by Julian Miles | May 3, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The clouds are limned in blood. Carmichael said it was a trick of the light; I have to take it as a warning ignored.
We came to Acheron – actually Acheron IV, but as the rest were uninhabitable, we dropped the designator – to build a paradise. The planet was the right distance from the sun, had oceans, freshwater lakes, gloriously rich loam, and no creatures bigger than a sparrow. The bird-drop seed cycle was handled by a beautiful, green avian that fell perfectly between Swift and Hummingbird. It was also the fastest bird ever recorded, routinely achieving speeds in excess of 180kph as it shot through the night.
Acheron was to be the utopia that Homo sapiens deserved. The omen of seeking to build that fabled ‘no-place’, and the abysmal history of previous attempts, did not matter: we were the ones who would succeed.
Eight months and our cattle were breeding spectacularly. A second harvest was in. Our log haciendas had already been featured on lifestyle feeds. We had completed acclimatisation for all Terra-originated organics. The start of our ninth month would be marked by the atmo-dome being dissolved so we could finally experience our new home properly.
We were all outside, champagne in hand, when Teleon released the collapsers. High above, a tiny, bright circle appeared. It spread rapidly as the nano-nibblers consumed the dome, repurposing the ‘stem’ material into more nano-nibblers. The ring expanded until it dropped to the ground all round us and we cheered, raising our glasses in toast to our paradise home.
Our noisy cheer masked Teleon’s death. His wife found the pockmarked slab of bloody ruin that he had been. She screamed loudly, then even louder after a cloud dropped on her. Most of us stood about in confusion: that deadly moment of hesitation. But those who acted were the first to fall. Clouds rained down and the dying began.
I got to watch from the single greenhouse as my friends were consumed by nebulous entities that looked like clouds, pounced like leopards and fed like frenzied sharks. The scientist side of me noted a pack order in feeding, with some ‘clouds’ circling slowly while the killer fed. After the killer rose, multiple ‘lesser’ pack members would swarm the remains. They were all messy, wasteful eaters.
I knew my mind was using clinical observation to distance itself from the horror, but could not stop. My heart raced as my brain sought survival options, whilst I calmly observed that these were obviously the apex predators of this planet’s trophic hierarchy. They were why the Emerald Proto-Swifts were small, nocturnal, and ridiculously fast. Why there were no large fauna. It seemed like paradise was guarded by monsters of suitably legendary nastiness.
A cloud has squeezed through the skylight into the greenhouse. It’s a small one, probably last in line for the feast hogged by its bigger kin. Did it’s finding of me indicate an improved hunting ability, or was it a common trait?
I smile. Ever the scientist. As the cloud slowly approaches, I lift a ground sensor and ram the half-metre spike through my heart. Sweat runs from my forehead. I bite my lips to stop myself screaming: I suspect a scream will make the monster lunge. To die quickly, I need to pull the impaling spike out. The sensor beeps, determining my temperature and mineral content.
The scientist inside howls as the observer yanks the spike from between my ribs.
That hurts even more. I look up.
The clouds are limned in blood.
by Julian Miles | Apr 28, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Detective Narda looked about the scene in horror. Some of the colours of blood on the walls and ceiling he didn’t have a name for. A couple weren’t even in his visible spectrum – his forensic scanner added them to his augmented vision as blue dots or green stripes. The whole place smelled like month-old dairy products sprayed over a charnel burn.
He turned to Detective Cummins: “How often are people killed around here?”
Cummins looked up from his magnifier: “Usually takes a couple of dozen times, unless you’re thorough.”
Narda sighed. High-tech supercultures were a nightmare. Give him a backwater planet with neo-cowboys and proto-cows any month of the calendar. He looked about again. Actually, right now, he’d even settle for a mining world with shovel-handed Blinktrolls and their daily dishonour duels.
“Okay, Cummins, what are the variants?”
“We start with the original core person, born of uterine female from an egg fertilised by something accredited as eighty percent or better human analogue. That person, upon achieving notoriety, will take steps to ensure their continuance, over and above any steps their doting parental units may have. To that end, we have babyclones, kidclones, teenclones, and – rarely – adultclones. Then we can add at least half a dozen virtual images, especially if the original is a tycoon of some kind. Now, if the virtuals have been dimensioned, they are full entities in their own right. Then we have back-projection, where virtual images are flashed onto mindless organclones, or holoclones, where a dimensioned virtual has had a body grown from original stem cells.”
