by Julian Miles | Jun 10, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I was face down in a pool of someone else’s vomit when they came for me. They had to drag me for two blocks before they could find someone with a cleansing suite capable of shifting the layers of ingrained filth that covered me from head to toe.
A little while later I stood, dripping and twitching, before the Commander of the Watch.
“Your Majesty, I’d like to say it’s a pleasure, and I’d like to say you’re looking well. Neither would be true.”
I nodded: “Gardin, I do understand. If you’d held off for a week, I could have made your day by being unable to appear by virtue of being dead.”
Gardin Badnors, my lifetime guardian, leapt his desk and punched me so hard it put me over the settee and through the coffee table. When I came round, he was standing over me, tamping his pipe and looking less than happy.
“You’re a charming young man and a royal fuckwit of the first water, Your Majesty. However, I will grant you that the assassination of your sister placed an unfair burden upon you, and the arrival of the alluring young Princessa from the Codamor System was timed perfectly to capture your grieving, turn it into lust and then groom that into obsession.”
He paused to lift a boot and place it across my throat: “But Your Majesty’s decision to indulge in an orgy of sex, drugs and gambling was his own bastard stupid idea of coping. As such, I had considered granting your unstated request to die as an unmourned addict of the Codamor opiate with the street name ‘A’.”
He knew. I’m dead, and it’s not going to be quick. Royalty or not, he’s going to kill me.
Gardin smiled around the pipe and exhaled a cloud of smoke: “No, you little shit, I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to help Your Majesty in the glorious coup you’ve come up with to reclaim the planet you gambled away for ten grams of A snorted off a fake Princessa’s lily-white arse. Alternatively, I’m going to lean on my boot right here while Captain Roukan puts a forceprobe through your lungs, then watch you choke on your own blood. You may slap your right hand on the floor to lead our noble cause, or your left to receive the ignominious end you so richly deserve.”
Bastard. But he’s right, too. Double bastard. I slap my right hand on the floor.
by Julian Miles | Jun 1, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Chandra Fourteen is an archaeological mystery. Not regarding its lost civilisation, nor the history of that civilisation. What everyone who encounters it becomes desperate to answer is why they did what they did.
Imagine a society at a pinnacle only dreamt of by man. Disease all-but banished, global peace established, a society turning itself toward furtherance of the physical, philosophical and spiritual sciences. A bright, beautiful world, geologically stabilised by a marvellous series of vents and pressor systems – that we still don’t understand – around their equivalents of the ‘Ring of Fire’.
That society has over ten thousand years of recorded history, showing parellels with humanity that cease when they nearly destroyed themselves in a global biowarfare holocaust. From that point it was as if they had gained something from the event that man has yet to realise. If the records found are complete, they never made war after that near-apocalypse.
Take time to mentally voyage across a world resembling the finest of climes that Earth has to offer, from sub tropical to frozen poles. See the artificial volcanoes that stabilise the world and allow a measure of weather control.
Now turn your gaze eastward, looking out across a gigantic ocean, seeing the peaks of the volcanoes like fenceposts stretching for hundreds of miles, then pause as you see that one of the ‘fenceposts’ has grown.
Impossibly tall, the vent installation at the centre of their greatest ocean stretches into orbit, a feat of engineering that has human engineers scanning it with a mix of glee, awe and despair.
How long it took to accomplish that feat is unknown. What followed took a lot longer, was far more difficult and infinitely more puzzling. This enlightened, advanced civilisation channelled it’s energies into putting the magma from the planet’s core into orbit.
It is insane to see this hollow sphere of barely ten-kilometre thick pumice, wrapped about a framework of a ceramic/metallic alloy that is still deemed impossible by our science. That sphere encases a dead planet, dead in a way never before encountered. They shut out the sun and, as far as can be ascertained, waited for one of the various lingering deaths to claim them. A monstrous, planetary suicide.
Professors Eppes and Rhodensteen have only one tenuous explanation, which is causing an uproar that looks to increase before it settles. It is based upon the one inscription on the atmosphere-piercing spire. At the top, plainly etched after the insane pyrospire ceased belching magma, is and inscription that translates as ‘We have become polluted/unclean’. From that, the learned Professors have drawn a conclusion: the society fell foul of mass delusion prompted by religious dogma.
When everyone has stopped screaming at each other, maybe we can return to looking for the truth – be it heretofore unexpected reason, or sad proof.
by Julian Miles | May 25, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I’m covered in blood and squishy bits that slide and splat on the floor. In that, I look the same as the entire boarding bay. Even the shipsuits are reduced to ribbons, and I can’t recognise a bodypart or weapon component anywhere.
She stands there, not a mark on her and hands on hips. The look on her face is a cross between amusement and bemusement.
“Can’t say I’ve met one of your kind before.” She smiles.
“Likewise.” I don’t.
There are many forms of psionics. Telekinesis is the most common, and personal nullification the rarest. Of the telekinetics, area-effect micromanipulation is the absolute pinnacle. It is also terrifying. The people who practice it, instead of taking a chemical inhibitor, are of a very ‘special’ mindset. People call them ‘shredders’ and regard them as mythical space-terrors.
Having full-spectrum personal psionic nullification in an always-on, unconscious implementation state will save you life and keep your thoughts private. It will not save what your clothes. I am naked and quaking, ankle deep in a blood-soaked pile of shredded kit.
She pulls a gun that seems too large for her hand: “You’ve just inherited a whole space-pirate scow. Or we get to see if you can nullify a flechette spray.”
Easy answer: I turn and squelch back through the puree of my crewmates, flicking chunks of them off me. Getting back into our decontamination lock, I have to stop the cleansing showers twice to scrape pirate mulch from the drains.
Wrapped in a robe I wander onto the silent bridge to see a ‘message received’ beacon flashing. I open it and have to smile:
FREIGHT HAULING. GOOD WORK FOR ONE MAN WITH A STARSHIP. ESPECIALLY FOR AN EX-PIRATE WHO DIDN’T CARRY A WEAPON FOR ME TO SHRED.
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.
