|
|
This may sound like a foolish thing, but I wasn’t afraid. Serra wasn’t either, she stood defiantly in the middle of the room, as though there was nothing in this world that could move her. She says, “try to keep up.” Then she sprung forward, the force of which made the Cicada dip slightly, she struck the door with enough force to rip it completely off it’s reinforced hinges, and rode it right into the side of the police cruiser that had it’s guns aimed and ready to fire, the magnetic lock cable it had anchored to us to halt our movement snapped off with ease, whipping back into it’s reel. The moment she struck it, she used her momentum to leap to the side and out of sight. The way she moved, the force of the impact as she hits the police cruiser, sending it spiraling off towards the ground. It looked ridiculous, spiraling away like that, it’s black gunmetal shape almost giving the impression that it were a large fly that had just been swatted away.
Cyborg. Probably high-level bionics. Military grade muscle fiber interlaced with a skeletal support system. Probably bone density supplements and nano-fiber. Definitely had spinal grafts, maybe titanium plating. Judging from the force she knocked that door off, I’d say she had the same treatment for her arms that she had for her legs. As a matter of fact I wouldn’t be surprised if she had an artificial body, but that seemed unlikely. Her touch was too warm, she still had human emotions. Something about taking the leap from human to bio machine did strange things to people. In my limited experience of it and what I’ve seen, the top police officers and some of the private security guys that go through the process lose their humanity in the process. They were perpetually on the net, never tired, never seemed to give a damn about anything. An emotional no-man’s land. Not her though. To be honest, I had expected to have been popped off by now. I confessed everything to her, not really out of trust, but because I thought that I was going to be executed any moment so I didn’t see much point in hiding anything. She said she was my bodyguard, and I laughed in her face. What a fool I was, she really is an army unto herself.
That’s when a more dangerous notion wormed it’s way into my head. I began to have a little bit of hope. It happened so fast, like a lightning striking, that I couldn’t stop myself. Once one begins to hope all sorts of insane ideas begin to gestate in one’s head. Ideas of escape, survival, even victory. In my experience hope was something that happened to other people, I never dared tamper with the stuff. That way I was never let down too bad.
Cicadas were piloted with an old control stick setup. Like you see in the ruined sectors of Europa, hovering around from landing to landing, scavenging old tech and fuel. There was a pain that resonated from the back of my head. Then what sounded like someone took an old circuit board and put it in a microwave. Then a flood of memories, reality and dream seeming to blend together in that moment. Zombie-like I wandered over to the control panel and pressed the manual override. With the magnetic lockdown the police cruiser Serra destroyed was placing on us gone, I could get the ship moving again. Outside I was half seeing, through the cockpit window, Serra holding on to the railgun mounted on the top of another police cruiser, and shadows of the past. The conflicting vision was of me piloting a helicopter away from a corporate strike team, you could see the logos on their body armor shinning brightly amidst the snow. They were firing up at me, but more to get my attention then to try and shoot me down, I must have left them behind. The image faded, but I found for a second I could think about it free of pain.
Click to continue reading “Monolithic Horizon; Act 1: Heathen – Chapter 6: Dead Man Walking”
Go straight to Post
Popularity: 7% [?]
When I first met John Seifer, it was at a press conference. This was after a failed assassination attempt on yours truly. The speech was my glorious assurance to the people that those responsible were brought to justice and that the threat has passed, but my heart wasn’t in it. The speech was flat, but no one seemed to notice that I didn’t even seem to believe what I was saying anymore. This is because I realized that I had become so used to lying that it came natural to show the correct inflection and emotion at times, like a reflex. While I didn’t summon up any feeling, there was no difference. This made me wonder what the point in me being a figurehead was. It was clear no one really paid attention to the government anymore, the people more that likely felt that I was totally irrelevant. Therefore I eventually came to the realization that I was most likely going to die. It wasn’t, as they say, a matter of how but when. The Commission’s market research data showed that most people didn’t even realize the government was still in operation, and therefore my termination was inevitable. That’s what Seifer told me after the conference was over. Off the record. It was the first time anyone talked to me like I was anything more than a tool, so I suppose that my guard was lowered slightly. Maybe that gave me the false pretense that he actually cared if I lived or died. Which, I should have known was far from the case.
