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.
by Julian Miles | Mar 21, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
*** Welcome to ThoughtWrite
*** Property of MSi
*** v0.1 BETA
*** 19-4-2043
So this is the new write-as-you-think softwa-
Blimey! It picked up on that oh my god…
*** IMAGE LOAD ERROR
Phew! It can’t pick up images. That’s a relief. This is going to be difficult, if it can’t distinguish between my casual thinking and the stuff I want to write…
It was a cold and stormy night –
No, that’s too cliché. Oh, for pity’s sake. It picks up every word. And how do I punctuate? Or paragraph break? It’s not like I have a command langua-
Just a moment. This is handling topic and paragraph breaks. How on – I thought this capability was decades away… Which means that – What was that?
*** You’re very good. But a little late. That faint popping sensation was an aortic valve. And as the light at the end of the tunnel comes up, we’ll be rifling your memories. If you can’t catch a techie, lure him in. Goodnight, sweet prince.
by Julian Miles | Mar 11, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Teatray!”
We all duck behind or under solid objects until the sound of a small crash landing gives us the all-clear. Wandering over to check the corpse, there are expressions of dismay. We’ve just clocked our first RAPTOR. I don’t know what the slang acronym means, but basically it’s a drone using ducted fans within a body designed to resemble a city hawk.
“Somebody’s lost a very expensive toy.” Mitch is unsympathetic: rogue drones cause more mayhem than any other form of technology.
I grin at him: “Looks like his birdie took a QR to the CPU. Someone won’t know we hit it.”
Mitch nods. He points toward the dot drifting high above and makes a circling movement with his index finger: “Hunt ‘someone’ down.”
That dot is Nils. Early experiments in drone policing used trained eagles. They were effective, but the wounds to the birds were increasingly horrific as drone operators started sharpening the edges of their rotors. Nils is an Osprey, brought into the program as they are the only eagle with reversible outer toes, giving them better grip to deal with drones. He was effective, but barely survived taking down a drugbug – drone full of heroin – losing both legs and part of a wing.
That was when Colonel Mitchell ‘Mitch’ Everton-Masham of MI22 – Cyber Intelligence, an evolution of MI16 – stepped in and gave me a new friend to work with. I’d handled a few birds of prey, but the first cybereagle was a whole new level of challenge. Thirteen months later, a rogue over Buckingham Palace got a photo of its killer that went viral: sunlight reflecting from the steel pinions of an otherwise-silhouetted giant bird of prey. Nils had arrived.
He’s also got a clever QR code between his wings, so drones with defensive scanning can read the encoded low-level command and obey the ‘land immediately’ directive. However, as rogues are frequently hacked to get around safety restrictors, some just fall out of the sky. The ‘teatray’ warning is one of ours, taken from the Mad Hatter’s song.
I nod and tap my comms: “Nils. Trace commsig.”
Nils spirals out westward, following the frantic commands being sent by the drone’s operator. A Metro chopper paces Nils about eight hundred metres behind: operators can turn aggressive when their getaway is interrupted.
When Nils gets within a hundred metres of the ground, his visuals sync with our main board and we get an HD view of two blokes in slouchies and donkey jackets staring in awe as Nils sidle-hovers with an eerie blades-from-scabbards noise made by his rapidly moving wings.
The audio pickups filter the noise so we get to hear the word that accompanies the operator’s stunned expression.
“Beautiful.”
I tap my comm twice to speak via Nils’ speaker: “Do not attempt to flee. Armed response is inbound.”
The two figures look relieved. There are whoops of glee behind me: these lads were leasing their expensive drone. They’ll take custody and anonymity to save themselves from mutilation by the crime lord who is out of pocket. We may well be able to roll up an entire rogue wing, right back to production facilities and related smuggling operations.
Mitch slaps me on the shoulder: “Tell your boy it’s steak ‘n’ giblets tonight.”
I grin and tap my comms: “Nils. Good lad. Come home.”
A piercing whistle of joy in my headset accompanies our display wheeling in an arc that lays London’s skyline out for us as my friend Nils, a.k.a. Pandion One, puts the sunset behind him and heads for dinner.
