Sixty Two

The Cannibals were having a BBQ. Normally this time of year, they would have had a sheep that they had stolen or some purloined cattle. Pickings were getting slim on that front though. Their summer of raiding had taken a toll on the local population of domesticated animals. Feeling a need to get back to their roots, they had captured and slain a human.
It was difficult to tell whether it was a man or a woman because it was in the process of being broken down into its constituent parts. They had hung it from a tree by passing a rope between the achilles tendon and the fibula in the same fashion that a deer is hung. This being head down and feet towards the sky. It had been skinned and was in the process of being quartered.
Sawing through the spine takes skill and patience, but the end result reduces cooking time and makes the carcass easier to handle. They had employed the use of a two man bucksaw to accomplish this task. This operation starts at the crotch and works its way towards the head, which in this case was missing. To keep the carcass from swinging pendulously with every stroke of the saw, they had passed ropes through the collar bones and staked them into the ground.
The handles of the bucksaw were decorated with a sort of paté that was a mix of bone meal and spinal tissue. After every ten strokes or so, the harvested paté would be scraped off and doled out as a sort of amuse bouche for the team of butchers.
Acts of butchery like this were standard in the everyday life of a cannibal, so to entertain the three dozen or so onlookers there was a bit of a show. Before you hang and quarter something that you want to butcher, it’s a good idea to skin it. Skin can be useful and the quartering process can leave it in less than ideal condition. Any sane and well adjusted person would salt this, or use the brain to tan it almost immediately. In this case, the skin was being used as prop comedy. One of the cannibals had donned the skin and was walking around pretending to be its previous owner in not overly flattering terms.
He was prancing about the campsite reenacting little vignettes of the daily life of a shepherd. Most of which seemed to envolve either taking a shit or fucking a sheep. The cannibal’s eyes could be seen through the empty holes that formerly were the windows to the soul.
He made the puppet face talk by moving his jaw in an exaggerated style that you would be familiar with if you had seen Planet of the Apes. It was a ghastly bloody horror show and the crowd was eating it up. This guy had been working on his tight five about shepherds for a long time and it was finally paying off. His big punchline was making the empty face say “I’m Kevin”, which was probably the previous owner’s name.
From their vantage outside the circle of firelight, Bird and Fyndraxis were filled with disgust. Fyndraxis had known on a theoretical level that cannibals were awful, but actually seeing it in action was utterly jarring. For once he thanked his lucky stars that he didn’t have a meat suit with features like a gag reflex. Bird on the other hand was not so lucky. She spent a few minutes quietly emptying her guts someplace stealthy.
“I’m going to take them out,” Bird said, with a quiet rage that was seasoned liberally with disgust.
“Stick to the plan,” he said, levelly, “you’re strictly backup.”
She begrudgingly backed down as Fyndraxis put his plan into motion. Fyndraxis summoned his sphere of hunters and bade it to enter the firelight. As it rolled quietly in from the forest, hardly anyone noticed it with the comedy show in full swing. Once it was noticed though, it was met with a decent amount of screaming and running. Pandemonium ensued for a minute or two while everyone tried to figure out what exactly was going on. Once the initial shock of a perfect black sphere rolling out of the woods wore off a little bit, there was at first reluctant curiosity, and then an investigation started in ernest.
The sphere was approached by a circle of cannibals brandishing improvised weapons. It was poked at, prodded, sniffed, and tasted. It was squatted in front of and pondered for a minute or two before the next phase of Fyndraxis’ plan went into action. When it did, the sphere transformed itself into a cylinder, and then took the form of a great owl. As the owl spread its wings in the firelight the cannibals crouched and stared at it in awe.
With their attention given so fully to the winged figure above them, they barely flinched when it turned to dust before them. They all took turns exchanging confused looks as the dust settled about them. Once the dust had covered their bodies all hell began to break loose.
The dust began to consume them. The Human voice is capable of some rather fantastic sounds. Given the correct training, you could achieve a vocal range of about five octaves like Morten Harket, the front man from the popular eighties group A HA. Nothing pushes the human instrument past its limits quite like abject, unadulterated pain though. Fyndraxis was able to observe one cannibal with an incredible seven octave range as his flesh was peeled off of him like the layers of an onion.
It was a messy business, but when it comes down to it the chemical difference between plastic and human flesh really isn’t all that significant. Plastic is made of long simple chains of repeating hydrocarbons. That’s a bunch of carbon with some hydrogen thrown in there for good luck. Human flesh is made of the same stuff, there just happens to be a bit more oxygen in the mix and that makes it a bit wetter. There are some trace elements like phosphorus and calcium, but for the most part it is carbon and water.
When his hunters consume something, they tear it apart with their little jaws. Inside their bellies these chunks are further broken down with lasers. After this laser treatment they are dealing with things on the atomic level. Atoms can be sorted by mass using electromagnetic fields and stored for later use like a teeny tiny box of legos.
Once a Hunter’s belly is all full of atomic legos, it takes a nap. While it is napping, it looks at a blueprint that is stored in its memory. This blueprint tells it how to make another hunter. It does this by reversing the laser magnet process and shitting another hunter out of its butt. Once the nap is done, the two hunters go on to have another meal and begin the process again.
The Human body is 18% carbon by weight, yielding about 22 kilograms per cannibal. Multiply that by forty cannibals and that ends up being 880 kilograms of carbon. Since the Hunters were made mostly of carbon, Fyndraxis had more than tripled his supply. He had an actual metric ton of Hunters.
He really could have made these out of anything. He could have pointed his hunters at any old patch of forest and had them mow it down to build their numbers. Forest is important though, It has a job to do. It’s the lungs of the planet. Taking atmospheric carbon dioxide and replacing it with good old O2 is a fantastic thing to do. It’s a net positive. The cannibals on the other hand were a net negative, so Fyndraxis decided to give them a taste of their own medicine.
The fact that the Wendigo had only consumed plastic was kind of a miracle. If they had decided at any point to broaden their culinary horizons, this world would have been toast. Fyndraxis’ hunters running his software could eat anything to grow their ranks. They also weren’t limited to just spitting out more hunters. They could print anything that was stored in their memory. They could even team up and print out something big.
Bird had been troubled by a touch of insomnia since Mycellus had chosen her as champion. Her internal mycelia had a tendency to connect up to the rest of the network while she was asleep and flood her with sensory data. She would awaken with the taste of dirt in her mouth and not be able to get back to sleep. So Fyndraxis would stay up and talk with her. The company was nice, but he was getting concerned about how little actual sleep she was getting.
Fyndraxis had been designing a present for her in his spare time. Sometimes when she would wake up, he would play music for her softly. That usually did the trick to get her back to sleep. He wanted her to have something that she could choose her own music on so he designed her a music player complete with little earbuds. There were off the shelf printable music players on his vintage of github, so designed is a pretty generous use of the word.
He also managed to sneak a radio into this new toy, so that she could talk to Terra and Pavel whenever she pleased. He had a private laugh to himself when he realized that it was made of the corpses of cannibals.