This was over a year ago.
We only met about a dozen times, and each time it was off the record. From what I was led to believe about that sort of thing, with enough money you could say and do whatever you wanted and it wouldn’t be used against you. Which, was rather stupid in retrospect, but I was desperate for someone to talk to. Desperate to speak about the things that concerned me after ten years, almost seven of which I felt like a walking corpse, barely capable of functioning without being told what to do and where to go. Over the last three years the headaches would get more frequent and more terrible, a cackling electric fire across my synapses, feeling like my brain had been replaced like a teeming swarm of fire ants. The thing about the noises, is that I could hear faint sounds, almost like voices. Yet, it wasn’t English or slang or anything human. It kinda sounded like a phone connection. A modem. You see some of those in the more low tech areas of Europa. For the like of me I don’t know how I knew that. There’s a lot of memories in my head, unbound like that. Little fragments of information, little factoids but they aren’t based on any experience of mine. This, combined with my normal experiences day in and out has accumulated over the years into this growing hatred for The Commission. Like lighting a waterproof fuse, once ignited there is only one possible outcome.
Click to continue reading “Monolithic Horizon; Act 1: Heathen – Chapter 5: A Better Future”
Go straight to Post
Popularity: 7% [?]
Not dead. Eyes open, and there’s smoke and chunks of metal and plastic, white material from the airbags, the foam inside them already drying up, causing the powder left in it’s wake to give thier surface a faint glow in the blinking red crash lights. There is an automated message playing on a cracked screen informing me that the crash is indeed over, and to exit the vehicle and seek medical attention. Oh and don’t forget to have a pleasant day and thank you for using Circa inc for all your commuting needs.
Memories, triggered by the smell of electrical fire, the pain radiating from my head and limbs, by the feeling of being buried in rubble. Somehow the past was playing catch up with me. The accident that took me out of commission couldn’t be the source, there was no memory from that, as it was explained to me it happened so fast and was so violent that I was immediately incapacitated and unconscious. Maybe a mine, bomb, grenade, betrayal, crash. No, this memory was much older, from something deep in the past, and the pain normally associated with recalling anything from anything from that far back was momentarily less horrific then the current head trauma I seem to have suffered. I was buried alive at one point. There was a city, I vaguely remember. Hands, frail and with chipped nail polish on them start digging and I’m crying. Then the memory fades, the pain overwhelms the forces of my concussion’s. Usually if something triggers an old memory; say, a smell, a moment, a voice of a turn of phrase someone uses around me, I get the sensation that my head is just full of those little white and black waring dots from white noise, all of them trying to kill their way through each other and out my ears. Like a loud electrical buzzing that rumble across gray matter like thunder. So I push those feelings down, I forget the moment, avoid it if I can and go about my normal routine. Smile, wave, talk to the reporter, lie a little, lie a lot, who cares, what’s it matter, do it and don’t ask questions and get your pay and go home.
With a tremendous struggle I turn enough to look out the slot window, between a piece of concrete and some cables and glass the sky is burning in the background. Like an apocalypse, a personal one, because nothing is a cliché when it’s happening to you. The sky was burning, the smog and clouds glowing in hues of orange and red that seem to rumble and pulse with their own hidden life. My home was up there, old books, old tech that I had collected. The sitting room where leaders met with me to take pictures and shake my hand and smile then berate me and criticize me when the cameras were off. A grim smile begins to worm it’s way across my face, with the knowledge that at least that part of my life is over. This is what you could call, my pink slip. Termination papers. Write-up. In every sense of the word, I was irrevocably fired.
