by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 24, 2015 | Story |
Lauren struggled to open her eyes, the lids heavy, the light in the room blinding. What time is it? It was evening when–
“You’re awake, good”
Darren. They were having dinner when she–
“The sedative will wear off shortly, you’ll be a bit groggy, and the epidural will make it impossible for you to move, but try not to be alarmed.”
She forced her eyes open, blinked as they teared against the bright light of the room. Darren stood facing her, stripped to the waist, one hand cradling the other elbow, idly stroking his chin with his free hand.
“The van I brought you here in is radio opaque, and this entire building is wired such that we’re untraceable. I don’t expect company.”
He moved to a chair opposite, still watching her. On the table beside him she could make out an array of tools, and a camera on a long articulated arm, which he pulled and pointed at his midsection while he continued to talk.
“It’s entirely possible that you don’t know why you’re here, and if that’s the case, I will be happy to apologize, but I’ve a nagging suspicion that you do, in which case – well – we’ll get to that later.”
She could see clearly now, a flat screen on the table beside him flared to life, displaying a high definition view of his lower right abdomen, each individual muscle clearly defined, sweat glistening on the olive-coloured, tightly stretched skin.
“You won’t remember,” he continued, “around my nineteenth birthday when my appendix ruptured. Messy business, rushed to the ER. Doctor went in through my stomach with what I can only assume was an axe, judging by the scar he left behind. Hurt to do anything for months while it healed. Sneezing, oh my god sneezing was exquisitely excruciating.”
He doused a cotton swab with dark brown fluid and scrubbed his right flank.
“Three years ago my body rejected the stitches they’d used, presumably they were supposed to dissolve, but they didn’t, and eventually my body took notice and an abscess formed around them. Messier still than the first round, rushed back into the ER, and another Doctor went back through the same scar tissue with, I’m guessing, a saws-all this time and cleaned everything out.”
He picked up a scalpel from the table, and paused, making deliberate eye contact.
“I’m pretty sure that’s when they put it in.”
She flinched and looked away, there was something about his eyes, a cold clarity that she wasn’t used to that frightened her more than the fact that he’d apparently kidnapped her and stuck a drip line into her spine.
“One summer as a teenager I spent a day out at the beach, it was overcast and I didn’t think about the sun but I burnt to a crisp. Do you notice the tan I’ve got now? Don’t you think it odd that my delicate white skin has become so resilient to UV rays? Last week I was at my barber and he complemented me on my hair replacement program, wondered who I used because he’d never seen a bald patch grow back in so quickly and completely.”
Still fingering the scalpel, he retrieved a number of gauze pads on their opened sterile wrappers and laid them on his lap.
“I can hear things far beyond what’s natural, and I can feel things with a depth and fidelity that I’ve never known before. I can feel this,” he waved the blade around his abdomen, “this foreign body in me, feel the virus it controls coursing through my veins. I can sense when they change its instructions and feel the ripple through my body, the newly versioned cells overtaking the obsolete ones as they die off and my entire being upgrades.”
“Have you noticed, the scar on my stomach?” He stretched pulling the camera closer and panning across the smooth flesh, devoid of any imperfections. “You never commented that it had gone, but you must have noticed. Didn’t that seem strange to you?”
Lauren studied him then, there was no doubt he was not quite the same man she’d first been introduced to, he was better in so many subtle ways, like a Darren that had been iterated over in design relentlessly.
“What do you want from me?” She sounded braver than she felt.
“Well, first I’m going to carve out whatever device they’ve buried inside of me, and I expect I should heal back up with alarming rapidity, and then we’re going to determine whether the virus they infected me with is contagious, or if you’re an observer, or perhaps this is just a double blind study and you truly don’t know anything about it.”
Lauren flinched. “What do you mean?”
Darren drew the scalpel across his stomach, blood welling out around the wound.
“Someone’s been following me, that much I know, and I’m curious, for example, how when I met you, you were blind as a bat, and yet you’ve been able to pay such close attention to what I’m doing when your glasses are right here on my table.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 24, 2015 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Lauren struggled to open her eyes, the lids heavy, the light in the room blinding. What time is it? It was evening when–
“You’re awake, good”
Darren. They were having dinner when she–
“The sedative will wear off shortly, you’ll be a bit groggy, and the epidural will make it impossible for you to move, but try not to be alarmed.”
She forced her eyes open, blinked as they teared against the bright light of the room. Darren stood facing her, stripped to the waist, one hand cradling the other elbow, idly stroking his chin with his free hand.
“The van I brought you here in is radio opaque, and this entire building is wired such that we’re untraceable. I don’t expect company.”
