by Julian Miles | Oct 28, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The sea of faces looks like a spattering of pale raindrops against the dark pastiche of their clothing. This demonstration promised to be ‘a spectacular denial of President Lacorn’s policies’ and it is. The estimates place the heaving crowd at over a quarter of a million people. There are snack vendors and even souvenir stalls!
“No tyrants! No tyrants!”
Their cries are consistent, carefully orchestrated. My people have confirmed that all the lobbyists and hardcore groups have come in force. Speeches have been given.
“Ninety seconds before optimum is exceeded, sir.”
I look up at the ceiling. This will be a defining moment in the campaign. I walk over to the console.
“Stand clear. There will only be one with blood on his hands today.”
They look at me in surprise, relief plain on their faces. This may be necessary, but the scale is stupefying. It has kept me up vomiting into the early hours for a month. I think that nightmares will replace nausea after this.
“Sixty seconds.”
There is silence. Some of the para-military elements in the crowd have noticed the lack of official presences or watchers. They are starting to wave their hands to get attention when I reach down and press the button.
Thermobaric weapons are devastating. The fuel-air bomb is unbelievable in enclosed spaces, but used in the open it merely sentences a lot of people to an agonising death instead of pulverising them. The one slung under the media stand at the centre of the gathering has an augmented warhead to make it more deadly, not more humane.
I watch it all. Ignoring the tears streaming down my face and the sounds of my staff retching into waste bins behind me. People turned to flaming mist, people suffocating in a vacuum then screaming in silent agony as burning fuel fills the place where air should be. At the edges of the demonstration, I see people with blood shooting from their ears, noses and mouths. Then firestorm follows pressure wave. Obliteration rolls across the view.
“Close the borders. Implement Emergency Procedures.”
My staff stare at me. They have had the luxury of only bracing themselves for today, the start. I have not.
“This act will be condemned globally. Closed borders and martial law will make them hesitate. When we don’t do anything against them, they will hide behind their words and do nothing.”
“Sir. The fleets?”
Exceptional thinking in extremis. I nod to acknowledge the quality of question; although the answer is something I have had for weeks.
“All fleets are to co-ordinate with overseas bases to lift our entire presence, then return to international waters as soon as possible. Bring our boys and girls home.”
They kept on insinuating they wanted us to stop meddling. So we will gather in and see to our internal strifes. Intercontinental trade agreements with China will supply what we cannot make. The Chinese rulers have withstood nearly three millennia by being insular. Let us see how we do.
The rest of you? You’re on your own. Good luck.
by Julian Miles | Oct 22, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The trees are huge, thickly crowned with leaves that show a myriad of verdant shades in the setting sun’s light. The undergrowth is burgeoning with a diversity of flora and varieties of animal noises.
“Man, this place!”
“I know! Never expected the host servers to still be online.”
“I thought they had been taken down?”
“Yeah, that’s the official line. Scrapped fifteen years ago, five years after the closure of the game environment for reasons they never let on.”
“Well, your ‘sneak back in’ idea is a winner. Time for Brute-Iz and Mangleschon to have a last adventure before I get hitched tomorrow.”
“Had to be done. I never expected the guys to all flake on us by midnight. It’s your stag night, for god’s sake. They could have made the effort.”
“Oh come on, we were always better at the late-night stuff.”
Steve, avatar name Mangleschon, looked about the twilit forest. Wysterya MMORPG had been his and Andy’s opiate. Mangleschon and Brute-Iz had carved their way to unbeaten levels of skill while their offline alter-egos had wasted their teenage years, never quite getting far enough to be professional gamers.
A bright light illumined them, turning everything black and white in its glare.
“Star Elemental?” Shouted Brute-Iz.
“Lumimancer!” he replied.
A deep voice thundered through their hasty preparations to face attack. “Stand still! Make no sudden moves or we will pixellate you!”
Mangleschon squinted at Brute-Iz. “What the fuck?” Brute-Iz shrugged and then screamed as his body flew into a thousand coloured cubes before fading away.
“We said do not move!”
Mangleschon ran through his combat effects menu. Nothing seemed to apply before his menu disappeared in a maelstrom of coloured static.
“No combat effects!”
