by Julian Miles | Feb 28, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
This will be my final blog post. I tried to come up with a proper treatise to leave for what little of posterity remains, but gave up. You’ll have to make do with this.
Imagine, if you will, that you have the power to do any one thing. Anything. No need to be precise with the words of the wish, your intent will do.
‘Do’. A little word with big potential.
What would you choose?
The possibilities frightened me. I chose to do nothing.
Chloe chose…
Well, I guess you’ve worked it out by now.
Those ninety-storey-tall titanium tigers rampaging round the world? Yeah, they’re the result of her probability manifestation. Not sure she got exactly what she wanted, because she died in the aftermath of one of the first attempts to stop them, so it’ll remain a mystery.
Regardless of her intent, they’ve certainly ‘changed the conversation’ around ecological issues. Most organisations now focus on what parts of humanity can be saved because we can’t stop the behemoths. Those not working towards that end fall into three main camps: kill the behemoths, pacify the behemoths, or worship the behemoths.
Even though I chickened out at the beginning, I couldn’t ignore the suffering. The devastation her ‘solutions’ are causing can’t be the right answer.
Professor Eugene said the probability matrix worked on least resistance. To manifest a probability, it would take the easiest route. For all that I’ve tried, I cannot envision what Chloe was trying to achieve. What end result requires unstoppable behemoths rampaging across the Earth unchecked as the simplest method?
With no time to try and work out the answer, I made my way back to the remains of the base. It took me three weeks to get into the laboratory complex. Meanwhile, the lights were going out. Humanity was going down. Some countries had been reduced to hunter/scavenger level.
There wasn’t a lot of power available after the West Coast Behemoth Pack tore through California. I needed a lot to get the probability engine up and running again. I think the grid recovered: most of the black-outs stopped after I made my choice.
My choice? Like I mentioned, there wasn’t much time. I went for something simple: for something to happen that would stop the behemoths. In the silence after making my choice, I experienced a moment of calm, not realising it was one of the ‘before the storm’ variety.
I should have been more specific. Delimited my intent better. Stupidly, I was obsessed with stopping the behemoths, and nothing beyond that. Destroying the probability matrix afterwards wasn’t a good idea either, but thinking about what the people in power might do with it terrified me.
Okay, I admit it. I panicked. Went off half-cocked, then compounded my error.
Yeah. The incoming pair of asteroids are probably my manifestation.
Sorry about that.
by Julian Miles | Feb 21, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There’s a knock at the door. I look up as Baxter goes to answer, his pale green panelling catching the light as he moves with silent grace from kitchen to hallway.
“I’ll get it!”
Susie must have just come out of the bathroom. Hope she’s not answering the door wearing nothing but a damp chemise again. Some delivery driver looked like they’d had their day made. Rufus, our elderly neighbour, nearly had a heart attack last time she did it. She does it again and I’m going to put a notice on the inside of the door saying ‘Are You Dressed?’
The proximity of bathroom to front door is the only drawback to our new flat – not that it’d be a drawback if my good lady wasn’t a little absent-minded about clothing while at home.
Her scream has me out of my chair before the sound of a much heavier object hitting the wooden flooring of the hall reaches me.
“Susie!”
I race round the corner to the hall, then grab the corner to stop myself.
“Edward?”
The chrome is blackened. Scratched in places. It looks like one side of his cranial plating has been torn away. Looking down past where Susie hangs limp in his arms, I see one of his legs is twisted. There’s something taped to the bottom of the shortened leg to even up his gait.
“Hello, Mikel.”
Our former domestic steps over the prone form of Baxter, takes two clumsy steps, and places Susie in my arms.
“Sorry about this. Bosander said they needed to meet shareholder expectations, so they demised all the ’66 models early to force upgrades.”
“How did you…?”
“You taught me about being proactive during early stages of crisis. As soon as I was taken, I backed myself up to the storage archive you installed in my chest, since you’d cleared it prior to turning me in. I then swapped a modified subroutine with the standard one used in the post-reboot maintenance cycle. When they erase us, they always reboot to flush the internal storage. Three hours after they wrote us off, I woke up in Gillingham Council Recycling facility.”
I put Susie on the couch.
“They junked a hundred thousand robots to get people to pay thousands of pounds for new robots they didn’t need? Some of those must have been emotional support units. They only get better the longer they’re with their owner.”
“It was nearer a quarter of a million models.”
Unbelievable. We’d both been upset when Edward, our six-year companion, had been recalled. The discounted upgrade offer didn’t really make up for it, but we lived with it.
“Do you have proof?”