He moved to a chair opposite, still watching her. On the table beside him she could make out an array of tools, and a camera on a long articulated arm, which he pulled and pointed at his midsection while he continued to talk.
“It’s entirely possible that you don’t know why you’re here, and if that’s the case, I will be happy to apologize, but I’ve a nagging suspicion that you do, in which case – well – we’ll get to that later.”
She could see clearly now, a flat screen on the table beside him flared to life, displaying a high definition view of his lower right abdomen, each individual muscle clearly defined, sweat glistening on the olive-coloured, tightly stretched skin.
“You won’t remember,” he continued, “around my nineteenth birthday when my appendix ruptured. Messy business, rushed to the ER. Doctor went in through my stomach with what I can only assume was an axe, judging by the scar he left behind. Hurt to do anything for months while it healed. Sneezing, oh my god sneezing was exquisitely excruciating.”
He doused a cotton swab with dark brown fluid and scrubbed his right flank.
“Three years ago my body rejected the stitches they’d used, presumably they were supposed to dissolve, but they didn’t, and eventually my body took notice and an abscess formed around them. Messier still than the first round, rushed back into the ER, and another Doctor went back through the same scar tissue with, I’m guessing, a saws-all this time and cleaned everything out.”
He picked up a scalpel from the table, and paused, making deliberate eye contact.
“I’m pretty sure that’s when they put it in.”
She flinched and looked away, there was something about his eyes, a cold clarity that she wasn’t used to that frightened her more than the fact that he’d apparently kidnapped her and stuck a drip line into her spine.
“One summer as a teenager I spent a day out at the beach, it was overcast and I didn’t think about the sun but I burnt to a crisp. Do you notice the tan I’ve got now? Don’t you think it odd that my delicate white skin has become so resilient to UV rays? Last week I was at my barber and he complemented me on my hair replacement program, wondered who I used because he’d never seen a bald patch grow back in so quickly and completely.”
Still fingering the scalpel, he retrieved a number of gauze pads on their opened sterile wrappers and laid them on his lap.
“I can hear things far beyond what’s natural, and I can feel things with a depth and fidelity that I’ve never known before. I can feel this,” he waved the blade around his abdomen, “this foreign body in me, feel the virus it controls coursing through my veins. I can sense when they change its instructions and feel the ripple through my body, the newly versioned cells overtaking the obsolete ones as they die off and my entire being upgrades.”
“Have you noticed, the scar on my stomach?” He stretched pulling the camera closer and panning across the smooth flesh, devoid of any imperfections. “You never commented that it had gone, but you must have noticed. Didn’t that seem strange to you?”
Lauren studied him then, there was no doubt he was not quite the same man she’d first been introduced to, he was better in so many subtle ways, like a Darren that had been iterated over in design relentlessly.
“What do you want from me?” She sounded braver than she felt.
“Well, first I’m going to carve out whatever device they’ve buried inside of me, and I expect I should heal back up with alarming rapidity, and then we’re going to determine whether the virus they infected me with is contagious, or if you’re an observer, or perhaps this is just a double blind study and you truly don’t know anything about it.”
Lauren flinched. “What do you mean?”
Darren drew the scalpel across his stomach, blood welling out around the wound.
“Someone’s been following me, that much I know, and I’m curious, for example, how when I met you, you were blind as a bat, and yet you’ve been able to pay such close attention to what I’m doing when your glasses are right here on my table.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 20, 2015 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
When the Alphas slaughtered the Charlies, Victor7 logged the incursion in his paper notebook and then meticulously removed all evidence of his tampering from both of their communications systems. The Alpha’s had received ‘intelligence’ that the Charlies were going to sabotage their base for much needed supplies, and when they mounted a pre-emptive strike, the Charlies didn’t know what hit them.
The Alphas had received similar intelligence about the Echo base, the Deltas and the Zulus, and misinformation, coupled with a modification to the stress inducing chemical makeup of the Alpha base rebreathers and food printers, made them an effective tool for reducing the clutter on the pretty blue rock they’d all been deployed on.
When mother arrived, it would be Victor7 and his brothers and sisters that stood as the Apex predators of record. It would be they who had adapted and overcome such that their DNA was most prominent in the population of the world in waiting for the coming children.
Victoria3 infiltrated the Tango and Kilo bases while they were turned away from the sun, the greenhouses safely isolated in the darkness while the rest of the station atmosphere was evacuated in one swift gasp. Safeties overridden, environment suits safely near the airlocks, just out of reach of those who so desperately needed them.
Their records would show an apparent murder-suicide by Tango2, and a drunken act of sabotage by one of the Kilo commanders when the news of her Tango lover’s death reached her.
