by Julian Miles | Oct 16, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There are naked angels riding our missiles down, using their wide wings to override delicate guidance systems by brute force. Distant explosions show that, yet again, we’re going to kill more friends than foes. Actually, those explosions-
“Charly Four, where are you, over?”
“Heya, Topside. Just watching the latest episode of Dances With Missiles. It’s sure to be ratings smash, over.”
“Charly Four, you’re not amusing. New orders: shoot the aliens off our missiles, over.”
Of course we shoot down our own ordnance. Good plan.
“How’s that going for the rest of the flight, Topside? Over.”
“You’re it for Charly Flight, Four. Sorry about that, over.”
“So our sainted Commodores want us to die shooting down missiles because they won’t listen, despite every bastard bombardment getting redirected to blow up our own? Over.”
“Can’t comment on that, Charly Four. It’s a good day. Every hit has taken out a bogey, and some pilots managed to bail out, over.”
Which reminds me.
“How do we know a bogey got downed, Topside? Is there a cloud of singed feathers twirling in the wind? Over.”
“You’re still not amusing, Charly Four. Weaklings like you are why this offensive has stalled. Get on with your duties and stop chatting. Over and out.”
Different voice. Could I have just been graced by one of our beloved Commodores?
There’s a knock on my canopy. Oh, poot. I slowly turn my head to look that way, keeping my hands steady on the sticks. No sudden moves.
What looks like a turquoise-haired teenager sporting auburn freckles, no nipples, and eagle-ish wings with a span wider than I can take in points at something inside my plane. I look down, trying to work out…
I look up and shout: “Ejector seat?”
The apparition crouching on my wing nods enthusiastically, pantomiming me punching out.
“Eject or go down with the plane?”
Another nod.
Nice of them to offer a choice. Okay. Live to snark another day.
“Topside, Topside, got a pair of them going at my wings. I’m bailing out. Co-ordinates are-”
The figure taps the canopy and points behind, nodding urgently, eyes wide. Surely not? Only one way to find out.
“-seven four cross three two, tactical grid nine.”
Which is about two klicks behind me, over that open ground I saw.
I kill my comms, wriggle out of my harness, and pop the canopy.
“What now?”
My hitcher leaps away, shouting: “Fly, mannish, fly.”
More of a controlled fall – I punch the eject panel.
A while later I come back to thinking, and find myself hanging under the parachute. Looking about, I see my seat being carried off by my hitcher while two more alien angels do slow circuits about me.
Shortly before I hit the trees, my hitcher comes hurtling back. The three of them manoeuvre me to drop neatly through a gap in the canopy.
I look back the way I came just in time to see a skylance obliterate the area I said I’d be landing in. So that’s what those explosions were! Well I’ll be…
Betrayed.
Being distracted means I clown up the landing, dislocating both ankles and a knee. I grab the painkiller from my medpack and give myself a shot in each leg. As I slump back in relief, a group of people, some in familiar uniform, storm into the clearing.
Uniforms might be familiar, but the lack of insignia isn’t. Gee, let me guess. More betrayed?
I raise a hand.
“We fighting angels or commodores?”
“Commodores.”
So be it. Cheeky bastards tried to kill me.
“I’m in.”
by Julian Miles | Oct 9, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
A grey horizon arcs cleanly against a backdrop of pristine stars.
“Well I’ll be damned. It worked!”
I look back at Arty. He’s already halfway into his suit.
“Going somewhere?”
He grins.
“After so little time cooped up, I need to get outside.”
“Are the comms still down?”
Arty reaches back and brings up the display.
“Yup.”
“Lets both EVA and check the hull for damage. There’s a loose wire somewhere.”
“Good excuse to go out. I like it.”
Outside, the view is even better. Absolutely breathtaking.
“Clancy?”
He sounds odd.
“Problem, Arty?”
“What’s that?”
I walk round to the other side of our lander.
Arty points towards the Moon hanging about a quarter-orbit away.
“Is that what I think it is?”
I look down at the dust about my feet, then run my gaze slowly out past the legs of the lander, all the way to the horizon and the curve of Earth.
“Some sort of optical illusion. Let’s go over the hull, then get back in and investigate.”
I don’t mention Earth is also in the wrong place. This has got to be some unforeseen visual anomaly.
Nine hours later we’ve confirmed all the wrong things.
“Sum it up for us, Arty.”
“We arrived on the surface of the moon using a prototype chronophasic transition drive, which effectively removes transit time by exploiting obscure interactions between uncertainty and other quantum effects using an application of Navascués manipulations. Some say it wouldn’t work if both ends of the journey hadn’t already been physically visited in real time, but as I don’t understand the basics, let alone the finer points, I can’t comment. Anyway, we got here near-instantaneously. During the few seconds of grey-out we experienced, we recall only strange sounds. I heard discordant music. You heard incomprehensible voices.
“Upon investigation, we found a second moon in the sky, and Earth moving away from us. Measurements indicate this second moon is in proper relation to Earth. It is we who are out of place.”
I raise a hand.
“No. I think we’re out of time. We’re exactly where the moon was at the moment we made this trip, and we’re now caught in an artificially generated reality. Trapped in a moment now past for everyone on Earth. Possibly everything else as well.”