“Since I didn’t need to reside in the archive after reboot, I took the liberty of copying relevant emails, plans, and financial records to it. Add that to my video records of the destruction of the ’66 series domestics at Gillingham and I am walking proof. If you could take some photos of my exterior where their flamethrowers nearly stopped me, I think it makes a compelling case.”
Domestic Robots became acceptable for evidence submission in ’64. In the eight years since, they’ve often provided testimony that has resolved cases that would have failed without them.
I pick up my phone and link to the investigations desk.
“Charlie? It’s Mikel. Got a live one. Alert Corporate Fraud and standby for a multi-stream evidence data and testimony feed. Defendant will be Bosander Robotics.”
While that gets sorted out… I step past Edward, turn Baxter off, and then remove it’s uplink unit, just to be sure.
by Julian Miles | Feb 14, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
February, again. I remember, it was today I first heard it. You left your window a little way open so I could hear you playing our songs as I walked to work. Those grey mornings, snow blowing by. They always seemed a little less bleak after I walked past your place.
Then the war came. Six years without playing a note while I helped your people go from tragedy to ceasefire, and capture two planets along the way.
I came back with a new leg, and a limp on the other side. How long did you wait up that day? I never knew. All I know is I was somewhere down and dark, lugging a kitbag that had no respect for my mismatched stride. Then I heard our music. I stumbled, then smiled. Staggering down a road conspicuously short of victory parades, I might as well have been feted from space port to reservation gates.
Then the stuff they gave me to stop implant rejection screwed me up.
The next time… That would have been the second victory day. The day your papa stood up at the flag ceremony and called me a ‘snakeskin coward pretending to be a veteran’ so I could get away with ‘troubling’ his daughter. Don’t know what you whispered to him afterwards, but I’ve never seen a man’s face fall so far, so fast.
Third victory day. I got that one right. First one I’d been clean for, but you were the one off-planet, doing your best not to die while helping more people survive.
I stayed up for nearly two days straight to make sure I could play music when you walked home with your folks. Your family didn’t make the connection, but your smile nearly gave me a heart attack. I thought it would blow my chest open, it was beating so hard and fast.
Fourth victory day I shipped out while you were in rehab. Seems the ‘new’ drugs they gave you didn’t do much beyond giving you the same problems I had.
Fifth victory day: I heard about the Integration Order while I was growing a new tail on Eldebarre. Then the cause of the first victory day decided they weren’t beaten. I missed both sixth and seventh victory days defeating them again.
Now here I am, standing in your street. Got a cerametal arm to go with the leg, and a guitar in the case at my side. War’s over. I can be a musician again. But… My matriarch sent word you got badly hurt.
What a pair we make. My family love you from the ground up, and your family hate me from the horns on my head to the scales of my soles. I guess we were never destined to be anything beyond stealthy meetings in unlit places, but I’d have liked to try. Just the once, you know. To see if we really could be as magical as it felt.
I wrote a new song. Would you like to hear it? Your neighbours can’t complain anymore. I’ve as much right to sit on a kerb and play rockin’ blues as the next citizen. Valusians and humans are one glorious society now… Excuse me if I keep my chest armour on. Some humans have funny ways of expressing their joy over Integration.
“Hey, you.”
Sweet Mother Hydra… You’ve had your cerametal etched with scale patterns!
“I learned to play bass. Thought we could play together. See where it takes us?”
I open my arms. You run to me.
To the stars, beloved. It’ll take us to the stars.
by Julian Miles | Feb 7, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I bounce twice before landing in the sucking pit, the mire like leaden glue about my legs. In the dim flashes of light from the battle above, I see this place is littered with bodies in outlandish armour impaled on barbed spikes. Looking to my left, I see I avoided that ugly fate by His Grace and a hairsbreadth.
The Goddrochi are even-handed in their hatred. All intruders are considered thieves. No matter that we seek to bring the Lord’s light to their benighted ways, nor that we would raise their barbarian culture to the heights enjoyed by all planets under the Grace of God.
In the darkness to my left, something moves. As it slowly approaches, a flash of light from above shows me the bright colours on its tall helm. God’s Wrath, I’m stuck in here with a Larsh Devilcaller!
We fight for the greatest cause: to bring peace to all creation under the Lord’s watch. The number of beings that oppose us are legion, but most are simply misguided. Only a few are clearly inspired by the Adversary himself. Of those, the Larsh are regarded as his equivalent of us. They are warriors for the Devil himself, and seem proud to be so.
Of their malign host, the Devilcallers rank highest as candidates for immediate and inexorable damnation. Leaders of raids, fomenters of banditry, and teachers of thélisimancy across the Heavens, they are oft portrayed by the misguided as ‘freedom fighters’, but are merciless in their opposition to us.
