by Julian Miles | Apr 15, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Tom! Tom!”
I shake my head and massage my jaw as I sit up. The pretty woman crouched by me looks worried. Behind her I hear a struggle occurring. That has something to do with the pain in my jaw.
“Are you okay?”
Good question. I raise my hand for a pause and take stock. I’m in a nice suit, sitting on the grey carpet tiles of the floor next to an overturned chair. I glance at her name tag.
“I’m fine, Margaret.”
“Thank god for that! I thought he was going to kill you!”
He was? Fragmented memories return: Arthur Windemere, long-term claimant. He’d come in for a ‘New Year Restart’ review and – what?
“Give me a moment, Margaret. That shook me up a bit.”
I stand up and see a green-jacketed figure, presumably Arthur, being locked into restraints by a police officer while a pair of security officers hold him. He’s screaming all sorts of nonsense and they’re not trying to calm him down.
“Let me help you up.”
With Margaret’s assistance I manage to stand up and lean on my desk. He must have really clouted me one. A chap in a blue uniform hurries over to me.
“Okay, Tom, we’re going to go down to the medical centre and get you checked over.”
He escorts me out of the open-plan office, down a long corridor, into a white room where two nurses wait. I lie down as instructed and he proceeds to do a very thorough examination before looking me in the eye.
“How’s the head, Tom?”
“Things seem to be a bit jumbled –” I look at his name tag. “Andy.”
With a smile he whips out an injector and applies it to my neck. There’s a brief stinging sensation and a sudden warmth accompanies my mind settling.
My name is Tom. I am part of the Cleardown team. We go into the welfare centres and work with the stubborn cases, using our skillsets to identify and goad the temperamental ones into assault, drive the vulnerable to suicide and the needy back out onto the streets where nature will save us money before spring. I know every miniscule piece and combination of legislation to withhold welfare chips. Using that, I drag every claimant through a bureaucratic nightmare until they snap – or die. Dying is preferred: less datawork.
When they attack me in frustration they contravene the terms of their agreement with WFA (Welfare For All). Prosecution is inevitable and they will join labour units or get exiled to Titan. More importantly, they are removed from the ‘black triangle’ of foodpacks, freedata and hydrofare; thus ceasing to be a drain upon our society.
My predecessor was Steve and my successor will be Ulrich. We are designed to be fragile in certain ways, so it takes less than the usual amount of force to break us. The more severe the sentence, the better it is.
Andy escorts me back and Margaret has already tidied my work area.
“For a moment I thought we’d had another bad one like the bloke who used to sit here.”
“Bad?”
She looks at me, eyes misty with tears: “He got attacked and cracked his head on the desk. Poor Steve never had a chance.”
“You’re a caring woman, Margaret. This place needs more people like you.”
Her eyes narrow and then open wider as she smiles; having decided that I am sincere.
“You remind me of him.” She looks down, then back at me: “What are you doing after work?”
by Julian Miles | Apr 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They say that Vikings never actually had horns on their helmets. Odd how that piece of trivia rises to mind at this moment of peril. I know why it’s arisen: the being attempting to end my existence has horns on his helmet – or his head looks like a knight’s full-face helm with quadruple horns set at ninety-degrees to each other. These horns are either aligned to one central on the forehead – or to ones extending forward and outward from the temples – from the examples of his race that I’ve seen.
A girder interrupts my musings: I run straight into it.
I come to lying on the ground with the helmed space barbarian looming over me, making noises like a short-circuiting loudspeaker. As my eyes focus, his head explodes and I see that there is no helmet involved – his head had horns. The spattering of alien gore snaps me fully conscious and I scoot backwards while spitting out gobs of xenobrain. I start to retch as the taste registers.
Minutes later, I’m puking bile to the accompaniment of girly laughter. That’s not funny.
Using a crunch-and-spring move I come to my feet, ready to give the lady a piece of my mind. Spinning around, I stare her straight in the second nipple pair from the top and hastily reconsider my options. Tracking my gaze upwards, I encounter an angular face of surprising charm and the greenest eyes I have ever seen. I suffer a ‘lost moment’ only men will understand before I realise that her eyes are glowing from within and while her hands are on her hips, the tail – which I presume to be hers – is pointing a Kritoralian Eviscerator at me. No wonder my erstwhile attacker’s head exploded!
“You’d be what they call a Hooman?”
She’s got a voice that is almost ULF. I can feel her speak. Is she the source of that contralto laughter? I nod.
“Goodly. I’m Persim. That me name. I be a Fune. Always wanted t’meet a Hooman.”
Here goes nothing: “Why?”
She laughs and yes, she’s the owner of the laughter.
“It’s a big night with lots o’stars. Only you lot seem to want to go find what’s behind the next one.”
I smile: “You’d be looking for a berth?”
“Yup. Got to get me off this rock before next moonrise. Otherwise one o’him what I just headshot will be my new owner.”
“New owner? What happened to your old owner?”
She points at the headless corpse: “Was ’im. Better get me gone. Was thinkin’ you might ‘elp me after I ‘elp you?”
I’ve never heard of a Fune, but then again, humanity is still coming to terms with space being multi-dimensional and chock full of aliens. The only reason Earth got left alone for so long was that we were in what was considered an uninhabited sector of an obscure dimension.
My father got out of Australia as soon as he could. Said the stars were calling him to come walk among them. I guess I inherited that wanderlust. Like Persim said: ‘go find out what’s behind the next one’.