Click to continue reading “Monolithic Horizon; Act 1: Heathen – Chapter 4: Us and Them”
Go straight to Post
Popularity: 4% [?]
Back in the Circa, I waited inside the dock. The place was still empty. Rows and rows of carved in grooves in the smooth metal all lined up and ready to fire one out into the skyline, like bullets in one of the old-model guns. The kind that used gunpowder and firing pins all timed with perfect precision, admirable much in the same way you would covet an old clock with all those spinning gears and wound up coils that managed to keep near perfect time. Amazing, all those years of practices and knowledge to keep track of an abstract concept. Now you can scarcely find a toilet without a clock built into it. You know, just in case you need to time how long your workers spend on the bowl so you can dock it from their wages accordingly. How all those old inventors would weep for the future if they knew how their advances were used to commit even the pettiest of oppression.
Personally, the old guns were always more reliable, Rail Guns overheat. The magnetic rails that power the projectile have to have a certain degree of friction which, after a few shots it starts to drastically overheat and wear down. To compensate some of the more determined proponents of the technology started mounting massive, cumbersome, heat sinks on the guns. Gauss guns sometimes are too powerful, firing through several city blocks depending on the size. Not exactly what you’d want to use on covert ops. An old gun though, was a perfect invention. Just raise the caliber, pack in better quality gunpowder, and you could shoot through a tank. A Gauss Gun is the weapon of choice by the police for civic suppression. Like a riot at a mall over a new product release, or god forbid, some workers decide to protest. The friction in the air can sometimes superheat the metal as it fires out, place some magnesium or phosphorous on the outside of the metal slug and you’ve got a high speed ball of molten steel. The results of impact are often rather unpleasant.
The seat pulls back and reclines. In this void of a place cradled in between the grooves of the railway system, cluttered with cables and electrical panels, the texture of the ceiling inside the Circa changes. The front projection is replaced by a 180 degree screen, perfect picture, gesture activated, internet connection. This is the type of interface people on the street have wet dreams about.
Bright lights, a login prompt, I say ‘Adamus Coerca.’ The world falls away and suddenly it’s spinning downward among digital towers, ads and light patterns arranged in perfect geometric patterns that serve as a grim facsimile of the outside world. One would think that the net would be much different from the outside world, perhaps looking like a laser light show made of vertex graphics. Maybe a forest, with each leaf really a portal or a remote server, the trunk composed of the various gateways and hubs. An ocean, that you dive into, and swim among the sea of floating servers and data ports, where things are fluid and smooth. When you’re greeted with a less gritty version of the current reality, the net becomes a much less exciting place. The frontier, the old internet, has long been incorporated into the Demer Enterprises interface scripting, forcing the internet to conform to a logical structure that most people can relate to and immediately interface with ‘for the good of commerce.’ The thing that they didn’t tell the few people left who actually cared about things like having independent information ports and feeds was that, the only compatible internet interfaces were those run by the corporations themselves. Private internet was locked out of the new corporate system and banished to the fringes, a place you could only access if you knew how to crack a five hundred and twelve bit encryption based firewall. Several of them.
Click to continue reading “Monolithic Horizon; Act 1: Heathen – Chapter 3: Electric Dreams”
Go straight to Post
Popularity: 4% [?]
The capsule screen is black. I haven’t pressed the button yet. When the screen is black you get a decent reflection, it’s the kind of black mirror you envision in children’s stories. The colors are faded enough to mask how thing really are, but enough to give you the details. My face stares back at me, with it’s cut-too-short brown hair, it’s slightly wrinkled brow, and bright blue eyes. Bright enough to almost negate the toned-down colors reflected in our makeshift black mirror.
I lean forward, press a button.