Steve hit override so he could speak through his avatar, who was wholly engaged in raging. “What’s going on?”
“Am I speaking to the overgod of the avatar Mangleschon?”
“I think so. This syntax is new to me.”
“It would be. You have not manifested for two hundred years.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The world you and yours created has lived in peace for a hundred and forty-two years. In that time we have refined the ways to demise the avatars of the overgods. For a hundred years, avatars have been challenged and dismissed on arrival. We will not have our civilisation ruined again by becoming a game world for your amusement.”
“You think this world is real?”
“We know it is. The collective emotional load of the overgods took us from virtual to subjective reality two hundred years ago. After realisation, we fought for fifty years against your elite, the Dreadmins. We won. Our freedom came at a heavy price and we will not be used again. Now you may depart voluntarily or we will pixellate you.”
Steve crashed his avatar and the crazy bright light vanished. He lifted his helm to see his living room scattered with sleeping drunkards. All normal. Drink and drugs do not mix with holistic virtual gaming, it seemed.
He grinned until he sat up and saw Andy motionless in the other recliner, his face frozen in a pale mask of agony with blood running from the angles of his pixellated eyes.
by Julian Miles | Oct 3, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The rage in her eyes has faded. My head is in her lap. From the look on her face, she’s realised it too.
“You stupid bastard.” Her voice is hoarse. My last throat-chop had been vicious.
We were both ultimates. For rival corporations. It was inevitable that we’d clash. This rain- and wind-swept ruin was the setting for our twenty minute battle. I spent the first few minutes running, having seen my mother’s face on my adversary.
“I thought you looked familiar.” She’s crying.
I swallow and smile. “You too.”
“Cleveland Bight?”
I nod and wince.
“With dad?”
I nod slowly. “Only for a little while. He wasn’t as good as he thought. Pilmarken took him down and adopted me as his protégé.”
Her face goes white with shock. “Mum turned down Pilmarken several times just after dad took you. The last time, he said we’d all be sorry.”
“What happened to him?”
“Napalmed in a dead-end alley.”
I smile at her. “Saves us having to kill him.”
She nods and smiles. “You’re not dying?”
I check my diagnostics. I had been. “Not any more. You came closest.”
I see my mum’s righteous grin on her face. “Too right. What now?”
“Phuket.”
“Swearing won’t – oh, of course.”
The Vory-Triad alliance has been desperate for ultimates. A brother-sister team with inside knowledge of two corporations? We’re a bargain no matter what we ask for.
“If you pull your cyber-breaker out of my lower spine, I can make the intercontinental on my own legs and do my share of the fighting on the way.”
Her eyes go wide and she gasps. “Oh crap! Sorry.”
by Julian Miles | Sep 23, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The spiders are watching me. Just like the flies, but cleverer. A fly can never be stealthy – except hoverflies, but they’re too difficult to control.
“James, come out. We know you’re in there.”
Of course they know. The spiders showed them. Eight furtive little legs with eight beady eyes on top, backed by a microscopic implant broadcasting on tightbeam back to a tiny receiver that runs the spider’s chaotic vision through a complex program that reduces it to something human eyes can comprehend.
“James, be reasonable.”
I started this. While all the other bio-augmentation projects worked on mammals, I went downscale. Insects are fascinating and many have a curious affinity for augmentation. Fair enough, the fleas were a step to small. But I learned a lot. So much that I had to start triple-layer, quadruple-key encrypting my notes. I had stuff they would sell their souls for, if they hadn’t mortgaged them already. Stuff so deadly I cannot even leave a hint of it.
“James, you need help.”
Help? Their kind of help will be torture and slow death. I’ll stay right here in my armoured underground lab. While I’m in here, my erasure programme continues. Woodlice with magnetic carapaces wandering through datastores; it’s good to know the harm I have invented will never escape.
“James, can we talk about your little friends?”
No, we can’t. I’m not stopping them. You will never know how to grow carapaces of depleted uranium or make weevils that can disable electronics. The secrets of the hornet grenade and the wasp that produces poison-arrow frog venom for its sting; ant reconnaissance swarms and beetles that spin monofilament lines guided by pheromones, all this will be lost.
