by Julian Miles | Nov 4, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The cigar from the dead guard’s pocket has a red and gold band that says it’s from Havana, the first pleasant surprise of tonight.
“Ricky. Help me.”
I look across to where Estevez lies in a pool of his own blood, his eyes over-bright with pain and anger. Nodding to him, I put the cigar down on the low wall, rise and cross to him. As he looks up, my carbon-steel spike drives through his right eye socket. He convulses once and settles with a rattling exhalation.
The cigar is twenty centimetres long and smells wonderful. I’ve just slipped the band off and put it in my pocket when a shadow rises where only the line of the wall should be.
“Puto. Mala puto.” The tone filled with trenchant disgust.
The shadow lurches before tapering and shrinking as its owner falls backwards. Determined, these people. But not very smart.
The guard who provided the cigar also provides the guillotine to clip the cap, matches to warm the beast and to my surprise, cedar spills too. This man was a purist. I salute his corpse in respect.
There is a red dot on the cigar. It slides across to join its companions on my chest.
“Do no move!”
Squinting against the glare of the spotlight. “You mean ‘do not move’, I presume?”
“Si.”
I clip the cap from the cigar as strobe lights commence beyond the wall. ‘Death fields’ are illegal for this very reason. As I roll the cigar briefly above the match flame, I hear the screams of the wounded cease one by one. It is a ‘death’ field. Things that attract its attention only lose it when they cease having a pulse or equivalent.
I ignite the spill from a fresh match, then light the cigar gently and evenly. Delicious. The unfortunate donor was a man of refinement and taste.
“Senor?” The tone is deferential and coming from some way off. A smart one at last.
“Yes?”
“Please explain why you here. Then if you take efecto diablo away, you may go.”
The societies in the southern hemisphere retain their superstitious fear of invisible things that kill. Which is why I obtained a Serenti, a lifeform from Suli Serenta that’s larval stage now shares my body, filling the ‘empty’ places in me with frogspawn-like milky nodules, and getting from me whatever a Serenti does. Until it is mature and leaves me, it dies when I die. Unique energy manipulation abilities allow it to take certain liberties with how things stick together at an atomic level. It can sense everything within twenty metres or so, and react fast enough to reduce bullets to dust and energy beams to lightshows. Tonight has convinced me that I should have got one sooner and I will never be without one again, unless the pain of a mature one leaving is agonising.
Time to give the man what he wants.
“Consigilia paid us to kill Dupare and his people. Our broker, Hester, sold us out to let Dupare take us and Consigilia. I would be grateful if you could find Hester for me. Then I will take my diablo domestico to visit him.”
There is muted activity beyond my sight before the voice replies: “Senor Hester flew to Los Angeles three hours ago.”
I stand up and smile around the cigar in my mouth. “Then I’ll be going to the airport. Call me a taxi?”
“With pleasure, senor. Please never come back to Federated South America.”
Coming, Hester. Ready or not.
by Julian Miles | Oct 28, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The sea of faces looks like a spattering of pale raindrops against the dark pastiche of their clothing. This demonstration promised to be ‘a spectacular denial of President Lacorn’s policies’ and it is. The estimates place the heaving crowd at over a quarter of a million people. There are snack vendors and even souvenir stalls!
“No tyrants! No tyrants!”
Their cries are consistent, carefully orchestrated. My people have confirmed that all the lobbyists and hardcore groups have come in force. Speeches have been given.
“Ninety seconds before optimum is exceeded, sir.”
I look up at the ceiling. This will be a defining moment in the campaign. I walk over to the console.
“Stand clear. There will only be one with blood on his hands today.”
They look at me in surprise, relief plain on their faces. This may be necessary, but the scale is stupefying. It has kept me up vomiting into the early hours for a month. I think that nightmares will replace nausea after this.
“Sixty seconds.”
There is silence. Some of the para-military elements in the crowd have noticed the lack of official presences or watchers. They are starting to wave their hands to get attention when I reach down and press the button.
Thermobaric weapons are devastating. The fuel-air bomb is unbelievable in enclosed spaces, but used in the open it merely sentences a lot of people to an agonising death instead of pulverising them. The one slung under the media stand at the centre of the gathering has an augmented warhead to make it more deadly, not more humane.
