Grand Theft Planetary & Other Stories
Chapter 11: A Theoretical Question

Tristan entered the expansive white hologram suite, hung-over and sleepy due to the latest lecture on the Alternative Theories of Splat. The room was an extraordinarily expensive piece of technology, justified by the university in the age-old technique of lying to their benefactors about its commercial benefits when, in fact, it was simply an extremely cool toy to parade in front of the other universities. At the far end of the room, Tristan could see his friend Josh busying himself over a small computer console.

“Oi mate,” Tristan called out as he wandered across the room, “why did you call me down here? I am very busy and have no time for this.”

Josh glanced over his shoulder, his silvery hair flowing. “What were you busy doing? Playing that ridiculously offensive game?”

“Hey – there is nothing offensive about the Surprise Love Simulator. It’s educational.” He leant against the wall and breathed a plume of yellow smoke at his friend. “So what are we doing here? Dean Kruger will kill us by way of Surprise Love Simulator if he finds us messing with his holosuite.”

Josh slid his finger across the surface of the terminal; the room started to hum. “Remember the conversation we had in the pub last night?”

“Of course,” replied Tristan, “But I was only joking. I never used to perform circumcisions with a pack of extremely sharp playing cards.”

“Not that conversation.” The air shimmered; several pink squat objects started to materialise around the room.

Tristan looked hard at Josh. “You’re not talking about the ‘how many babies we could take on in a fight’ conversation, are you?”

Josh beamed. “That’s the one! Well, it got me thinking. How many babies could we take on in a fight?” He motioned to the screen in the wall. “Using this holographic suite, we are going to discover the answer. I’ve programmed in the physical attributes of an average 6 month-old child, as well as some behavioural characteristics obtained from the medical faculty’s servers.”

“You’re joking? I’m not going to waste my time watching how many babies it’ll take to defeat a man.” He dropped the cigarette and stamped on it, leaving a dark streak on the multi-billion dollar floor. “Laters.”

“Hang on there; we’re not going to just watch.” Josh removed his coat and rolled his shoulders. “We’re going to take part.”

Tristan stopped dead in the middle of the room that was quickly filling with computer-generated toddlers. “We’re actually going to smack around a bunch of babies?”

“Yes.”

“Just to prove how many it’ll take to over-run a full grown man?”

Josh nodded enthusiastically. “A trivial waste of university resources, wouldn’t you agree?”

“And against common decency too.” Tristan ripped off his own coat and joined his friend, small pale fists at the ready. “Alright then, let’s do this!” Josh activated the simulation. A few peaceful seconds passed, and Tristan coughed. “The babies are quite cute, aren’t they? The way they just sit there, gurgling and cooing, not attacking us. There may be a flaw in this experiment.”

“Hmm. Maybe we need to spice things up a little.” Josh flipped open the console and altered some settings. “Let’s reprogram them to be more bloodthirsty.” With a shimmer of light, the babies were replaced by green and grey decomposing versions.

“Zombie babies!” grinned Tristan. “Although, why didn’t you just make the normal babies more aggressive? Why do you have to turn them into zombies?”

“I don’t know,” replied Josh. “I just get the feeling that someone might complain if we continued this experiment with holograms of real babies.”

They both looked around the room, then shrugged and started the simulation. The nearest zombie baby, a screaming mass of rotting flesh and bone, started crawling slowly towards the pair of students, a murderous look in its red eyes. After five minutes of waiting for the zombie to reach them, Josh relaxed. “They need to be faster.”

Tristan nodded and yawned, his initial interest waning. “Here’s an idea. Let’s run around kicking their heads in!”

“Don’t be idiotic! We’re trying to find out how many babies it’ll take to defeat us, not whether we can kill.” He pressed the console rapidly. “We know we can kill babies. Let’s begin again.”

“Question; can we get hurt?” Tristan asked. “I mean, when they reach us, what will happen?”

“Whenever a baby is attacking you, holographic tractor beams will slightly impede your movements,” replied Josh.

“So if lots of babies are in contact, I’ll become paralyzed?”

“Yes. And if you become paralyzed, you’ll be technically dead, and we’ll have our answer. Are you ready?” With a click of his fingers, Josh started the simulation, then backed up against the wall in fear as the horde of zombies snarled towards them at an inhuman speed. “Stop simulation!” Josh cried just as an undead cherub leapt at Tristan’s head.

“Wow!” exclaimed Tristan, patting the face of the airborne zombie now frozen in front of him. “That’s more like it!”

