Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Herds, not Hordes: Observations on the current crisis. Walker Station LEO, Feb 13. 2237.

If there is anyone else left alive to read this, this will be my last post on the system net. It has been seven years since the fall. Seven years of homo zombicus wandering the globe. And everywhere else in the solar system, I imagine. I don’t know for sure. But there has been no indication of other survivors anywhere on the ‘net.

Perhaps they don’t have wifi. The hypothetical survivors. Not the zombies.

Human civilization was not felled by greed. Nor climate change, nor nuclear war, not pollution and certainly not necromantic magic. Not unless mankind has fallen so far that nanotechnology and viral infections now qualify as sufficiently advanced enough to be magic. Studying the effects of the so called “zombie virus” or “zombie plague” has kept me sane, or at least relatively so, these past few years. And for all the dangers of living in space, at least it has one especially good benefit in the current era:

Our immigration controls are top notch. Twelve thousand miles to the nearest neighbors makes for a damned good wall.

I believe that my distance from the problem has created a certain amount of objectivity. My inability to reach the com array meant I didn’t have to hear the dying screams of Earth and her children, but I could watch. There’s only so much horror, so much sadness a human brain can take. I am no psychologist. But with access to what remained of the system network and some seriously fine optics, I could watch what happened down below, within the limited arc of my instruments. Mine, as there is no one left sane enough to claim them here.

In the beginning, I read the reports of the initial infection, the patient zeros initially identified not by the CDC or any government agents, but by a so-called crackpot in rural Wyoming. She got it right when everyone else got it wrong. Everyone else was puzzled by the speed of initial symptoms, the bizarre aggression, and the drastic weight loss. They never could nail down a person who was only mildly infected- only uninfected or completely zombified, nothing in between. Because it wasn’t just a viral infection. It was a worm. A digital worm.

Human beings for the last hundred years have all been born with their own nanite swarm. It splits off from the mother’s colony in vitro, and differentiates within the first week of pregnancy, and even at this stage they improve general health. This proved a boon to expectant mothers, reducing both mother and infant mortality by thirty three percent by the most conservative estimate. Our own nanites help us stay healthy and fit, allow us to access certain technologies on an instinctual level, and accelerate learning when properly trained. The downsides of needing more energy to maintain the colony via food intake has historically been a small one with the advances in large scale hydroponic farming and protein propagation labs in addition to traditional food sources.

The so-called “zombie virus” operates in three stages. Infection, suppression of immune response, and controlled mutation of the brain. Controlled, because every single zombie brain dissected and studied showed the same mutated structures. The exact same structures. To say such things are not common in biology considerably understates the matter.

The initial infection via absorbed blood, saliva, or mucus has to reach a certain threshold before it can begin stage II, when the virus can pass the blood brain barrier and begin the process of changing the brain into its new form. Nanites in the body typically aid in fighting off infection, acting as a sort of supplemental immune system by carrying information on all sorts of bacteria and viral infections to simulate pathogen associated molecular patterns to jump start immune response.

The problem is that the nanite colony actually suppresses immune response in this case, leaving the body extremely vulnerable to the virus. Infected individuals rapidly succumb and their bodies wither, taking on the corpse-like appearance now associated with zombification. The withering of the body is actually carried out by corrupted nanites, proliferating beyond their limits and devouring as much energy as they can, up to the hardware limit at the starvation stage. Hacksaw45 may have been a conspiracy theorist, but she was evidently competent enough in microrobotic programming to recognize the hardware limit.

Few, if any, recognized this at the time.

Modern disease theory has stated that viruses tend to become less lethal over time, but more infectious. The zombie virus rarely outright killed a person even from the first cases identified according to the records kept by the CDC and Doctors Without Borders. This fact led many sources to suspect that the virus was manufactured. Hacksaw45 was convinced it was. Because nanite machine instructions evolve, but they don’t make giant leaps. Colonies that evolve shoddy instructions become less efficient, but the ones that actually cause harm to their host die off as they trip certain hardware limits. And given that nanite machine code evolves on a bot-by-bot basis, there is a strong trend towards higher efficiency over time. Changing that trend was long thought to be impossible.

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Whatever worm program was inserted into the first colonies allowed them to infect other colonies that they came into contact with. This did not create a “super colony” as some later theorists posited, but the very similarity it engendered in the zombie population may have helped give rise to what we know today as “horde behavior.”

Zombies seem to have a strong instinct to gather together. In common language, they form hordes. A more proper term might be “herds” or “large packs.” Zombies are a changed form of human. They have human brains, though severely damaged and changed, and are based upon the human body. When one zombie sights prey, the howl it makes is swiftly echoed by others nearby.

Other zombies, even those without line of sight to either the initial howler or the prey turn towards the prey, not the howler. Zombie attack strategy is simple to the point of crudity at that point. Straight at the prey without deviation. But along they way something interesting happens.

Zombies cannot climb ropes or ladders. They can stumble up stairs with some difficulty, but using their arms to climb appears to be impossible. When faced with an obstacle, the press of bodies spreads out to the side somewhat. If the horde can go around, it will, as new horde members see the prey, others will follow the path they took. But if the obstacle constricts the horde and the horde is large enough, front runners will be used as stepping stones. The initial horde slumps down, and the following horde walks up.

The siege of Mexico City showed the stack of thousand upon thousands of zombies can reach several stories up, as the initial horde are pressed down into a ramp. When the horde finds a source of food, the first zombies to show up eat only so much before they wander away allowing more of the horde to find sustenance. Dead zombies are not often seen as food so hordes tend to stay on the move.

When food is scarce, as in winter in certain climates, hordes tend to fragment into a larger area in search of food. Howls still draw additional zombies, but large hordes seem to be highly scarce, with a few exceptions. The hordes in Shanghai, Brussels, and London have never dispersed. Hordes in Alaska and Siberia seem to exist only in highly urbanized areas during warmer months, and disperse rapidly and widely afterwords. Cold doesn’t appear to hinder zombies greatly, only a very long term lack of food does.

Without the ability to study the individuals more closely, I have hypothesized that the larger nanite swarms in zombies are largely inert, save when on the hunt. They appear to not draw energy from the host while quiescent. Normal colonies have a constant but low energy draw, but zombie colonies seem to be quite different. This, along with their paradoxically reduced food intake while supporting larger colonies remains a mystery to me.

I am posting this to all remaining servers on the system network. Our robust infrastructure is finally failing on Walker Station, and the heat exchangers here in my lab have started to fail. Perhaps I will open my door at last, and see what remains of my colleagues one last time. I’ve sharpened an old IV stand to serve as my spear, but I’ve never been a fighter in my life. Perhaps some latter day survivor will find me, teeth stained with blood and viscera, gnawing at the port airlock in anticipation of a free meal. I’ve no courage to suicide. Someone else will have to aid me in that.

Five years is a long time to spend in micro gravity. The generators failed two years on. I’ve kept up my exercise as I could, but there’s only so much one can do. Perhaps I will make it to the escape pods and fall towards the Earth. Maybe I might somehow miraculously survive and continue my observations there. If I am truly blessed, perhaps there will be a hospital where I can begin my experiments that I’ve theorized over the past few years.

Hah. Wouldn’t that be something.

With sincerest hope that this finds sapient eyes, this has been Dr. Abraham Henry Zolnikov. Walker Station will be abandoned by intelligent life soon. One way or the other.

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