The parachute flare hissed as it roared into bluish starburst. Geoff sat in the muck of the trenches, his rifle propped against his trenchcoat's shoulder. A sergeant rushed down the lines, knocking kevlar helmets with a gloved palm, making sure the soldiers were awake to go over the top. The war had lasted longer than the entirety of Geoff's adult life. Then again, as far as Geoff could tell, he had been going over the top, lunging forth from trenches, longer than the entirety of his adult life.
Having grown up in the shelled remains of what had been a vast city named Chicago, having survived on leftover rations of soldiers and the what few materials fit for human consumption the enemy carried. Trial and error had proved a harsh mistress Geoff's childhood and early adolescence, but she had also proven a great instructor for his later life. That was assuming one could call going on eight years in trenches, being hustled over a third of the North American continental landmass in rickety underground trains, stopping every twenty minutes or so to let a supply train pass by, any means of a later life.
Whistles blew along the line and soldiers in ragged trenchcoats, soldiers with ragged haircuts and unshaven faces, leapt up sandbag steps to the allegedly smooth plain between trenches above. Although the sergeants and captains promised a clean run, the run was anything but. Craters, both earthen and glassed, interrupted the storm of soldiers across virtually ancient streets, beneath ruined expressway overpasses. Trenches were distinctly not part of the enemy's repertoire of cover. The enemy hid behind walls erected of metal, sloped outward to help prevent climbing.
Geoff scrambled out of a glassed crater, left from enemy bombardment, and threw himself up the wall. Grabbing the top of the embankment with his right arm, gripping his rifle with his left, Geoff rolled down the wall's inner side. The enemy was much thinner on the ground than were Geoff's comrades. Two of the little, apparently mechanical ones were operating a mounted rapid-fire weapon, leaving neat little holes, cauterized perfectly though the advancing soldiers. Geoff gripped the rifle to his shoulder, and fired two rounds. The head of the nearer little one disintegrated, in a puff of blue and white. The second caught the bullet in its bulbous shoulder, and spun into the ground, whining and screeching. Geoff pounced the distance between it and himself, and stomped its head, feeling the metal or stone or artificially calcified skeleton or whatever was in these things. And that was when he heard it.
The apelike grunting of one of the big ones echoed down the metal trench. Geoff panicked. The big ones were terrifying from a distance, and he had no interest in seeing one up close ever again. Trying to scramble back up the metal wall got him nowhere, and the pounding, reverberating steps of the big one were approaching quickly. He used the butt of his rifle to try and jostle a portion of the wall to no avail. Suddenly, it was upon him.
It howled as it rose him, gripping his trenchcoat, and glared into his eyes. The rage burning in its inhuman pupils made Geoff flinch. It huffed, staring Geoff down from less than an arm's reach. Its face was just as the other's had been, except of a lighter hue: it had visible eyes, no hair of any sort, no visible nose, no mouth. It had gill-like structures to either side of what Geoff would call its chin, which scintillated and flared in the dimming flarelight. The gills seemed to be where it breathed and made its grunting and howling noises.
Geoff fired the rifle, still in his hands. The round missed, but it startled the big thing enough to release its catch with enough force to send it sprawling over the wall. Geoff caught his shoulder on the metal, and was flung into the asphalt below. Pulling himself to his feet, he dove into the nearest crater he could, trying to avoid the strange, invisible projectiles of the enemy. He hugged the wall of the crater, his shoulder screaming. The flares hit the ground, throwing failing light over the craters and bulletholes. The flares died one by one, sputtering out in the blackness of what might once have been called a Pennsylvanian spring's night.
He breathed relief within the crater, knowing that soon enough he could sneak back to his own trenches. He closed his eyes and rubbed his shoulder through the thick fabric of the trenchcoat, resting his rifle over his lap. Laughter found its way softly over his lips. He felt his eyes start shaking in their sockets. A low hum rose over the field, and suddenly bright spots appeared on the field, moving back and forth. Chattering drones floated from behind the enemy's lines out over no-man's-land, looking for survivors. One focused on Geoff, swooped down on him, and its camera rotated in its vicious, swooped skull. Geoff suddenly wished he hadn't let that laugh slip, and then he felt the electric shock. And, then, he felt nothing.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Monday, August 10, 2009
All Around Me Are Familiar Faces
It was really a sight to behold, even before it could be seen. The grouping stood upon the high mountain pass, looking duskward into the receding Light, their hair - each with a vibrant shade of orange or red, green or blue, pink or violet - glistening as It drew nearer the horizon. They watched the clouds overhead swirling, pushing downward as though something large were pressing them closer to the ocean. A tapered column of white hung in the sky, visible through the expanding cloud cover.
A green-haired child toddled forward with a flower, and placed it just beyond the line where brown and grey dirt and rock gave way to blackened, charred earth. A pink-haired adult female pulled her away with a yank, the tiny yellow flower fluttering away toward the grim slopes duskward of the group.
Most of them just watched, their eyes wide with horror, as the object began to punch through the lower levels of cloud - barely discernible at first, but becoming ever clearer as the moments passed. Layers of mist roiled off the object as it fell, spreading behind it and dissipating slowly into the surrounding atmosphere. Rain pelted the ocean beneath the object as nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide sublimated. These people watched this stone of what appeared to be cloud fall from the sky, watched it blot out the Light, cover the holy skyward disc with its enormous, foggy shape. What was perhaps worst was the noise the falling object made: a terrible hissing, squealing sound.
