by Julian Miles | Jun 25, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
He gently places a finger on her hand.
“Now try. Over there. No, don’t look back, you won’t see him. Look in the window. He’s just to the left of Mrs. Bakker, kissing her shoulder.”
Krista stares around the room, at Connor, then at the window. There’s her, there’s an empty chair where Connor should be, there’s Amanda Bakker, and there-
She stares at Connor: “He’s in your shipsuit!”
Connor nods: “Seems he doesn’t have access to a wardrobe in reflection world. Just glad I had a shower before we made that run.”
She can’t help it and looks back. He watches her head tilt and a smile form: “Widow Bakker seems to be enjoying life on the other side.”
He nods: “I’ve seen her with him in the reflections in my room, and in my shower. A couple of the reasons why I’ve painted out every reflective surface at my place.”
The celebrity dinner swirls and shimmers about them, seemingly the only sombre people in the ballroom.
“Take me through it again.”
He sighs: “The first FTL run, when it overperformed and unleashed that anomalous burst of black-body radiation. The evening after I returned, I looked in the mirror in my room and saw my reflection sitting on the bed reading a book. I reported it, but they can’t see him unless I’m in physical contact with the observer. Therefore, they’ve concluded it’s a localised issue and I’m still being subjected to tests while they try and find out how I suppress my reflection.”
She looks up to see Reflected Connor passionately kissing Reflected Amanda. Around them, the event swirls in a proper reflection of the reality she’s in. Just a moment-
“Where’s Amanda?”
He grins: “You spotted it. She died a week ago after a period of ‘erratic behaviour’ that started just after my return from the mission.”
Krista takes a big gulp of her drink.
“How can I help?”
Connor smiles: “I’m not asking for help. I think that’s beyond current science. I’m taking the opportunity to get closer to a woman I’ve been in love with for years, hoping she’ll accept my oddities and we can have some fun regardless.”
She takes a bigger gulp of her drink. Puts the glass down. Pauses. Picks it up. Drains the glass. She smiles at him: “How can I, as a scientist and hopeless romantic, resist that and the mystery you bring?”
He leans in. With a smile, she places a restraining hand on his forehead.
“Easy, tiger. You mentioned ‘oddities’, as in ‘more than one’. I’m almost scared to ask, but what on Earth can top that?” She points toward Reflected Connor escorting the reflection of a dead woman from the mirror image of the event they’re sitting in.
He sighs: “I hoped you wouldn’t notice my slip.”
Krista leans a little closer: “Your secret is safe with me, especially if it’s as interesting as the other one.”
He smiles: “Where the fuck is my shadow?”
She reaches, grabs and downs his drink.
by Julian Miles | Jun 18, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The moon picks out bright lines from the vegetation-shrouded hulks at the sides of the road. High above, our Night Ravens duel with watch drones. So high that any kills fall outside our ken, leaving the night undisturbed.
“A long time ago, they had names for every living thing.” Dappen nods as he works the wheel.
“Everything?” Graea’s unconvinced.
He nods: “Everything. Had a special language for it, too. Called it ‘Latin’. Never got on with it myself.”
“You learned Latin?” Too much!
He looks at me with a grin: “Never did. My grandma had a smatterin’, got it from her grandma. I sided with me mum; it’s past. Best let it go.”
Graea leans forward: “Everything? We still got that. I knows oaks and hornets and jackdaws an’ such.”
Dappen reaches back and ruffles her hair: “Not like that. This language told how things came to be and where they came from, making great big chains of what became what from where.”
“Why?”
He looks at me: “There’s the question. Hang on.”
The rig swings wide round the forested hill that sticks up from the centre of this expanse of cracked blacktop.
“Used to call this the A24, back when they named everything. Funny how the oldest bits last longer.”
“Cheap tradesmen?”
He grins and reaches out to ruffle my hair, but I duck out of reach.
“Likely as any other theory.”
With a sigh, he brings the rig to a standstill. Midpoint. Letting the Night Ravens clear the skies for our run down to the coast.
“Right, while we wait. Why did they name everything? I don’t know. But I’ll guess what it did. Made them think they had a handle on everything, like the ancestors really did back in the times of power when naming something gave you control over it. Except, with these new names, it didn’t. All it did was give them a feeling of comfort, like when you collect stuff. Don’t do nothing but make you feel a little better.”
“Like Dee’s rocks-in-a-row?”
I feel myself blush.
“Just like them. But, for these folk, they were so sure they understood how everything worked they put names to all the stuff they couldn’t see as well, then pretended like they knew how it all worked together.”
“Don’t seem clever. Some of the stuff they guessed at might have turned out grimmer than they thought.”
He grins: “Why do you think we’re sitting in a century-old truck about to drive down a road that’s even older while our patched-up robot birds destroy the enemy clan’s noisy flying discs? All we got is what survived when them what gave the names ran out of words against the fury. Too many people, too few things to keep them alive. Nothing left but the children of the lucky and any technology that was useful. Everything else got left in the ashes.”