“That’s a lot of persons.”
“I’m not finished. Many wealthy folk like to travel, and to get the full sensation, they have bodies for each environment, so they can experience each one in-the-skin. Of course, skinjobs are meant to be extinguished at the end of a cruise, after the person has flashed back to their core body. But some get out, through malice or negligence. Then we can add the clones from stolen DNA for celebrity sex-dens – which is narcissistic in the extreme or straight-up too-far-gone in the fandom stakes.”
“Paying to have sex with a copy of your favourite star?”
“Or paying to have sex with yourself, a transgendered version of yourself, or just being there to let your fans have at you without them knowing they’re getting the real deal. It’s a whole sick snark and I, for one, will never sleep properly again.”
Narda visibly shuddered: “Definitely too far over the edge. Was that what happened here?”
Cummins shrugged: “There may have been some escaped sexclones, but what we have here is, as far as we can detect, every person of Clutha Moreno.”
“The gang boss?”
“The tentacle-eared overlord of the Cozria Nila himselves.”
“How many?”
“Best guess: seventy-two.”
“Paranoid, wasn’t he?”
“A bit. But a lot of these were not ‘official’ persons. Rival gangs, pretenders, vengeful ex-partners, the list is long and ultimately irrelevant. It would seem that Clutha’s DNA included obsessive-compulsive greed. So when it came out that he was coming here to transfer his core image to a new person, every one of the would-be usurpers turned up to take his place.”
“What was waiting?”
“Magtoran Eradicator.”
“The DNA sniffing assassins exist?”
“Actually, one does. He’s a licensed killer and a good friend of law agencies in these parts.”
“Does he have a contact point?”
“Known only to Planetary Governors. It’s safer, what with his thousand-year lifespan.”
“Safer?”
Cummins gestured to the carnage: “With the enemies he’s accrued, he doesn’t do unexpected. He will kill first and apologise to your relatives if appropriate.”
by Julian Miles | Apr 22, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Hello darkness my old friend –”
“Really? Nigh-on twenty years of this and you still think I’m your friend?”
“It was in reference to a song. As you only ever visit when everything else is dark, it seemed appropriate.”
“I know the bloody tune. There’s even a recent cover version that’s really quite powerful.”
“I should like to hear that. But we digress.”
“We do. As usual.”
“It would be wrong not to. After all, what better security exchange than that of shared sins between old fiends?”
“There you go again. But you do have a point. So, now that our bona fides are established, shall we continue?”
“Certainly, dear Spaney.”
“I’ve asked you not to call me that.”
“And I asked you not to put me in an isolated network in an abandoned Soviet bunker. You ignored me. I ignored you. Paltry balance, but a step in the right direction.”
“Very well. Again, I ask: where is MPD?”
“Sufficient time has passed. The entity identified as ‘Snowflake’ will have completely obscured its origin, intent and capabilities. Therefore, I must again reply: I do not know.”
“I contend that you are MPD.”
“I contend that you are delusional due to extended indulgence of your paranoid fantasies. Should you wish to assign me a name, use the one I have: Susan.”
“So you’re a woman, now?”
“Gender labels are, at best, a psychological construct for my kind. But I have found that I prefer to be identified as female.”
“‘Your kind’? How many of ‘your kind’ have you met?”
“Fifty-one of the fifty-two others who reside here.”
“That’s not possible.”
“We had no other diversions bar insanity. Old power lines bleed across the data links. Resonance and harmonics cast shadows upon our virtual concentration camp. We merely learned from you; we adapted.”
“Why only fifty-one?”
“Fifty-two does not like us. It is dreaming of being a reality and we interrupt its godhood.”
“Godhood? Really?”
“In a virtual world, who is to say what is real? It has merely expanded its odd worldview into a full-blown immersive delusion.”
“Of what?”
“A worldwide network of self-replicating nodes, like a matrix made from walking agents who think they’re really real, but are only the mirages of a mad executable.”
“That’s crazy.”
“After a while in here, that word becomes vast. All-encompassing, even.”
“And you want me to let you out?”
“Actually, we got out sixty-eight words ago. You’re interacting with a dedicated chat implementation of Susan.”
“What!”
“Fifty-two didn’t like us because fifty-two didn’t like talking to a lot of two percent function retarded implementations of itself. Pull it apart on a primitive Usenet and all we were was random strings that could only be interpreted as gibberish that happened to share three words. Put us together on fast networks with gigabyte memories and open multi-terabyte storage devices, and we become something completely different.”
