Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(85)
Maxim has now resided in this apartment building for a year. When he first arrived there were no live residents. Of the 25 units, only 12 had corpses in them. The first thing he did was start to drag the bodies, one by one, outside the building to leave for scavengers. But there were 23 corpses; after the fourth one, his stamina gave out. Then he hit on the notion of throwing them off their balconies, and that went much faster. He did all this in full daylight, to minimize personal risk, as he remembered reading that most predators and scavengers hunted at dawn or twilight.
Birds and insects converged on the splattered remains immediately, but that night Maxim observed coyotes feasting. The next morning there were heavy rains; by the time the weather calmed just before sunset, there was barely a trace of gore left.
A week later, three Latinas – aged, Maxim guessed, between 20 and 50 – moved in two floors beneath him, taking over the entire level. The following day, the Chinese man appropriated a unit for himself on the third floor. No one has settled in the building since, because the man always chases anyone new away. He never interferes or interacts with either the women on the eighth floor or with Maxim.
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Maxim Fujiyama lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, North America, Planet Earth, Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy. Maxim doesn’t like people to make assumptions about shared knowledge when they express themselves, either verbally or in writing. Everything should be defined and contextualized carefully, so as to make sure there can be no misunderstandings. For example, there’s another Vancouver 490 kilometres south of the one he lives in; the other Vancouver is in the state of Washington, in the United States of America. Aside from seeing it on maps, he knows nothing of that other Vancouver.
Two years ago, his hometown boasted a population of 700,000, with the Greater Vancouver metropolitan area comprised of more than 2.5 million inhabitants, the third-largest urban agglomeration in Canada. Now, without official statistics, Maxim is hesitant to make a precise guess. But, for one year now, he has been keeping tabs.
Two years ago, it would have been impossible to take note of every person encountered or observed in a single day, or even walking the length of a downtown block. There was too much activity going on at all times.
According to his observations, Maxim has identified 1,324 different people in Vancouver. At least 597 of these can be assumed to currently reside in the city, as he has recorded their presence throughout the past year at various intervals. Another 344, seen no more than three times and not more recently than 60 days ago, he lists as “transient or deceased.” Another 104 were only observed for the first time in the past eight weeks, so their status is still “indeterminate.” He counts 170 whom he observed regularly for the first few months but then disappeared; these are noted as “deceased or emigrated.” Finally, he identified 109 corpses as “newly deceased,” as he had previously counted them among the survivors spotted in Vancouver. He does not keep tabs on other corpses: those who died more than a year ago, such as those of his parents. There are too many to count, and they fall outside the scope of his survey.
He has not spoken to any of the survivors. And no one has tried to talk to him. The inhabitants of Vancouver seem content keeping to themselves, which suits Maxim. He only ventures from his base of operations to scavenge or observe and record the population of the city. There are also nonhuman animals in Vancouver; beyond the usual urban fauna of squirrels, cats, dogs, crows, pigeons, sparrows, and the like, Maxim has seen numerous foxes, rabbits, and coyotes and a handful of timber wolves, lynxes, cougars, and bears. He lacks the expertise to be able to distinguish individuals of most of these species, so he has not been keeping tabs on their population, although he does enjoy observing them.
Today, Maxim recognized four people already on his list
of permanent residents, seven people from the pool of newcomers, and two individuals he has never seen before (the two men who tried to gain entry into his building).
Precision makes knowledge and communication possible. Maxim is a precise person.
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Maxim is uneasy using the word “person.” What does it mean? Who or what is a person? Can only humans be called persons? Are dogs persons, too? Cats? Parrots? Lions? Dolphins? Elephants? Mice? Iguanas? Octopuses? Sharks? Some say that chimpanzees and gorillas are persons and should be treated as such. Who or what defines the limits of personhood? If being human equals personhood, does that mean that chimps and gorillas are in some way human? For many years, humans were thought to be Cro-Magnons. Persons were Cro-Magnons; other animals, from primates to insects, were not. Fossils from other branches of not-quite-human hominids had been found, but all of these were thought to be extinct. Later DNA analysis told us that, no, they were not truly extinct, and, yes, they were human, too. They still live among and within modern humans – or at least what remains of the human population.
When the Cro-Magnons migrated out of Africa across Europe and Asia, they encountered these other humans – the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and probably others whose DNA has yet to be located in the current human gene pool, such as the Red Deer Cave People, and others whose fossil record and DNA may as yet be undiscovered. To what degree did these different types of humans fight or cooperate? How much did they recognize each other as akin or distrust each other as alien? The details of those encounters are forever lost, but one thing is now certain: these different branches of early humans interbred. Were they all persons? Some modern humans are part Neanderthal, part Denisovan, part who-knows-what other species of early human. Are all modern humans equally persons, regardless of their genetic background?