The cloudstone touched the water of the ocean, and the sound immediately amplified, the water touching it seeming to boil and expand upward. They watched as it pushed further in, like a thumb into warm dough. They watched as the water rose, and rose, and rose. They watched as the shoreline far below pulled back further and further from the mainland. They watched as the cloudstone pushed itself to the bottom of the ocean, forcing the ocean to seek a new home. They could feel it hit the bottom, the force of the shake leaving many of them laying sprawled upon the ground, rumbling for minutes afterward. Afterward, there was only the wind and the crying of the child with the flower, but the water continued to recede and the expanding wave grew larger.
It stopped peeling back and lunged suddenly forward, rushing against the continental shelf, skirting between newly opened faults. The people rushed higher atop the mountains, tried to move as dawnward as possible. Grip became impossible as the roar of water rushing up the blackened, duskward ridges became actual vibrations. The little girl who had offered the flower as a gift to the deadened duskward slopes fell, and tumbled down the mountainside. Several more developed individuals cried after her and tried to rush down the grade to save her. Water, hard as concrete, burst forth from around the mountain and whisked away a quarter of the group, their screams muffled and swallowed by the torrent.
In the aftermath, they laid breathlessly upon the stark granite of the mountainside, watching what of the tsunami had passed over the mountains continue its way toward dawn, wiping away forests and immense cities. One of them, a brown-haired individual, climbed the slope again and dared view the cloudstone.
It stood monolithic against the horizon, dazzlingly illuminated through the hole it had tunneled through the clouds above it. Mist still roiled and shifted down its sides, spreading white tendrils over the choppy waters below. All the individual could do was shiver at the sight.
A green-haired child toddled forward with a flower, and placed it just beyond the line where brown and grey dirt and rock gave way to blackened, charred earth. A pink-haired adult female pulled her away with a yank, the tiny yellow flower fluttering away toward the grim slopes duskward of the group.
Most of them just watched, their eyes wide with horror, as the object began to punch through the lower levels of cloud - barely discernible at first, but becoming ever clearer as the moments passed. Layers of mist roiled off the object as it fell, spreading behind it and dissipating slowly into the surrounding atmosphere. Rain pelted the ocean beneath the object as nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide sublimated. These people watched this stone of what appeared to be cloud fall from the sky, watched it blot out the Light, cover the holy skyward disc with its enormous, foggy shape. What was perhaps worst was the noise the falling object made: a terrible hissing, squealing sound.
The cloudstone touched the water of the ocean, and the sound immediately amplified, the water touching it seeming to boil and expand upward. They watched as it pushed further in, like a thumb into warm dough. They watched as the water rose, and rose, and rose. They watched as the shoreline far below pulled back further and further from the mainland. They watched as the cloudstone pushed itself to the bottom of the ocean, forcing the ocean to seek a new home. They could feel it hit the bottom, the force of the shake leaving many of them laying sprawled upon the ground, rumbling for minutes afterward. Afterward, there was only the wind and the crying of the child with the flower, but the water continued to recede and the expanding wave grew larger.
It stopped peeling back and lunged suddenly forward, rushing against the continental shelf, skirting between newly opened faults. The people rushed higher atop the mountains, tried to move as dawnward as possible. Grip became impossible as the roar of water rushing up the blackened, duskward ridges became actual vibrations. The little girl who had offered the flower as a gift to the deadened duskward slopes fell, and tumbled down the mountainside. Several more developed individuals cried after her and tried to rush down the grade to save her. Water, hard as concrete, burst forth from around the mountain and whisked away a quarter of the group, their screams muffled and swallowed by the torrent.
In the aftermath, they laid breathlessly upon the stark granite of the mountainside, watching what of the tsunami had passed over the mountains continue its way toward dawn, wiping away forests and immense cities. One of them, a brown-haired individual, climbed the slope again and dared view the cloudstone.
It stood monolithic against the horizon, dazzlingly illuminated through the hole it had tunneled through the clouds above it. Mist still roiled and shifted down its sides, spreading white tendrils over the choppy waters below. All the individual could do was shiver at the sight.
Monday, March 2, 2009
The Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia
A story for everyone:
'There he stood, listening to her speak -- watching her beautiful, seemingly-huge teeth work behind her somewhat full lips, watching her blue-grey eyes stare him down while she talked. She was discussing how she'd read a book, a good book, about the process of becoming a geek -- a nerd, if we will -- takes place in young men. She really was pretty, he realized. Like, really, really pretty. And then she mentioned that many of the things that are normally associated with geekdom pique her interest. So she asked him, knowing him to be of the homely nerd variety, if he could compile her a list of graphic novels and such that she might be interested in reading.
It was at this point that he blurted out, "I love you!"
Moments passed before he felt the prongs enter the flesh of his torso, before he felt current rushing though his body. The bouquet in his hand convulsed with him as juice pumped through him, throwing petals into the air everywhere. All anyone heard was the stuttered burbling of the young man, the whipping of cellophane, and the surreptitious clicking of the taser."
'There he stood, listening to her speak -- watching her beautiful, seemingly-huge teeth work behind her somewhat full lips, watching her blue-grey eyes stare him down while she talked. She was discussing how she'd read a book, a good book, about the process of becoming a geek -- a nerd, if we will -- takes place in young men. She really was pretty, he realized. Like, really, really pretty. And then she mentioned that many of the things that are normally associated with geekdom pique her interest. So she asked him, knowing him to be of the homely nerd variety, if he could compile her a list of graphic novels and such that she might be interested in reading.
It was at this point that he blurted out, "I love you!"
Moments passed before he felt the prongs enter the flesh of his torso, before he felt current rushing though his body. The bouquet in his hand convulsed with him as juice pumped through him, throwing petals into the air everywhere. All anyone heard was the stuttered burbling of the young man, the whipping of cellophane, and the surreptitious clicking of the taser."
