Nurturing Wonder

“That’s… not just any love token,” Hogar said, hesitating.

“I know,” she said, closing her hand over the pendant and holding it to her heart. “It’s a Ffallan eternity symbol. Given to the one you want to spend your life with.”

“Given as a marriage proposal,” he corrected gently. “I didn’t know – I wouldn’t have put you in this position, if I had known. It was just supposed to be a surprise present.”

“Anthea!”

I startled out of the world that Bayou Moon had woven around me and hunched my shoulders guiltily. I knew I was reading past my bed-time, and that I would likely regret it in the morning.

“You do know it’s past midnight, don’t you?”

Ooops… I had thought it was 11, tops. Still, the interruption was a timely one. I put the book down reluctantly and went to bed, glad it wasn’t time to get up yet.

Still sick, and definitely finding it makes it more difficult to be creative. There’s always *something* to write about as long as I sit down and get started, though. And while I’d love to be writing amazing, moving, brilliant fiction, *something* is enough.

Heat. The moist touch of steam condensing inside my nostrils as I inhale, almost too hot for comfort. Warmth, penetrating through my hands and soothing the chill in my joints.

A sip… too hot still. Tip of the tongue burned, but only barely – I knew it was probably too hot. I rub my tongue against the roof of my mouth until the pain fades, then blow gently across the top of the cup and try another sip of tea.

I rounded the corner and walked into a cacophony of… it hardly does the noise justice to call it a cacophony of cheeps, but what else would you call it? Hundreds, maybe a thousand or more tiny birds gathered in the trees of that one little alleyway, cheeping their little feathered heads off.

So, zombies. Yes, again. Specifically, zombie population dynamics.

Zombies evidently gain some form of nourishment from consuming the living, so they need some living around to continue to consume, right?

They also convey zombie-ism to victims who are infected but not consumed, perhaps via some parasitic infection that takes time to develop. Evolutionarily speaking, the parasitic lineage that doesn’t wipe out all of the living in one fell swoop is more likely to survive. If the infection rate is too high and too lethal, the infection burns itself out before it can spread further, like with Ebola. (Terrifying disease, but it seems to burn out quickly because it kills all its carriers. Or maybe our health institutions have just been good enough to keep it contained so far.)

So… Patient 0 gets infected, converts to zombie-hood and starts trying to consume the living. There’s only one of them, though, and they’re sort of shamble-y, so most of their targets escape fairly easily. Some of those were successfully bitten, and convert to being zombies, and eventually join up with each other. Now, there’s a pack of zombies, which are more successful at bringing down prey and consuming it. Fewer people escape to convert into zombies, and attrition (bodily decay, the living trying to kill them, etc) brings down the number of functional zombies.

With a smaller, less-functional population, more people start getting away again, and converting to zombies to replenish the population.

Wash, rinse, repeat…

On second thought, maybe they’re not so much trying to consume as being directed by the parasite to pass on the infection. It’s just the neurological buttons the parasites trigger are violent and don’t have an internal limiter. The parasite doesn’t care about survival of the host, just propagation of the parasite, so that explains the decay and so on. The host can’t pop out for a burger because they’re compelled to attack potential hosts, but once they’ve attacked, hunger (and lack of higher brain function) can drive them to cannibalism.

Zombies don’t attack each other because the parasites want new hosts, not already populated ones. Zombies probably emit some sort of parasite smell to warn off other zombies… which could be co-opted as a defense, once sufficiently understood. You could buy cans of “Zombie-off” in the corner store, right next to the bug spray.

“Duty first, then pleasure.”

“Awwwww…”

“Come on, get to work!”

“But Civilization V just came out…”

“Exactly! And how long does a game of Civ take?”

*smiles happily* “Days…”

“Work first, then Civ.”

“Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…”

Spam isn’t the only strange meat product people eat – it’s similar in many ways to sausage, or meatloaf, or even stew. Odds and ends that you don’t want to eat on their own, made more appetizing by mixing them all up with some sort of seasoning and serving in an unrecognizable format. (Yes, I realize that you *can* make sausage and meatloaf and stew out of prime cuts of meat just because you enjoy sausage and meatloaf and stew, but that’s not why they were invented in the first place.)

So… I would guess that most fictional cultures would have similar “odds and ends” foods to inflict on unwary travelers, much like Dibbler’s “meat onna stick” (and other assorted culinary offenses) in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.

No idea where I’m going with this, but I think it has potential…

Purring, purring, purring.

The sound pulled Reika towards wakefulness, but somehow full awareness seemed just out of reach. She felt warm, but all her senses were fuzzy. She tried to blink, but her eyelids were either stuck or unresponsive. She tried to swallow, and whimpered at the pain of her dry, gummy throat and mouth.

The purring sound intensified. Something… somethings shifted against her.

She tried to remember where she was, what was going on. She hadn’t had cats since… Earth.

Adrenaline shot through her system, but even with that boost it was a struggle to prop herself up on her arms, to force her eyes open and try to focus. There were no cats on Cygna 7, so what was purring?