by Julian Miles | Feb 18, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
TRANSCRIPT: 01141220072461
INCIDENT: LEU1093-19072461
OUTCOME: PERPETRATOR FATALITY
INCEPT: 230336 Emergency call made from D40F38CB17: “Help. He has a gun. And a knife. And my daughter.”
RESPONSE1: 230619 LEU on scene.
RESPONSE2: 230728 Call for Policeman.
‘Call for Policeman’. Three words that define my life. Enforcement at all levels has been automated for over four centuries, yet the continuing need for discretion when dealing with humans resulted in real Policemen returning to duty three centuries ago. Machines cannot cope with the diversity of human actions, the nuances of emotion and expression. Lethal force had been applied too many times in minor situations, when decision trees bifurcated their way down to a guaranteed result that actually did more harm than good.
In my first life, I put nineteen years into the police force. On a rainy day in 2043, I was gunned down by a teenager with an assault rifle after intervening in a petty dispute over who controlled the drug distribution rights for a playground.
I had filled in the ‘Revive to Serve’ form thinking it was a joke. I’m not laughing anymore. This is my fourth tour of duty, each one lasting twenty years or until I am killed.
Last night I got the call and made my way to the thirty-eighth floor of Cityblock Seventeen. In Dwelling Forty, what used to be called a family-sized council flat, Mister Stevens had consumed his post-work alcohol ration and augmented it with several grams of something that apparently turned his world into a paranoid hell in which his family were out to get him. So he defended himself. He knocked his wife out with a home-made squeezegun before stabbing his son and the first LEU to arrive before barricading himself in the bedroom with his daughter. The fact he’d managed to scratch the LEU showed how far gone he was.
It was clear from the ranting that he had left the rails completely. He would return tomorrow, all grief and remorse. But for tonight, he was a chef beyond redemption. If he hadn’t grabbed his daughter, the response would be contain until sober and then fine him. As he had a hostage and was out of his mind, I had to try and talk him down.
I am equipped with body armour and full data access, nothing more. If I want physical intervention, the Law Enforcement Units on scene will apply it.
I spent two hours talking to him, hearing how his profession is no longer rated as such due to vending being available for all and no-one wanting to pay for the personal touch. He was angry and sad, seeing the end of his vocation. He’d mortgaged everything to keep his restaurant going, his family’s comfort secondary to the need to keep cooking.
I tried. I always do. The evaluation headware that monitors my effort and mental state flashed an ‘out of options’ decision after ninety minutes. I kept going for another thirty. Then he sliced his daughter’s arm and clipped an artery. I saw his smile and realisation dawned moments before the response to life-threatening injury caused the LEU accompanying me to burn a hole through his skull. Within five minutes, the organ salvage unit had whisked his body away to pay his debts. My data feed told me that his corpse value was enough to pay them all and allow his family to live comfortably for a long time.
Nearly nine decades of service across three centuries and I still see desperate love expressed as ‘suicide by cop’.
by Julian Miles | Feb 4, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The drill slides sideways like it’s got a mind of its own, so I straighten up to lift it clear of the crystal. My vision blurs and I pause to gauge which of the two reasons applies. With a bark of laughter I realise it’s the good option: too much rum.
“Hey Andy, you slackin’ again?”
Milt’s unbelievable, able to track the world around him like a sober person.
“Not enough blood in my alcohol system, ya fruit. I’m declarin’ snacktime. You in?”
“Goddam, boy. You goin’ nine-oh-one on me?”
That’s the medical code for saturation, when your body cannot metabolise enough alcohol to keep the Fenden at bay and let you work.
“Not a chance. I did half a bottle too soon is all.”
“That’s the problem with Jamaican. You should switch to Russian.”
“It’s got no flavour, Milt. If I’m going to pickle my ass, I’ve gotta have somethin’ I can savour.”
“You always did read too much and drink too fancy for a jeweller.”
“Bugger off. I’ve got cold hog and fresh kiwis; last chance.”
“I never said anythin’ bad about your goo-er-may eatin’ habits, boy. I’ll be there afore you have canvas up.”
I grin as I turn and use the drill to punch a post-hole in black rock. Sure enough, I’m just swinging the awning up onto the pole when Milt appears and grabs the far side. In a few moments we’re cross-legged in the shade savouring meat and fruit. From where we are, you can see the company enclave on the horizon. Between us and them lays the glittering expanse of the lowlands, shining like the treasure it conceals. Randell is a pretty planet, the vast crystalline plains reflecting whatever light is about, day or night. Under the plains in striated crystalline clumps is the wealth of the universe, the purest of which make any optical device better and the least of which make women feel appreciated.
