Human After All: Prologue

Author's Note: Welcome to Human After All, the first serial arc in the We Happy Few series. Join Captain Jez Shaw and his crew as they travel around the galaxy fighting off an apocalyptic threat to the Galactic Union. For more information on the series, please visit the series page. To subscribe to future chapters, please visit the story page.

Many thanks to my Writers Against Hunger contributors Joel and Jeremy for donating to Feeding America and sponsoring this story!

Trigger warnings for this chapter: violence, blood, cannibalism.

Lucy started at the screen in front of her, amazed at how much older she looked through the camera’s lens. She was only 34, but it looked as if the past 36 hours had aged her considerably. There were dark bags under her eyes, and her cheeks were hollow, the blush having been exchanged for the sallow undertones of hunger and exhaustion. 

She couldn’t remember how long she’d been on Theta-1 at this point. The computer system, Nous, insisted that it had only been two weeks since the expedition had been dropped off on the planet with only a small runabout to return to space “if necessary,” but that didn’t seem right to Lucy. She swore she’d been locked up in her lab for at least that long. Her sense of time had been lost with the lack of sleep, so she couldn’t be sure anymore.

She was desperately hungry, too, hungrier than she should have been if she’d only been in her lab for a day or two. The only food dispensers were in the mess hall, but nothing Nous could recreate would sate her. She craved meat, real meat, bloody and raw and preferably still body-warm. The mere thought of giving into that desire made her stomach reject the little bit of acid that was still in there, though, so she sat in her lab and worked so, so hard to ignore the gnawing need inside her.

Instead, she worked on her research and recorded what had had happened to the expedition, in case the Union ships returned a quiet, desolate staging ground. 

The Theta-1 Expedition was a disaster from the start. They had agreed to go to Theta-1 because a large deposit of chromelite was detected on the uninhabited, Terran-like planet near the edge of the Galactic Union’s territory. Like most research teams, they were understaffed, undersupplied, and underwhelmed from the very moment they set foot on the planet. Early scans indicated that the chromelite deposit was much smaller than originally estimated, but their expedition leader had insisted they continue scanning for the “original” deposit that led them there in the first place.

Despite the size of the deposit, there had been enough chromelite to give Lucy enough neural capacitors to last weeks, more than she’d had just sitting at Orion Station hoping for a trader to come by. The miners and surveyors weren’t happy, but Lucy was. She was so very close to a real technological breakthrough, and she just needed a little more time.

Then the Buzz started.

It came on their third day on Theta-1: a deep, rattling, buzzing sound that vibrated your bones and made your head ache just enough to be annoying but not enough to actually do something about the pain. It was uncertain where the noise came from; all of their sensors seemed to say it was coming from the planet’s core, but the phenomenon hadn’t even been detected before that day. It was as if someone had simply turned on the sound once they arrived.

The expedition agreed to continue work as normal, but you could tell things weren’t as efficient as they had been the previous couple of days. You got used to the Buzz itself as the days went on, but its effects lingered deep in your soul, trying to shake your body apart at the atomic level. Lucy could barely concentrate on her work, which meant she was now making sloppy mistakes that cost her precious time and funding.

Everyone was on a knife’s edge by day five, and it showed as interpersonal relationships began to break down. Arguments were commonplace, turning physical as time went on. The expedition leader, Hammond, ordered everyone to stay in their quarters during off-hours to try to keep the peace. All it seemed to do was give everyone cabin fever.

Mitchell had been the first one to succumb to the Buzz, gouging his left eye out with a spoon at breakfast on day eight. Lucy could still smell his warm blood, taste the coppery tang on the air that seemed to make everyone ravenous. It had taken three men to pry Hammond off of Mitchell and lock her up; she was still holding part of his jugular vein in her mouth as they took her away. Things seemed to calm down after that, but the scream from Seran’s quarters an hour later summoned all of them to witness the Doatan woman’s suicide by laser drill.

That seemed to be the final straw.

All hell broke loose as Lucy ran to her lab and locked herself inside, barricading the doors with a large filing cabinet. It didn’t feel like enough to keep the danger out as the remaining 26 members of the expedition fought and stampeded and screamed. Eventually, blessedly, the expedition’s base grew silent. 

It had been quiet (too quiet, the Buzz nonwithstanding) for a day now, but Lucy was still scared to venture outside her lab. She could smell copper on the air, and it beckoned to her with a pull at her stomach she was barely able to resist. She had no idea if anyone was still alive, and even if they were, there was no guarantee of their sanity.

Her options at this point were few and far between. If she left the lab, she might succumb to the Buzz and kill herself (or worse, anyone else left alive). She could send a distress signal, but the ship that responded to her call might also fall prey to the Buzz. She might be able to make it to the runabout and escape the planet, but that was only if she could resist the overwhelming urge to consume that was wracking her body.

She looked over her shoulder at the results of her research and sighed. There was one way she could escape without the Buzz taking her too, but it was a long shot. She didn’t even know if what she was considering was possible, but she was desperate at this point; it was either this, or certain death.

She faced the camera again and tapped her index finger and thumb together. “Nous,” she said to the computer system activated by her gesture, which was now awaiting her command. “Record.”

“Recording,” the soft, feminine voice of Nous replied.

Lucy nodded and began speaking. “This is the last will and testament of Lucy Ellen Smith, Lead Researcher in the Theta-1 Expedition. If anyone finds this, know that I am attempting what my fellow researchers at the Union Academy will know as the Lazarus Protocol. If it fails, please provide my notes to my fellows at the Academy, as I am certain they will find them insightful. If the Protocol is successful, however, I hope to tell them myself…”