by Julian Miles | Sep 11, 2017 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Two.”
A long time ago, there was a war. A really big, planet-smashing war. Sometime during that conflict, they had a knock-down, drag-out battle nearby. It spanned a couple of systems and went on for many years. When they stopped fighting, there was so much scrap wargear floating about they ‘tidied up’ by somehow corralling it all into orbit about Currachus and stacking wreckage so deep on its twin moons they apparently had to make a third moon to calm the tides.
“One.”
Our scant records continue, saying they didn’t even land. Just stole the sky. ‘Currachus’ means ‘A million eyes in the night’. Our ancestors named our home after the glory of the night skies. Old tales tell of the wondrous sight of the yellow moon ‘Neorthas’ following the green moon, ‘Climia’, against that million-eyed backdrop.
Those skies are gone. My skies are shades of grey with ‘eyes’ that spark briefly as chunks of wreckage grind together. Sunlight is a diffuse, dim illumination broken by beams of brilliant light as reflective fragments align, allowing spears of pure sunlight to reach the ground.
“Loose!”
With a roar of chains and the crash of counterweights, the steel-shod tree trunk starts to move along the ancient slipway. Right on the horizon, I can see the sheets of sparks from where the haul chains crash across the skid plates that protect the canyon edge.
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
I peer at Adrianna. She’s got the faraway look she gets when her imagination overtakes her clever.
“It’s certainly the loudest thing I’ve ever encountered.”
She punches me in the shoulder. I grin. She punches me again.
“You’re an idiot. Our forebears built this to let us escape.”
“They built this in the crazed hope that someone would get lucky before this world finished dying.”
“We’ve brought down so much. Some of it we understand.”
That’s the problem. I look to the ground as I reply: “Yet optimists like you insist that eventually we’ll knock an intact starcraft out of orbit and it’ll survive the drop and we’ll be able to use it. We don’t fully understand the principles of what we’re doing anymore! My father certainly doesn’t, yet he’s Overseer of the Winches. We’re becoming primitives with an annual religious ritual that culminates in hurling a metal-clad tree into orbit to bring down the metal we use to clad the next tree. It’s ludicrous!”
She hooks a finger under my chin, lifting my eyes to meet hers, then shakes her head.
“What would you have us do? Things are getting worse. Every year there are fewer crops, weaker livestock, less children surviving. I’m not supporting a gamble, I’m supporting a desperate purpose that gives our folk the will to live. No, it’s not entirely sane. But, it’s all we have.”
Well, now. There’s a viewpoint I hadn’t considered. One that, sadly, makes sense.
Far away, a dark arrow hurtles into the sky as the final thousand drag weights plummet into the canyon with an impact that shakes the ground where we stand.
I stand up, take her hand, and meet her gaze: “Maybe, this time, we’ll get lucky.”
She stares at me, as if probing my change of opinion, then smiles: “Maybe. If not, I’ve got an idea for how we can do this twice a year, but I need someone who works on the haul to check it before I present it to the elders.”
I gently squeeze her fingers: “Time for you to meet my father’s mechanics.”
by Julian Miles | Sep 4, 2017 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The dim glow of combat lighting is broken by a single white spotlight, which goes out as our new officer scrambles through the side hatch, barely slowing from a flat sprint. I don’t blame him. There’s several varieties of lethal flying about outside.
“Good morning. I will be your tank today. As we are now ready to depart, please ensure all genitals and other munitions are stowed safely.”
The officer rolls over and – her! – eyes are a breathtaking shade of sky blue.
“Good morning, tank. My chesticles are secure, thank you for the reminder. Do I just call you ‘tank’ or do you have a callsign you use when a superior officer is bollocking you?”
There’s a strained silence, broken by the ‘thud’ of the side hatch closing.
“Callsign ‘Gentry’, ma’am.”
She smiles and, just like that, I’m in love.
“Thank you for not mentioning anything involving upright positions, Gentry.”
The piercing eyes look about: “Sound off!”
The crew don’t miss a beat.