That thought settles my answer: “I’m Doobrie. You’re welcome to a berth. Let’s go see what’s behind that one.” I point to a star low on the horizon. She looks, laughs and I get a feeling we’re going to see the back of many stars before we part ways.
by Julian Miles | Mar 20, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“At the sound of distant murder, there will be precisely three humans left.”
I used to find Dave hilarious. These days, after nineteen years surviving the end of an age in his company, he’s been bloody irritating for about the last eighteen. Of course, he’s oblivious to the fact that we’re being chased by a woman who hates him more than any other living being. You’d think that he’s just having a perpetual walk in the park; for all that he bothers with anything.
“Dave, your ex just killed Clint, and killed him brutally if the noises he made were anything to go by.”
“Oh, I’m sure he had it coming, Dmitri. She’s never been one to kill without good reason.”
See what I mean?
“What possible reason could she have for killing a quarter of the humans left in the universe?”
Dave stops and turns to face me: “Well, now.” His tone is one I haven’t heard before: “That would depend on how many can fit in the escape vessel that only I know the way to.”
I know the answer already.
“I see that you’ve guessed it. What you haven’t guessed is that we’ve made it. Right under our feet – under this grey rock that disguises the access hatch to the launch bay – lies a fully loaded Challenger Six Space Yacht.”
Not many snappy replies to that little revelation.
“So now I need to know, Dmitri. Are you with me?”
“Don’t be an idiot, Dave. I’ve been with you since the Eiffel went over.”
He nods, a look of relief appearing on his face: “Thank God for that. She’s insidious, that woman. I never understoo-”
Dave’s eyes bug out as an arrow goes in his left ear and out through his right temple. Without even a death rattle, he drops to the ground, stone dead before he started to fall.
As Shelley approaches, bow in hand, I nudge his body with my boot and idly comment: “She’s marvellous, that woman. We’d have abandoned you years ago, but the processor cores of our Challenger Five didn’t survive that last flare.”
by Julian Miles | Mar 13, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Did you see them? Silver streaks through cumulus, probably an Andorini scout formation. It’s not like anyone here would recognise them.”
Officer Peters looked over at the shuffling, muttering figure. Taking in the irregular gait, the handful of carrier bags stuffed to overflowing with obscure things, the neck of a bottle protruding from the brown paper bag clenched in the other fist, he nodded sadly. Another crackpot left to wander the streets due to cuts in the mental health budget.
“Second stage flare this morning. Guess that’s when they gated in. How many more can they get through before someone notices?”
This one had been out for a while, given the dishevelled nature of his layered clothing. He’d give the shelter over on Pasadena a call.
As he reached for his radio, a cat yowled from nearby and he jumped at the sudden sound. Peering about for the enraged feline, he forgot all about making that call.
*
Officer Fuentes sighed. Another muttering loon on the loose. This one smelt like a pickled sewer, too.
“You stupid angshor, how could I see them? I’m on another continent!”
She shook her head. Just what she needed, a care-in-the-community failure right at the end of her shift. She checked her watch. Five minutes. Enough time to start the process.
“They’ll not notice until it’s way too late. We’ve known that for ages. Just keep moving so the volkfängers cannot get a line on us.”
Fuentes flipped through her notebook looking for the Church Homeless Programme’s number. It flipped past her searching eyes like it momentarily didn’t exist. With a sigh, she noted where she’d seen the derelict and headed for the station to clock out.
*
On a rooftop far away, something with stealthy gossamer wings and hungry red eyes sniffs the air and clicks mournfully at the waning moon. It will find the shuffling ones eventually. They cannot keep moving forever.
by Julian Miles | Mar 4, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The robot stands there just after dawn, under the skies of another beautiful day, atop a rusting hulk, waving a steel pole about in a way that hints at long-lost purpose. On the ground nearby, two large felines rest on their haunches, their harnesses loosened and packs put aside as they watch the strange ritual.
“Why does hee do that, grantom?”
“Because that pole used to have a piece of cloth tied to the top, Clayre.”
“Was hee trying to signal other hees?”
“No. Hee is obeying his last order, to wave the cloth defiantly, so enemy hees will know his Tom and clan have not surrendered.”
“They had clans?”
“Yes, Clayre. Huge ones. So big they didn’t work properly.”
“That’s why H’n made hees, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. They made hees to do the things they couldn’t. H’n were very weak. They had no claws; couldn’t even see at night.”
“Is that why they tried to change everything?”
“That’s right. The real world scared them, so they tried to cover it up. But it wouldn’t be covered up. In the end, it won.”
“Q’een Norton saw that coming.”
“Yes. She saw there was no winning, just an ending. She set us on our path in defiance of her Tom and his clan. But she saw through the coming night better than any. That is why we People walk the greenways alone today. No other People’s Q’eens or Toms saw clearly.”
“Why do we wait, grantom?”
“Because this is where she left her mark. She swore a hee to her service and it cut words into the stone of the bluff. They are ancient, but you can still see them when the morning sun shines on them. After you have seen, we will go.”
“Q’een Norton left something? Why did the elders not tell us?”
“Because they did not believe my grandam, so she passed it to down within our clan.”
“What, grantom?”
“The telling I had was that her clan dismissed Q’een Norton. They thought her sun-touched. So she used the hee to leave an insult her Tom and his get would see every morning until the day they died.”
“What is ‘words’?”
“‘Word’ is one, ‘words’ is more. They had no proper speech. They had to leave marks on the ground to talk. A word represented something in that low speech.”
“How do we know what she left?”
“My grandam had the speaking of the words from her grandam and so on back and forward, so we will know what to say if the H’n came back from the stars like the oldest tales say they will.”
“What is the speech cut into the stone?”
“‘All your banners are dust.’”
