by Julian Miles | Aug 3, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
I woke to one of those ‘phantom impacts’ on the bed. The source of the bump was one of the legs of the spider looming over me. I will admit to squealing a little before grabbing my glasses to restore things into perspective.
The glasses allowed me to focus on the gigantic purple spider filling my bedroom. My squeal, which had been ebbing, climbed into a full-blown shriek.
A huge pair of mandibles swung down in front of my face and my shriek fainted dead away.
“Youthling, you have averred a policy of peaceful co-existence with my siblings all of your life. Many have not.”
The voice emanating from this monster arachnid did not alarm me as much as a sudden awareness of distant bedlam.
“Please excuse the disturbance. We are dealing with transgressors.”
I found a voice. It wasn’t my grown up one, but it had to do: “Transgressors?”
“The many who sorely afflicted my kin are being judged. We are the Avengers of Uttu.”
I swallowed hard before asking: “Uttu?”
“She who wove the net upon which the universes hang. We are her blessed, journeying the webs between the suns to bring her scattered kindred home.”
I took a moment to think slightly faster than my hyperventilation, then slowed breathing and imagination.
“You’re taking all the spiders to arachnid heaven?”
“I do not accurately parse the terms ‘arachnid’ or ‘heaven’, but derivation by context leads to confirmation of your query.”
“You will be leaving afterwards?”
“Assuredly. We have many planets yet to visit.”
“So why are you in my bedroom?”
“The sibling that you prevented your progenitor from crushing with a tome yesterday asked me to thank you.”
“They remember?”
“Other than threats, only for a short while. I was impressed by the level of recall, which indicated repeated interventions by yourself.”
“Repeated? I though spiders didn’t live very long?”
“They live many cycles. They just do not stay in one location for long. Otherwise their uncharacteristic longevity would be noticed by your elders.”
I had a moment of wonder and horror: “Spiders live for centuries but we haven’t noticed because they were actually a part of a covert alien ecosystem in temporary residence on our planet, which is about to depart forever?”
“Correct.”
I just stared. I may have gibbered a bit.
“My vessel is ready. Farewell, youthling.”
It backed out of my room without touching a thing. In the darkness of the hallway, the glow of eight violet eyes receded, then vanished.
I fainted.
As nightmares go, I thought it was new paradigm. Until I turned on the news the following day.
That was two months ago. While a lot of people had squished a spider, a strange commonality was that there seemed to be only one person in each home or office who did that. We’ve got a new view of the universe, a massively reduced population, and a lot of single-parent families.
Governments and religions are having a hard time arguing against the sudden outbreak of Uttu shrines and anti-Uttu cults, but everyone expects sectarian violence soon.
Ecologists are quietly watching and guessing what the sudden loss of spiders will do to the world, apart from make arachnophobes happy.
Me? I had to mop up my father.
Now I care for my mother: waking up to find a giant purple spider hacking her husband to pieces was a little much for her mind.
We, like everyone else, just get by. And worry about every other creature that has had an ancient divinity associated with it.
Especially the species that humanity has rendered extinct.
by Julian Miles | Jul 23, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Upon a world a lot like our own, amidst ruins of wonders long fallen, there lies a single legible artefact, its surface unblemished by time, with words still clear under the transparent layer that keeps its metallic surface pristine.
Year 0001 U.S.T.
We are The Utopia Society, and we are victorious at last. Every whim that plagued you is either realised or edited from your psyche. Every flaw that made birth such a gamble has been repaired. You are what you can be, you are everything you can be, and you are that from birth.
Year 0011 U.S.T.
We are The Utopia Society, and whatever you need is provided. What you need is tailored for the greatest good. What you will be is chosen early so you can prepare for your productive lifetime without wasted effort. No disappointment, no heartbreak, no peer pressure or emotional burdens. You cannot be guilty, for guilt is a flaw and there are no longer any flaws.
Year 0092 U.S.T.
We are The Utopia Society, and we are done. We were perfect. Too perfect to aspire, too perfect to desire, too perfect to live. We existed flawlessly amidst a flawed universe, and it proved to be an intolerable burden.
by Julian Miles | Jul 14, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
They call me Wrench. It’s not particularly imaginative, but it does the job. Just like Socket, who still has a case to keep all the fiddly bits together. I like the adaptability and extra weight of a wrench, though. Socket has to be sneaky, coz if he hits anyone hard he might bend the case, so he has to use the long-handled socket drive as a little club. Still, it’s better than the spannermen. You get a poxy little quarter-inch or seven-mil to start. You can’t kill anybody with that easily. You have to get really personal about it, almost like knifework.
Knives. Yeah, I remember knives. I’m old. Seen one once, but the guardsman put it away before anyone could make a grab for it. It was just after Ma and Pa got downgraded. Good thing Pa dabbled with mechanicals as a hobby. Down here among the piles, if you can’t fix anything, you’re just fodder. Nobody wants to be fodder.
How did it get this bad? You’re asking at the wrong end of this society, chum. You want to go upside to get the lowdown on that. All we know is that our uncles and aunts made a bit of a stink about being chosen to be the underclass. They kept on making a stink until the upsiders had just about banned everything we could use against ‘em. The Bandroids were the trick. Couldn’t fool one of them. We just got our sharps taken away, then they took our blunt gear too. Left us with not a whole lot to do anything with, truth be told. But the treadmills at the powerplants don’t need tools, they just need legs.
Spanners? No, I don’t know how that came about either. Somebody screwed up, is my guess. Bandroids don’t consider spanners and similar to have weapons potential, so they leave us with ‘em. My adjustable wrench came from me pa. Biggest one not confiscated, so he said.
