by Julian Miles | Oct 12, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Section three. All clear.”
That’s Christov. Which is clever, because according to the heartbeat monitor I have, Christov’s heart stopped beating ninety-four seconds ago.
My claw comes down on the ‘Section Three Purge’ button as people about me register my movement and open their mouths to shout. Far to our west, an outlying section of the metropolis dies under neutron charge detonations and layered EMP.
“Section three was compromised one hundred seconds ago. The dead man talking confirmed it.”
Shock registers, then sorrow, gratitude, and finally: renewed resolve.
Nanowar is a tainted thing, a combination of chess, sociopathy and gambling. As the enemy can work through things so small, a certain paranoia has to be practised, and it is hard keeping the equivalent of Level Three Disease control everywhere that could be threatened. Errors occur. People die before they are even aware of being killed – or even invaded.
I am a Telemeter, the latest edge for my side. A totally sealed armoured unit, impervious to anything below macro-scale invasive attack. I look like a giant beetle and move with a silence that makes anyone who has a fear of multi-legged things incapable of working with me.
My purpose is to monitor everyone else, to make tactical decisions and enact suppression routines that are simply too hard for humans to make in the correct timeframe. They lose precious seconds in emotional quandaries, seconds that cannot be lost if we are to counter the insurgencies.
“Section four. All clear.”
That’s Michaela. She’s clever, and has a heartbeat too.
I do not move.
There are sighs of relief.
by Julian Miles | Oct 2, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There is always an uncertainty after you’re restored. The time between your last backup and the point when you died is an unknown. You can get various synopses if you ask, and you can catch up with the events via media reports or conversations with those who saw you. But you weren’t there. It can be difficult to reconcile.
“Finally, for conspicuous gallantry in the face of overwhelming odds: for giving his life to save his comrades, I award this Conciliator Star to Officer Banto Rhees.”
I never thought of myself as a hero. Never considered myself to have the right mindset to plunge into a room full of drug-crazed Neo-Jamaican heavies, taking multiple hits before using one of their own grenades to take them all out, allowing my team to use that gap in the encirclement to escape their own certain deaths.
Police work never gets any easier. I hear that even the rural beats have drug labs and water smugglers to deal with, these days. It’s a thankless task, bringing law to the lawless while politicians, press and custodians watch for the slightest deviance from their perceptions of ‘proper police procedure’.
My grandfather came to the UK from Nigeria in search of a police force that wasn’t venal and corrupt. By and large, he found it. My dad served until his retirement, and I went into the police after two years in the army, having gone in straight from college. You could say that police work is in my blood. You would also be right in saying detective work is in my blood, as my dad spent thirty years as one.
Thirty years. Plus a decade of my own experience. So when I checked my comrades’ reports of my heroic demise and found that they were identical, one of my father’s first lessons came to me: “Witnesses never see the same thing. They never say the same thing, either. Unless they practice their stories. Which always means the witnesses have something to hide.”
I have a medal and a team who actively assisted – or caused – my heroic death in the line of duty. I think I shall use the commendation to facilitate me following in my father’s footsteps: a transfer from Armed Response to New Scotland Yard. Then I shall investigate just how many murderers are hiding behind my medal.
by Julian Miles | Sep 11, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Hawking proposed that information was not consumed by black holes, just held in super-translation holograms at the event horizon. I proposed that stored information is always accessible. Discounting the chaotic infoforms emitted as Hawking radiation, I was sure that there had to be a way to interrogate the universe’s archives.
Like the rest of humanity, I had witnessed the global schisms instigated by the Transit phenomena, although I was only a child. To me, the ability to switch from physical body to virtual was a magical thing. By the time the Hawking proposals were reaching tenuous confirmation, I had been Transited for over a century. With the fortune made by my own work multiplied nearly a hundredfold by speculators eager to reap the rewards of the biggest big data to ever exist, I spent the next century working with the most brilliant minds I could find. Many of them so brilliant that science regarded them as crazy.
Being Transited, I needed no life support of other bulky luxuries. The huge, freespace-built drive unit to carry the superdense, solid-state device I had transferred my consciousness to was fired up on what would have been my two-hundred and fiftieth birthday. Within minutes of launch I had attained ludicrous speeds, heading towards V404 Cygni faster than anything man had ever built. From that pinnacle, my ship dived into subspace and I left what is termed as reality for a while.
When I returned from the place where machines misbehave unless sentience is within to keep them anchored, I beheld V404 – and experienced helpless terror.
I remained in the throes of that terror until ejected by my vessel, whereupon I entered a state that I can only describe by theoretical allegory. If one was being eaten alive, I suspect the experience may share some with what I felt. The flashes of pain, the reduction of sensation, the frantic thrashing of phantom limbs. That last one finished me. I had never missed my body, until then – the moment where my consciousness was dying.
The blackness took me in chunks, something wholly alien to my digitised perceptions of self. When the dark consumed me, I was puzzled by my continuance, before resolving to at least fade away with some vestige of grace.
