World War Z

The ISS is one of the greatest marvels of human engineering. We’re talking about an orbital platform so large it could be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It’d taken sixteen countries over ten years, a couple hundred space walks, and more money than anyone without job security would admit to finally complete her. What would it take to build another one, if another one could ever be built ?

Even more important than the station was the incalculable, and equally irreplaceable, value of our planet’s satellite network. Back then there were over three thousand in orbit, and humanity depended on them for everything from communications to navigation, from surveillance to something even as mundane yet vital as regular and reliable weather prediction. This network was as important to the modern world as roads had been in ancient times, or rail lines during the industrial age. What would happen to humanity if these all-important links just started dropping out of the sky?

Our plan was never to save them all. That was unrealistic and u

Were you ever promised a rescue?

No, and we didn’t expect it. The issue wasn’t how we were going to get back to Earth, it was how we could manage to stay alive up there. Even with all our tanked 02 and emergency perchlorate candles,” even with our water recycling system operating at peak capacity, we only had enough food for roughly twenty-seven months, and that was including the test animals in the lab modules. None of them were being used to test any kind of vaccines so their flesh was still edible. I can still hear their little shrieks, still see the spots of blood floating in micro gravity. Even up there, you couldn’t escape the blood. I tried to be scientific about it, calculating the nutritional value of every floating red globule I sucked out of the air. I kept insisting that it was all for the good of the mission and not my own ravenous hunger.

Tell me more about the mission. If you were trapped on the station, how did you manage to keep the satellites in orbit?

We used the “Jules Verne Three” ATV, the last supply pod launched before French Guyana was overrun. It was originally designed as a one-way vehicle, to be filled with trash after depositing its cargo, then sent back to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere. We modified it with manual flight controls and a pilot’s couch. I wish we could have fixed it with a proper viewport. Navigating by video wasn’t fun; neither was having to do my Extra Vehicular Activities, my space walks, in a reentry suit because there wasn’t room for a proper EVA kit.

Most of my excursions were to the ASTRO, which was basically just a petrol station in space. Satellites, the military, surveillance type, some-times have to change orbit in order to acquire new targets. They do that by firing their maneuvering thrusters and using up their small amount of hydrazine fuel. Before the war, the American military realized it was more cost-effective to have a refueling station already in orbit rather than sending up a lot of ma

We had maybe an hour a day, maybe even two, where there was nothing to do. You could sleep, you could exercise, you could reread the same books, you could listen to Radio Free Earth or to the music we’d brought with us (over and over and over again). I don’t know how many times I listened to that Redgum song: “God help me, I was only nineteen.” It was my father’s favorite, reminded him of his time in Vietnam. I prayed that all that army training was helping to keep him and my mum alive now. I hadn’t heard anything from him, or anyone else in Oz since the government had relocated to Tasmania. I wanted to believe they were all right, but watching what was happening on Earth, as most of us did during our off-duty hours, made it almost impossible to have hope.

They say that during the cold war, American spy birds could read the copy of Pravda in a Soviet citizen’s hands. I’m not sure if that’s entirely true. I don’t know the tech specs of that generation of hardware. But I can tell you that these modern ones whose signals we pirated from their relay birds-these could show muscles tear and bones snap. You could read the lips of victims crying out for mercy, or the color of their eyes when they bulged with their last breath. You could see at what point red blood began to turn brown, and how it looked on gray London cement as opposed to white, Cape Cod sand.

We had no control over what the spy birds chose to observe. Their targets were determined by the U.S. military. We saw a lot of battles — Chongqing, Yonkers; we watched a company of Indian troops try to rescue civilians trapped in Ambedkar Stadium in Delhi, then become trapped themselves and retreat to Gandhi Park. I watched their commander form his men into a square, the kind the Limeys used in colonial days. It worked, at least for a little while. That was the only frustrating part about satellite surveillance; you could only watch, not listen. We didn’t know that the Indians were ru

We had our own observation gear, both the civilian research birds and the equipment right there on the station. The images they gave us weren’t half as powerful as the military versions, but they were still frighteningly clear. They gave us our first look at the mega swarms over central Asia and the American Great Plains. Those were truly massive, miles across, like the American buffalo must have once been.

We watched the evacuation of Japan and couldn’t help but marvel at the scale. Hundreds of ships, thousands of small boats. We lost count of how many helicopters buzzed back and forth from the rooftops to the armada, or how many jetliners made their final run north to Kamchatka.

We were the first ones to discover zombie holes, the pits that the undead dig when they’re going after burrowing animals. At first we thought they were just isolated incidents until we noticed that they were spreading all over the world; sometimes more than one would appear in close proximity to the next. There was a field in southern England-I guess there must have been a high concentration of rabbits-that was just riddled with holes, all different depths and sizes. Many of them had large, dark stains around them. Although we couldn’t zoom in close enough, we were pretty sure it was blood. For me that was the most terrifying example of our enemy’s drive. They displayed no conscious thought, just sheer biological instinct. I once watched a Zed Head go after something, probably a golden mole, in the Namib Desert. The mole had burrowed deep in the slope of a dune. As the ghoul tried to go after it, the sand kept pouring down and filling the hole. The ghoul didn’t stop, didn’t react in any way, it just kept going. I watched it for five days, the fuzzy image of this G digging, and digging, and digging, then suddenly one morning just stopping, getting up, and shuffling away as if nothing had happened. It must have lost the scent. Good on the mole.