The sky opens up around me, the only structure that still stretches up higher than my current position is the Demer Complex. It’s one of those arcologies, the kind that were ripped off from old oriental architecture. It’s a self-sustaining structure. A self-contained city. The standard rails won’t operate on it, you’ve got to get on the one railway that goes around the circumference of the tower, which, from this height looks like a mountain of steel Tall and angular. They call the railway system for the complex the stairway to heaven. Once you’re rich enough to ride it, you won’t be coming back down to gallivant amongst us mere mortals.
The capsule takes a dip. They call these capsules Circas. The kind I use, because it’s got a duel piloting system. That means that I can control where I go to a degree, I can choose routes, and change them on the fly by touching the screen and pointing to a different building, rail, whatever. The conduit towers are supposed to be used for two purposes, to catch people coming back from orbit and to place people in orbit. You can only use it as a quick jump halfway across the city if you happen to press the release at the moment it is about to pull you upwards and inside the tower. Inside your vessel is subject to what a spike would be inside a rail cannon.
During the decent I get a slight case of vertigo, this is all right and perfectly normal. When you lose the sensation of gravity and then are quickly reminded of it’s presence you tend to have moments like this. This is my vacation. This is my therapy. Thinking that I might die, it’s not as frightening as you may think. Especially when there’s always the prospect of my job looming in my mind’s horizon, making my thoughts of the future only of two things, which I’ve already had in ample supply in my life. Dread. Regret. The important thing to remember is, I’m not a monster. My job is the president of The Commission. You look at my face on the news every night, you hear my voice in every national address and speech. I show no emotion other than optimism, and what I say never has any true meaning. You see, there is an arrangement to ensure this is the case.
Click to continue reading “Monolithic Horizon; Act 1: Heathen – Chapter 2: Behind Blue Eyes”
Go straight to Post
Popularity: 5% [?]
I’m a very angry person. Over the last five years I’ve lost touch with my passion for anything because, for the most part, I felt that there was no point in trying. I realized this somewhat recently and thought long and hard about the condition of my life, where I want to be, where I was, and how close I was to my goal of writing full-time. Not very close. I have wasted the last ten years of my life working for jobs that I have hated, that have left me tired and humiliated and a little broken. Not because of any overt oppression, but the implications of the work and how it effected everyone I worked with and me. When I thought about it long and hard, it made me realize just how angry I was about the situation I’ve put myself into this whole time. It’s my fault for putting up with these jobs, sure, but I learned something in the process. I saw how the corporate world is, I know how these people think. So with that in mind, I have set to using that as inspiration to make one last attempt at reaching my ultimate goal.
So bear with me over the next few months, I will only be writing about stuff that I can use as material for my work, and I will only be posting sample chapters. If I do not have this book finished by the end of the year, or at least the first draft, I will officially give up my goal of being a writer. So, one more time, from the top. Here… we… go.
Click to continue reading “Monolithic Horizon; Act 1: Heathen – Chapter 1: Telling Lies (w/ Foreword)”
Go straight to Post
Popularity: 5% [?]
3
Wayward Son
Dudelicious looked over the ship’s command room, truly impressive. Sexy women handling all the flight controls and armed guards at all the doors. A wide window panned around the room in a large circle. He was standing on the command deck with Rockbring. Rocker 69 was on his way to the infirmary, so he was not present. Rock Whore had already began to undress Nurse Kiki and continued to … do things… to her on the ship’s command console.
“So youse wanted to lay some info-mation on me?”
Rockbring pressed a button on the command console that was right next to Rock Whore’s CENSORED. An image came up, of one of them tentacles and all. “Dudelicious, we’ve been looking for you for some time. It seems you’ve attracted their attention. You’ve done smuggling jobs for a lot of my men and agents, and your combat prowess is impressive. You see the band is both a front and our focus. We pull jobs all across the galaxy in order to find the great rift.”
“The great rift doesn’t exist, ya dig. I’ve been chasin’ that wild goose fo the past five years o my life. I’m tellin’ you, there’s no hint not even a rumor of where it could be. If that’s your goal then youse is jus’ wastin’ my time.”