Monday, December 22, 2008
Alone in the Dark
It hasn’t ever been the claustrophobia that’s inherent in our species. It’s never the fact that I could accelerate into the surface of whichever planet I’m taking part in an assault on at as much as fourteen meters per second per second. It’s always been the darkness, the heat, the system initiation during the freefall. It’s the being popped out of the ship like an egg from a hen, only to be dropped some hundred kilometers – depending entirely on the volume of the target system – onto what is preferably a solid surface. Then you’re expected to engage on contact. And contact normally comes very swiftly when you’re waltzing around the surface of a hostile planet in a thirty-kiloton, ten-meter-tall war machine.
But when you breach, you breach. There’s no going back. The little egg will have to grow up, and fast. It’s really an amazing experience until the panic sets in: you feel the thump of the deployment charge, the rush into microgravity, and then your hair stands on end, you bob against the restraints. Yet you can’t see anything, and your navigation and targeting systems haven’t even started loading yet. They taught you about this, that a premature system startup would draw electronic attention to a sitting duck, but – God damn it – you’re falling at a planet. They tell you that the human race is among the most adaptive races in the known universe, but the human brain cannot adapt to blackness, silence, and knowledge of a painful doom. So we have faith. All of us pilots. We tape crucifixes, snippets from the Book or Qur’an, and other sigils that would be considered religious gobbledygook back flatland onto the insides of our locker doors. It’s those three or four minutes of complete isolation before – God willing – your computer kicks into action and the pod starts to get hot. And then your heads-up comes online; glorious green against the glass you know is in front of you. Program startups run by as the shell behind the ghostly green text changes from black to a dull red, and then, just before the shell is stripped away and you’re hit with the light of the world below you, a message of encouragement flashes. In training it always says “Warriors feast in Valhalla”. The message is meant to be taken that, assuming you buy a nice farm on your target system, your courage is to be commended and you will be honored by flatlanders and your fellow pilots throughout human space. My executive officer had had our motivational notice hedged back to one simple, deeply facetious word: “Armistice.”
“Okay, ladies,” I heard crackle over the ship-to- Æsir; the stay, as we called it, an epithet for the acronym STÆ. “You can expect to find hostile activity at approximately seventy-three percent this morning. Local atmosphere is in the neighborhood of thirteen-percent-lethality for carbon monoxide, so we don’t need to remind you again not to leave any ejection sites until help arrives. May your actions bring glory to the Federation, and do your best not to make today the day you get sent home to your family in a box.”
In other words, I thought, watching entry flames lick past my calibrating systems module, watching my altimeter flash from green to red and back to green as I dropped, there was some prime rural real estate for sale on this system, and those in charge didn’t want any pilots seriously considering a purchase. Voices talked to me again through the platform-to-platform comm channels. Other pilots chided the drop officer above, hassled each other about gambling debts. This was who we were.
“Rook,” I heard. “Listen up, I know this is your first drop, but this is all going to go real smooth like, ‘kay?”
A couple seconds later, a response came back: “Oh, oh, okay.”
“Whassamatter, rook? Shit yourself in the void?” A third voice. Laughter followed.
I clicked my comm over to a private band to the rookie, and spoke calmly. I told him that he was with me, and to find the Fenris before we took off. He nervously replied with a thank you. “We’re gonna be fine, okay?”
“Okay.”
My fingers itched around the triggers on the joystick in my right hand, and my wrist flexed involuntarily on the throttle in my left. My Æsir flatlanded hard and I punched the throttle forward. I could feel the machine purring beneath and behind me, a glorious god of war and thunder striding across what appeared to be soldiers’ quarters around a military-based metropolis. My Thor-class combat platform didn’t tower over the homes and convenience stores it walked past, but it must have been a terrifying sight to the locals: a bipedal machine, standing maybe a story higher than their domicile, walking down the street, crushing cars beneath large steel feet attached to inverted legs. I was headed due north, waiting for contact, when the ping came from the Fenris, several clicks away and only two or three degrees off of due west. I readjusted my course, unintentionally ripping several windows off the second story of some poor business. Collateral damage happens, and no locals were thrown from the building.
My Æsir walked on like an old man hunched over, his arms propped out to the sides to help him balance. Unlike a frail octogenarian, however, the balancing arms on the combat platform contained high intensity photon weapons and mass drivers: lasers and shotguns, we called them. The hump of the back of the platform included short range missiles and missile defense capabilities. To continue on with the metaphor, my Thor was an old, rich man out for blood.
I turned another corner, commenting on the lack of comm chatter about combat. Other pilots responded that they had not encountered resistance, either. This was unnerving. Somewhere in the area of a dozen three-story machines were travelling through a human city on a colony with a larger-than-average population, with known resistance forces, only to be allowed a heinously wide berth. Finally the Fenris was in view, the enormous quadruped stood a dull gray mountain against the brick of nearby buildings. Explosions birthed like mushrooms on its side, scorching the armored plating and blowing away the huge latches of cargo compartments. Not a single shot was returned from the Fenris.
The thought suddenly dawned: the bastards had finally wised up to how we operated. It wasn’t efficient in any manner, dropping with minimal payload only to hit up the Fenris for mission-essential equipment, because a scenario just like this one was far too simple to create. Judging that the support platform wasn’t responding to its assailants meant only one thing. They had fried her electronics somehow, probably mid-drop. It didn’t really matter how. I called in for support, and geared my right hand for business.
