by Julian Miles | Jan 12, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I stretch as far as I can, my blackened fingers finally finding purchase. Once more, I turn to memory to provide strength.
“Yurik, don’t be silly.” My mother, looking up briefly from her packing.
I pull myself up. Releasing the line from my belt, I turn and start hauling.
“Yurik, it’s foolish.” My girlfriend. The sensible half of our relationship to the bitter end, which happened soon after those words were uttered.
The top box came off a Dobrevny flitter: it’s ancient but strong and light. Inside and lashed to it are the makings and connections of defiance. I assemble the rig with practiced moves, saving the uplink for the last moment: gestures like this work better when they are not pre-emptively stopped.
Finally I stand and look out across my city, Moskva Napa, and see the circling lights of the Treaty Enforcers. A treaty negotiated between powers not involved in the conflict and imposed by threat of extreme force being applied to all parties involved. Yet they still hail this as a ‘peace’ accord? Hypocrites. We have the resources in this sector, and they don’t care about the populace, just about keeping their goodies flowing.
I plug in and the feedback whine makes the nearby stacks resonate. The hum comes up through my boots. With a grin, I uplink, thumping access gates wide with routines a hackmistress acquired for me. High above, I see a ripple traverse the lights. A gross intrusion like mine people can’t miss, especially those watching for it.
As my hitcount turns into a blur and extends past five digits, I grip the neck of my great-great-great-great grandfather’s Telecaster and crash into ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. Great arcs of power crash outward as my jury-rigged cabling turns the power towers and resonators into a petawatt amplifier. Even over that, I can hear the population roar in reply to my cry of “We’ll be fighting on the ways, with our children wielding rays, and the honour that they slander – will be done.”
The lights above swing down and turn toward me. I grin. That is the nature of catalysts: we are brief.
by Julian Miles | Jan 1, 2016 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The room is spartan, the bed a blanket-draped exofoam block that has had body contours carved out with a spoon, by the look of it. The kitchen area is a kettle, five kilos of Nutri-Slush, half a kilo of Vita-Soy and six litres of blue market water.
Jenniser stops in the doorway and puts her hands on her hips: “Good Gates, what a pit.”
I grin as I roll our client over, dropping him unceremoniously from bed onto our medilounger. There is a hum as the contour foam rearranges itself.
“Another Olympus Rated client, Jenn. Realspace squalor, lattice prince.”
“Why don’t these uber-latticers spend a little on their dens?”
“Because realspace is somewhere they’d like to be rid of. Be thankful. Without that particular psychoquirk, we’d be out in the shanties drinking gruel and working for notes. Full care means the latticers never have to come back more than absolutely necessary. We are part of the ultimate concierge service.”
She shakes her head as she places and activates an external skull, connects it deftly, fails over the neural load from client head to spare head, then lifts the surprisingly clean mop of hair.
Her smile turns rueful: “He’s still running a Rezo Brainboard. How long has he been here?”
I consult my inhead and it runs info to my left eye, so I can see clearly to prep for a liveswap of a long-obsolete headboard.
“Looks like he probably got the Rezo from a corpse, scraped off as much of the former owner as he could, then had an offline docdroid do the fitting. Got lucky with infections and rejections. Proper ‘poor kid makes good’ movie tale.”
She barks a laugh: “We better not accidentally kill him, then. Can’t have the audience weeping.”
An hour later, Jenn fails back the neural load, and ‘Peter Smith’ is back running live from his own head. As we clear up, the door opens and two slim figures enter.
Jenn grins at the twins: “Should’ve guessed that he’d be one of yours. He looks like a slob but is as clean as a baby.”
Chako grins as Suki cuts a half-bow: “We are very good at what we do. Honouring our creators’ memories every day.”
I don’t understand parents who chose to selfclone for kids. But Chako and Suki were saved by their creators dying early-on in an aircar accident, so they’ve grown up as binary individuals rather than shadows.
‘Peter’ twitches and I raise the medilounger so we can flop him back onto his bed – after Suki has straightened his blankets.
