Emergence

I've always had a fascination with oral telling of stories, and this was originally written as more of a script than an actual short story. Because I intended it to be told sitting around a campfire each night, with the teller in costume and the 'kid' mentioned matching, and others simply sitting around it is broken up into several parts.

You probably don't even know what an Emergence is, do you? I remember when they were still happening, when it was still novel, before everyone forgot and we shipped them all off. We never did get to the bottom of them, never managed to puzzle it out. Then again no one really bothered, they were an embarassment more than anything. No one, absolutely no one, wanted them except themselves and a few comic book fans. They were a disaster.

Bah. Listen to me ramble on, sorry about that. Now what was it I was talking about?

Oh yes, Emergence. Well then, lets go.

I was actually there for the first Emergence. I was six at the time, yes, I know that makes it seem a very long time ago. I suppose it was a very long time ago actually, since I'm over a hundred now. What's that? How old am I? That's not a particularly polite question to ask. I'm one hundred and sixty-two, if that makes you happy.

Anyway, the first Emergence. People didn't live as long then, we hadn't wiped out the common cold, and AIDs was still a threat rather than an annoyance. They even had these things they called health scares, all long before nanos were developed. I suppose they were actually developing at the time, but it was before they were released anyway. A good fifty years before in fact.

Right then, sorry I keep drifting off the topic. The first Emergence then, at least the first officially recognised Emergence. I saw it happen, I was actually in the bank where it happened. Hell, I was the first one saved by it.

Now what happened was this, I was in the bank with my parents.

Yes, parents you know. You must've been taught about them. It was when we still had men and women, and just men and women, and they actually reproduced together by exchanging genetic code.

Yes I know people still do that, but trust me, its not the same.

Anyway we were in the bank all together, and in came a half-dozen crooks. Dozen, it means twelve, and a half-dozen is six. They came in, and they looked perfectly normal at first. Then they pulled various guns out of these carrier bags they had and held up the place.

Oh for God's sake. Guns, you must've seen them in a museum or something, under that safety glass to keep the nanos from digesting them for resources. They used to shoot bits of metal at high speed, designed to hurt people.

You know what, I'm getting tired of this. Come back tomorrow.



Ah, okay, you're back then. I'm actually quite suprised. Where were we yesterday?

Yep, that was it. The bank. Its a building, big concrete building, used to hold money. Money was used to trade for stuff, kind of like bytes are now, except then it was solid and banks used to keep it in a safe. They used to trade it for solid stuff too, not just info-space or resources. Actual goods, books, things like that.

You know what a book is? I'm impressed.

No, no, that's not what books used to be. They used to have lots of pages, not just one, and it was permanently fixed. Forget it, we'll come back to that later.

So I was in this bank with my parents and these guys came in with their guns to hold up the bank. A hold-ups a bit like someone trying to swipe some of your info-space without a trade, like someone walking off with a kilo of resources, except they used to threaten people to do it. You could still kill people then, its kinda like someone going dormant and not coming back out.

And they took a hostage, that's someone that they're threatening to kill if they don't get the money they want. Then they put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger.

And this was the amazing bit, this was the moment of the first Emergence, which we should have recognised for the disaster it was. He didn't die. The gun didn't blow his head off. He wasn't even kneeling there any more. By the time the crook had pulled the trigger, he was already standing behind him, with an arm locked round his throat. The bullet went stray and hit one of the others in the arm, not that any of us cared, we were watching the first of the heroes take apart the crooks.

You know its been said that a lot of legends might have come from periods of Emergence. We don't know what caused it, but a lot of legends of gods and myths of heroes match up with what actually happens.

Head off home kid, and leave that kilo here. I've got a few mods I want to make and you ain't getting this tale for nothing. See you tomorrow.



Welcome back kid. Getting to be a regular thing. Right then, shall we get on?

So there was this hero who saved us all, could move incredibly fast or something. I mean we're talking faster than a sprinter here, so fast you could barely see. Eyes were more limited then, now it wouldn't be a problem. He took all of the guns away, knocked out the crooks, and that was it. The first Emergence.

Of course the media were all over it, the guy was a celebrity overnight. That's where we screwed up.

See celebrities now aren't the same as they used to be. It didn't used to be all self-promotion and building yourself up, telling people about you. Instead there were people whose jobs were just to find out information about these people, and when the Emergences started there got to be people who had to find out all about the heroes.

At first it wasn't so bad. There were only a few of them, and they kept fairly quiet, the press couldn't get at them. By the time of the hundredth Emergence though it was over the top, they got no privacy. Imagine someone cracking your security coding and watching you constantly, reporting to everyone exactly what you're doing. Yeah, I see that gets you. That's pretty much what these people had to go through.

And you can imagine what it did to them. They started to get angry. The original celebrities were a bit like they are now, they were the type who liked the attention, but those who went through Emergence were just average people. Good people with a sense of justice in most cases, but basically just people.

The first murder happened. A sniper took out Zip while he was just walking down the street, and the whole thing came crashing down. Zip? He was the one who'd saved us in the bank, that first one. The sniper was caught.

Oh, a sniper is someone who uses a gun over a very long distance. Or that'll do for now anyway.

I'm actually nearly crying from this, I remember exactly how it all went wrong. That murder was the first of many, it was put down to various things, jealousy, personal reasons, all sorts of different things. I think jealousy was the main one, if these Emergences got to be special then why couldn't everyone?

Eventually there were only a handful left alive. Sure, they were powerful, they were amazing, they were heroes. But there had only ever been a few hundred of them and there were six billion average humans. They went on the rampage, they fought back against the people who wanted them to be just your average joe and part of the crowd.

The death toll was never really counted, but we won in the end. I killed two of them myself in fact. We lost a lot I'll admit, but we got rid of them, and we thought the world would go back to normal.

And then someone released the nanos. But you know about that one.