last day of the spring term wasn’t known for high turnouts, not with the Festival of the Revealed Trinity the following day. Most skipped class and blamed clan or religious obligations for their absence.

  Their teacher, a visiting professor from Sandis’s own homeworld, was a lot more tolerant of the honest ones who simply wanted a chance to lie in or over-indulge. The festival was simply another day, albeit one where the three stars of the Sirian system revealed themselves together in all their glory. But born on a planet of eternal twilight where the entire horizon was a net of stars, Sandis wasn’t easily impressed by three of them.

  Sandis liked the chance to have a day off like any other student but today was Ask Anything Day, a tradition among the staff where they would talk about whatever their students wanted to know.

  “Morning Sandis!” Rheia called. “A little eager, aren’t we?”

  “Oh I’ve been waiting for this for months. After all, I get to ask you anything.”

  “Within boundaries, you do.” She sounded intrigued, intentionally not reading Sandis’s mind to find out what he wanted to ask about. “It should be good way to spend a morning, then.”

  Rather than teaching from the podium in an amphitheatre, Rheia had chosen one of the smaller rooms for the day. She descended to the floor and indicated the students, wandering singly or small groups, should join her. They pulled cushions and low chairs into a circle. Today they were not teacher and students, physician and trainees, today they were people, and most of those who had turned up had been trying to word their questions like you might a genie’s offer of three wishes.

  Rheia was dressed in purple skin and goat ears, soirei tattoos flowing under the summer dress she’d chosen instead of her normal red physician’s uniform or teacher’s garb. Appearances could be deceptive and most of the students knew that was just an outfit she wore, that Rheia of the Ashterai was born on another planet a long time ago, one that had just been contacted by the Union.

  Some people asked about life and the cessation of it (“Not my area but you’ll find out when you die, you’ve done it before, after all.”). Others wondered about space-time (“It’s a river, you can see the whole thing but if you get too close it pulls you under.”) and one girl even asked what the answers to next term’s examination questions would be.

  Rheia had laughed at that one: “I’m not telling you that! It’ll get me fired. You’ll have to wait, be patient and revise. Now then. Sandis, you mentioned having a question for me. Care to surprise me?”

  “Is there any scientific basis to the human belief in zombies?” Sandis asked.

  She stared. “Zombies? Really?”

  “Yes. It’s a valid question, right?”

  He’d said the world in English, zombie. Contact with the planet, known locally as Terra or Earth, had only happened a year previously, and while Rheia understood the interest in a new world, Sandis was sure it baffled her that someone would be so curious about a creature that didn’t actually exist.

  “Have you been reading Wikipedia again?” she asked, unable to hide her surprise. “Because if I find you using that or any other source not supported by the medical faculty’s peer review panel, I will fail you.”

  “It was in a book I read, a horror novel I found in the archives.” The others looked at him. “What? I like medical fiction. It was a book about autopsying a zombie with long and complicated medical notes at the back. Oh, and pictures, anatomical drawings. I thought it was a real record for the first hour or so.”

  “What’s a zombie?” Malani asked.

  “It’s an Earth legend,” Rheia said. “Originally, zombies were supposed to be the dead who had returned to life, animated by people who said they had magical powers, abilities to control the dead like mindless slaves. Then popular culture embraced the idea, but re-cast zombies as caused by a plague. You die, you turn into a zombie. They bite you, you die, you turn. The only way to kill a zombie is to sever the spinal column or destroy the brain.”

  “So it’s caused by an infection? A virus?” Sandis asked

  “Sometimes, but not always.” Rheia was speaking carefully, as if she couldn’t believe she was entertaining a discussion on zombies in the same way she might the Arcadian plague. “Traditional zombies were slow, but popular culture began talking about slow and fast zombies. Faster zombies usually means they haven’t been dead long.”

  “So a fast one was bitten more recently?”

  “Generally yes. Some sources suggest that the reason most zombies are slow is that their brains are functioning at the lowest power setting: no emotion, no memory or conscious thought, just the core brain. All they have to motivate them is the need to feed on living flesh and, by extension, to infect other people with their condition.”

  Sandis saw that Rheia continued to treat this as if it was a disease, a scientific discussion, and not a random trope from an alien civilisation. The young men, woman and others sitting around her were all destined to be doctors, nurses and members of the School of Medicine and so she was hell bent on treating even the most outlandish conversation in a clinical manner.

  “Are they real?” another young man, Gaavi, asked.

  “Real…” Rheia murmured.

  Sandis clarified, not just for his own benefit but for his classmates as well: “Do they actually exist?”

  Belief was personal and many humans—he knew from his reading—believed zombies not only could exist but that their appearance would herald an apocalypse. Some humans even stocked up on supplies: food, water, and basic survival tools in anticipation of the end of things, and bought weapons that would offer protection from a zombie horde.

