by Julian Miles | May 22, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles
“My microwave just exploded.”
Here we go again. Mrs Jolene Public and her inability to program white goods.
“Certainly madam. Now, I’ll need some details. What did you put in it?”
“A damp face towel with a couple of drops of lemon juice on it.”
“What did you set it to?”
“One minute reheat.”
“Intensity?”
“Pardon?”
“Power?”
“Seven hundred.”
That didn’t seem like a set up for detonation.
“Did the unit emit any noises?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? No beeps or chimes?”
“No. The housemon didn’t go off either.”
Oh no.
“Madam, has anything else gone wrong today?”
“Why yes. The fish were all dead in the aquarium this morning – housemon said the thermostat had failed. The vacuum cleaner nearly sucked the cat bald and my partner got a flash burn from the depilator.”
“Could you please go across to the housemon panel and press the number eight three times?”
“Okay.”
Don’t let it be another.
“That’s odd; the panel is showing patterns instead of the numbers. They look like little skulls.”
“Madam, please exit your house immediately. Then call your partner. I am calling the police now.”
And an ambulance, and the fire service.
“It’ll be easier if I call her from the housemon – eeeee…!”
Her scream goes off the scale and I hear a body fall before the line goes dead.
I rest my head on the cool edge of my workstation. Another attack on the families of key players while they are in the ‘safety’ of their own, monitored homes. The problem is that the program is designed to induce fear, but doesn’t allow for the foibles of humans in their own homes: the insistence on pressing the button one more time to see if ‘it’ will work this time, etcetera. People are dying and if the maniac isn’t caught, the housemon boom ends and I’m out of a job.
Right now, I’d happily live in unemployment if it means no-one else dies and I never have to take one of those calls again.
by Julian Miles | May 5, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Jack came down from Elevator Town with a tale to tell and a song to sing. He sung it good and told it fast, but we didn’t believe him. Who would? What could make a man flee from Orbitopia to come and grub in the dirt with us who didn’t pass the tests?
Okay, there were a lot of us dirtside: more than made it upside. But we didn’t pass the tests. We spent our days working to provide for the upsiders and pay for our training, all the schools and tuitions and folk who could help us pass the tests – for a fee. That’s all we did, back then. All the game shows only had one prize: a ticket to Orbitopia.
Next thing we knew, Jack had himself a cable channel: “Jack’s New World”.
We thought it was something about a new Orbitopia habitat. But it wasn’t. Just about Earth. Nothing interesting, we told each other over our pseudobeer.
But it was. Jack went outside the colonies and visited mountains and did something called ‘skiing’. He strolled through somewhere called ‘alpine meadows’ and went ‘skinny dipping’ from tropical beaches. We couldn’t help it. We watched. All the feeds from Orbitopia were about parks that curved over your head. Jack went places where you couldn’t see the end of the place. Just something called a ‘horizon’.
Then he started offering tours. After that, he started settlements to support the tours. Those settlements became the first Freetowns. All of us suddenly wanted to go out there, not up there.
It was almost five years to a day after Jack came down that the unthinkable happened. Orbitopians came down here to go on one of Jack’s tours! They had to come down in exoskeletons, they were so weak. They couldn’t eat the fruit from the trees outside the Freetowns; they had to have their protein drinks shipped along with ‘em in great big cooler wagons.
We looked at each other and the question Jack had asked rose on our lips. “Do you want to sentence your kids to this?”
We didn’t. No sir, thank you very much, we’ll work to supply you and save to move to a Freetown. Jack’s set up Freetowns near the cities. We can ‘commute’. It means we can go to the city to work, but come home to our town when we’re not working. We can watch our kids run in the sun and play, while the Orbitopians hum by looking tired and sad in the machines that hold ‘em up.
We didn’t believe Jack.
He didn’t mind.