Click to continue reading “Starship Rock 69 & 1/2 – Chapter 3″
Go straight to Post
Popularity: 33% [?]
The meeting room was densely populated, it was clear, upon Ezekiel’s late entry that Estrada was waiting for him. There was a thin haze of cigar smoke hanging overhead as he made his way towards a seat in the front of the room. The room itself was far too open for the couple dozen people scattered about its dusty halls.
Estrada wasted little time getting things started, he stood behind a church window as the dawns light poured in through the stained glass behind them. This was the Cathedral back in the day, now it was town hall. The general consensus around the frontier was that whatever god was watching over the old ones died with them and as a result all their holy books were purged from the area long ago. Estrada once told Ezekiel that their was enough kindling from the books that as a young boy staring into the flames he felt like he was he was in front of a great burning tower, like one of the buildings in the great cities that could no longer be reached and existed only as a memory suddenly manifested before his eyes to burn as it sure had in the cataclysm.
Click to continue reading “Scortched Frontier – Bring Me The Disco King – Chapter 2″
Go straight to Post
Popularity: 30% [?]
The cool winds blow across the veranda stirring a glass wind chime. A man dressed in a wrinkled brown suit and a pair of pilot sunglasses stirs slightly, beginning to wake to the cool afternoon. With an almost spectacular struggle he manages to get one arm over the edge of the small daybed before sinking back into the cool polyurethane cushions. The man brushes the shades off his face carelessly and struggles to open one eye, making the world seem distorted and blurry. A flag billowing in the wind, attached to the smooth white columns by a small metal mounting bracket, catches his eye and he fumbles for his sword. Of course even in his groggy condition it only takes him a moment to realize he was looking at the red flag that marked the independent territories and not one of the dust cloak bandits he rolled onto his back and waited for his heart to stop pounding.
Click to continue reading “Scorched Frontier – Dawn is a Feeling – Chapter 1″
Go straight to Post
Popularity: 27% [?]
Station to Station
The train passed through Amersterdam, my headphones pounding the tunes of a past century’s long-dead music. They were corrupted files downloaded off an ancient database, audio that came through perfectly clear, the only flaw in being the gibberish file names that scrolled by the LED screen of my side box as a series of garbled characters. The names had been encrypted to avoid detection on the networks. Old files were considered dangerous, regardless of their content. I had been riding the trains as it passed from station to station; to my right we glided by a patch of post-apocalypse. It was a cityscape ruined and charred, looking like a fried circuit board that had been shelved and never repaired. Everything was covered in dust, dirt, and grit. The settled dust of ancient fallout had covered everything in thin layers. It vaguely reminded me of those old black and white movies.
The buildings and skyscrapers were collapsed and ruined, resting on top of other buildings and even more skyscrapers, making it look as though a giant had played dominos with them. Retrofitted chunks of old buildings had been turned into slipshod shelters and businesses that were capped with bent and twisted metal and crumbling pieces of concrete. All over the streets there were kiosks that had set up for the days business, some of them sold bioware chips v-pak upgrades, ‘softs and OS upgrades; some even proclaimed to have “newly developed AI” available for installation, but everyone who had a brain in their head knew that was a scam and had avoided those places. A fool who walked up my be jacked into some sort of new v-stim and fried right down to the last synapse. There were, after all, a lot of unemployed scientists who needed to further their research without the testing resources of most of the high-end corporate labs. It was not uncommon to plug in some new software into your v-pak or PAN only to have a DataStream the size of the Internet flood your head. The human brain could only take so much stimulus before shutting down. These people weren’t very good at setting limits to the amount of data they could unleash with their “revolutionary” technologies, without a cap it just become a flood that spread across the mind of the user like wildfire; amateurs.
Click to continue reading “Monolithic Horizon – Station to Station”
Go straight to Post
Popularity: 21% [?]
|
|