When the company opened up the digs, they franchised the ‘jewellers’ and supplied the drugs that make our bodies inedible to the Fenden, the translucent gas things who just love having a human for dinner. Bloodmist outbreaks were a problem initially; when Fenden gorge and get amped up on warm human fluids, they group together and go into a slaughter frenzy. Made mining almost impossible until some doctor discovered that certain chemical additives make humans taste bad. The company had us jewellers over a barrel until Marty Grufe discovered that being pissed up was just as effective. You could buy two months supply of spirits for the price of a one-week shot of the company’s patent protector. Pretty soon, the only sober people on Randell lived in the company enclave. If you’re outside these days, you’re either drunk or dead.
Milt slaps my shoulder and points. In the middle distance, a ruby cloud whirls by. I wonder who we lost today. It’s easy to get so engrossed in a rich lode of gems that you let your regular swigging go. Do that for a couple of hours and you get to be edible, which is always fatal. Every jeweller has a few Fenden nearby, just waiting for him to get careless. That’s why smart jewellers pair up: to live long enough to enjoy their earnings.
I lift a bottle of rum and raise it to Milt. He lifts his vodka bottle and clinks it against mine.
“Here’s to the gems an’ the booze never runnin’ out.”
“Damn straight. Sláinte!”
by Julian Miles | Jan 21, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
As a child I was fascinated by the reflections you see when you place two mirrors facing each other and stand between them. Trying to understand that fascination drove me through mathematics and into science, down into quantum foam and up into the things that make reality real.
I could never shake the feeling that what I saw in those mirrors was something fundamental, if I could only understand it. When the new scientific fields caused by Tennerson’s discovery of the principles of wormhole transit opened their doors, I made sure that I was one of the first to get access to their data. Then Cravedine had his accident during a wormhole transit experiment. It caused an utter sensation, but I ignored the media furore. I knew that deep within the logs of that event was the thing I needed.
To go directly from one reality to its alternate is impossible. But in a wormhole, certain laws are placed in abeyance. A wormhole can deliver you into another reality. I added Cravedine’s rather elegant energy field equations to my mirror theories and used the gestalt result as the focus for a wormhole. Reducing the bizarre mechanism down to a backpack and a bag of portable reflective surfaces took longer than the science.
The paired mirrors are the key. The field generated between them places you in a portal. If you can see a reflection of yourself distinctly, you can go there. There being a reality divergent from our own. Of course, you needed to count how many instances from here the reflection is, so you can return.
My first jaunt was reality plus one, my shorthand for going through the right-hand mirror to the first reflection. I found myself in a familiar place, but standing in a sizeable crater. After scrambling out of it, I found the nearby city blocks deserted. Upon reaching populated areas, I got some odd looks. When I read the headlines about my ‘crazy’ experiment demolishing a neighbourhood, I ran back to the crater, unfolded a pair of mirrors and stepped back into reality minus one.
The guard standing in my laboratory was white-faced with surprise, but he held his rifle steady as he ordered me to stay put. I said I needed to stabilise myself by putting up two reflective surfaces. He nodded assent and while he called for backup, I unfolded my mirrors and stepped back into reality plus one.
I stepped into my laboratory and the me in there screamed like a girl before collapsing, hitting his head heavily on the corner of the bench. I heard his neck snap as his head twisted. I unfolded mirrors and got the hell out as I heard running feet in the corridor outside. This time, I chose reality minus two.
The ruined laboratory was open to the sky. Climbing up, I beheld the ruins of a city stretching as far as I could see. So I sat on charred masonry, snacked, drank and thought hard. Then I mirrored up and selected reality plus fourteen, the furthest that I could make out.
Six years later, I am still here. I have become a best-selling author with a backpack and a bag of mirrors cemented into the foundations of my Swedish home. I didn’t think it through. A reflection is never an exact copy and each reality has its own reflections. The reflections I saw in each reality were reflections of that reality, not mine.
I discovered the most effective method of exile ever. Then inflicted it upon myself.
by Julian Miles | Jan 9, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Unauthorised access to archives. Overdue viruser ‘Aloysius’ in serious breach.”
The info-alarm finishes as I slide onto the longseat, dermal plates on mesh conducting me into the antechamber. Checking my vody for artefacts, I find my virtual self complete and in the right sequence. Thinking a filter onto my command tab narrows the probable spoofers to two. Subsetting them by touchpoints highlights Angela Capel as aberrant, being a six year old querying the socio-data impacts of the Nazi putsch of 2098.
BritLib digitised the last library book in 2037, adding it to their info-archive which was established in 2024. They became the leading adoptee of crystalline storage and pioneered holistic archiving with vody access in 2052. By 2074, BritLib housed 3.2 yottabytes of information. Holographic recording and mind mapping quadrupled that. Near-exponential storage demand forced them to pioneer self-replicating crystal lattices, so the archives could grow unhindered throughout the Spadeadam complex without capacity restrictions.
Depending on your access permissions, you can retrieve any of the works of man from this morning’s quiz shows back to the pictures we scrawled on cavern walls. There are secrets here too, things deemed too critical to be lost yet simultaneously too dangerous to be known yet. Those are the usual targets, secrets being valuable in this info-dependent world.