Then the community reached me and night turned to day.
And that is where I remain, dwelling in a proof of Hawking’s contestation that goes so far beyond it as to almost make it erroneous.
Everything is here. The information of a universe consumed. The sentiences of all those consumed, too. Not all survive intact, but those that do not are purposed with whatever they can achieve. Our reality is a toroid of super-translated data holograms architected by the sentiences that survived the transition into it.
This place grows as the hungry infostar we encircle draws in and translates everything without into dataforms within.
Of all the wonders I have encountered, it is the fact that I am content that staggers me most. This place is, I believe, the nearest a scientist can get to heaven.
by Julian Miles | Sep 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“Lie back, Daniel Sixteen. This will be over in under five instants.”
I swing my legs up and settle into the logro, feeling the soft curves adjust to the contour and temperature settings supplied by my envi. Things have definitely come long way from my last forgetting. Not that I remember the exact details, but the echo of certainty – what used to be called déjà vu – hints me true.
Yarrie Four-Twenty Clone smiles and rests her hand on my brow, her entire forearm tailored to convey reassurance and gravitas with that single contact: I am safe in competent hands.
“Please drop your envi.”
A simple request that causes me more discomfort than the fact I am about to have three decimillennia defragmented. When one lives forever, the little things become so tiresome: shower temperatures, seat posture preferences, tea flavours and strengths, they all take up time and matter. So we have attotech personal processors – envi – to carry those environment invariables and free our matter for living.
I drop my envi and feel a lack that I cannot name. Then a grey twisting streaks across my conscious, is gone, and I feel lighter. My envi restarts without prompting.
“Arise, Daniel Sixteen. You are cleared.”
Man’s technology has allowed him to live forever. In conjunction with the need to limit the number who are permitted to do so, there is a need for those of us who are permitted immortality to remain sane – some early horrors taught us that lesson well.
The postulated problems with memory turned into hard limitations until selective memory removal became a science, two centuries after its genesis in the torture chambers of MK-Ultra. Amnesia is not enough: an amnesiac has simply lost the way to a memory, not lost the memory itself. Brains have a finite capacity and only a limited way to tidy up – after all, organically we’re still designed for around a hundred years of thinking at most.
The memory removal process has retasked an old term, and ‘defragmentation’ is what immortals voluntarily undergo. Formative memories – the first four decades – are inviolate. Apart from that, you can choose what you keep: the Euphorics only retain joyous events, Glooms keep their disappointments close, Screamers retain extreme events, Horrors retain catastrophes, and so on. The gamut is similar to the old book and film genres, but since we can come back from anything bar a total brain incineration, we are our own entertainment. Vicarious pleasures are a thing of the past for the eternals, and those who do not qualify for immortality can watch us for their entertainment.
by Julian Miles | Aug 21, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Written this 10th day of August in the year of Our Lord 1708.
My king, I fear for the custody of the charge you bequeathed me, so many years agone. My health is failing, and while that which is our burden seems to be weakening, I am sure that my end will arrive sooner.
I have made as much preparation as possible, but as you urged me to be diligent in all things regarding my charge, I have to let you know that the good Lord may take me into his care before he sees fit to lift your penance.
As you requested, this is the current disposition of my charge –
He awakes at dawn and undertakes votive prayers to the false-idol star that he refuses to recant, despite the diligent efforts of the chaplain you assigned. He breakfasts upon water and mealy bread, and it is noticeable that he quaffs far more than he devours these days.
He spends his morning performing arcane rituals as always. I think that La Riviere’s contention was correct: “computay shonal” operations are related to the discipline of mathematics in some manner that we do not yet grasp.
The afternoon is spent sitting motionless in whatever daylight he can attain. His preference for strong sunlight has increased, but he is never forceful, merely insistent that he get the best seat within his limited demesne.
He remains cheerful, polite, noncommittal and entirely lacking in the remotest understanding of the concept of death. His requests to talk to “Leonardo” really do refer to the Sage of Vinci!
After sunset he gratefully accepts assistance in removing the mildew that accumulates upon his mercury skin each day. I note that the mossy tarnish spreads faster and is increasingly difficult to remove. My manservant has to scour it away with potato spirits and coarse vinegar.
Post-cleansing, he settles to rest without evening rituals or further converse.
This routine remains, of course, without deviation.
In regards to his ongoing care, I attach an authority for your signature, as black velvet of requisite weight and size for his veil has increased to a price beyond the stipend allowed for his upkeep.
This is the whole of it. I expect that this may well be the last missive you receive from me. I beg that you make ready for the continuance of his care in the event of my death.
I trust that you are in robust health, as France depends upon her Sun King.
I pray that Our Lord bestows mercy upon you and takes the changeling soon. Should I find myself blessedly chosen to be worthy of heaven, I shall entreat the angels upon you behalf.
I remain, as ever and until the Lord gainsays me, your humble servant –
Bénigne Dauvergne de Saint-Mars.