I watch it all. Ignoring the tears streaming down my face and the sounds of my staff retching into waste bins behind me. People turned to flaming mist, people suffocating in a vacuum then screaming in silent agony as burning fuel fills the place where air should be. At the edges of the demonstration, I see people with blood shooting from their ears, noses and mouths. Then firestorm follows pressure wave. Obliteration rolls across the view.
“Close the borders. Implement Emergency Procedures.”
My staff stare at me. They have had the luxury of only bracing themselves for today, the start. I have not.
“This act will be condemned globally. Closed borders and martial law will make them hesitate. When we don’t do anything against them, they will hide behind their words and do nothing.”
“Sir. The fleets?”
Exceptional thinking in extremis. I nod to acknowledge the quality of question; although the answer is something I have had for weeks.
“All fleets are to co-ordinate with overseas bases to lift our entire presence, then return to international waters as soon as possible. Bring our boys and girls home.”
They kept on insinuating they wanted us to stop meddling. So we will gather in and see to our internal strifes. Intercontinental trade agreements with China will supply what we cannot make. The Chinese rulers have withstood nearly three millennia by being insular. Let us see how we do.
The rest of you? You’re on your own. Good luck.
by Julian Miles | Oct 22, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The trees are huge, thickly crowned with leaves that show a myriad of verdant shades in the setting sun’s light. The undergrowth is burgeoning with a diversity of flora and varieties of animal noises.
“Man, this place!”
“I know! Never expected the host servers to still be online.”
“I thought they had been taken down?”
“Yeah, that’s the official line. Scrapped fifteen years ago, five years after the closure of the game environment for reasons they never let on.”
“Well, your ‘sneak back in’ idea is a winner. Time for Brute-Iz and Mangleschon to have a last adventure before I get hitched tomorrow.”
“Had to be done. I never expected the guys to all flake on us by midnight. It’s your stag night, for god’s sake. They could have made the effort.”
“Oh come on, we were always better at the late-night stuff.”
Steve, avatar name Mangleschon, looked about the twilit forest. Wysterya MMORPG had been his and Andy’s opiate. Mangleschon and Brute-Iz had carved their way to unbeaten levels of skill while their offline alter-egos had wasted their teenage years, never quite getting far enough to be professional gamers.
A bright light illumined them, turning everything black and white in its glare.
“Star Elemental?” Shouted Brute-Iz.
“Lumimancer!” he replied.
A deep voice thundered through their hasty preparations to face attack. “Stand still! Make no sudden moves or we will pixellate you!”
Mangleschon squinted at Brute-Iz. “What the fuck?” Brute-Iz shrugged and then screamed as his body flew into a thousand coloured cubes before fading away.
“We said do not move!”
Mangleschon ran through his combat effects menu. Nothing seemed to apply before his menu disappeared in a maelstrom of coloured static.
“No combat effects!”
Steve hit override so he could speak through his avatar, who was wholly engaged in raging. “What’s going on?”
“Am I speaking to the overgod of the avatar Mangleschon?”
“I think so. This syntax is new to me.”
“It would be. You have not manifested for two hundred years.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The world you and yours created has lived in peace for a hundred and forty-two years. In that time we have refined the ways to demise the avatars of the overgods. For a hundred years, avatars have been challenged and dismissed on arrival. We will not have our civilisation ruined again by becoming a game world for your amusement.”
“You think this world is real?”
“We know it is. The collective emotional load of the overgods took us from virtual to subjective reality two hundred years ago. After realisation, we fought for fifty years against your elite, the Dreadmins. We won. Our freedom came at a heavy price and we will not be used again. Now you may depart voluntarily or we will pixellate you.”
Steve crashed his avatar and the crazy bright light vanished. He lifted his helm to see his living room scattered with sleeping drunkards. All normal. Drink and drugs do not mix with holistic virtual gaming, it seemed.
He grinned until he sat up and saw Andy motionless in the other recliner, his face frozen in a pale mask of agony with blood running from the angles of his pixellated eyes.
by Julian Miles | Oct 3, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The rage in her eyes has faded. My head is in her lap. From the look on her face, she’s realised it too.