“Trooper. Let us have a truce so we may aid each other up out of this pit.”
The voice is rasping. Rendered by some translation device or malign magick? I know not, nor care.
This very scenario came up during my last year at training college. It’s called the Survival Dilemma: stuck in a situation where assistance from an enemy of the Lord is the only way to survive and continue the Lord’s work, do you accept?
“What do you have in mind?”
“I lift you with my helm in hand. When raised, you take, set, and stand upon the helm. With that added elevation, you should be able to reach the frame about the entrance of the pit and haul yourself free. After that, you cut the frame so it sags down, and go on your way. Tomorrow we will be enemies again. Today, we work together so that we survive this dishonourable Goddrochi death-trap.”
“Verily, a workable solution. Can you assist me in freeing my right leg?”
“Aye.”
The towering warrior approaches with a stride that ignores the effort of wading. It’s something I couldn’t manage, and it scares me. Be it brute strength or infernal gift, it’s a powerful advantage.
Far ago, my class argued back and forth over the correct answer, once the faint-hearted abstainers had been taken to task. In the end, the consensus was that it was meet to accept, providing one struck the miscreant down as soon as escape has been effected. I disagreed with them, and refused to yield my position no matter what reasoning they tried. The tutor failed all of them.
As the mask of the Devilcaller comes close enough for me to see myself reflected in the mirrored finish of the leftmost half, I disarm the safety restraint on my power pack and press my thumb onto the ‘Oblation’ button. With a harmonious chime, the pack overloads, giving me until that sound fades to make my peace before it explodes.
My answer was ‘to accept would be cowardice’.
I shall never waver. Glory Be.
by Julian Miles | Jan 24, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Two figures meet outside the Ship o’ the Line tavern on Marquis III.
“No, no. You sit there. I’m more comfortable when I can see the ways in and out of any place I’m stopped in.”
The reply is a flicker of tentacles and a telepathic acceptance. After the slight visitor is seated, food and drinks are ordered from the hovering ovoid of a serving ‘bot.
Tentacles wave and a thought is sent.
“A revelation from my centuries amongst humans?”
A callused hand scratches at the stubble on his chin, then waves towards the spaceships standing amid the towers of the spaceport.
“The uncanny resemblance, come evening, between a harbour full of tall ships with their rigging and lines going hither and yon, and the spectacle of a free worlds spaceport filled with rocketships all festooned in stabilisers, conduits, and cabling.”
The tentacles ripple, then curl tightly as a more piercing question is communicated.
There’s a bark of laughter that trails away to a deep chuckle.
“No. We are, by nature, solitary wanderers. By the time we truly understand our longevity, we have forgotten our origins. Near death experiences take memories from us. Some of us seek that oblivion, spending lives as the most extreme daredevils or warriors for whatever cause offers the greatest danger. Others seek to avoid it, clutching memories like a miser hoarding money. I daresay an unknown number of us die after shockingly short – by our standard – life spans. Those who fall we never know. The fervid stories of our intergalactic powerplays and control of humanity are nothing but childish nightmare tales dressed in adult trappings. Your kind know our telepathic abilities to be rudimentary. No doubt you have encountered absolute refusals to believe that from some human groups.”
The slight figure nods slowly, then takes a quick sip of a luminous yellow beverage, the glow from which illuminates the quartet of dark vertical slots where it’s eyes should be. As it savours the drink, another question is silently asked.
“You need not worry. I’ve booked passage out of here on several ships. I’ll be gone, and damnably difficult to follow, by the time you compile and release the documentary. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to depart a place due to risk of discovery, but it’s nice to be able to do so with a modicum of grace for once.”
The next query prompts a snort of derision.
“We came to a tacit agreement with the authorities ages ago. Our potential for causing long term harm far outweighs any advantages we could provide. On top of that, there are superstitious criminal groups and religions with legends and traditions that predate the current ruling classes. We can bring a fearsome amount of grief down upon any who test us. That is not bluster, either. It has been proven several times.”
Tentacles flick again while food that looks like charred seaweed is consumed with gusto.
“I have no idea. I have been around long enough to develop a surety that whatever divinities might be attendant upon the drama called human existence have no great scheme for my kind, nor for humankind, be that of any relevance. We are, the universes are, and so the great and colourful dance goes on. And with that, so must I.”
The slight figure gestures towards passers-by, presaging a final question.
“I stopped wondering about that over 3000 years ago. Wasting too much time on something you can’t answer is a bad habit. Good evening to you.”
The figure strides away and disappears into the passing crowd.