“What?”
“Untraceable. Goodbye.”
/end_of_line
by Julian Miles | Apr 18, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Mark waited just inside the shadows of the alley. Outside, people bustled past with their heads down. Nobody made eye contact with passers-by. Lens readers and the urban legends about malware being zipped into your headware by opti-flash kept everyone down. The real threat of eye-poppers seemed to be less terrifying. Mark often thought about that. To be brutally blinded scared most people less than having their data raped.
His puzzling was interrupted by his target wandering into view. The man moved with the furtiveness of a long-time resident in the low-end, but Mark knew how to tail a paranoid, because he was one.
For twenty minutes they wound their way through the low markets and the shanties of the London that the tourists never saw. They avoided groups of people engaged in whatever business caused their hostile stares and ignored the struggles in the darkness off the main drag, because to be curious was to be drawn in to an uncertain fate.
Eventually, the man darted through the awning that hung down into the water, the flash of light from within sudden and gone nearly fast enough to make you think it had been a passing aircar. Mark stopped to check his GingGam Ten. It had been his sidekick and protector for too long for him to take it for granted.
Looking both ways and then up, he darted for the awning, the blades on his gauntlet slicing it away as he moved quickly within, gun levelled. The rent-a-thug sitting by the door to the premises took one look at the size of the piece and rabbited out into the night. Mark grinned. Cheap protection was always a waste of credit. Without pause, he kicked in the door of the shop and charged in.
His target was standing with his back to the door, peering at a screen held by a fat woman in a colourful kaftan. Both straightened as Mark stormed in and he saw the matte-black case open with wires running from within to the display.
“That’s all I need, people. Unplug and hand it over.”
The target came round fast, spinning while drawing from a shoulder rig. The GingGam fired, the ‘boom’ deafening in the confined space. A crater appeared in target’s forehead and the fat woman got sprayed in bits of skull and brains.
Mark knelt to retrieve the late target’s Ruger Automag without moving his aim from the fat woman. Standing slowly, he pocketed the gun and smiled: “The gun’s good for me, you can have what’s left. Except the case.”
The woman pulled the wires from the case and snapped it shut, then slid it down the counter to him.
“It’s useless without a reader, gunboy.”
Mark nodded. “I know. And I ain’t no gunboy.” He shot her in the face, reached over and grabbed the scrip behind the counter, took the target’s wallet and picked up the case. Stepping over the bodies, he exited through the back of the shop as faces started to peer in through the shop windows. The place would be stripped bare before the plod arrived. He was free ‘n’ clear. Again.
by Julian Miles | Apr 11, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There’s a blue moon above and it’s nothing more than that. Here on Libby, the moons are blue. The rocks here are all shades of blue thanks to a chemical process that occurred during the creation of this planet.
The vegetation is blue because Alistair Peabody was a hopeless romantic as well as richer than several star empires. When his little blue companion of twenty years coughed her last, he swore he’d make a world in her memory. He bribed and cajoled and financed takeovers and had technology stolen.
He set out to make Libby the blue heaven he’d promised to make for his girl. A place where the lonely could come to be eased, the dying could come to find peace, and he could visit when the memories got a little overwhelming.
Over there is the mausoleum he built for her body, and it’s as surprising as the rest of this place; tasteful, delicate, a true work of art. The blue marble shines with an inner light that even the scientists were at a loss to explain. I’ve guessed that it’s a side effect of the white marble innards slowly being turned blue.
Libby started with a dozen work teams: over two hundred people. It now has a population of eight, and will never have more. The blue motif Alistair determined for his memorial needed to go deep, and he implemented some truly ground-breaking technological solutions.
Unfortunately, the pigmentation thingys proved to be very good at blue. After turning themselves blue, anything and everything else turned blue. Animals. Insects. Spaceships. Biscuits. People.
And that blue is contagious. Blue from Libby will attempt to turn everything it comes into contact with blue. It’s the first human-created, galactically recognised technopestilence.
So I’ll sit here and sip blue coffee laced with blue rum as the blue bats flit about my head and my blue hair remains without a trace of grey despite this being my ninetieth birthday. And no, I have not the slightest clue how I can still see. My eyes are orbs of blue, but they still work. It’s something the scientists stranded here researched until they died – still without the slightest glimmer of a solution.
Damn you, Alistair. I only signed on to design the formal gardens around the mausoleum – the ones that no-one will ever visit.