“You’re joking! We’re going to get annihilated by these turbo toddlers! Let me balance things out.” He twiddled the console as Tristan sat on a zombie and lit up a smoke. Eventually, Josh clapped his hands together. “There - I’ve reduced speed and zombie aggression. Let’s begin again.”

This time, the wave crawled towards them at a more favourable pace until they were within striking distance of the two students at last. “Let’s do this!” bellowed Tristan, then started kicking and stamping on the tiny enemies as they tried to bite and scratch him. One grabbed hold of his leg and sunk its decaying holographic teeth into his calf. “Ha ha ha! That tickles!” Tristan grabbed the baby monster and wrenched it free. It fell and rolled into the mass of crawling bodies, then got up and started back towards him.

“There’s too many!” shouted Josh as he jumped up and down, sending babies flying everywhere. “When you hit them, they just get back up!”

“Who would have thought babies were so resilient?” Tristan shouted back as he threw a couple of demons across the room. “Stop simulation!” The two exhausted scientists sank to the floor, covered in holographic gore. “We need weapons,” said Tristan simply.

It took a few phone calls and vague promises to some of his classmates, but Josh eventually gained access to the university’s weapons database and downloaded everything on offer. “That’s more like it,” exclaimed Tristan, brandishing a holographic chainsaw.

Josh raised his own weapon, a WW2 flamethrower, and then started the simulation again. Tristan was immediately obscured in a cloud of blood and gore as his chainsaw cut through the zombies. Josh fired the flamethrower in short controlled bursts, turning the enemy into small fireballs; much to his horror, the flames didn’t affect them at all.

With a toothy clank, Tristan’s chainsaw stopped and the remaining babies quickly rolled over him like a green wave, clawing and biting until he was paralysed. Josh was on the floor quickly afterwards, immobile and covered in burning zombies. He called out frantically, and the fiends disappeared.

“That didn’t work,” muttered Josh as he staggered to his feet. “Do babies not feel pain?”

“They’re baby zombies,” reminded Tristan. “My weapon was awesome until it ran out of petrol.”

“According to the console,” said Josh glumly, “It took only 70 babies to take us down.”

“Really? It felt like more.”

Josh rubbed his chin. “We need weapons that are immediately incapacitating, like the chainsaw, but don’t require ordnance or fuel. Samurai swords, for instance?”

“What about shovels?” suggested Tristan. “Sharp on the end, but can be used as a club too.”

“Shovels it is!” Josh waved a wand, and the implements appeared in their hands. The horde appeared at the other side of the room, and started their advance. “These shovels are a bit heavy though,” Josh said. “We’re going to get tired quickly waving these around.”

He was right. The pair swatted the first wave of babies away with the face of their garden tools, but the pale students’ “sedentary lifestyle” arms were never meant to wield such objects, and the babies soon won the fight.

“Swords,” panted Josh. “Light and sharp, that’s the way forward.”

They reset the experiment and brandished a pair of Katanas, the electronic replicas moving slightly slower than their hand movements, but otherwise totally realistic. The attacking horde rolled towards them as before, but this time the scientists had the advantage, cutting and chopping the zombies effortlessly.

“Freeze simulation!”

Josh and Tristan looked at each other in confusion. “Why did you stop the simulation?” they said in unison, then both slowly looked towards the entrance to the holosuite where Dean Kruger was now stood. He was accompanied by a small party of suits, who were staring at the scene in disbelief.

“What the HELL is going on here?” screamed the Dean, more menacing that any of the zombies they had battled.

“We were experimenting sir!” quivered Tristan, trying to hide a cigarette butt under his foot.

“By killing these... creatures?!” Kruger advanced on them, fists clenched. “Do you realise that these people,” he gestured to the following party, “are the benefactors who paid for this hologram suite? The suite you are using without permission?”

“Yes sir,” they said together, backing away from his rage.

“Excuse me,” piped an elderly gentleman from behind Kruger, “but what is the experiment? What are these students trying to discover?”

The soon-to-be-excluded pair looked at each other; there was absolutely no other explanation for it, no lie they could tell that would result in Kruger smiling, patting them on the back, and congratulating them on being thigh-high in baby bodies. “Well,” said Josh, squaring his shoulders defiantly, “we were attempting to discover how many babies it would take to incapacitate a full-grown human male.”

There was a shocked silence, Kruger’s face turning redder with every passing second until he started to steam. The benefactors looked around the room; at the blood, gore, corpses and severed limbs, and then one of them raised a hand. “Can I have a go?”

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