On The House

by Kathy Kachelries | Jan 16, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

It was going to be a very, very slow night. Tuesdays usually were. Throw in the hellacious thunderstorm outside, and not even a desperate alcoholic would wander in. I had just decided to close the bar up early when the mother of all lightening bolts hit just outside the window, nearly blinding me. After I rubbed the white circles from my eyes, I was startled to discover a man standing three feet in front of me. He placed a copy of that fat New York telephone directory on the bar and asked me for a beer.

“Where the hell did you come from and why ain’t you wet?” I demanded as I placed a Budweiser draft in front of him, then added, “That’ll be $2.00.”

He smiled. “’When,’ you mean,” he replied, “and I don’t have any money from this area. But it doesn’t matter,“ he glanced down at one of them big city watches with all kinds of dials and buttons, “because in exactly 1 minute and nine seconds you’re going to say ‘It’s on the house.’”

Thunderstorms always bring out the crackpots. “Why would I say that?”

He chugged half the beer and glanced at his watch again. “Because, in exactly 58 seconds, I’m going to save your life.”

I inched closer to the baseball bat that I keep behind the bar. “You sure about that, mister?”

He walked to the back corner, where he was practically swallowed up by the shadows. “Because I’m a temporal police officer, and a criminal from the 24th century fled to this time. He needs money. Unfortunately for you, he doesn’t know how to use your century’s projectile weapons. He stole a hair-trigger pistol. You’ll see soon enough.”

Just then, a shirtless maniac came crashing through the door. He was soggy as hell and shaking like a leaf. After he did the drunk-dance up to the bar, he slurred, “Give me all your money, quick,” and yanked some pawnshop gun out of his pocket. He might have been more confused than I was.

“Take it easy…” I started, but my voice was lost in the sound and light from the muzzle of his pistol.

By the time I remembered where I was, I wasn’t there anymore. Instead, I was against the old-fashioned cash register my boss kept around for that “old-time feel.” My ears were ringing, my back hurt, but somehow, I wasn’t dead. Across the bar, the cop guy downed the last bit of his beer, and the would-be assassin was lying on the floor tied up with some kind of glowing neon rope. The New York phone book was against my shirt. A column of white smoke spun up from a big-ass hole in the front of it.

“Sorry I had to let him shoot,” he said as he plunked the bottle onto the bar. “The DA needed enough evidence to put him away for a long time. What do I owe you for the beer?”

From far away, I heard my voice say, “Uh, it’s…it’s on the house”

He smiled again, pressed a button on his fancy watch, and both of them disappeared in a flash of light. I stood there for ten minutes before making up my mind. I grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels, walked over to the door, locked it, and sat down in a corner booth with every intention of emptying the thing before going home.

The Electric Ant

by Kathy Kachelries | Jan 12, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

“Okay everyone, you know the drill.”

Alex’s partner didn’t break pace between the doorway and the register, and she swung her gun around with the precise grace of someone who had done this far too many times. Her features were hidden behind a fuzzmask, and the sharp tips of her black hair poked from the base of the thin helmet. Nis was a professional: professional thief, professional manipulator, professional drug courier, and professional counterfeiter. She was a professional at everything that skimmed beneath Federal radar. Alex was not a professional. Alex was a nineteen year old boy who’d never pulled the trigger of a pulse rifle.

Behind the counter, a teenage register kid went white.

“Alex,” Nis called without taking her eyes from the boy. “Damage control.”

Alex nodded. He continued into the back of the restaurant, rifle at chest level, listening through the hum of microwaves for hints of movement. Pulse rifles weren’t lethal, which is why they used them. Murder was a level one crime. Robbery was level three. There were two employees in the kitchen: an attractive blond girl no older than twenty five and a man no younger than fifty. At the sight of his weapon, the girl screeched something incomprehensible while the man stepped away from the burger assembly line and coolly lifted his hands to his head.

Quietly, almost calmly, he backed into the wall and listened to his partner’s voice fire orders like the guns he’d heard on television. “Into the back,” she finally said, and the kid appeared in the doorway with Nis’s pulse rifle motionless against his skull. He didn’t look so hot; eyes wide, skin pale, breath coming and going at a rate that couldn’t be maintained for long. His legs moved beneath him like the legs of someone who’d had too much gin, and he stumbled forward to hold his weight against the assembly line.

Despite her panic, the woman was breathing slowly, deeply. The man remained calm. Nis gestured with her head towards the cooler, then nudged the boy’s neck with her rifle. He closed his eyes. “On with it,” she said as she shoved him forward with her other hand, and he promptly dropped to his knees. Alex went to pick him up, and a second later, his world exploded into stars.

Somewhere, there was yelling and movement. His vision was dark and light at the same time, and a dizzy pain pushed its fingers forward from the back of his skull. It took him several seconds to understand that the floor was beneath him, and another second to feel the man’s weight on his chest. The man wasn’t moving. There were three still bodies on the tiled floor. Only Nis remained on her feet. “Get up!” she yelled. Alex tried, but the man’s body was heavy and his own was heavier, so Nis pulled the worker off of him and yanked him to his feet. Alex pressed his hands against the wall to maintain his upright position. “Pulses,” she said, and pushed him towards the register kid. He stumbled but somehow managed to fall only to his hands and knees, then he dug his fingers into the boy’s neck. A dull, rhythmic throbbing. “This one’s cool,” he said, but there was no reply.

“Christ,” Nis said quietly a second later. “Oh shit.”

Alex tried to get to his feet, but failed. “What?”

“She’s cold.”

“She can’t be cold.”

“Oh God. No. No fucking way.”

Alex crawled over to verify. Nis ripped away the girl’s shirt to reveal rubbery skin, perfectly formed breasts. Most importantly, a thin, black line tracing an indented rectangle across her torso.