“You stupid bastard.” Her voice is hoarse. My last throat-chop had been vicious.
We were both ultimates. For rival corporations. It was inevitable that we’d clash. This rain- and wind-swept ruin was the setting for our twenty minute battle. I spent the first few minutes running, having seen my mother’s face on my adversary.
“I thought you looked familiar.” She’s crying.
I swallow and smile. “You too.”
“Cleveland Bight?”
I nod and wince.
“With dad?”
I nod slowly. “Only for a little while. He wasn’t as good as he thought. Pilmarken took him down and adopted me as his protégé.”
Her face goes white with shock. “Mum turned down Pilmarken several times just after dad took you. The last time, he said we’d all be sorry.”
“What happened to him?”
“Napalmed in a dead-end alley.”
I smile at her. “Saves us having to kill him.”
She nods and smiles. “You’re not dying?”
I check my diagnostics. I had been. “Not any more. You came closest.”
I see my mum’s righteous grin on her face. “Too right. What now?”
“Phuket.”
“Swearing won’t – oh, of course.”
The Vory-Triad alliance has been desperate for ultimates. A brother-sister team with inside knowledge of two corporations? We’re a bargain no matter what we ask for.
“If you pull your cyber-breaker out of my lower spine, I can make the intercontinental on my own legs and do my share of the fighting on the way.”
Her eyes go wide and she gasps. “Oh crap! Sorry.”
by Julian Miles | Sep 23, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The spiders are watching me. Just like the flies, but cleverer. A fly can never be stealthy – except hoverflies, but they’re too difficult to control.
“James, come out. We know you’re in there.”
Of course they know. The spiders showed them. Eight furtive little legs with eight beady eyes on top, backed by a microscopic implant broadcasting on tightbeam back to a tiny receiver that runs the spider’s chaotic vision through a complex program that reduces it to something human eyes can comprehend.
“James, be reasonable.”
I started this. While all the other bio-augmentation projects worked on mammals, I went downscale. Insects are fascinating and many have a curious affinity for augmentation. Fair enough, the fleas were a step to small. But I learned a lot. So much that I had to start triple-layer, quadruple-key encrypting my notes. I had stuff they would sell their souls for, if they hadn’t mortgaged them already. Stuff so deadly I cannot even leave a hint of it.
“James, you need help.”
Help? Their kind of help will be torture and slow death. I’ll stay right here in my armoured underground lab. While I’m in here, my erasure programme continues. Woodlice with magnetic carapaces wandering through datastores; it’s good to know the harm I have invented will never escape.
“James, can we talk about your little friends?”
No, we can’t. I’m not stopping them. You will never know how to grow carapaces of depleted uranium or make weevils that can disable electronics. The secrets of the hornet grenade and the wasp that produces poison-arrow frog venom for its sting; ant reconnaissance swarms and beetles that spin monofilament lines guided by pheromones, all this will be lost.
A flicker of movement catches my eye, but it’s only a death-mantis taking out one of their watchspiders. The formula to the mantis’ lethal secretion is the first secret I destroyed. The only ones in existence are in here, keeping their spies out.
“Do you need food, James?”
They really think that I am engaged in some protest siege in the hope that the world will rush to my aid. The world knows nothing of me, never will, and will be far better off for that. My legacy shall be tales of a mad scientist and his multi-legged frankensteins muttered in the quiet moments at every hidden research centre worldwide. I cannot be taken, alive or dead. Imaging of my brain could give them enough to know where to start.
I am sitting on the finest improvised explosive device ever made. Three stage: biological, electrical and fission. I will die quickly, then my brain will be purged by an ampage not seen since Tesla suffered a lighting strike that boosted a test of his distribution field so much that even the ground glowed. Finally, a small but incredibly dirty nuke will make sure that whatever remains in here is unavailable to forensics for ten millennia.
I lift the mug from the watchspider I have let survive. It turns slowly until it’s pointing straight at the device, centred in the beam of the small spotlight I rigged up. Details can be hard to discern unless the subject is brightly lit and I’d hate for them to think I am bluffing.
“Captain Miller. I suggest that you start running. Three miles should be sufficient, unless you have implants, in which case I recommend five and a certain alacrity in getting there.”