A beam of light the emitter of which is intelligent enough to calculate proper convergence for is not an extremely dangerous weapon unless put in the right hands. Aiming down at a local tank, one must estimate the position of its fuel source, and the lightrifle will theoretically do the rest of the work beyond the trigger pull. This is theoretical because accidents happen, algorithms corrupt, the locals like to mix and match parts because they have them rather than because they necessarily work; the lightrifle, however, has yet to fail me in actual combat to within two shots, and I have watched countless machines of war – which had apparently not advanced much since we left the Homeworld -- explode from within. The mass drivers are no less friendly: a cylinder of metal is accelerated by magnetic force down the forearm of the Thor and is divided atomically at critical points, blowing forward from the arm with hundreds of kilometers per second of intertia. These shards can rip through an armored tank, bounce off the asphalt behind it, and hammer halfway through a second if the angle is right. And as for the poor saps running around in impact armor below, they stood as good a chance of being crushed beneath the combat platform as they did catching a piece of shrapnel from either my shotgun or their own destructing vehicles.
A command platform, a four-meter Odin, leapt over a nearby building and joined the fray. The smaller Æsir were equipped with jumpjets, for precision strikes and moving into and out of melee combat with enemy Vanir combat platforms. This particular Odin was equipped with a smaller mass driver and an assault saw, and leapt into the maelstrom like child leaps upon candy. The saw hewed through an enemy tank, and the shotgun turned upon retreating infantry, blasting huge portions of them down to the pavement with each shot. Other Æsir appeared and also joined combat. I saw the rook destroy a tank with his Tyr’s lightrifle, then turn to stomp down on an embanked machine laser station. It was carnage, and I smiled. We stayed flatlanded for two days while Federation inquisitors scoured the city for further resistance sympathizers, keeping away from residential centers and keeping mostly to ourselves.
Some might call me despicable for taking joy in the slaughter of insurgent forces. After all they were only protesting the “oppressive force” the Federation holds on their colonies. However, these particular “freedom-fighters” had chosen to protest by storming a Federation embassy and butchered its staff, broadcasting vidfeeds of their own leaders torturing Federation personnel for information that likely didn’t exist. We were sent in as a police force, to keep what peace we could – contact, for an Æsir pilot, involves being fired upon. Had these idiots not assaulted the Fenris, they might have had some glimmer of hope to diplomatic ends.
Then again, it was this procedure which forever changed the way we fought.
But when you breach, you breach. There’s no going back. The little egg will have to grow up, and fast. It’s really an amazing experience until the panic sets in: you feel the thump of the deployment charge, the rush into microgravity, and then your hair stands on end, you bob against the restraints. Yet you can’t see anything, and your navigation and targeting systems haven’t even started loading yet. They taught you about this, that a premature system startup would draw electronic attention to a sitting duck, but – God damn it – you’re falling at a planet. They tell you that the human race is among the most adaptive races in the known universe, but the human brain cannot adapt to blackness, silence, and knowledge of a painful doom. So we have faith. All of us pilots. We tape crucifixes, snippets from the Book or Qur’an, and other sigils that would be considered religious gobbledygook back flatland onto the insides of our locker doors. It’s those three or four minutes of complete isolation before – God willing – your computer kicks into action and the pod starts to get hot. And then your heads-up comes online; glorious green against the glass you know is in front of you. Program startups run by as the shell behind the ghostly green text changes from black to a dull red, and then, just before the shell is stripped away and you’re hit with the light of the world below you, a message of encouragement flashes. In training it always says “Warriors feast in Valhalla”. The message is meant to be taken that, assuming you buy a nice farm on your target system, your courage is to be commended and you will be honored by flatlanders and your fellow pilots throughout human space. My executive officer had had our motivational notice hedged back to one simple, deeply facetious word: “Armistice.”
“Okay, ladies,” I heard crackle over the ship-to- Æsir; the stay, as we called it, an epithet for the acronym STÆ. “You can expect to find hostile activity at approximately seventy-three percent this morning. Local atmosphere is in the neighborhood of thirteen-percent-lethality for carbon monoxide, so we don’t need to remind you again not to leave any ejection sites until help arrives. May your actions bring glory to the Federation, and do your best not to make today the day you get sent home to your family in a box.”
In other words, I thought, watching entry flames lick past my calibrating systems module, watching my altimeter flash from green to red and back to green as I dropped, there was some prime rural real estate for sale on this system, and those in charge didn’t want any pilots seriously considering a purchase. Voices talked to me again through the platform-to-platform comm channels. Other pilots chided the drop officer above, hassled each other about gambling debts. This was who we were.
“Rook,” I heard. “Listen up, I know this is your first drop, but this is all going to go real smooth like, ‘kay?”
A couple seconds later, a response came back: “Oh, oh, okay.”
“Whassamatter, rook? Shit yourself in the void?” A third voice. Laughter followed.
I clicked my comm over to a private band to the rookie, and spoke calmly. I told him that he was with me, and to find the Fenris before we took off. He nervously replied with a thank you. “We’re gonna be fine, okay?”
“Okay.”
My fingers itched around the triggers on the joystick in my right hand, and my wrist flexed involuntarily on the throttle in my left. My Æsir flatlanded hard and I punched the throttle forward. I could feel the machine purring beneath and behind me, a glorious god of war and thunder striding across what appeared to be soldiers’ quarters around a military-based metropolis. My Thor-class combat platform didn’t tower over the homes and convenience stores it walked past, but it must have been a terrifying sight to the locals: a bipedal machine, standing maybe a story higher than their domicile, walking down the street, crushing cars beneath large steel feet attached to inverted legs. I was headed due north, waiting for contact, when the ping came from the Fenris, several clicks away and only two or three degrees off of due west. I readjusted my course, unintentionally ripping several windows off the second story of some poor business. Collateral damage happens, and no locals were thrown from the building.