He just gave us a new song and made us part of his story.
by Julian Miles | Apr 20, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The Gynler are a race that specialises in winning wars by slow, psychological means. They pride themselves on not having had to use a weapon of war in over a century. When it came to conquering Earth, they spent a long time in planning their opening move.
“It must be devastating to their collective psyche.”
“It must demonstrate our technological dominance.”
“It must be visible to all regardless of censorship.”
So they dusted off a strategy used three centuries before against a humanoid race called the Nondori: they attacked the Moon.
More correctly, they vandalised the Moon. Everyone knew about the Man, or Woman, in or on the Moon. Come joy or mishap, we smiled when we looked up on a clear night and saw the silver companion to our lives.
The Gynler struck the Moon with malicious precision. When we looked up the following night, a leering face peered down. Faintly comedic, fanged and horned, it was a perfect evolution of the infamous ‘Kilroy’ style of graffiti.
“We will leave them for a year. Let them quiver under the reminder of our power.”
Quiver we did – with rage.
That single act managed to achieve what centuries of diplomacy had failed to do: unite the nations of Earth. We plotted and schemed and frothed and spouted rhetoric and fortified all the while.
Kit Newman went to his boss with an idea he’d had at a barbeque outside the car repair shop they worked in. His boss laughed. Then stopped laughing and called his brother. Who called his boss: General Albert Simms. Again, the laughter turned to a thoughtful silence. Kit Newman got flown to London. Then to America. Then to Russia and on to China.
Four months and six days later, Kit Newman pressed the button at Canaveral that launched an old Ares V – carrying maximum payload – toward the Moon.
Three days later, Earth waited. Most watching screens, the rest standing in open spaces across the night side of the world.
Something grey-white blossomed dead-centre on that leering face high above. Within a few moments, the face was largely obscured by a pale blob. Around the world, humanity went noisily crazy and screamed defiance to the skies as they raised their glasses.
Sixty-five thousand litres of a blend that was mainly white exterior emulsion and anti-freeze makes a big mess. A glaringly obvious big mess when it’s slapped onto a vast, black scorched surface made by aliens who completely failed to understand human psychology.
Everyone agrees that the Moon’s surface will have to be cleaned up eventually. But before that, we’re going to wipe the Gynler off the face of known space.
by Julian Miles | Apr 15, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Tom! Tom!”
I shake my head and massage my jaw as I sit up. The pretty woman crouched by me looks worried. Behind her I hear a struggle occurring. That has something to do with the pain in my jaw.
“Are you okay?”
Good question. I raise my hand for a pause and take stock. I’m in a nice suit, sitting on the grey carpet tiles of the floor next to an overturned chair. I glance at her name tag.
“I’m fine, Margaret.”
“Thank god for that! I thought he was going to kill you!”
He was? Fragmented memories return: Arthur Windemere, long-term claimant. He’d come in for a ‘New Year Restart’ review and – what?
“Give me a moment, Margaret. That shook me up a bit.”
I stand up and see a green-jacketed figure, presumably Arthur, being locked into restraints by a police officer while a pair of security officers hold him. He’s screaming all sorts of nonsense and they’re not trying to calm him down.
“Let me help you up.”
With Margaret’s assistance I manage to stand up and lean on my desk. He must have really clouted me one. A chap in a blue uniform hurries over to me.
“Okay, Tom, we’re going to go down to the medical centre and get you checked over.”
He escorts me out of the open-plan office, down a long corridor, into a white room where two nurses wait. I lie down as instructed and he proceeds to do a very thorough examination before looking me in the eye.
“How’s the head, Tom?”
“Things seem to be a bit jumbled –” I look at his name tag. “Andy.”
With a smile he whips out an injector and applies it to my neck. There’s a brief stinging sensation and a sudden warmth accompanies my mind settling.
My name is Tom. I am part of the Cleardown team. We go into the welfare centres and work with the stubborn cases, using our skillsets to identify and goad the temperamental ones into assault, drive the vulnerable to suicide and the needy back out onto the streets where nature will save us money before spring. I know every miniscule piece and combination of legislation to withhold welfare chips. Using that, I drag every claimant through a bureaucratic nightmare until they snap – or die. Dying is preferred: less datawork.