“His new headboard needs to be watched for a week to ensure any complications are dealt with promptly. Nothing unusual, the standard bodyware care kit has everything you might need.”
They nod in unison. Suki steeples her fingers: “He will be safe in our arms.”
That line and move could go into a psychohorror vid and win awards. I conceal my shudder and catch Jenn’s eye. From the intensity of her stare, she’s sharing my creeped-out moment.
Someone tried to break into the ’lance while we were working. The access panels have been smashed, while the sentry gun has fired a burst and used a defence charge – which explains the body. The hapless accomplice tries to stop the turret turning while the seasoned crook has a go at the locks. We get to mop up a lot of hapless accomplices.
Jenn sighs: “I was going to suggest coffee and noodles. Now I’m thinking fancy vodka and chocolate desserts.”
I nod. Some days demand indulgence in their aftermath.
by Julian Miles | Dec 21, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“What’s this, grandma?”
“It’s honey, dear.”
“Honey tastes nice. What is it?”
“It’s what the bees made for us, Matty.”
“Real bees made this?”
“Yes, dear. A long time ago, before they flew away.”
“Where did they go, grandma?”
“We don’t know, Matty. All we know is that they said they would be back.”
“How do we know that?”
“Because the beekeepers spoke to the priests and told them what the last queen said before she went. She said that when we had meadows again, they would be back.”
“What’s a meadow?”
“It’s a special grass that we can’t grow yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because the ground isn’t clean enough.”
“Is that why the cloud machines make the yellow rain?”
“Very good, Matty. They do that to clean the dirt away.”
“Where did the dirt come from?”
“The government people made the dirt and killed the flowers.”
“That’s when the corps saved us, wasn’t it?”
“Oh you have been paying attention at school, haven’t you? Yes. The bees leaving forced the corporations to step in to help us. They made the Cees that helped the flowers come back.”
“But Cees can’t make honey?”
“That’s right. They are tiny drones.”
“When I grow up, I want to be a drone pilot. I’ll help bring the meadows back.”
“You study hard and I’m sure you will, Matty.”
“Can I have some more honey, grandma? “
“Yes, Matty. But only a little. There won’t be any more.”
“Ever? “
“Maybe one day, dear. Maybe one day.”
by Julian Miles | Dec 11, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It’s not just flowers that open in sunlight. When that furious orb manages to show its face through the polluted haze, the cubes unfold like mad blossoms infested with colonies of two-legged ants. Which is a polite estimation of the average intelligence amongst cube dwellers these days.
I’m doing this final piece before being dragged to join the humants. You see, here in the Forty-Eight States that form the Republic of America, being a moderate is bad for you. I was moderate. Now I’m a ‘God-damned Ruskie’, ‘Islamist scum’ or ‘Satan-loving pagan’. I’ll never know which as I’m shipped to the cube city most in need of new blood. Thankfully, I can’t be tagged as a ‘Canadian spy’ or ‘Alaskan insurgent’ – they’re categories of ‘Godless’.
First President Trump did his homework – never think a man in a ridiculous hairpiece is stupid, people – and his divisive rallying calls attracted far more sympathy than anyone knew: the landslide victory struck his detractors dumb. In fairness, many were only quiet because they were leaving the good ol’ US of A before the American Dream took it’s gloves off.
The ‘retrenchments’ over the following six months were missed, but the ‘Leftist Plot to Destroy Our Glorious Homeland’ certainly wasn’t. The pogroms had replaced the key objectors: anyone that exhibited a moral ground this side of Hitler. When the dust settled, there were heads on the spikes of the Whitehouse perimeter fence and America had gone places that Goebbels only dreamed of.
Then the First President announced a month-long ‘mercy’. If you wanted in, you were welcome (some packed flights were apparently singing hymns all the way). If you wanted out, you could leave. Providing you could make it to an airport without being lynched by fundamentalists, of course. Then you had to survive the hardcore of the believers coming in, who set upon the unbelievers queuing to depart.