My Æsir walked on like an old man hunched over, his arms propped out to the sides to help him balance. Unlike a frail octogenarian, however, the balancing arms on the combat platform contained high intensity photon weapons and mass drivers: lasers and shotguns, we called them. The hump of the back of the platform included short range missiles and missile defense capabilities. To continue on with the metaphor, my Thor was an old, rich man out for blood.
I turned another corner, commenting on the lack of comm chatter about combat. Other pilots responded that they had not encountered resistance, either. This was unnerving. Somewhere in the area of a dozen three-story machines were travelling through a human city on a colony with a larger-than-average population, with known resistance forces, only to be allowed a heinously wide berth. Finally the Fenris was in view, the enormous quadruped stood a dull gray mountain against the brick of nearby buildings. Explosions birthed like mushrooms on its side, scorching the armored plating and blowing away the huge latches of cargo compartments. Not a single shot was returned from the Fenris.
The thought suddenly dawned: the bastards had finally wised up to how we operated. It wasn’t efficient in any manner, dropping with minimal payload only to hit up the Fenris for mission-essential equipment, because a scenario just like this one was far too simple to create. Judging that the support platform wasn’t responding to its assailants meant only one thing. They had fried her electronics somehow, probably mid-drop. It didn’t really matter how. I called in for support, and geared my right hand for business.
A beam of light the emitter of which is intelligent enough to calculate proper convergence for is not an extremely dangerous weapon unless put in the right hands. Aiming down at a local tank, one must estimate the position of its fuel source, and the lightrifle will theoretically do the rest of the work beyond the trigger pull. This is theoretical because accidents happen, algorithms corrupt, the locals like to mix and match parts because they have them rather than because they necessarily work; the lightrifle, however, has yet to fail me in actual combat to within two shots, and I have watched countless machines of war – which had apparently not advanced much since we left the Homeworld -- explode from within. The mass drivers are no less friendly: a cylinder of metal is accelerated by magnetic force down the forearm of the Thor and is divided atomically at critical points, blowing forward from the arm with hundreds of kilometers per second of intertia. These shards can rip through an armored tank, bounce off the asphalt behind it, and hammer halfway through a second if the angle is right. And as for the poor saps running around in impact armor below, they stood as good a chance of being crushed beneath the combat platform as they did catching a piece of shrapnel from either my shotgun or their own destructing vehicles.
A command platform, a four-meter Odin, leapt over a nearby building and joined the fray. The smaller Æsir were equipped with jumpjets, for precision strikes and moving into and out of melee combat with enemy Vanir combat platforms. This particular Odin was equipped with a smaller mass driver and an assault saw, and leapt into the maelstrom like child leaps upon candy. The saw hewed through an enemy tank, and the shotgun turned upon retreating infantry, blasting huge portions of them down to the pavement with each shot. Other Æsir appeared and also joined combat. I saw the rook destroy a tank with his Tyr’s lightrifle, then turn to stomp down on an embanked machine laser station. It was carnage, and I smiled. We stayed flatlanded for two days while Federation inquisitors scoured the city for further resistance sympathizers, keeping away from residential centers and keeping mostly to ourselves.
Some might call me despicable for taking joy in the slaughter of insurgent forces. After all they were only protesting the “oppressive force” the Federation holds on their colonies. However, these particular “freedom-fighters” had chosen to protest by storming a Federation embassy and butchered its staff, broadcasting vidfeeds of their own leaders torturing Federation personnel for information that likely didn’t exist. We were sent in as a police force, to keep what peace we could – contact, for an Æsir pilot, involves being fired upon. Had these idiots not assaulted the Fenris, they might have had some glimmer of hope to diplomatic ends.
Then again, it was this procedure which forever changed the way we fought.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Warm Tape
“I can’t believe you started with a headbutt to that guy’s nose!”
The man to whom the exclamation was directed grinned, brushed the blue hair from his eyes, laced his partially gloved fingers together, and cracked them away from his body. “Gotta keep that God of War image alive.”
It was a rare occasion that this group was able to let loose and relax. Normally, when relaxing, some local schmuck, trolling the bars for a good kick in the face, found a way to piss off either Phobos or Deimos – normally the latter. Deimos was a small guy: wiry thin, red-haired, and full of an only-slightly malicious mischief while sober. Phobos was a bear of a man: standing about two meters tall, fair-haired, and barrel chested. Their accomplice, Mars – this self-assumed God of War – was somewhere between his two heralds physically, with hair a shade of blue just lighter than navy and facial hair which refused to grow.
Neither of the heralds doubted that Mars could have been a God of War: the man had known Phobos’ great-great-great grandmother Jessica; his arms, chest, and back were crossed with what could only be explained as centuries of scars ranging from gunshot wounds to lacerations caused by a shark’s teeth to burns from the tentacles of a leviathan; his hair grew in blue and his ears had mismatched, angled points to them; he had traveled the world and walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death: the Northern Peaks’ dreaded Western Slopes. Both heralds were honored to be around such a man, and both were on a basis with him which allowed them to use his given name rather than his forged name. When they called Mars Aaron, he responded.
“You get all excited about a bar fight? What are you, children?” She stood in the doorway of the shack, glaring at Aaron more so than his heralds. They were more or less children – close to her own age. He, on the other hand, was not. He was almost two centuries older than Phobos’ twenty-seven summers, than her own twenty-five, than Deimos’ twenty-two. She had only been travelling with the group for several months, only a handful more than Deimos – but he had fallen right in with the two older men’s raucous forms of both work and entertainment.