Graea leans on my shoulder: “So we’re the lucky and we don’t need to know the names of everything?”
I look across at Dappen: “Not quite. The lesson I get is that knowledge is pointless on its own.”
She claps her hands: “You got to do something with it, not just collect it.”
Dappen nods: “Close enough. Dee used her knowledge to find a possible orchard on an old map. Doing something with it means we now need to get this haul of apples home.”
He swings the wheel and the truck moves ahead. With a chuckle, he glances over at us: “One of you two needs to make tea for the driver. I know he’s parched.”
by Julian Miles | Jun 11, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Sweating people are moving quickly down the High Street, frantically making angular edifices with cardboard boxes and spray paint. I’m working with Heather, rigging cat’s cradles of fishing line between the trees and bushes in the little park off Wendlesham Close. Jethro’s zig-zagging down Keynsham Road, spraying glow-in-the-dark crazy string under the cars and occasionally right across the road.
“Johnny Reed! What’re you doing?”
The towheaded kid stops, arms full of looted chocolate.
“If you go around and give that out, I won’t tell your dad.”
He nods and runs off.
Over on Queen’s Way Estate, they’re charging back and forth across the paths with fence panels and nail guns, changing the layout of back alleys. Up in Victory Gardens, they’re painting out the charge points and putting plastiboard over door and window recesses, which Malcolm’s team are then matching to the walls using plaster sprayers.
Ninety minutes. That’s all we have. Then the sky will fill with drones and the robots will clatter in. I don’t understand why they bother padding the feet: a pack of robots gently collide with each other all the time. Walking quietly is irrelevant.
The drones won’t be a problem. We’ve wires everywhere above the second floor and motion-triggered air mortars shooting weighted plastic netting.
Warfare changed with global access technologies. Troops can prepare for attacks in virtual environments built from real-time data that might only be days old. When they come, they already know the ground.
Naturally, after that level of accurate mapping, you don’t have to use humans. Robots can do the early dirty work, especially in urban warfare.
“They’ve sighted the carriers! Eighteen minutes!” Janine runs past, the training behind her athletics medals coming in handy.
That’s our communications trick: electronics being just about useless – either jammed or eavesdropped. So, we work with runners or junkshop walkie-talkies while we change the way the streets appear.
The synthetic resin in some ornaments appears – to simple scans – just like explosive blocks. Granny’s holiday souvenir from Scotland slung under a car with a handful of loose wires, outline broken by luminous plastic string, which also screws up imaging, is a treat for stalling an advance.
Which is our endgame. We can’t win. Civilians versus modern military? Suicide. However, we can confuse and frustrate their autonomous war machines. Streets the AI ‘knows’ look radically different when you obscure distinguishing features. In extremis, we can simply spray a whole street white or black. Computer imaging is a complex thing that requires substantially more processing power than you’d believe. Fast processors made it viable, to a point. Take it beyond that point and it’s going to be working out why the location doesn’t look like the image it has in memory when the streetlights come on, or the sun goes down, or something else happens to change the ambient lighting, which means the checking has to restart – if it hasn’t already crashed out and left the robot sitting there. Add a few well-placed mirrors to baffle spotlights or flares and an area can become impassable without human assistance.
Time. It’s our friend. The longer it takes them to clear an area, the more likely they are to be caught mid-op by a counterstrike. When our side hit back, we hit hard.
This ‘police action’ is costing them millions. The actual casualties may be few, but the losses being sustained by their backers? Huge. They’re haemorrhaging money.
Which means this war should get called off soon.
by Julian Miles | Jun 4, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There’s another muted ‘thud’. Bangstri leans its eyeball on the cool bulkhead.
“How many is that?”
“Seventeen, Venerated Piloting Specialist.”
It rotates it’s necktacle to glare.
“My appellative is Bangstri. You are to use it at all times, not just when you haven’t made a wormhole-sized bartniff of something whilst trying to overachieve. It has reached a point where I don’t actually need reportage from you. All I have to hear is how you address me to determine the success or failure of the particular in question.”
“Apologies, Venerated Piloting Specialist Bangstri. It was not my intent to commit a bartniff of such scale.”
It leans back against the bulkhead. The chill metal stalls rage-induced temperature creep.
“You were aiming for a smaller one, mayhap?”
Sputtering and multiple colour changes accompany limb waving and genuflecting.
“No being intends to bartniff, Dangdo. You simply did not think all the way through your cunning contrivance.”
A trio of eye stalks pop upright: “You thought it was cunning, Venerated Piloting Specialist Bangstri?”
“Not particularly. Merely testing to see where your self-preservation boundary lies.”
“I do not understand?”
“That much, I have gleaned.”
There’s another thud.
“Eighteen.”
“Apologies, Venerate-”
It extends a striketacle so fast it pins Dangdo to the wall.
“I am no longer in the mood for apologies. Indeed, I am reconsidering whether an educand is desirable upon this vessel. I would venture that you delivering a scintillating remediation theory within the next few minims might improve your chances of not being my morsel for this wake cycle.”
