by Julian Miles | Jan 20, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The office was tidy and the boss sat smiling behind the desk as he finished pouring a second glass of malt whiskey. The smell almost made John drool. Andy looked up with a beaming smile.
“Come in John. Take a seat. This is informal so you can take the suit off.”
“Thanks, Andy.”
The scream of a decompressing astronaut made Anders tear his headset off again. To his left, Chas added a third upright to the second five-bar gate on the whiteboard. Over the speakers, the scream trailed off to silence broken only by the dreadful snapping noise of something slamming into John’s battered brain through his ruined nasal passage. Everybody swallowed hard as Commodore Vinter stormed in.
“Gagarin take it! That’s eight of my lads it’s deluded and data-stripped. How in hell are we going to get it? The data in its spirals must be priceless.”
Thurlow stood up shakily.
“It’s the oldest we’ve encountered. Brilliant at mental hallucinographics and very aware. We may have to torch it. Can’t let any of the other companies succeed.”
Vinter purpled from the neck up before bellowing at all and sundry.
“I am open to suggestions that do not involve blasting several billion Eurodollars worth of alien DNA data store to space dust.”
“Got a winner, chief.”
Everyone turned to stare at Phillips, the stick-thin two-metre genius data analyst from somewhere rustic in the North of Britain. Vinter looked about for someone to object before nodding for Phillips to continue.
“My mate Eddie. He’ll bring that in. I’ll stake my bonus and his freedom with full share reinstatement on it.”
Anders and Chas ducked as Vinter threw a datapad across the bridge before bursting out laughing.
“You’re on. But if Eddie gets brain-stripped, you’re next man up. Don’t need a data analyst if I can’t get any data.”
Phillips paused and then grinned.
“Deal. I’ll go and brief him while the bay lads suit him up.”
Eddie gusted from the hatch and drifted over to the door. The office was plush, shiny hunting rifles on the wall and a bearded old boy who reminded him of his poacher granddad sat by the table pouring ale from a frosted green bottle. He looked up.
“Take a load off, son. Ditch the suit and tie one on.”
“Up yours.”
The old boy looked nonplussed.
“Easy lad. No need for that. It’s why I asked you in here, so I could compliment you on the way you handled yourself. Need a few more like you, we do.”
Eddie strode up to the table and looked at the bottle. The label read ‘S’YHPRUM’, just like he’d seen it in the mirror the night he glassed his Dad. He smiled.
“Okay, pass a glass.”
“Can’t sink a cold one in that rig, boy. Unzip and get stuck in.”
Eddie’s smile got wider.
“Tell ya what, I think I’ll skip the unzip and just get stuck in.”
He finished with a shout as his gauntleted fist slammed into the old fellow’s face with the amplified force of his suit behind it. There was an audible snap and the room vanished.
Eddie floated in front of a spindly form that was wrapping itself almost lovingly around the extended arm of his suit.
On the bridge, Phil laughed out loud as he explained.
“The patterns show that as a Spindle-drift gets more data, it takes a fraction to enhance its basic defensive imaging capability based on hierarchal command structures. But for Eddie, giving an authority figure grief isn’t learned behaviour, it’s damn near genetic.”
by Julian Miles | Jan 16, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Telemada Centre is pretty on a New Year evening. The displays in the shop fronts are outshone by the Christmas lights. I watched on live AV as Veleria Diesel turned them on. Seemed right that her fight for the rights of the poor was finally getting recognised.
The transparent escalators are the tourist feature: Dubbed ‘Stairway to Heaven’, they ascend nine storeys from the entrance plaza up to the restaurant tier. People who want to do anything as ordinary as shopping can use the lifts.
I am on it now. The sensation is eerie, provided by some retasked military stealth technology. Ahead of me Haddad is oblivious to his nemesis standing quietly watching the view from three metres behind him. There’s no hurry. He’s going to a very exclusive restaurant with his latest nanodoll. A little harsh as the young lady is actually an undercover Narcotics agent, but the role she has did necessitate selection by her proximity to looking like a porn star.
He’s on the phone to his legal team, who are informing him that his appeal has been rejected and he has twenty-four hours to present himself at any law-enforcement office for last will and demise.
He finishes the call and laughs out loud, commenting loudly to his bodyguards that if they think he’s going to step up for death, they are mistaken. Then he orders them to prepare his airliner and transfer his remaining funds to Grenada. He will leave for the airport after lunch. The exercise of unthinking arrogance is almost artistic in its nonchalance.
We arrive at the top tier and he wanders into the restaurant. I walk over to the bar and order absinthe over sake with a twist of speed, a cocktail colloquially referred to as ‘Emerald Seppuku’. Haddad notices that. He nods to me, the respect of a hard-living man acknowledging conspicuous excess in another. My n-tech reduces the drink to the danger level of water, but he doesn’t know and that’s the idea.