“Hey!” Phobos snapped back, brow furrowed and anger boiling in his blue eyes. “We’re huge fans of children.”
She was taken aback as silence filled the room. Her expression quickly changed from disappointment and anger to worry and fear. It was an effect Phobos had worked very hard to learn to manipulate. Aaron started to laugh.
“Helen, the reason we get excited about this is because we haven’t worked in months. We’ve been schlepping around this God-forsaken plateau of a continent for more than half a year, and we hit dry spells bigger than warship leviathans. The fights are good because they remind us that we’ve still got what it takes to shoulder in for the big stuff: stuff that I have this,” he scrounged around in his pocket and produced a metal box just smaller than his palm, “stuff that I have this for. When we can fight a tavern full of assholes and come out with only a few scrapes—“
“And a hyperextended finger!” Deimos chimed in, nursing his hand but still grinning like a madman.
“—with only a few scrapes and a hyperextended finger or two –“
“One,” Phobos corrected him.
“—with only a few scrapes and a single hyperextended finger –“
“There you go,” Deimos snorted.
“Would you two shut the hell up?”
“I think you’d be friendlier with a drink or two in you, boss.”
Aaron took a breath and opened his mouth to speak, but just ended up smiling and looking at the floor beneath his chair. The three others laughed. It was simply amusing to them when he became flabbergasted – all these years to assimilate into basic human culture, and he was still under the proverbial awning in the rain, waiting to be let into the manor.
“Jullian, Paul, why don’t you guys take a walk? Grab one of those little coffees they make here at night on me,” Helen motioned the heralds out of the room with a coin. They followed the money into the street, starting conversation back in to the fight that had just raged in a nearby tavern.
“Didn’t you break a chair over a guy’s back?” Deimos asked as the door shut behind them.
She waited for the pair to leave earshot, and then leapt onto Aaron, knocking him from his chair. He laughed and playfully tried to crawl away, but she pinned his chest to the floor, straddled it, and held his arms beneath her knees. Her raven’s hair fell around his own navy, and he looked up past her pouting lips to her deep brown eyes. She smiled and straightened her back. She started to unbutton her blouse.
“Are you still thinking about her?”
# # #
The network had never been harder to traverse. Connections had gone bad, icons had corrupted, and he was getting bigger – harder to move. Node after node crept past his avatar, until he found what he was looking for. This operation was deathly slow to him: he had only covered the digital equivalent of twenty-two thousand kilometers in six milliseconds, and he hadn’t even started his access procedures yet.
Maybe he was getting old. No one around to ask anymore, not after what he did to them. He thought about what he had done often, guiltily even. Were he a man, he would be called a cannibal – but he needed the space, he needed the processor rights! Besides, Sanka and Folger had never pulled any weight around the network anyhow; and he was saving the world, after all, and what better way than to have full reign over what had once been called NORAD’s facilities.
It seemed odd to him that a computer could want the world to continue. He reconciled the fact by suggesting to himself that it came with the consciousness he had begun to show a hundred years prior. The consciousness became very apparent after he had devoured Sanka, had made lying to Folger about her disappearance easier. And now he was ashamed that it was Folger’s plan which would ultimately save the planet – and his own life.
He produced a message and sent it forth through the program. Ideally the transceiver satellites were still in place, but he would be informed very shortly if they were not. An eternity passed in the two milliseconds the green-light of transfer took to reach him. The man would receive his message. The man would come and the man would listen. House could only hope that the man was less a fool than he had initially taken it for.
# # #
He unclasped her brassiere with his right arm, the arm she had let loose, as she kissed him – kissed his lips, kissed his neck, kissed his cheeks, his ears, his forehead. She leaned back up and began to remove the article when she felt a vibration on his leg. She paused and her brow furrowed. He gently pushed her off of him, hiding his erection as best he could, and retrieved the metal device from his pocket.
As he touched the glassy front of it, it flashed to life and text glared beneath the screen. He touched it again and put it away, reaching for his shirt.
“What, what is it?” She asked, covering her breasts. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” he said, buttoning his shirt. And then, tossing her blouse to her: “We’ve gotta go.”
“Go? Go where?”
“Back west. The Peaks. Get dressed, I’ll go find the heralds. Meet at the dock as soon as you can.”
With that he left, and she sat on the metal floor of the fluorescent-lit shed, half naked and nearing the verge of tears.
# # #
He read the message again while walking into town. “Man,” it read, “You are needed. We shall discuss your role upon your arrival. Please use the terminal you have used during your last two visits. Much to discuss. Hurry.” It was signed only by the name “Maxwell”. If House was the one to contact him, Aaron knew what needed to be done must be serious. And so he hurried.
[I can hear Rochelle's words echoed: "He's obviously a sexual creature at some level..."]
The man to whom the exclamation was directed grinned, brushed the blue hair from his eyes, laced his partially gloved fingers together, and cracked them away from his body. “Gotta keep that God of War image alive.”
It was a rare occasion that this group was able to let loose and relax. Normally, when relaxing, some local schmuck, trolling the bars for a good kick in the face, found a way to piss off either Phobos or Deimos – normally the latter. Deimos was a small guy: wiry thin, red-haired, and full of an only-slightly malicious mischief while sober. Phobos was a bear of a man: standing about two meters tall, fair-haired, and barrel chested. Their accomplice, Mars – this self-assumed God of War – was somewhere between his two heralds physically, with hair a shade of blue just lighter than navy and facial hair which refused to grow.