“Private Blachent. Loader, ma’am. Callsign ‘Greaser’.”
“Gunnery Sergeant Jones, ma’am. Callsign ‘Jupiter’.”
“Communications Officer Williams, ma’am. Callsign ‘Cleric’.”
“Private Raddle. Driver, ma’am. Callsign ‘Whiz’.”
“Corporal Neun. Driver, ma’am. Callsign ‘Dodge’.”
My turn: “Lieutenant Hallam, ma’am. Callsign ‘Comet’.
The new ruler of our chariot – and love of my life – keeps talking as she swings herself under, round, and up into the command saddle, without a trace of effort showing in her voice: “Captain Lallie Bann. Callsign ‘Spooky’.”
She wiggles herself comfortable: “You call me Spooky at all times, except in the presence of brass. Now, everything says you’re a top tank. So, if you would be kind enough to tell me the truth about Captain O’Donnell, we can get back to being a neighbourhood threat.”
I look about. Everyone’s looking at me. So, I gaze into those awesome eyes and lay it on like a smooth bastard.
“Mitch O’Donnell chose his own callsign. ‘Captain Kong’ is what we had to call him. Failure to do so was punished with a day spent scouring Gentry’s drainage channels. During combat, the Captain was usually involved in something important elsewhere – not that the roster showed that. When he did ride with us, we became a ‘hyena’: picking off damaged units from the outskirts of the engagement.
The last time he rode with us, a drone mine took out one of Gentry’s drives. With the front withdrawing, we were left on hostile ground to fix a massive piece of tank which would then need all of us to hold while Gentry realigned it. We were vigorously discussing Captain O’Donnell’s reluctance to get his kit dirty during realignment when some opposition wandered by and started using us for target practice. To our surprise, Captain O’Donnell volunteered to hold them off while we jury-rigged the alignment. Unfortunately, he sustained fatal wounds during the brave intervention that saved us all.”
She looks at me, the ghost of a smile playing at the corners of her mouth: “I see. So, the accounts of a beleaguered crew fighting both enemy patrols and their own hysterical captain, repelling the former and subduing the latter, all whilst performing an ingenious ad-hoc fix to their tank, are erroneous?”
“Totally, ma’am.” Her eyes narrow. “Totally, Spooky. If we’d subdued him, he wouldn’t have ended up under our wheels, now would he?”
She smiles: “I’d bet that sharply creased uniform gave Gentry the extra traction it needed.”
Gentry interjects: “Captain Kong would have been honoured to know his remains served a purpose.”
Spooky bursts out laughing: “I doubt it, but, it’s more than he deserved. Enough. Move out!”
by Julian Miles | Aug 21, 2017 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They’re leaning on the Antares descent stage. Von is sipping a latte from a little café in Venice. Griddin is swigging real kumiss from a Mongolian bar in Gwanghui-dong. Their view flickers with the pulsations of the environment field that surrounds them.
“Did you have to stop the whole planet?” Von’s tone betrays exasperation.
“Have you seen the analyses of the place? Conflicts, paranoia-level detection systems, distrust everywhere.” Griddin grins: “Plus, conspiracy theorists querying everything, unaware they’re part of our cover and making it more difficult for us.”
“So? They’re a little edgy.”
“Phenomenal understatement. One inexplicable incident and every technotribe with an arsenal and a grudge is going to take a swing at whichever culprit they decide it would be advantageous to blame.”
“Oh, come on. That far from land, it’ll become a legend.”
“There are close ties between our target and the mythological record, some parts of which have attained religious significance. In many ways, a legendary event could be worse.”
Von sighs: “I’m not going to change your mind, am I?”
“The quantum lock is so big the suspension team is having to tap solar energetics to keep it stable. I’ve already got over eight thousand beings deployed under invisibility fields with tractor beams and temporal anomaly generators in case of resynchronisation failures; some of their air vehicles are ludicrously fragile.”
“Why now?”
“The adjacent trench-chain collision zone has already caused the plateau atop the seamount to tilt. This is the only intact Noan Archive ever found. We daren’t risk the slightest damage.”