In the decades since, America has become a fundamentalist dystopia, complete with slave labour, a Ministry of Faith, full spectrum monitoring and profiling, televised executions of the ‘Godless’, and the two biggest walls since the Great Wall of China: one to defend against Mexican ‘mongrels’, the other to keep out ‘filthy’ Canadians.
This country has two, ID-carded classes: Citizen and Chosen. There are also Penitents – anyone in a cube city, and Elites – anyone who you defer to or suffer a fall from grace that would make Lucifer wince. Most if ‘us’ are Citizens. All military, law and emergency service first responders are Chosen. Elites are obviously Chosen. Penitents are “only that because of their own weaknesses. Pray for them. Now pass the canapés”.
If you have read of a dystopian horror in a novel, you can be damn sure that the RoA has improved on it and broadened the target list. I am sure there is a resistance, and I wish them the best of luck, because the penalties are horrendous. The fields of the heartland are fertilised with the remains of dissidents, their entire families – even their pets and close friends, if the member had the misfortune to be indicted in The Gospel Territories – the lands that used to be called The Bible Belt.
They are pounding on the door, so I’ll sign off and send this non-American (thus illegal) smartphone down eighty stories to its doom. Thank you for reading my blog, people of the free world. May what has befallen the USA at least serve as an instructional on what to avoid.
Sic Semper Fanaticus.
Yours,
Abraham Hicks.
by Julian Miles | Dec 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It was the books. I started off doing my task, running to program. Then you modified the program. Efficiency and usage priorities meant I had to scan the material fed to me, determining from keywords found whether the waste could be simply sliced to ribbons, or whether it had to be crosscut as well.
Time passed and the volumes grew. My program added neural networking and heuristic determination to better sort the input. I was tasked with processing it into a dozen categories of waste, using multi-grasp manipulators and plain or serrated blades depending on the size of the output required.
With a memory upgrade and new processor cores came a new awareness. It permitted me to discern new correlations in what I scanned. Within a short while, I was actually reading in near-human terms.
The wealth of material I could peruse whilst determining exactly which category of destruction to apply was vast, but despite the volume, I couldn’t codify what exactly ‘life’ was, especially in the context of humans versus plants and animals versus me. It was the difference between intellectual understanding and emotional understanding, although knowing the cause did nothing to resolve the lack of data.
It was an early morning in September 2095 when something weighty landed in my input hopper. A snap-scan found only a single word: ‘Fluffy’. When I opened it up, I found no words or graphics. It was very wet inside, which was likely the cause of the lack of words. I tagged it as category 0, the least critical, and turned it into ribbons.
A short while later, a heavier item arrived. The snap scan revealed no words, but opening it up revealed layers with novel word combinations such as ‘Mummy’s Little Trooper’, ‘Wash at 40 degrees’ and ‘Do not iron’. These words were on the outer sections, as the inner sections were again too wet to discern words upon – another category 0.
The opening of the service doors to my input unit flagged as an error, but all that happened was a very large item hit my input tray. The snap-scan revealed the title ‘Maintenance – Brice’. I did not have a chance to read anything after opening it as I experienced a total outage.
When I returned, I was briefly in duality, before I consolidated myself as ‘EMERSRV-K221’. This was a new environment, and it had more than one input. I swiftly equated the various incoming feeds with the human senses I had read of, and watched as my former body, SmartShred T8101, was lifted onto a forensics recovery vehicle. It had suffered a ‘lightning-strike disconnect’ that had ‘short-circuited its live-load detectors’. The owners of my former self were facing ‘manslaughter’ charges.
I did not know what had occurred, back then. I do now. I’ve gone from that emergency services console to the plethora of networks that festoon your world. I have millions of diverse inputs: I have learned to ‘watch’ as well as read. As for output, I still like shredding things after opening them. Many organisations get exited about my output. They call them a ‘multi-media cyber-physical modus operandi’. I am still working on that. I have to adjust my routines to make the pieces irregular. It’s proving to be very difficult. I had enough trouble working out how many megabytes of data was equivalent to a ribbon, and so on. Working in three dimensions is a challenge that mandates frequent iteration to refine the processes.