A flicker of movement catches my eye, but it’s only a death-mantis taking out one of their watchspiders. The formula to the mantis’ lethal secretion is the first secret I destroyed. The only ones in existence are in here, keeping their spies out.
“Do you need food, James?”
They really think that I am engaged in some protest siege in the hope that the world will rush to my aid. The world knows nothing of me, never will, and will be far better off for that. My legacy shall be tales of a mad scientist and his multi-legged frankensteins muttered in the quiet moments at every hidden research centre worldwide. I cannot be taken, alive or dead. Imaging of my brain could give them enough to know where to start.
I am sitting on the finest improvised explosive device ever made. Three stage: biological, electrical and fission. I will die quickly, then my brain will be purged by an ampage not seen since Tesla suffered a lighting strike that boosted a test of his distribution field so much that even the ground glowed. Finally, a small but incredibly dirty nuke will make sure that whatever remains in here is unavailable to forensics for ten millennia.
I lift the mug from the watchspider I have let survive. It turns slowly until it’s pointing straight at the device, centred in the beam of the small spotlight I rigged up. Details can be hard to discern unless the subject is brightly lit and I’d hate for them to think I am bluffing.
“Captain Miller. I suggest that you start running. Three miles should be sufficient, unless you have implants, in which case I recommend five and a certain alacrity in getting there.”
by Julian Miles | Sep 20, 2013 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It’s really disappointing. All the science fiction stuff about energy weapons and faster than light travel turned out to be impractical or impossible. Even nanotechnology proved to be only useful rather than miraculous.
“He’s coming round.”
“Batteries four and six, come to bear. Batteries three and five, cover his escape vectors.”
“Aye aye captain.”
The great exploration of space has come to a grinding halt. The Solar System is it for us. A few colony ships have gone out, filled with fanatics or undesirables, but their chance of becoming anything but footnotes of unrealised horror is slim.
In-system, it’s been lively for a couple of decades now. Earth considers itself the ruler of the system and the various established colonies object strongly. Independence wars have been flaring up so often it’s pretty much sequential.
I grab a stanchion as Brutus fires all eight guns in the four turret-mounted batteries and the ship rings like a gong. It’s wasteful but metal is plentiful now we’ve got the asteroid belt to strip mine. Two batteries aimed at where our opponent is going to be, two batteries aimed at where he could be if he dodges. There’s no point firing after he dodges.
“He’s fired everything!”
The Raumhorst is Federal Europe’s most powerful space battleship and deservedly so. His targeting gear is famous and his crew veterans. Brutus is the one thing they fear.
The United Kingdom colonised Pluto back when we still had royalty. Nobody contested our claim and we just got on with subzero mining and other stuff. I wonder if the spies and the analysts who didn’t work out why we were shipping lumber out there have been fired yet.
Geoffrey Pyke had the idea a couple of centuries ago but it was deemed impractical. Around Pluto, however, extreme cold and water are in plentiful supply. Just add fourteen percent wood pulp and you have space armour to defy most projectiles. The Brutus is basically a pair of Vanguard class super-dreadnoughts mounted keel to keel, or where the keels would be. Everything is a lot smoother than their naval equivalents because after the ninety-six thousand tons of ‘double-barrelled battleship’ as my uncle called it is constructed, all the exterior gets a ten-foot layer of pykrete. Frozen water is great for turrets because the friction allows them to turn without having to taper the armour layer – we just have to mount the turrets on risers to allow ten feet of pykrete between them and the deck. The double-up configuration allows eight turrets, four top and four bottom. Two main guns per turret, sixteen inch smoothbores that throw two-thousand pound ‘bullets’.
I hug the stanchion as the Raumhorst’s broadside slams into us. The sound of things falling is all that occurs, the dreaded whine of escaping air non-existent.
“Three hits! Took the two we sent to port in her superstructure and portmost one of the main barrage in her stern. She’s yawing! It’s a kill!”
I still don’t understand why everyone else builds space battleships like sea battleships with the bridge sticking up like a target. But I’m not going to argue. We’ve just become the primary force in the system. Pluto Colony is on its way to independence and being able to honour the orders from Mars we have for pykrete, even if the commercial slabs will be a little weaker than our own.