“But, the whole planet?”
Griddin looks at Von: “The course of least harm. An event so inexplicably huge that most of the population will ignore it or create their own explanations.”
“How much trouble can our locals expect from the fraction of a percent who’re determined to find out what caused their reality to freeze for a while?”
“Nothing. I’ve instigated a complete reset. The persistent few will eventually conclude it was an alien exodus due to the simultaneous disappearances, for all that each missing person case will have sufficient circumstantial evidence to satisfy official investigations.”
“Which will make the re-infiltration exercise even more risky.”
Griddin raises his hand: “No, it won’t. Next time we’ll perform clean, targeted insertions. But only after the datasets gathered by decades of ad-hoc, opportunistic replacements are analysed. In the interim, we’ll simply observe.”
“Observe? My team-”
“Is going to get some well-deserved downtime. Now, speaking of observation, look.”
The blue of the ocean is disturbed by a colossal pentagonal antiprism rising from the depths. Vast waterfalls sparkle as it rises under the careful supervision of a four-hundred-unit gravity suppressor swarm.
Von chuckles: “From here, it looks like there should be an intergalactic jewel case floating just to the right of us.”
“And behind us, a pocket cut from a black hole for it to be tucked into.”
Von laughs: “And who would such a gift be for?”
Griddin turns pensive: “Seshat. Back when we first dropped in, she was a goddess of knowledge; one of their first. She should receive it, by way of apology for us failing to correct that male-centric cultural bias before it set hard.”
Griddin goes back to drinking fermented mares milk. Von considers a reply, then nods and returns to sipping his coffee. Before them, the stupendous ‘jewel’ exits Earth’s atmosphere, heading for rendezvous with a vessel the size of Deimos.
by Julian Miles | Aug 14, 2017 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I look up as Anthony strides in, closing the door behind him.
“You closed the door. What’s gone wrong?”
He grins, then hands me a metallic tube. I turn it over. A courier tube, used for documents too precious for digital transmission. I spin my chair to bring it under the light. It’s pitted and scarred, abraded through age and exposure.
“A mystery! An artefact of modern creation tarnished like a relic.”
“That’s the problem. This came out of the autofind from Deep Sixteen.”
“That chunk of Pangaea hasn’t been above sea level since the mid-Triassic!”
Anthony leans in: “Still isn’t. It’s just outside Davy Jones’ Locker and likely to remain there for a while to come.”
“You’re not telling me something.”
He pivots to land in the armchair by my desk: “I thought it was a practical joke until I looked inside.”
“Inside? You did that-”
“Under controlled circumstances. It was encrusted with centuries of crud. But the contents? Go ahead. Look. You won’t believe me if I tell you.”
I unscrew the end of the tube and peer inside. There’s some kind of flimsy. Pulling it out, I unfold it and peer through the thin piece of transparent plastic at Anthony.
“And?”
“Wait for it. It needs to pick up a charge.”
What?
There are words appearing on the sheet. Glowing words. As they form sentences, I feel my mouth drop open.
My name is Tristan Mokolan. I lived in Bellsringham, London. I have been marooned in the Triassic era long enough to know that I will die here. My time manipulation technology has been stolen by my former partner, Bertrand Hallsey. He knocked me out and dumped me here as a cruel way to ensure my disappearance.
I don’t care about his reasons. I just want my Anna to know that I was coming to her with the ring she said she’d wear. I didn’t desert her or Sharna, her daughter. I intended to be the husband and father they trusted me to be.
The small sheet is filled with words. There isn’t room for more, no matter how much I will it.
“Good gods.” I put the sheet down and the message fades out.
Anthony hands me the other glass of vodka he’s poured: “And several devils.”
“Bellsringham?”
“It’s a recently proposed thirty-third borough, comprising a chunk of northwest Bromley.”
“So, this is a 235-million-year-old message in a bottle from a genius who lives in a place that doesn’t yet exist about a perfect crime that hasn’t happened?”