When they attack me in frustration they contravene the terms of their agreement with WFA (Welfare For All). Prosecution is inevitable and they will join labour units or get exiled to Titan. More importantly, they are removed from the ‘black triangle’ of foodpacks, freedata and hydrofare; thus ceasing to be a drain upon our society.
My predecessor was Steve and my successor will be Ulrich. We are designed to be fragile in certain ways, so it takes less than the usual amount of force to break us. The more severe the sentence, the better it is.
Andy escorts me back and Margaret has already tidied my work area.
“For a moment I thought we’d had another bad one like the bloke who used to sit here.”
“Bad?”
She looks at me, eyes misty with tears: “He got attacked and cracked his head on the desk. Poor Steve never had a chance.”
“You’re a caring woman, Margaret. This place needs more people like you.”
Her eyes narrow and then open wider as she smiles; having decided that I am sincere.
“You remind me of him.” She looks down, then back at me: “What are you doing after work?”
by Julian Miles | Apr 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They say that Vikings never actually had horns on their helmets. Odd how that piece of trivia rises to mind at this moment of peril. I know why it’s arisen: the being attempting to end my existence has horns on his helmet – or his head looks like a knight’s full-face helm with quadruple horns set at ninety-degrees to each other. These horns are either aligned to one central on the forehead – or to ones extending forward and outward from the temples – from the examples of his race that I’ve seen.
A girder interrupts my musings: I run straight into it.
I come to lying on the ground with the helmed space barbarian looming over me, making noises like a short-circuiting loudspeaker. As my eyes focus, his head explodes and I see that there is no helmet involved – his head had horns. The spattering of alien gore snaps me fully conscious and I scoot backwards while spitting out gobs of xenobrain. I start to retch as the taste registers.
Minutes later, I’m puking bile to the accompaniment of girly laughter. That’s not funny.
Using a crunch-and-spring move I come to my feet, ready to give the lady a piece of my mind. Spinning around, I stare her straight in the second nipple pair from the top and hastily reconsider my options. Tracking my gaze upwards, I encounter an angular face of surprising charm and the greenest eyes I have ever seen. I suffer a ‘lost moment’ only men will understand before I realise that her eyes are glowing from within and while her hands are on her hips, the tail – which I presume to be hers – is pointing a Kritoralian Eviscerator at me. No wonder my erstwhile attacker’s head exploded!
“You’d be what they call a Hooman?”
She’s got a voice that is almost ULF. I can feel her speak. Is she the source of that contralto laughter? I nod.
“Goodly. I’m Persim. That me name. I be a Fune. Always wanted t’meet a Hooman.”
Here goes nothing: “Why?”
She laughs and yes, she’s the owner of the laughter.
“It’s a big night with lots o’stars. Only you lot seem to want to go find what’s behind the next one.”
I smile: “You’d be looking for a berth?”
“Yup. Got to get me off this rock before next moonrise. Otherwise one o’him what I just headshot will be my new owner.”
“New owner? What happened to your old owner?”
She points at the headless corpse: “Was ’im. Better get me gone. Was thinkin’ you might ‘elp me after I ‘elp you?”
I’ve never heard of a Fune, but then again, humanity is still coming to terms with space being multi-dimensional and chock full of aliens. The only reason Earth got left alone for so long was that we were in what was considered an uninhabited sector of an obscure dimension.
My father got out of Australia as soon as he could. Said the stars were calling him to come walk among them. I guess I inherited that wanderlust. Like Persim said: ‘go find out what’s behind the next one’.
That thought settles my answer: “I’m Doobrie. You’re welcome to a berth. Let’s go see what’s behind that one.” I point to a star low on the horizon. She looks, laughs and I get a feeling we’re going to see the back of many stars before we part ways.