More sputtering and multiple colour changes accompany limb waving. The attempts to genuflect whilst pinned firmly to a wall are quite desperate.
“I remain bereft of remediation.”
Further sputtering. Bangstri opens the flap over his primary digestor and pops Dangdo in. The flap closes and it feels a sense of calm return. It always gets forceful when peckish. Now, to the problem at hand.
Eighteen-
‘Thud’.
Nineteen native bipeds in body-contoured clothing with matching tabards, engaged in rapid locomotion along some sort of game trail. A tribal challenge, mayhap? This activity is obviously a local ritual of some importance. The participants also possess a passable level of electronic sophistication, although only worn, not embedded or grown.
What to do?
‘Thud’.
Twenty. This getting out of appendage. Why on Flordiplah had Dangdo parked them across an obvious transitway with obscura-screens engaged? Impacting fauna are snatched into static containment until decisions as to denouement are taken. Thanks to this bartniff, the vessel is actually running out of containment capacity.
It scans local transmissions for an acceptable way to avoid having containment autopunt twenty sentients into the big empty as its vessel exits the atmosphere.
“Yet again conspiracy theorists are having a field day due to three people collapsing unexpectedly over the weekend. All of them were visiting Meech Lake, over in Gatineau Park. Conspiracy theorists maintain that Carbide Wilson left an underground laboratory that’s never been discovered. Chemicals stored in the lab are leaking and mixing, leading to noxious gas releases, an early warning that the lab will soon explode. So far, investigators haven’t found any subterranean lairs. The cause of the collapses remains under investigation.”
Serendipitous. It transits the necessary distance and artfully decants the sentients along a convenient length of transitway adjacent to the collapse locations. Being bereft of consciousness, they should be flaccid enough to suffer no lasting harm from the short drop.
Departing for home on the minim, it feels it’s temperature fall back to cool.
That’s it. No more educands. Their snack value isn’t worth the irritation.
by Julian Miles | May 21, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There’s a dark atmosphere here on the hill, which is a sad achievement: with modern lighting and the city sparkling below, the Governor’s place is usually the brightest spot.
Until Maleshi brought the ruckus to the docks and Grunhilde took it personally. The mother of thieves versus the smuggler lord.
“Denton, you making up articles again?”
I turn and smile: “It’s my living, Governor. I’m always thinking about making articles.”
“Well, this won’t be one.” He seems dead serious.
Which means there’s a better tale to be had: “Then give me a story that makes it worth my while not to tell the galaxy about how a corrupt police chief suborned a planetary council to allow the criminal he obeyed to run our spaceports for personal gain.”
William appears too genteel to be a Governor. He should be cultivating roses or teaching history to scions of nobility.
“I know that look. You’ve told me the story behind it. I hate roses and spoilt brats. Looking like a fop is part of the repertoire. Get over it.”
I cut him a little curtsy: “We’re back to ‘tell me a better tale’.”
He huffs: “I give you a decent story and you forget your designs on me and outing Chief Retnagnir before we complete the case against him?”
“To cover both, it’ll have to be an epic.”
“Winonna Rogers.”
“Bandit queen of this sector, until she disappeared.”
“Classically trained pianist, horticulturalist, and the mother of my estranged children.”
That I did not see coming.
“Your children?”
“Son and daughter. So devoted to one another it was worrying. Of course, in their teens that devotion occasionally flared into hateful arguments. One would storm out, Winonna would intercede, there would be sullen silence for a couple of days, then they’d be amigos again.”
I suspect this not leading to a happy place.
“My son tore it all up. Being bandit-raised most of the time, I had tried to immunise him to the poisonous aspects of their culture. It didn’t take. Nineteen and full of machismo, he came down hard on his sister for being ‘unladylike’. For the first time, Winonna took a side. He stormed out. As usual, she waited a few hours, then sought him out. I guess he thought his mama had betrayed him.”
He looks at me and I can see tears in his eyes.
“The love of my life was killed by our son. Our daughter vowed revenge.”
This’ll get readers.
I’m not sure I like myself right now.
“No-one knows you have scion or had a lady. Why tell me, especially over a silly threat?”
“Those kids are beyond my reach. Maybe your article can get that far, if you add the impact their war is having on the common people.” He looks out across the city as another plume of smoke rises: “People their father has taken an oath to help yet is powerless to do so while his children quarrel using other people’s lives.”
Oh, no.
He looks back to me, tears spilling down his cheeks: “My children call themselves Maleshi Blood and Grunhilde Storm. Both are younger than thirty. I dread what they could become.” He waves his hand toward the city, where fires mark battles every day, and whispers: “Look at what they do.”
William, dear William.
“You realise one or both might turn on you?”
“Yes.”
“Why now?”
“Their deeds are getting darker. Something must change to break this cycle. So, write as well as you always do. Publish without regret.”
He smiles.
“Shine a light, Miss Denton. Show them what they cannot see.”