“Yes.”
“Then how did a metal tube survive that long?”
His expression turns serious: “It’s a ceramic-plastic-metallic alloy and I can’t even imagine the technology needed to make the technology that actually made it.”
“And this flimsy?”
“Didn’t dare mess with it.”
“Good call.”
Anthony looks at me: “What now?”
We’ve already come to an unspoken agreement: we have to try.
“When we get home tonight, we set up clauses in our wills that hand a sealed copy of the message down through the generations until a borough called Bellsringham exists and a scientist by the name of Tristan Mokolan lives there.”
Anthony grins: “We’ll never know. I can live with that.”
Everything lurches, like reality tripped over a kerb. I grab the wastebin and puke into it. Anthony is clutching the arms of the chair in a white-knuckle grip. On the table is a plain white card with the words ‘Thank you’ written on it. The tube and flimsy are gone.
While we stare at each other, shaking in wide-eyed shock, the card hisses as it evaporates.
by Julian Miles | Aug 7, 2017 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I hate old servers. Not ‘old’ like they peddle on the upgrade-your-old-one-now streams, but genuinely aged kit still running despite all odds. There’s a lot of it out there. Even back in the late twentieth century, corporates had no real clue as to exactly what hardware they had, where it was and what – if anything – it was doing or being used for. Multiply that information gap by several decades of huge growth in deployed estate and the lack of need for direct connectivity bestowed by the ‘internet of things’ and the result is an unfixable issue of ridiculous proportions.
All of which is a nice preamble to a nasty fact: dead people aren’t going away. Oh, their bodies are recycled and their possessions redistributed, their websites archived and their social media identities memorialised, but any who had a direct neural interface are not actually departing. Whether they are undeleted data or some form of ghost – or even a new form of life, the ‘virtual entity’, is a moot point when they start afflicting. In a world reliant on computerised systems, something that actively interferes is a threat. Giving it so many ‘dark’ places to hide in just makes it harder to remedy.
It’s taken a week, but we’ve traced the faint scatter of this entity to an old server somewhere in the industrial sector around Manchester. As this one managed to kill a real person by slaying their avatar, it’s a priority in case of another ‘attack’. I suspect otherwise, but the concept of vengeful virtual revenants is something I can’t mention. So, I’ve quietly done some research in the hope I can fix it rather than having to erase it.
Ahead of me, amidst the vague data constructs of an ancient system with a faulty GPU and no HPU – holographic processing didn’t exist when this server was installed – there’s a creamy glow with perfectly rounded edges that moves round the constructs, not through them. It’s like it lends them substance with its presence.
“Harold?” The voice is feminine, crackling and hissing like a weak radio broadcast.
“No, ma’am. I’m with the police.”
The creamy form slips nearer, resolving from momentary pixel storm into a young woman in an elegant ballgown.
“Miss Eleanor Graude?” Let’s see if my suspicions are on the mark.
“Why yes, young lady. How can I help?”
My avatar looks like beat cop from twenty years ago.
“Ma’am, it’s Harold. He’s been murdered.”
She hangs her head, a shaking hand covering her eyes: “I hoped I had succeeded, but it’s so difficult to pick things up around here.”
Eleanor looks up: “He beat me all the time. I couldn’t stand it. I can’t prove it, but that’s why I killed him.”
I smile: “Mary told us, ma’am. You defended yourself at last, didn’t you?”
She looks confused: “Mary? But she’s barely six. How could she-”
Her form flickers as realisation sets in.
“I’m dead outside, aren’t I?”
“For nearly two decades, ma’am.”
“He killed me, didn’t he?”
“That’s what Mary told us, Eleanor. With Harold dead, she could tell the truth. And she has. All of it. All the years of it.”
I see her smile as her outline blurs. A perfectly formed tear rolls down her face, leaving a line of empty space where skin used to be.
“Please tell her I love her.” She fades as she utters the words.
I quickly drop out of the virtual world and roll my head to one side so the tears don’t fall on my interface.