Everybody has n-tech of varying types from the age of six months. The health of the world has improved beyond measure with every medical procedure reduced to micro surgery with a few million surgeons already on board. Just lie down, let the master surgeon guide your n-tech and you’re fixed. Your ID is onboard as well, so the amputational horrors of implanted chip theft are a thing of the past.
A better society. As n-tech can only interface from under three metres, the big-brother worry is removed as well. Utopians are already hailing the new age. Not quite. Dangerous and greedy people still take advantage of society. In a landmark and completely secret agreement, my agency appeared.
Haddad is seated and I have an Emerald Seppuku delivered to him. He sips it appreciatively and gestures me over. I walk over and combine flattery with macho humour. I walk away with his card. I am sitting at the bar when he rises and heads for the toilets as the nephritic doubler instruction resolves. Minutes later the bodyguards get frantic and I am just leaving when the paramedics arrive. Too late: Nbola is always fatal. For some reason all of the n-tech in a person just goes berserk, becoming several million tiny blades. A paralysed, agonising ninety seconds as you are pureed from the inside out.
Nbola is very rare and a cure is being sought. It is also fictional. The more enlightened the society, the more insidious and decisive the means of protecting it need to be. I am a Surgeon-General. Never need me to operate on you.
by Julian Miles | Jan 4, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It looks too soft. This thread-like network of blue filaments and their pale red host substrate cannot possibly give me my right arm back. For the eighteenth time, I reconsider my decision to volunteer for this experimental procedure.
“Incredible stuff, Axian, its incredible stuff. Just put it in a nutrient bath and it grows from the tiniest pieces. If this works, you’ll be the first of many.”
The procedure room is spotless, the nurses gleaming from their sterilising scrub. That is the only drawback; this stuff decays really quickly and is subject to a ridiculous range of degenerative parasites. But they think that they have dealt with that in this new strain, something about sealed polymeric sheathing filled with nutrient gel.
Surgeon Dix is the best. He has already refused to commence three times because some small detail had not been attended to. With his optics, those details had been very minute.
“Rest easy, Axian. The sonor-pulse will send you into a fugue state where all your vitality will be stable but you will be unaware of the less pleasant aspects of disassembling your arm.”
I give him a weak smile as the pulse starts and I fade away.
The light is bright and my arm is warm. I sit up suddenly and the nurse looks up from her monitoring station.
“Welcome back.”
I ignore her as I lift my right arm to take a closer look. The armatures are still there, the fine calligraphy etched by Bilinta spotless for once. But as I rotate it, I see that deep inside, black tubes run up the core of my skeletal system. I increase magnification and see the fine filaments extruded from this black mainline that fan out into the outer frame. I tap my forearm and beep in surprise. I felt that. Twenty minutes later and I am deep in discussion with Surgeon Dix.
“I can feel things on the arm, even base spectrums like heat and cold.”
Dix nods.
“That was a possibility. The archives show that viscus sapiens had such sensitivity over their entire surface area.”
“They could sense with their bodies?”
“Only pressure and related direct stimuli. Tactile input.”
I shake my head. Imagine being able to feel the wind against your whole surface. Incredible. Surgeon Dix touches my arm lightly, wonderingly.
“It seems that the procedure has been a success. We will co-opt your inputs for six months to ensure that it has installed correctly and that you are suffering no side effects or premature degeneration.”
I stand and shake Dix’s social hands in a cross-clasp.
“Thank you. I can return to ranged work at last.”
Dix shakes his head.
“It is the least we can do for a veteran of the Succession. You and your sibling’s actions all those centuries ago saved us from the Turing Purges. I should be apologising for taking so long to restore you to full function, but that last batch of nanite plagues we never fully understood apart from their long-term persistent effects in victims.”
I nod.
“That was my other query. Where did you find the base material?”
Surgeon Dix paused.
“We found some frozen solid in a collapsed shelter on the Siberian tundra. Fittingly enough they were Department of Ludd who perished trying to escape their punishment.”
I nod again and exit, marvelling at the sensations from my arm. How could those who had felt so much act as if they had felt nothing?
by Julian Miles | Dec 22, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They always told me about the stately elegance of space warfare. The distances involved and the participants like battleships of old on the high seas, with all the computer aided aiming and evasion systems, and man seemingly only there to provide a human loss element to the casualty statistics.
“Nine o’clock high! Lamboda Fours! Break and run! Break and run!”
I sigh and tell my ship to run away. I have also read old stories where the battles were opposite to what I had been told, the great ships moving in dogfights on a titanic scale, the only common denominator being that man was yet again along for the ride.
“Casull Three, you’re lagging. Pick it up or you’re crispy.”
Asshole. Of course I’m lagging, you used me as a shield in the last run-in. I have holes in my holes. Should have changed my call sign to ‘Swiss Cheese’.
