Half-a-story: Beacons

Sometimes stories don’t go anywhere. Here’s one I’ve been tinkering with for a while. I think it’s a neat concept, but if there’s an actual story in here somewhere I’m just not seeing it. (Or, rather, I don’t think any stories utilizing this concept would be cooler than the actual concept itself.)

The first beacons were inmates, men awaiting execution who bargained their sentence down to life-without-possibility and lived out the rest of their natural days in a different kind of cell. Or mob snitches who couldn’t be made safe in even the most hopeless levels of solitary confinement. Or some white-collar criminal with a fancy lawyer who wants to serve out his five years in a place with booze, hot meals and nudie mags.

The project was almost killed after that first generation of beacons failed. The pods weren’t soundproof, see, and the ones who didn’t find some way to commit suicide were incurably insane upon retrieval. The ventilation systems were also a notorious weak point; seven beacons died by suffocation after the vents were disabled from the outside and became clogged with gore when zombies tried to climb through. In one case a beacon actually managed to escape after a chance earthquake upended the pod, granting him access to the floor hatch. Nobody knows how far he made it, but smart money says “not very”.

The military railed against the pods from the very beginning. Regular patrols had kept residential, industrial and agricultural sites safe for more than twenty years. Sure there was the odd coups or barely-contained outbreak. And yes, sixty percent of the world’s population was living under martial law to keep the gears turning. But it was war. That’s the price we had to pay for safety.

It may have all ended there if the story hadn’t been leaked. Once the public learned about the project’s spectacular failure, its most fatal flaw was diagnosed: they weren’t using the right sort of people for beacons. Indeed, for most of human history the right sort of person didn’t exist. But now we had them: folks who had grown up back in the aughts and teens, social hermits who spent their lives plugged into the Internet. People who neither needed nor craved actual human contact.

People who were immune to ennui.

Volunteers came out of the woodwork. Writers who wanted long stretches of uninterrupted solitude to complete their masterpieces. Forty-year-old children who wanted nothing more out of life than a steady supply of beer, frozen pizzas and computer games. Folks with crippling social disorders who couldn’t bring themselves to make a phone call let alone hold a job, but updated their blogs daily. By the time industry leaders had offered up the technologies required to build the perfect self-sufficient pod the government was holding lotteries to see who would win an eighteen-month shift.

Your standard L25-C beacon pod measures 40′ by 8′ by 18′ and is transported in two sections by armored flatbed truck. The hull is five inches thick, the outermost layer composed of a perfectly smooth and virtually fireproof polyetheretherketone synthetic, curved outwardly so as to be impossible to climb.. Layers of silica nanofoam for insulation and latticed ferrite for soundproofing are sandwiched between solid steel. The bottom half of the pod is populated by huge tanks of oxygen-producing algae and intricate low-maintenance ventilation and waste-removal systems. Power is generated by a compact nuclear turbine and supplemented by solar, wind or geothermal sources depending on climate and terrain allowances.

The beacon’s living area is more or less whatever he wants it to be. The required exercise equipment, removable pantry, med station and toilet facilities take up less than half of the 273′ square dwelling. Some luxuries are an impossibility; food preparation is by necessity limited to a small refrigerator, microwave oven and basic utensils. Bathing is limited to a standing shower unit only, cell phone service practically impossible. Windows are right out.

What every pod does have is miles and miles of fiber-optic cable giving them continuous, uninterrupted access to the Internet, television and cinema. Movies, books, magazines and video games are delivered digitally, as is a monthly deposit of $4,567.88 for services rendered. Though space is severely limited items like king-sized beds, sprawling multi-computer workstations and state-of-the-art speaker systems are common requests. Despite the lacking need for privacy most beacons still ask for a locking door on the toilet.

And every pod comes with zombies, clawing at the synthetic hull, trampling each other to sludge, groaning endlessly. Driven by some unquenchable instinct to move towards the closest human meal, they are attracted for hundreds of miles around. Z-MAC soldiers who accompany the monthly supply drops often find a pod completely buried in a mountain of grey, writhing flesh and have to burn or carve a hard-fought path for themselves. The beacon only learns of the raging battle just feet away once the chime goes off, harkening the arrival of his new pantry. In twenty-two hours the time lock will disengage and he’ll find it completely stocked with all manner of frozen and non-perishable foods.

When the second generation of beacons was an overwhelming success some number-crunchers got together and determined that it would take only sixty-seven strategically placed pods in various points of the North American wilderness to attract and contain the entire zombie menace. After a year of preparation, convoys of carefully-coordinated armored trucks left from every urban area on the continent, leading the undead away from civilization and towards a scorching desert or a broken mountainside or an arctic wasteland where a newly-appointed beacon waited for them. The media referred to the uncountable zombies shambling after the trucks as “evacuees”. Once the pied pipers had delivered their payloads they were airlifted out, leaving the zombies to converge upon the pod instead.

Z-MAC spent most of the following year securing city perimeters and overseeing smaller “evacuations”. There were only one hundred sixty-two recorded zombie-related deaths in the US that year. The year after, only forty-three. Year after that, 80% of Z-MAC were decommissioned or reassigned.

Year after that, the highways re-opened for the first time since the outbreak.

This year the EU voted to lift its ban on air and sea travel to North America. Time magazine did a twenty-page spread on the first family’s visit to Paris.

Two of the current New York Times bestsellers have come out of pods. Fudzuu, the new Internet phenominon people are calling “Web 4.0” was programmed and implemented by a beacon during his shift. Hit reality show Todd in the Pod has no fewer than six knock-offs this season. One beacon requested external microphones on his pod to record the endless moaning, which he sampled into a revolutionary new style of music he called “greyscale”. His album went double-platinum.

A retired Z-MAC pilot invested his life savings in a run-down motel and as many high-powered sniper rifles as he could get his hands on. He opened up a bed-and-breakfast-and-shooting-range just outside the Death Valley perimeter. For $300 an hour plus the cost of ammunition you can go there and shoot as many zombies as your little heart desires. If you make twelve consecutive shots he puts your picture on the wall. He’s booked solid through November.

At this point I realized I was just describing and shaping the idea for its own sake rather than directing it towards any kind of actual plot. Ah well. Still a fun read, no?