  “There are visual narratives, movies and television shows produced for entertainment purposes focusing around their existence, or around a world overrun by zombies. Of the various apocalyptic scenarios for Earth, it’s one of the less far-fetched, especially if you add in human scientists tinkering with viruses they didn’t quite understand.”

  “That’s insane,” Tahi muttered.

  “That’s sensible,” Sandis retorted. “Everyone should have an emergency kit.”

  “There’s a difference between flooding or winter storms and a plague of mindless aliens who want to eat you. Cannibalism? Mindless monsters? Really, Sandis?”

  “Before you start judging, Tahi, remember other races’ histories.” Rheia said. “The Mihari, for example. Half their society is held in place by a subjugated underclass—”

  “Yes but the Helot talk, they have minds and feelings, they’re just subjugated by the aristocracy,” Tahi interjected. “There’s a difference between soulless and mindless. Plus the Helot, they’re not cannibals.”

  “I didn’t mean the Helot, the lowest caste. I was referring to the Sankai, specifically the Rulani, the Mihari’s engineered clone army. In fact, a bit of history for you, who’s heard of the Chiitai Conglomeration?” Rheia asked. “Come on, some of you must have. Malani, you’re from the outer rim of Union space, you mus
t have heard tales of the Great Hiveworld? They were the ones who first realised how to control another being so completely that they are, effectively, zombies.”

  “Deep space trader talk. Legend, nothing more than that. Hives of sugar and coloured glass…mothers and daughters left while the clans warred. Black creatures that descended like locusts.”

  “What about the Sankai?” Rheia asked. Not giving them the answers, but instead prompting them to start asking the right questions, as anyone wanting to go into the medical sphere should.

  “Clones?” Tahi asked. “I saw one once, one of the free-range ones before the Mihari took over their maturation-farms.”

  “They didn’t start that way,” she replied. “And sometimes, once a generation or so, the process doesn’t work.”

  The chimes signifying the start of lunch rang, melodic and calming. Rheia rose and the students waited a moment before following. For most, the discussion had just been a fantastical one, a thought experiment. Sandis headed to the library and went looking for answers in the archives.

  * * *

  Sandis sat at one of the booths by the reading windows, with a view of the gardens and enough of a breeze to rival even the carefully temperature-controlled stacks. He had books and a terminal linked to the medical, historical and general archives, as well as records dating back to An’she and Elys, one of the first to swim deep into the star-filled sea.

  Even amongst the Union, whose territory is the smallest but most stable of the carved up Milky Way galaxy, knowledge regarding the Chiitai Conglomeration was scarce.

  The Chiitai kept to their own worlds for a reason; initially it was because of their culture and the order of their hives. At one time they had apparently wandered the universe but at some point decided to keep to their own worlds. However, it was known that, before the Union’s formation, they became embroiled in a territorial dispute recorded as ‘the War of Bloodied Fields’. Though that conflict was now, by all accounts, concluded, the Chiitai retained their isolationist stance—to rebuild their worlds, too focused on that to pay attention to anything other than their own affairs.

  The records didn’t go into specifics about the cause or the ending of the war. Sandis checked scholars’ accounts, rumours jotted down by passing ships, annotated musical maps of the explored universe—but for naught.

  Sandis laid out a sketch done based on An’she and Elys’ recollections, of a glorious city of spun sugar and domes of glass hives which caught and channeled the sunlight, of rooftop gardens and arching foundation vines. The city had survived for a single reason, the same one which gave the war its name: because it was fought in the endless fields of the Chiitai homeworld, in trenches and pits so that the highest caste of queens needn’t see the violence or hear the cries of the dying, the fallen gutted in their names.

  Were they still out there? Why did Rheia mention them in class? What did their feud have to do with zombies anyway?

  * * *

  The rains battered the triage tent where Muzzac, warrior of the Gefaia Hive, lay resting after his brush with death on the front lines. His mandible had been crushed and it still pained him, even bound and splinted up. The scurrying nurses and medics had more seriously wounded to worry about, and so he bore his pain stoically.

  The injury meant his days on the battlefield were over and he was almost glad. While lying injured on the field, surrounded by the dead and dying, he had had an epiphany: If this war did not end, then the Conglomeration and every Chiitai within would be consumed. Their species would fight until no one was left. Such an ignominious end for such an old and mighty civilisation.

  The females, the Jiha Queens would live on. War-making was for the warrior classes, the drones. He imagined hives of spun sugar and sweetglass on other worlds after all the lower rungs had been trampled in the mud. For a moment he almost saw a new empire, not a conglomeration but something different, a place where the Queens ruled with impunity, controlling a select number of worlds and billions, be they Chiitai, mammal or others entirely.

  Their burden would be the fallout from this endless, bitter war.

  “Ah, you live!” Velok, second-in-command, slipped under the tent flap, exo-armour scraping together as he ducked in, the scent of ash, blood and smoke washing in behind him as he searched for his commander and old friend.