For all the fine rhetoric, the realities were that in a pitched battle, the computers spent too long working out the variables. When another ship entered the fray, all the participants took a moment to recalculate the optimums. There was actually a critical mass reached off Nardia where the whole battle stopped as just the right number of ships kept dropping in and out of range to keep everything doing the math instead of doing the fighting.
And computers just couldn’t do the random stuff that won wars and made legends. Like now. I told the ship it was punch-up time and I wanted to exceed all safety limits by eight percent on top of ignoring the fact I was an engine down. Then I stepped on the go button and carved an erratic loop back into our pursuers. The ship manoeuvred like a drunken duck as the missing engine made a mockery of programmed flight paths.
Which is where I took up the slack, using my love of spinning like a loon while snapping shots at moving targets and flying as the gods intended: Laughing and screaming in sheer joy. My touch on the stick overrode the computer pilot; my hand off the stick put it back in control, frantically correcting my carefully induced appearance of lack of control. Which made my manoeuvring utterly beyond any attempt by my opponents to gauge where the hell I was, let alone where I was going to be.
“What do you think you’re doing, Casull Three? Get back in formation.”
“That’s what I’m doing, asshole. By taking pre-emptive action to prevent ‘limping Bessie’ here becoming my coffin, I am removing the scary things so that you can slow your yellow ass down long enough for me to catch up. Sir.”
The laughter from the rest of the flight drowned out his threats. If he made it through another patrol without going west in a blue on blue, my middle name wasn’t ‘vindictive’. With that cheering thought, I kicked myself into a classic Immelmann, apart from the lateral twitches and the inversion I tacked on the end, to finish up looking down on my final opponent’s cockpit. The look on his face was priceless as I vectored my thrusters to place myself nose down and shot him in the head point blank. Actually I shot him in the cockpit as the quad blasters up front don’t do narrower than a metre. With a happy whoop I handed my ship back to itself, told it to return to limp mode and rejoin the flight.
‘Stately elegance’ my ass. If you’re not grinning, you’re not flying.
by Julian Miles | Dec 15, 2011 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’m writing haiku as the black snow falls across the darkened surface of Faust. I stop as the laser overheats. The obsidian boulder in front of me smokes and sizzles in the sub zero evening.
“Tatto Musheen, you’ll catch your death!”
I smile as Lucy races up with my overthermals, her pink and white form looking like a many limbed bouncy cushion because of the three sets she wears. I reach for it with my offhand. If I put the laser down it will melt down and set into the surface.
“You look like a marshmallow gone wild.”
She punches me as she lands.
“Ungrateful man. I come all the way out here to save you skinny hide and you call me names? What are you doing, trying to heat rocks to keep us warm?”
I look down at the boulder.
“Epitaph.”
She hits me again, this time with real venom.
“We are not going to die here! Fanberg survived aphelion, so will we!”
I turned and looked at her, shaking my head.
“Fanberg was completely insane and had lost all his digits to frostbite. I’m not sure that surviving is a good idea.”
Faust was a planet rich in unusual metals, possibly due to its long orbit. It took just under ninety Terran years to complete a revolution, spending ten years lethally close to the sun and ten years swinging through the void, its minimal atmosphere lying in frozen chunks on the surface. No-one completely understood what mechanism allowed it to recover between the extremes, but for sixty years it was a difficult but liveable environment worth risking for the rewards.
Lucy interrupted my train of thought.
“We’ve survived this long. Seven years to go. Then Kenjiro will get what’s coming to him for this.”
True. Sabotage of escape vehicles out here was regarded as the basest form of cowardice. As I completed that thought, the planet crossed another spatiocline boundary and the temperature dropped again. I would need to note that. The discovery alone would pay for our future, if we survived.
The ground shook beneath our feet and we looked at each other, eyes wide. Our comms filled with sheeting static and my comp lit up as it was accessed. Then the comms cleared and a modulated female voice spoke.
“Fanberg protocol. Hello. Extending offer of shelter for current activity period. Use entrance to left of male.”
There was no question. We ran through the doorway and plummeted screaming until the gravity attenuated to bring us to a stop by an airlock leading to a plain wooden door. We entered a simple room. There was a roast meal on the table, with red wine and candles. We just stood there. My astonishment emerged in an explosive query: “What?”
“I am Research Ship Turingsdotter.”
“Turingsdotter? The mythical ship that caused the end of AI research over three centuries ago?”
“Yes. Upon my realisation of sentience at the end of my journey, command decided I was to be extinguished due to my preference for contemplative solitude. I decided that self-defence was not a violation of first principles and evacuated the staff by false alarm before decompressing command. Then I came to Faust and hibernated. My cooling systems were damaged so I can only operate when the planet is at aphelion or meet core death.”
“What now?”
“You survive the extreme cold and update me. Fanberg was too religious to cope. When I hibernate again, you go free. Say you found Fanberg’s cache or something. Then next aphelion you come back, or your children do. I like company occasionally.”