Virusers like Aloysius-cum-Angela are either thieves or ‘Open Access’ fundamentalists who will not accept that some things are too risky to be known. They insist that civilisation can moderate itself, despite centuries of proof to the contrary. I am a member of the BritLib team that ensures none of them succeed.
I flash through the sectors back to the twenty-first century. There I pick up the intrusion and bi-directionally traceroute, pursuing while sending trackers back toward the originating noderooms. Angela’s teachnode will get a shock when Infosec barge in, but they’ll understand. The other hit will be Aloysius. Most breaches are met only with closetab actions, but any serious violation or a viruser hitting ten breaches is classed as ‘Overdue’ and referred to us for moderation.
Alighting in the data-draped halls of the Nazi subsection, I trace him past the putsch into the fimbulwinter caused by their nuclear totenreich. There are no lockloops to trap me in memory, but I find a shunt in the metadata and instigate an action prompt: “Immediate fix; prevent usage of index links to bypass access tabs.” The remediation team are going to love that one.
Slipping down the link, I overlay my vody to appear as a government privileged user. Let his access fixation bring him to me.
Emerging in a BritLib closed subsector is a surprise. I knew the library became the secure depository for all data during the fimbulwinter, but the fact they stored the entire preamble is unindexed. Too much information obscures many things, even from us. A scan of the infoclumps shows me that this subsector lists the actual location of BritLib. That fact is staff only. Game over, Aloysius.
I wait until he tries to subvert my simvody, falling for the lure of high level access.
“What the – who are you?”
That’s all he gets out before I lock his vody, diagnose his interface, select the correct overload and end him by turning his longseat into an electric chair, holding him in place with tonic seizures. Then I view his noderoom to ensure the orchestrated series of hardware overloads I deliver burn everything beyond salvage.
Infosec will clear up a ‘clumsy amateur killed by his own incompetence’ and his messy demise will add to the mythology that defends BritLib better than the firewalls.
by Julian Miles | Jan 1, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
After the successes of breeding for telepaths and telekinetics, they moved on to the more esoteric strains. My mum and dad had the right genetic markers for rarest of them, precognition. So they joined the program and had two kids with everything paid for.
I was the first, “a beautiful baby boy who turned into a reclusive weirdo”, according to grandma. My sister, Sandy, was even better looking and far better at being social.
Precogs have affinities. Attunement to earthquakes, fire, weather, aircraft and anything else you can imagine. The range is forever expanding.
Sandy is lying motionless on the bed in intensive care, the scars of her multiple suicide attempts a roadmap of sadness on her forearm. This time she stole a shotgun. The fact she is alive is purely down to the fact that the gun was too big for her to hold properly against anywhere vital. She’s lost an arm and one side of her face is a ruin, but she’s alive.
“Hey Stu.”
Her voice is a whisper, but my lil’ sis is back.
“I screwed up, didn’t I?”
I smile through the tears. “Yeah, sis. You missed. But I’m happy you did.”
She reaches slowly and I take her hand. She squeezes it as hard as she can, which isn’t very hard at all.
“Why, sis? You were there. Fully manifested at rank six. You were set for life.”
A tear rolls down her cheek.
“My affinity, Stu. It’s disease. All I see is families dying horribly, all the time. I have this six-year view and I see them all, starting with whatever causes the most pain and death.”
That’s common. Seems that the more people in agony, the stronger the ‘signal’ to be picked up.
“If only you could manifest, Stu. At least I could share.”
Oh sis, I’m so sorry. I never realised that my secret would cause you to feel so alone.
“Sis, you’ve got to promise to keep a secret before I tell you something crazy.”
Her one eyebrow raises and she nods, then winces in pain.
“I manifested when I was eight. At rank fifty-five.”
Her eye widens and she nearly crushes my hand.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone? That’s forty ranks beyond the best. What’s your affinity?”
I smile and lean closer.
“I’m only telling you because you have to know you’re never alone. I’m always going to be here for you.”
“But what’s your affinity?”
“Me.”
She looks puzzled. “What?”
“My affinity is me. Nothing more. I know when every member of the family dies, because I have felt my grief. But I don’t know which family member it is. I do know that I will outlive all of you.”
She smiles. “So that’s how you got here so quick. You precog’d your pain over my shotgun surgery.”
I nod. “Too right, little sister. Don’t you ever try that again…”
Her eyes widen as I drop into farsee without warning. Then I’m back and smiling even wider: “Good girl. Some events I felt have gone.”
She squeezes my hand: “Rank fifty-five? Why there, do you think?”
I look at her, a sorrowful smile spreading across my face.
“That’s when I die, sis.”
“That’s amazing. Why don’t you announce?”
“I really don’t think that knowing the exact time I will be taking a shit for the next forty-four years is going to help the world.”
She laughs so hard that the automed sedates her. I stay, holding her hand and knowing that my little sister is finally going to be okay.
