Memestalk

By Caldon Mull

Nadia Oliphant has the case of her life ahead of her, dragged from her semi-retirement by a desperate EarthGov and conscripted to investigate and solve the Memestalk Plague. Nadia would much rather sit and watch the sunsets from her Namaqualand home, amidst all of the catastrophic climate change disrupting the Earth's political and economic systems. Nadia consents when the Memestalk gets personal. She is dragged back into the flailing mid 21st Century civilization when her grandson begins to show early symptoms and the race against time begins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caldon Mull
• Release date: Jan 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463664612

Caldon Mull

Caldon Mull is the pen name of a veteran storyteller with continent-spanning work experience consulting for the financial and military sectors. His work includes his primary series the 'Sol Senate Cycle' and his time-tripping fantastika series 'Agency Tales'. He is best known for supporting Games Master Content for the GENCON, UPCON, Oubliette and ICON game and comic conventions but is lesser known for his more edgy literary Fiction.His genre-skipping Fiction work has received 'honorable mention' over the years beginning with the 1986 Q2 Writers of the Future contest and from the SFSA Nova Award over later decades. His shorter works have been published in Omenana, RPGA Network and the SFSA Probe magazines. His longer works have been published under his eponymous Caldon Mull brand and by Sera Blue Publishers. He is currently resident in Finland with his wife and many cats.

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Memestalk

Copyright © 2019 Caldon Mull

Published by Caldon Mull

at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

Memestalk… is a work of fiction, any resemblance of any character to any person, alive or dead is entirely coincidental.This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to your favourite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Memestalk

About Caldon Mull

Other books by Caldon Mull

Connect with Caldon Mull

Memestalk

Nadia bent to inspect her pot as she dragged it out of the water. It was empty, like the three before this one but that didn’t matter much as she already had two fresh, healthy lobsters in a bucket at the stern of her boat. She replaced the bait and started rowing back towards her jetty with long strokes, low in the water with precise placing and maximum use of her core muscles.

She grinned to herself while she steered the boat towards the jetty and threw a line onto the mooring iron. If anyone thought this was about fishing, they would be wrong. She could think of no better way to stay in shape, without appearing to stay in shape. She put her gloved hands into the bucket where the large lobsters were sulking and inspected them while they wriggled and flapped.

Then she tossed them back after recording their measurements on an old stylus. The larger of the two, a larger-than-normal size male, was a regular in her pots. He just couldn’t resist the bait. One day she would eat him if she were hungry enough, but today wasn’t that day. She would download the information from her stylus into an old laptop and then beam it to a friend at the end of the month.

Nadia swung on the rope and landed firmly on the balls of both feet, only a single sound ‘thunked’ from the jetty wood. Satisfied with her muscle memory, she strolled along the rickety jetty frowning at the warping of the planks. Soon, she would have to repair the old structure again. She stopped before climbing the steps to her garden and watched the Atlantic current tug at the little rowboat, and the sun begin to sink into the sea.

It would be another glorious sunset, she smiled to herself. She should go and brew up a pot of tea or something similar and watch it set from her porch. Here in her desert retreat very little disturbed her if she didn’t want it to. There wasn’t even a proper road to her house, just kilometers of sand dunes and rocky plains, the sea and the sky.

Her nearest neighbor was hundreds of kilometers away last time she checked, and could be even further if they had followed the surface water north into the Kalahari. They were San, so- called Bushmen, and the first nation-people of this place. Nadia was here because under her feet were hundreds of meters of sand aquifer and flowing water, they were here because they had always been here.

Her house was set on an ancient rock dyke-and-sill formation, a remnant of the massive forces that had formed the Richtersveld at the beginning of the world, and were still existent in this day and age. Since then, billions of years of sand had swirled around the rock protecting and exposing it in equal measure until it was what it was today.

Nadia had asked to be here; she had asked a special friend to be here and he had made it happen. She couldn’t bear to be around people any longer; she had become oversensitive to their presence a good time ago and had withdrawn to her retreat in order to save her thinning sense of self.

The world was a mess, and she had done her part to make it better. Nadia considered herself failing in that particular endeavor, no matter that everyone else seemingly considering her to have done her best. It just wasn’t good enough.

She didn’t want to mull over the past, she thought as she sipped her fynbos tisane, it would always be there waiting for her, all the unresolved issues, all the ‘what-ifs’… Nadia coped with the present and that was good enough for now. It had to be. The sun set, it was as beautiful as it had promised to be, and so she went inside to blend herself a supplement for dinner.

After years of special training and certain other modifications she had received in her heyday to stabilize her condition, Nadia couldn’t really eat anything else but a specially prepared set of ingredients. It was the one thing she needed from outside her retreat, and one of the only reasons she maintained contact with what was left of her group of friends.

Nothing else provided as much calcium and protein as the concentrate, and Nadia did not want to spend nine hours a day eating regular portions of regular meals. It frustrated her, but the hungrier she got, the worse her temper became. Nadia had a notorious temper to start with.

A call came in over her open channel as she was packing away her dishes for the day. Nadia had long since hacked and patched her receiver; the video feed came though without any returning feed from her.

This is Minister of Police Phakase speaking, switch on your cell! Nadia smirked; it looked like the woman had never walked past a donut shop in her life without stopping. Nadia waited it out in silence, she could always out-wait anyone… the minister started to look confused Is this thing on, is it working? There were some whispers behind her and she tried again Commissioner Oliphant! I demand you answer my call! It is… Nadia cut the stream abruptly and fed the number to the local blocked cue.

The service provider would scrub the blocked queue next month, and it will all start again. The threats, the orders, the attempted bullying… Nadia was not going to respond, she was never going to respond to that tone of voice, not ever again.

She fumed silently, and then walked to the stairwell to her underground gym. There was more space under the house than above ground; Nadia’s bunker would have put any survivalist to shame simply because she had been stocking it for a lot longer than most people.

Nadia was not a simple survivalist, though. Her underground hall was packed with computing power that would rival a Pay-Gate, tied into virtually every pay-per-use channel she could register for or hack. Her various free ‘student’ accounts had allowed her to amass seventeen undergraduate degrees in any number of disciplines.

Her solitude was self-imposed because she had needed the time to think. While she had been thinking, she had also studied everything she had always wanted to. She had always found studying comforting, externalizing her inner turmoil, sorting and ordering it and quieting it. Time had passed outside her home without her even noticing it had been fifteen years.

She stalked past her fully-stocked infirmary, complete with some of the experimental component manufacturing printers