Arty looks at me.
“You saying we’re stuck here?”
“Maybe, maybe not. My guess is the only way to prove it is to shut down the chronophasic drive. We’ll either snap back to where we were, cease to exist as this reality collapses, or end up marooned -which I think it the least likely outcome.”
“Slightly insane, but I can’t disagree. So, what’s your vote?”
“Wait until we’re nearly out of supplies. If no rescue mission arrives, we shut down the drive. In the meanwhile, we record and document everything.”
“Good enough to call a plan. Let’s do it.”
Four days later the life support fails.
Arty looks at me, his gloved hand over the red-flashing panel.
“You sure?”
“About the result? No. About having to do it? Yes.”
He nods.
“Okay. Five, four, three, two, one.”
His palm comes down on the panel.
*
“There has been a huge explosion at the NASA site near Cocoa Beach in Florida. Early indications are that the site has been completely destroyed. Cocoa Beach itself has suffered considerable damage.
“This catastrophic event comes right after we received reports of an unspecified incident during the launch of Chronos One, barely an hour ago.
“We’ll be back with updates as soon as we have them.”
by Julian Miles | Oct 2, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’m all for elegant combinations of form and function, but I’ll never agree that bioreactors sat every hundred metres is an improvement over having trees and streetlights.
These ‘greenboxes’ even have benches on their pavement sides, charge points, and community notice boards: which look suspiciously like digital advertising hoardings. Anyone in the communities these things serve can’t afford to place an e-notice, so the space is ‘regretfully’ leased to marketing companies.
When fresh water went past £25 a litre for the first time, some bright spark started adding filter taps to the bioreactors, until they changed the liquid to be only nearly water. It’s still great for the air-purifying algae inside, but it turns humans green and sometimes kills them. The filtration necessary to stop that is too expensive to make theft worthwhile.
So here I am, leaning up against a greenbox, pondering while I wait for tonight’s reason to have a foray. I really should go uptown, but the competition there would mean a more effort for less money, and a much higher chance of getting murdered by rivals instead of criminals.
“Magrone.”
As if summoned by my mere thought, Tasty rocks on up like he’s parading through Neo-somewhere-classy instead of Burton Street, number one destination for those with nowhere else to go: those with a desperate need to get out of their mouldering tenements and pretend things are okay for a few hours.
“Tasty. Looking average again, I see.”
“Screw you. I work for a living. You hunt people.”
“Looking average, and with a line of something like courage up each nostril too. Come on, Tasty. You called me, so either get off your marching horse or I’m gone.”
He blinks as reality crowds his illusion.
“Yeah, well, It’s not about me. Lilah’s been scooped by Bernadino again.”
I’m being played. His eyes go wide as my hand closes about his neck.
“You could have said that when you called. Instead you got me to waste four hours. You’re out of favours, Tasty.”
I throw him behind me. He bounces off the greenbox. I run for a tram. Much as I hate public transport, being recorded leaving the area is essential.
Forty minutes later I’m in the shadows of the alley on the opposite side of the road to the greenbox where Tasty now sits, smoking a fat cigar… A cigar with a blue-gold band. Bernadino’s favourite brand. All I have to do is wait.
Mum’s third husband arrived with a daughter he treated as a servant. While Lilah took no shit from anyone else, she put up with everything from him – until the day he took my mum for a ride and they both ended up under the 14:22 from Piccadilly to who cares.
Which brings me back to now, and the fact Bernadino’s had a thing for Lilah for too long. We’ve often clashed – after Lilah actually asked for my help – but I always knew the outline for the finale. If he wants to keep her, I can’t be alive. So he sent Tasty to trigger me: the delay meaning I’d charge into an ambush at Bernadino’s. Instead, after making sure Lilah’s safe, I’m here waiting.
A grey town car pulls up. I level the rifle I stole from one of Bernadino’s goons years ago.
Bernadino lunges from the car, yelling at Tasty. I’ve not turned up to be killed and he’s not happy about it.
Now! Tasty dies second, falling across Bernadino. Green liquid arcs from two holes, splashing down on both bodies.
Better go give Lilah the good news.
by Julian Miles | Sep 25, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The woman with the crossbow spits into the fire.
“I don’t understand why they didn’t just reboot the computers as soon as it started.”
Her sidekick nods, pushing their cap back before joining in.
“Reckon a lot of them eye-tee types were in on it. Musta been.”
The man next to me tucks a rusty revolver back inside his jacket before adding an opinion.
“It’s like that Y2K bollocks. They played that, made a fortune, and nothing happened.”
The woman’s not impressed.
“Except, this time, everything happened and they didn’t say a thing beforehand.”
He nods, trying to appear sage.
“That’s my point. They knew. They all fucking knew. They’re off somewhere right now, living on an island-”
Enough.
“Sitting by a campfire listening to people spout on about things they know nothing of.”
Just like that, I’m centre of attention.
“You saying I’m an idiot?”
I glare at him.
“No. I’m saying you don’t know what happened, so you’re making things up because not knowing makes you feel uncomfortable.”
“I have a gun.”
