by Julian Miles | Mar 14, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The man sitting in the waiting room looks like a typical, middle-aged office worker. His suit might be his best rather than his daily wardrobe, but from freshly-shined shoes to carefully slicked-back hair, he’s a shining example of average as portrayed by media outlets for decades.
Cleon, the new recruit, turns from the one-way panel.
“Why on earth did the powers that be call this Joe in?”
Taram, the one tasked with mentoring Cleon, sighs.
“If you’d read the briefing pack delivered to your preferred device this morning – another of the ones I said should be read before you arrive at your first designated location each day – you wouldn’t need to ask.”
Cleon waits. Taram offers nothing more. With a start, Cleon pulls out his phone and scans through the briefing pack.
“Picotech?”
Taram smiles. At least the new dork is a quick reader.
“Correct. Mister average is Bernard Royus.”
Cleon looks back at Bernard, then down at his phone, trying to reconcile the two extremes.
“He’s so, so…”
“Ordinary?”
Cleon nods.
“We think it’s deliberate. He doesn’t stand out, except for being an early adopter of synthetic prostitutes. Which, when you factor in his unique nature, is no surprise.”
“Is he aware?”
“We’re sure not. We’re also convinced he’s subconsciously guided in some things, for example: intimacy partners. Anything that could conceivably betray what he carries is behaviourally managed to mitigate even a slight risk.”
“Yet we’ve left him free to wander about?”
“You wouldn’t believe the number of people he interacts with who are members of this department. From those who collect the bins he throws anything away in to those who intervene to ensure any bodily soil is contained. This man is the single biggest mission we’ve ever had.”
“Why?”
“Agent Cleon Daniel, think it through, and do it openly. Consider this a mission exam.”
Cleon swallows. Exams are unarguable. You pass or you get transferred somewhere you can’t be a risk. Sometimes that’s a graveyard.
“Bernard came to our attention after a road accident in Devon. His car was found blown to pieces about him, but he was apparently unharmed, apart from having no memory of the previous week. That gave us the excuse to call him in for irregular ‘check-ups’.
“His body is permeated with microscopic machines. The term ‘picotech’ has been coined to describe them. Nothing like them have ever been encountered anywhere else. Some of the materials they are made from do not appear in the periodic table. The postulation initially made as a joke has been reluctantly accepted as fact: what’s in him came from an extra-terrestrial source.”
Cleon snaps his fingers.
“That fact changes how we handle this. Such advanced technology and stealth, but we have no visible opponent. We’re in the dark. All we can do is limit the exposure to what he carries and disseminates. Everything that comes from him has to be securely contained to limit the spread of the picotech into the environment.”
He puts his phone away.
“We’re waiting. Something modified Bernard Royus. Was he intended to be a Typhoid Mary, a hub, some other form of infiltrator, or is he an experiment in his own right? We simply don’t know. We have to make sure Bernard lives a contained life. On top of all that, there’s the possibility he was meant to be discovered.”
Taram nods.
“Well done. That last possibility is the scariest thing. Many fail to pick up on it.”
Cleon sighs.
“Justified fear of the unknown. Terrifying.” He grins: “Exhilarating.”
Taram smiles. Cleon is going to fit right in.
by Julian Miles | Mar 7, 2022 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Colin claws his way through a ruined doorway, his sight near-obscured by the blood smeared across his face. Slumping to the floor, he wipes his vision clear with his sleeve, then surveys his surroundings.
An ancient stone vault, lit by an ultra-modern lamp. The soft light highlights the exquisite etchings on a steel coffin, and is reflected in the smoky chrome of the blaster clutched in a taloned hand.
A calm voice emanates from the shadows above the gun.
“Good evening, Mister Dawson. A stimulating journey, I trust?”
“Bastard.”
The reply tails off into a wrenching sob.
“I take it your little army came to a sticky end?”
He gathers himself. There’s still a chance.
“They did.”
“Well, here we are, exhausted hunter and indifferent prey. What next?”
“Smug bastard!”
“Defiance. How sweet.”
“We’ll get you. Not me. Not my team, God rest ‘em. But someone will find the data caches.”
Hopefully enough impetuous fools will have vanished by then to make the rest wary. Make them investigate this evil thoroughly, using all the technology available, and then not make stupid assumptions based on centuries-old cinema.
“You left them with Susan?”
“Not just her.”
“Then other people might see them.”
The choice of words catches his attention.
“But not if we’d only left them with her? What have you done?”
“Nothing new. Now, enough byplay. Time waits for no-one, not even me.”
“So?”
“Choices. You may join us, or you and your family will simply disappear.”
“Us?”
“You didn’t think I was a singular aberration, did you? That was a rash. Our attrition rate is vanishingly small amongst those who fully adapt.”
“So I work for you, or you eat my family?”
“In short: yes. Technology still trips us up occasionally. Having someone who can intervene is essential. Since you discovered and then killed Tez Wallace, you will take his place. It can be quite lucrative, and the health benefits are excellent.”
Colin nods. A sop to his selfishness to make servitude bearable: old techniques, but effective. The data is his only hope. All he has to do is buy time.
“I’ve no choice. I’ll obey our bloodsucking overlords.”
“The term is ‘nightwalkers’, and I am not one of the voivodes. We should both pray to whatever gods we have left that we never attract the attentions of such. They are busy trying to save my kind from the ravaged planet your kind have created. Petty distractions receive short thrift.”
“You’re trying to sneak onto the colony ships!”
Fangs flash in the darkness.
“Very good. A few self-contained feudal domains are the ultimate goal, I believe.”
Marty’s crazy idea had been correct. He’d been right to insist it be included in the cached data.
Colin smiles. Good on you, Marty. When Susan gets the truth to the media, you’ll be famous.
There’s a chuckle from the shadows.
“You still haven’t realised, have you?”
He looks up.
“What?”
The sound of skirts rustling makes his eyes go wide. A raven-haired figure in a pale ballgown steps into view.
“Did you really think you had any sort of advantage? Susan has belonged to my voivode for years. Our monitor within the hunter collectives. Bringing about your downfall was her final task before being embraced.”
She smiles, revealing long, delicate fangs instead of canine teeth. Green eyes show no hint of regret.
Colin feels hot tears start down his face.
“We of the dusk are eternal. Will you serve us?”
He nods, still crying. This surrender is only to save his family. It will never be more than skin deep.
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.