“She’s an electric ant,” Nis said. There was a thick rope of panic drawn across her voice. “Registered. Let’s move. Right now.”

Alex looked into the girl’s open blue eyes. Polymer. Polymer and pigment. Nis’s hands dug into his shoulders and pulled him to his unsteady feet. Before him, the fleshy pile of shorted circuits lay as still as an unconscious human. Nis ran to the door, but outside, the street was already bathed in red and blue. “Christ,” she whispered.

“It’s been less than five minutes!”

Nis backed up to the register. “Get beside the door,” she ordered as she changed the battery of her pulse rifle. “And don’t let anything get through.”

On The Road

by Kathy Kachelries | Jan 7, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

The road lay before me like the body of an overdosed hooker; all valleys and plains and nameless geography. My hand stroked the air from the window of the pickup as the wind smoked my cigarette and left me with ash. This could work, she’d said. We can make this work.

Behind us, the dome shrank and shimmered in the ozone-laced sunset. My overeducated freelance cab driver droned on about something forgettable, something like music he’d liked as a child. Claire was five miles behind me and counting. By this point, I knew that the feds would have noticed my absence. I pictured her in a white interrogation room, angles and pale skin and cocky syllables in the face of bodily decommission. This had been her idea, of course. Everything good was her idea.

“-totally captures the alienation of the human experience,” the driver said. The radio sputtered silence and noise. He’d gone to Yale. This was a rebellion, I’m sure. The type of rebellion that only the rich can afford. “So what’s your story?” he finally asked when his thoughts on Bob Dylan had become less than captivating.

“Don’t have one,” I said, which wasn’t entirely a lie. Most people don’t have stories worth telling. The problem is that they very rarely recognize it.

“You’re outside of the limits,” he said.

“So are you.”

“Yeah, but I’m getting paid for it.”

Seven miles, now. I pictured her blond hair traced with blood, her body curled up on the interrogation room floor. She wouldn’t tell them anything, of course. I wished that she would tell them something.

This isn’t how it should have been, I thought to her. Next time, I won’t let it won’t come down to this.

The cab driver flicked up his control panel, and I turned around to watch the last spark of the silver bowl disappear into the horizon. We were far enough away for the rockets. We were beneath their radar. Decades beneath their radar.

“All strapped in?” he asked as he entered a code into the ancient keypad. I nodded. I was more strapped in than I’d ever been before.

Steganography

by Kathy Kachelries | Dec 28, 2005 | Story | 0 comments

The feeds are not for the news. The feeds are the distraction, the feeds are the facade. The news is contained within them, invisible to the naked eye, downloading itself as cookies, slipped into meta tags. Sometimes, Anna wondered who controlled the news, who encoded it so carefully before covertly disseminating it to a throbbing public that would never be able to read it.

“Six civilians reported dead after recent bombing,” the scrolling headline told her as she slapped a post-it above the monitor.

It is a crime to open up your computer. Computers come fully assembled: white cubes with no seams, glowing power button and white cord.

You had to buy a saw, the kind used for cutting pipes. It was a tedious process. When Anna was thirteen, it took her five hours to get through the half-inch of white plastic and the quarter-inch of metal beneath it.

She was disappointed at the interior, which consisted of shiny green boards pricked with bits of copper. It was too mundane to be forbidden, she thought. She resented the laws for tricking her into wasting her time.

The newsfarms were self-contained as well. The boy who lived down the street told her that the buildings were empty, operated by machines. Machines made the feedsites, and machines maintained them. That was why they had no doors.

“How do we know they’re telling the truth?” she asked, squinting at the windowless building.

“Machines can’t lie. They don’t even know what lies are.”

In the cafe, Anna inserted a small black cartridge and cut off the auditory alarm with a few keystrokes. The computer could recognize “malicious code.”

She glanced up to the innocent-looking post-it note attached to the top of the monitor. The usercamera was the first line of offense, and it was the first one to be neutralized. Now, it was busy converting the image of the yellow paper to digits, which were stored and immediately printed by the DHS for deployment. Their enemy is the color of dandilions, she thought, smirking at their waste of yellow ink. The front of the square said 10.12.01.

Judith had been a few years older than Anna, and lived in the apartment beside her. Judith’s apartment was sealed like a newsfarm, and, though there was a door, Anna had never seen it open. Eerie blue light flickered from the inch between wood and tile.

The first and last time she saw Judith was a week before she graduated from high school. Anna answered the door at three am, mostly because her mother told her not to answer the door at three am, and Judith shoved a box into Anna’s arms. “This is for you,” she whispered breathlessly before turning and running down the hallway in a mess of curly hair and toffee-colored skin. The police arrived three minutes later.

Confident that the computer’s safeguards had been bypassed, Anna opened the program on the disk and stared at the black window for a second before filling it with white letters and numbers. Another window opened, and the guts of the feedsite spilled out into black and white as numbers and letters. Anna hit print, then eject, then yanked the cord out of the wall and replugged it. Pocketing the disk, she looked at the startup screen. “Shit!” she said, loudly enough for the clerk to hear. He glanced up. “It turned itself off,” she explained.

“Do you need-” he started, then the phone rang, exactly on schedule. “One second,” he said, and picked up the receiver.

Anna grabbed the stack of seventeen freshly-printed pages and exited while his back was turned.

Sitting in the diner, drinking her fourth cup of coffee, Anna worked over the pages with a ballpoint pen. Eighty three people had died, not six. Their names were half-assembled as letters trapped in little blue circles of ink.

“You shouldn’t do puzzles in pen,” The waiter said, refilling her coffee. “What if you want to erase something?”

“I don’t like erasing things,” she responded without looking up. He walked back behind the counter and she circled another letter, frowning.