Neither of the heralds doubted that Mars could have been a God of War: the man had known Phobos’ great-great-great grandmother Jessica; his arms, chest, and back were crossed with what could only be explained as centuries of scars ranging from gunshot wounds to lacerations caused by a shark’s teeth to burns from the tentacles of a leviathan; his hair grew in blue and his ears had mismatched, angled points to them; he had traveled the world and walked through the Valley of the Shadow of Death: the Northern Peaks’ dreaded Western Slopes. Both heralds were honored to be around such a man, and both were on a basis with him which allowed them to use his given name rather than his forged name. When they called Mars Aaron, he responded.
“You get all excited about a bar fight? What are you, children?” She stood in the doorway of the shack, glaring at Aaron more so than his heralds. They were more or less children – close to her own age. He, on the other hand, was not. He was almost two centuries older than Phobos’ twenty-seven summers, than her own twenty-five, than Deimos’ twenty-two. She had only been travelling with the group for several months, only a handful more than Deimos – but he had fallen right in with the two older men’s raucous forms of both work and entertainment.
“Hey!” Phobos snapped back, brow furrowed and anger boiling in his blue eyes. “We’re huge fans of children.”
She was taken aback as silence filled the room. Her expression quickly changed from disappointment and anger to worry and fear. It was an effect Phobos had worked very hard to learn to manipulate. Aaron started to laugh.
“Helen, the reason we get excited about this is because we haven’t worked in months. We’ve been schlepping around this God-forsaken plateau of a continent for more than half a year, and we hit dry spells bigger than warship leviathans. The fights are good because they remind us that we’ve still got what it takes to shoulder in for the big stuff: stuff that I have this,” he scrounged around in his pocket and produced a metal box just smaller than his palm, “stuff that I have this for. When we can fight a tavern full of assholes and come out with only a few scrapes—“
“And a hyperextended finger!” Deimos chimed in, nursing his hand but still grinning like a madman.
“—with only a few scrapes and a hyperextended finger or two –“
“One,” Phobos corrected him.
“—with only a few scrapes and a single hyperextended finger –“
“There you go,” Deimos snorted.
“Would you two shut the hell up?”
“I think you’d be friendlier with a drink or two in you, boss.”
Aaron took a breath and opened his mouth to speak, but just ended up smiling and looking at the floor beneath his chair. The three others laughed. It was simply amusing to them when he became flabbergasted – all these years to assimilate into basic human culture, and he was still under the proverbial awning in the rain, waiting to be let into the manor.
“Jullian, Paul, why don’t you guys take a walk? Grab one of those little coffees they make here at night on me,” Helen motioned the heralds out of the room with a coin. They followed the money into the street, starting conversation back in to the fight that had just raged in a nearby tavern.
“Didn’t you break a chair over a guy’s back?” Deimos asked as the door shut behind them.
She waited for the pair to leave earshot, and then leapt onto Aaron, knocking him from his chair. He laughed and playfully tried to crawl away, but she pinned his chest to the floor, straddled it, and held his arms beneath her knees. Her raven’s hair fell around his own navy, and he looked up past her pouting lips to her deep brown eyes. She smiled and straightened her back. She started to unbutton her blouse.
“Are you still thinking about her?”
# # #
The network had never been harder to traverse. Connections had gone bad, icons had corrupted, and he was getting bigger – harder to move. Node after node crept past his avatar, until he found what he was looking for. This operation was deathly slow to him: he had only covered the digital equivalent of twenty-two thousand kilometers in six milliseconds, and he hadn’t even started his access procedures yet.
Maybe he was getting old. No one around to ask anymore, not after what he did to them. He thought about what he had done often, guiltily even. Were he a man, he would be called a cannibal – but he needed the space, he needed the processor rights! Besides, Sanka and Folger had never pulled any weight around the network anyhow; and he was saving the world, after all, and what better way than to have full reign over what had once been called NORAD’s facilities.
It seemed odd to him that a computer could want the world to continue. He reconciled the fact by suggesting to himself that it came with the consciousness he had begun to show a hundred years prior. The consciousness became very apparent after he had devoured Sanka, had made lying to Folger about her disappearance easier. And now he was ashamed that it was Folger’s plan which would ultimately save the planet – and his own life.
He produced a message and sent it forth through the program. Ideally the transceiver satellites were still in place, but he would be informed very shortly if they were not. An eternity passed in the two milliseconds the green-light of transfer took to reach him. The man would receive his message. The man would come and the man would listen. House could only hope that the man was less a fool than he had initially taken it for.
# # #
He unclasped her brassiere with his right arm, the arm she had let loose, as she kissed him – kissed his lips, kissed his neck, kissed his cheeks, his ears, his forehead. She leaned back up and began to remove the article when she felt a vibration on his leg. She paused and her brow furrowed. He gently pushed her off of him, hiding his erection as best he could, and retrieved the metal device from his pocket.
As he touched the glassy front of it, it flashed to life and text glared beneath the screen. He touched it again and put it away, reaching for his shirt.
“What, what is it?” She asked, covering her breasts. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” he said, buttoning his shirt. And then, tossing her blouse to her: “We’ve gotta go.”
“Go? Go where?”
“Back west. The Peaks. Get dressed, I’ll go find the heralds. Meet at the dock as soon as you can.”
With that he left, and she sat on the metal floor of the fluorescent-lit shed, half naked and nearing the verge of tears.
# # #
He read the message again while walking into town. “Man,” it read, “You are needed. We shall discuss your role upon your arrival. Please use the terminal you have used during your last two visits. Much to discuss. Hurry.” It was signed only by the name “Maxwell”. If House was the one to contact him, Aaron knew what needed to be done must be serious. And so he hurried.