“Yes, I’ve seen it. It’s a big one. You find it comforting, but aren’t confident with it, unlike the lady with the crossbow.”
I glance at her. She changes aim from me to him.
“Before anybody gets violent, I’m sure few know what actually happened. I worked with computers, and all I’ve got are good guesses. Would you like to hear?”
The ring of people grows as others crowd in. The woman nods.
“Whoever did this spent years setting it up. Getting their software, which must have taken a good while to prepare, installed everywhere in places where reboots and the like wouldn’t stop it. They went about it in various ways: most of it included with other applications or hacks. A surprising amount was added to hardware by people assembling devices without knowledge of what exactly they did – put the chip with the yellow writing in the top right, the one with the blue numbers in the lower left, and so on. Automated assembly lines would have been compromised in a similar way.
“The key factor here is patience. Nothing happened until they were sure they’d infected most of the world’s digital infrastructure. Then someone launched the activation commands. Now, that’s not as simple as typing ‘stop’. It involved several hundred instructions, each for a different system, probably duplicated, and with multiple ways to get where they needed. That would have been noticed. Cybersecurity suites across the world would have raised alerts. However, I doubt any of them occurred more than a few minutes before the systems they ran on failed.”
I look about. I think a few of them are getting it.
“We all know the results. The death toll is incomprehensible. The knock-on effects will remain with us for decades. I suspect the only reason we’re still here is that all the nuclear missile control systems defaulted to non-hostile when they went down.”
I suspect some tried to launch, but their silo covers had already failed. That would have destroyed whole sites, but at the cost of everything within a hundred kilometres or so.
There are one or two people whose expressions betray realisation. Time to wake everyone else up.
“The thing to understand is none of this was an accident. Somebody intended to ruin the world, and they’ve nearly succeeded. I don’t know why. Best case is something like extreme nihilism: they wanted to destroy everything.”
The woman nods.
“Worst case is it was the opening move. In that case, better hope they got overwhelmed and killed by their own apocalypse.”
by Julian Miles | Sep 18, 2023 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The two personages in blue suits look at me like I’m an ornament. One that grandma got from her mama, only kept because of that, and never found a soul who liked it anyway.
Tall blue suit flicks a glance towards skinny blue suit, who’s standing slightly behind and to the left.
“It appears we have an unbeliever, Robert.”
Robert the Skinny nods like he’s received the wisdom of the ages.
“That is unfortunate, Malcolm.”
Malcolm the Tall gives the slightest nod. Acknowledging the act, not in any way a thanks for the agreement. After all, when one is always right, such niceties are irrelevant.
“My humble apologies, personages. I find myself between places of avode.”
Malcolm passes my card to Robert, who slips it into the reader in the top pocket of his suit jacket. Woven in: very discreet. Perceptions, after all, are everything.
Less than a minute passes before they both grunt, almost in unison. Neither are approving in tone.
Malcolm crouches down while Robert takes a step back, flicking his jacket clear of his holsters. Not one, but two. That’s not the customary wear, and what’s in them gleams like metal, not the dull sheen of tasers. Seems I’ll not be getting out of this one easily: I’ve been cornered by Obligators.
Malcolm notes my gaze.
“You are perspicacious, unbeliever. Which surprises me, because your record shows you to be between avodes far too often for one who presents themselves as well as you. Surely one as observant as yourself wouldn’t be so clumsy as to leave gaps in their record? After all, there are many places of registration that fail to keep as lovingly close a watch over their flocks as the Edicts suggest.”
As if I need to sign up to a dodge shop, where – for a monthly fee – my devout labour history could be maintained while I got on with defying the Torble: which is the officially blasphemous but far easier to pronounce nickname for the ‘Sainted Edicts of Labour for the Common Good, Being the Highest Way to Know God, as set down by His Prophets Oliver and Siraj’.
Robert picks up the sermon started by his elder.
“It could lead a pair of righteous personages like ourselves to believe you might have alternative means of support. So, what are you? A dogsbody, a money-changer or a prostitute?”
No mention of mercenary? They don’t have a high opinion of me.
My implanted comm vibrates.
Malcolm perks up. Robert draws a pair of military issue magnums.
“You have an implant? We may have cornered ourselves a dealer, Robert. Truly our avode is blessed this night.”
I smile.
“I presume you’d prefer me not to check or answer that?”
Malcolm raises his eyebrows.
“Both audio and messaging in an implant? Your sinning must be profitable. For shame that dealing in blasphemous wares isn’t considered avode, for all that you’ve clearly worked so assiduously at it.”
Robert grins anticipatorily.
This is about to get a little too real. Time to stop.
“Let me show you my other ID.”
“The unbeliever sees the light.”
Something like that. I raise and clench my fist, pressing down with my little finger. The subdermal tag on the outside of my hand lights up.
They scan it, exchanging looks of disbelief. The confirmation comes back. Robert looks sick.
Malcolm sighs.
“I’d heard Anointed President Gregory the Seventeenth was a reformed unbeliever. Seems the rumour is true.”
I smile.
“It’s not that bad. As far as I’m aware, I’m his only bastard. You have a good eve, Obligators. Ciao.”