  “Velok! Come, and let us talk strategy.” Muzzac beckoned him over, his chittering notes and pheromones garbled slightly by the weather and by the lingering scents of pain and death.

  “We must finish this.” Muzzac said, his remaining mandibles translating a mournful song, not only his thoughts but the depth behind them. “Or this entire quadrant of space, our territory and those of the others will all suffer for it.”

  “You mean the Demons’ Empire and the mammals, that biped Queen’s coalition of worlds?”

  “I do.” He propped himself up, comfort still eluding him. “This war, it has no end, not unless we finish it. We need to take control.”

  “And how do you suggest we do that?” Velok asked, entertaining his commander in what he was sure must be the trauma of his injury.

  “We alter a batch of drones and then we seize power.”

  The movements, the noise Velok made betrayed his shock. “A coup d’etat against the Jiha Queens? Against the Conglomeration itself?”

  “A necessary evil. If we take their minds, control them, we control the hives and the Conglomeration.”

  “For what?”

  “To end this war.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “We bury this and move on. Drones have short lifespans; we send them in, we take control, they die off and we begin writing a new chapter in our history. Once we put this stupid war behind us, we can move and grow.” Muzzac was suddenly reflective. “Do you even remember how it started, old friend? Who exactly stepped over the lines and into another’s land?”

  “Only the stories, and those feel more like myths than fact. Did nearly dying do this to you?”

  “It clarified things somewhat, yes. We only get one life, after all.”

  “Almost dying will do that,” he agreed. “The Queens…if they knew, they would unite against us.”

  “We do this amongst ourselves, the warrior caste. The Jiha are figureheads. They control the hives but the power has always lain with us, the defenders of the hives. The drones are the foot soldiers and we are the strategists, the brute force.”

  It was another year, five seasons and much healing, before Muzzac could put his plan into action, but war can be a slow thing, and warriors the most patient souls ever born.

  The time away from the front line allowed Muzzac to prepare: drones came with the winter moons, destined to die before the same moons rose again the following year. They would steal a generation and win the war.

  Altering the drones was simple. A change in the genome, modifying the chemistry of the jelly used to mature them. Rather than a Jiha Queen’s genome, Muzzac instead replaced it with a substitute based on his own. Drones would be born loyal to him, not to the Hive Queen.

  And so the end of the War of the Bloodied Fields began.

  The Jiha’s attention was normally focused on birthing and grooming their heirs, that one embryonic Chiitai in a billion who was literally born to lead. Rather than a golden daughter with wings the colour of the sky and the shifting green seas, a Jiha Queen was born to Muzzac’s own Gefaia hive with a body black as the warrior’s own. She was his daughter and the Jiha realised too late that control had fallen from their grasp.

  The civil war was easier in some ways, less bloody and quicker. It was over in days rather than generations, with a minimum of causalities. The drones died quickly but the Black Queen remained and a new hive, the Hedrim, was created to ensure that the War of Bloodied Fields would never be repeated. The Chiitai would learn to police themselves with a hive that was part mediator, part peacekeeper, with a queen who did not sit with the Jiha but instead watched from the sidelines.

  Muz
zac met his end as he had lived, and died a hero, his name remembered and his remains preserved.

  But he had only ended one war. Another much more deadly one would take its place…and it was for something none of them, not the warriors, the drones or the Jiha had ever suspected: the Demons had arrived.

  * * *

  Sandis went to the refectory, his stomach growling, to get a late lunch and then returned to the blissful silence of the near-deserted library. The Academy had cancelled afternoon classes for the festival. With another load of source material, more terminal-based than books this time, Sandis turned his attention closer to home.

  The Mihari were a part of his history, their expansion having been the driving force behind the Union’s formation. The Mihari—referred to by some races simply as the Demons—were the sea monsters who would devour unwary wanderers of deep space, races who were beginning to explore the galaxies. The Union had formed to combat the Mihari Empire, based on the idea that together the races were stronger than they ever could be alone. That one idea had allowed for eight millennia of peace within their borders.

  He knew from his childhood history lessons that the Mihari Empire held the least stable but largest span of stars. They ruled with an iron fist, headed by an Emperor who demanded the very souls of his subjects to feed a creature that gave him near-immortality, a creature they named their Shadow God. The wraith, more a parasite than a deity, gave the leaders of the ruling dynasty long life and then jumped from father to son at the moment of death. Each generation was forced to offer their most precious commodity—their souls and the souls of their children—to ensure the continuity of the Empire.

  Like the Chiitai, they had also gone through a period of expansion, but the Mihari continued, descending on weaker worlds not protected under the Union banner. That was how Earth, a world Sandis found oddly curious, came to be Contacted years ahead of schedule, because the Mihari’s watchdogs, the Rulani, had been snooping around the Sol system for decades, trying to decide if the planet was worth their interest.