Blades? Yeah, we have a few. Problem is, Bandroids come in a lot of sizes and the small ones will call big ones and so it goes. A man can’t even get a decent shave no more. Got to use that cream instead. It’s just not manly, I tell you. A man should be able to shave with a razor. But at least we can mix that cream with solvent, freeze it and get Dust crystals. Makes a man forget his troubles for a few hours, does Dust.
Rebellion? You’ve been listening to those resistance stories, haven’t you? Well, come with me. That much I can give you a clear steer on. You see that place up there? That’s Socket’s girl’s place. Yeah, it’s proper clean. She can do that because she is the resistance. Well, she writes a good resistance. Your bosses pay her a good-damn fortune for articles about a rebellion that only exists on paper.
Illegal? Not a bit. Socket’s girl is smart. She got it all cleared with the Department of Bans. Seems she can write about rebellion as much as she likes. Makes the folk upside all nervy and obedient, she got told. That’s a good thing, apparently.
Why would I want to fight a battle where most of us would die to get to a place where I don’t know how to live? We’ve about got it sorted right here. Spanners and Dust. It’s all a man needs, these days.
by Julian Miles | Jul 6, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
There is an unacknowledged transcript of the end of Twentieth Fleet. It surfaced a few years after the event that removed a small star system at the far edge of the Milky Way from existence in a flash of glorious colours and strange radiation.
We suspect that the lost system contained the origin planet of Homo sapiens, our predecessors, but as data transfer is notorious for inherent corruption, we cannot state with certainty from the records we have left.
Why exactly this transcript remains unacknowledged is a puzzling thing, because it hints at a starfaring race of immense antiquity and divergent technologies.
But I am not here to draw conclusions. I am here to disseminate the transcript so greater minds than mine can do that.
The last transmission of the Assault Cruiser Hyperdyne, as transcribed by the deadfall recording array in the quadrant monitoring station at Upervant:
“It looked like a short-handled sledgehammer!”
“Did it go through the Hyperdyne’s stellar drive before or after the enormous lupine entity appeared and ate your escorts?”
“After. The being named Azbragh who appeared did apologise – he had been aiming at the lupine entity, which he named a ‘Fenreer’. He set off after it when I told him our ship was doomed anyway.”
“That was when you long range sensors detected the silver missile with prismatic drive emissions?”
“No, that was when we saw a giant metallic serpent wrapping itself around a rainbow-hued freespace edifice of some kind.”
“Really? Very well. You moved to investigate, I presume?”
“No sir, we did not. There were too many freespace entities of types similar and dissimilar to Azbragh appearing and engaging in pitched battle with unknown energy technologies and primitive melee weapons.”
“In your opinion, were they similar to any previously encountered group, or even historical reports like those about the Olympus Theocracy?”
“I would agree a similarity between accounts of the Theocracy’s Guardforms and the Fenreer, sir. Apart from that, these beings seemed to be completely novel alien forms.”
“And this Azbragh being returned to warn you?”
“Yes. He looked to be badly wounded on his second visit.”
“And as you completed the withdrawal, the entire planetary system collapsed in upon itself?”
“Yes. There were some odd visual effects, like a great tree of lightning connecting the planets and such, but there were no adverse gravitational effects, which we expected from proximity to what we assumed to be a nascent black hole.”
“Your current status?”
“We appear to have suffered some unquantifiable irradiation, sir. Hallucinations and deliria are getting worse. I regretfully recommend that you write the Twentieth off and place this sector under ban.”
It is recorded that the Hyperdyne was lost to a ‘catastrophic stellar drive malfunction’; the aberrant drive field emitted by that moment inducing a detrimental resonance effect with the rest of Fleet Twenty’s stellar drives, causing them to detonate in a freakish chain reaction. No record of the Twentieth Fleet’s actual co-ordinates when this catastrophe occurred is available.
by Julian Miles | Jun 30, 2015 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
He nailed that card to the hull of my bird and said: “Don’t you be takin’ it off. Shows people what y’are.”
I looked at that Ace of Spades and I’m not ashamed to admit it, I cried. Timmy and his posse stalked off all righteous-like, while I stood on a deck speckled with my fallen tears.
“You got a choice, Jensen Bard.”
I turned to see Rosalie, smiling like she always did and offering me a cup of something brewed in the spare cooling system off her bird. I took it an’ choked down a half-cup, crying more but feeling better.
“What choice, Rosalie Crane?”
She pointed to the ragged card: “You gonna let that be the memorial for your flight? The mark of a reaper and the repute of someone who may not be a coward, but fled anyway? T’ain’t no crime to survive. It’s just that some of our flyboys got too much Kamikaze and not enough Art of War in their heads.”
I grinned at that. She grinned right back.
“I can tell you gots an idea, Rosalie. Let me in on it.”
“I got an idea, but we’re not gonna be sleepin’ and you better get Flag-Chief Denners in here to approve it.”
Next morning Timmy led his flight down to the bay and I saw him up his swagger as he entered. Then his pace went awry and he stopped. His posse just stared, hollered and pointed.
My bird had a glorious Ace of Spades blazoned right up both sides of the tail fin, all done with filigree paintwork – it had taken ages to programme the painterbots. Down one side of the Ace there were the names and numbers of all eleven of my lost flight. Across the bottom was the banner ‘Fighting to Honour the Fallen’.
Timmy got his act together and barked a laugh as he pointed. None of his posse did. When I walked out, they came to attention and snapped salutes. Timmy hunched his shoulders and stomped off. I’d have trouble with him, but it was trouble we could settle in the dojo. Out here, I’d be a Flight Captain again. I had no doubts, and saw no doubts on the faces before me.