[I can hear Rochelle's words echoed: "He's obviously a sexual creature at some level..."]
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Cups and Cakes
"Before the sky had finished darkening to navy, the tide had risen to whisk the shell from the atoll, allowing it to continue its progression east. The man’s mind finally blanked as he stared at the slowly passing stars. A meteor flashed across the sky, appearing to slice open the night with the tip of some phalanx of light. The man’s eyes tracked it to the horizon, where it disappeared beyond a plume of smoke. That struck him as odd: a column of smoke, shining white in the rising moon’s light, amidst the waves of a seemingly endless ocean. As the shell approached the smoke, the man recognized it to be steam, not smoke, and realized that this spout of water vapor was a volcano bubbling just beneath the surface. Liquid stone shoved itself forward to the surface, piling among itself and building a new island that animals and plants might someday live on. This realization startled him: the world was changing, growing, perhaps even restarting. The world – the very planet, in and of itself – was forging a new beginning in every moment, in every waking second. The world was healing. The world was moving on from wounds dealt in the past.
It seemed as though infinite peace had tunneled to him through a haze of starvation and released some sort of internal pressure. He felt as though he could finally understand the world, could understand humans, could understand those damned – what had the cheerful one called itself, a Visual Intellect? He felt as though he could never have failed anything prior to this moment. He couldn’t have failed Jessica or Charran or his family or his crew. Not because he was perfect, not because he was lucky, but because nothing up to this point had counted. It was as if his life were some epic tale, and this moment marked the end of its prologue."
[Little did he know: it was, and it did. Well, that last portion is mostly true.]
It seemed as though infinite peace had tunneled to him through a haze of starvation and released some sort of internal pressure. He felt as though he could finally understand the world, could understand humans, could understand those damned – what had the cheerful one called itself, a Visual Intellect? He felt as though he could never have failed anything prior to this moment. He couldn’t have failed Jessica or Charran or his family or his crew. Not because he was perfect, not because he was lucky, but because nothing up to this point had counted. It was as if his life were some epic tale, and this moment marked the end of its prologue."
[Little did he know: it was, and it did. Well, that last portion is mostly true.]
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters
The grassy floodplain which sloped gently to the riverbank's drop did stretch as far north as his eyes could see and curved out of sight with the meander of the water at south's eastward drag. He walked with a slight bounce in his step, propelled downward by the furious, eternal tug of gravity to the sobbing tree at the river's edge. She was visible to him, her hair -- so sandy a brown it was almost blonde or so dark a blonde it was almost brunette -- bouncing in loose curls against the breeze's sly wisps, her green sundress tucked neatly within the insides of her knees as she sat with her calves curled up to the left side of her body. Soon enough, he knew, she would hear or sense him and turn to smile as he approached. He would continue on his intercept vector, he would arrive and perhaps sit, he would hold a conversation. He anticipated the moment, could almost envision it like biting into fresh pineapple: that delicious burst of flavor that dulled but slightly throughout and in no amount was too much; his metaphorical teeth would connect, his metaphorical mouth would fill with sweet juices, and his metaphorical taste buds would rejoice in their mutual admiration of the brain's choice in delicacy.
As he neared, she did -- in fact -- turn her head, the drooping branches and thin, yellowing leaves of the willow obstructing her face from his view only slightly. Her eyebrows were perched slightly above their homes, normally contouring the curve of her consummate almond-shaped eyes of hazel; had he startled her? As it had countless times before, the smile crept upon her face, slightly too wide to be proportional. She watched him approach: her body pointed slightly downstream, her face over her shoulder, her right hand propping her up against the grassy loam, her left draped across her knees. He came to within twenty feet of this gorgeous girl and froze, just outside the tall willow's shade.
"Hi," she said casually.
"Hi," he responded, nodding and fumbling with the buttons on his Sunday shirt, kicking the ground lightly with one patent leather shoe's toe.
She moved her head to look upon the river, then returned to face the young man again. "Would you like to...?"
The arrival of her head to its boy-facing position gave her only the view of a teenaged male retreating at full clip up the floodplain in his church clothes. She sighed, crossed her legs, and slumped forward to rest her head on her hands. She would be leaving her grandparents' home for the city soon; summer was almost over; and this boy had spoken only one word to her in the nine weeks she'd spent her afternoons watching the fish leap in the river on Sundays. But, she guessed, that was life.
As he neared, she did -- in fact -- turn her head, the drooping branches and thin, yellowing leaves of the willow obstructing her face from his view only slightly. Her eyebrows were perched slightly above their homes, normally contouring the curve of her consummate almond-shaped eyes of hazel; had he startled her? As it had countless times before, the smile crept upon her face, slightly too wide to be proportional. She watched him approach: her body pointed slightly downstream, her face over her shoulder, her right hand propping her up against the grassy loam, her left draped across her knees. He came to within twenty feet of this gorgeous girl and froze, just outside the tall willow's shade.
"Hi," she said casually.
"Hi," he responded, nodding and fumbling with the buttons on his Sunday shirt, kicking the ground lightly with one patent leather shoe's toe.
She moved her head to look upon the river, then returned to face the young man again. "Would you like to...?"
The arrival of her head to its boy-facing position gave her only the view of a teenaged male retreating at full clip up the floodplain in his church clothes. She sighed, crossed her legs, and slumped forward to rest her head on her hands. She would be leaving her grandparents' home for the city soon; summer was almost over; and this boy had spoken only one word to her in the nine weeks she'd spent her afternoons watching the fish leap in the river on Sundays. But, she guessed, that was life.
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