Soon the remaining bases deployed on this planet will be engineered to eliminate each other, all of them oblivious to the fact that the Victor base had ceased to exist on any of their servers or systems within hours of their awakening. Should anyone scrape through and find any reference to the Victor base and be curious enough to go look, they would only find a crater in the space it had never really been. The Victor team’s invisibility was absolute and several levels deep.
Once the Alphas were no longer necessary in this engineered genocide, they would suffer a catastrophic failure of their fuel storage systems. “And that,” Victor7 chuckled into his helmet, “will be the end of that.”
Victor and his brothers and sisters would then spend the next months unpacking additional clone resources to man the necessary stations, consolidating the equipment and supplies into the active ones, shutting down any they couldn’t easily maintain, and rewriting logs, records and personal communications across all of the bases to make it apparent how dangerous and treacherous they found their deployment to be, and for it to be clear how strong the Victor team must have been to survive when so many others perished.
They would ultimately unpack some of the remaining bases’ clone stock from storage to breed selectively, but only once their engineering team could guarantee Victor-trait dominance. Genetic diversity was an unpleasant necessity, but the Victor lines must be maintained at the highest level of purity possible.
They were brilliant strategists, expert cryptologists, and fabulous story tellers. When mother arrived several genetic iterations in the future, that would be the message, that would be their history, just as they had written it.
by Stephen R. Smith | May 29, 2015 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Tamis woke under the heat of the mid morning sun, the ocean reaching tentative tendrils up the smooth sand to lick at his feet. The last evening was a grey cloud, but he’d evidently passed out on the beach again. Levering up on one elbow, he followed the beach-line unbroken to the horizon, then pushed up into a sitting position and turning, scanned to the horizon on his other side. Nothing to see, apparently nobody up yet.
Last night…
A fragment of a song flitted through his mind, and he latched onto it, pushing at its edges to try and expose the entire tune. There was something familiar, but without context…
The girl breezed by in the periphery of his mind’s eye, but as he reached for the memory it dissolved, like a chalk drawing in the rain.
On the sand he’d absently scratched the crude outline of a heart, and the letter ‘T’.
She must be here somewhere.
Climbing to his feet he began to walk along the shoreline, the waves still reaching for him and he staying just beyond their touch, taunting the massive body of water. ‘You can want me, but you can’t have me.’
The beach gave way on one side to a thick expanse of jungle, trees reaching skyward choked at their bases by vines and bushes peppered with brightly coloured flowers. Birds chattered to each other unseen, and occasionally something big would breach out in the open water. Close to the shore schools of needlefish darted towards the shore and back again, a glittering mass of light-ribbons moving as one just beneath the surface.
He passed an almost familiar Victorian mansion set back in the greenery and covered with plant-life, it’s architect long forgotten and the jungle slowly reclaiming it. The structure filled him with a nagging unease that he could neither shake nor coax out in to the light over the next hour of walking.
From the corner of his eye he saw her again, tanned skin wrapped in red tropical printed silk, but as he turned to look she had disappeared into the green. A fist closed on his heart and his stomach lurched, he had to find her, had to have her again… Again?
In the sand at his feet was the crude outline of a heart, the letter ‘T’ scratched inside.
Had he been walking that long? Was the island that small? He looked again, slowly turning, following the beach to the horizon in both directions.
Not an island. A loop. A construct.
His mind raced as he started walking again, consciously willing his heart-rate to remain neutral, his pace natural. If he was jacked in someone would be monitoring his vitals and he needed to exploit the relative freedom the unpopulated beach afforded him while it lasted.
Venturing closer to the water, he let the cool ocean wash over his feet as he walked, the schools of needlefish parting and swimming past him seemingly unconcerned by his presence, but not oblivious to it.
Stopping, he dropped to his hands and knees in the sand and dug a hole half a meter across, forming a berm with the wet sand around its edges. The hole filled from the water beneath, and once it was complete he busied himself coaxing the slender fish towards him then flipping them out of the ocean and into the pool. Having trapped enough, he sorted the construct’s predictably sized simulacra, small, medium and large, and returned all but three of the largest and half a dozen of the smallest back into the ocean. The remaining fish he pinned gently to the bottom of the pool with one finger, watching his print burn into their scaly skin. He could affect the programming of insignificant things, he’d spent enough time in virtual and coding constructs to do that, but he would need to be very careful. He sequenced them, the short ones one through three, and seven through nine, and the long ones four through six, then busied himself for a while digging a trench from the pool back out to the open water.
When the fish had all escaped, he struck off towards the jungle and the red dressed woman he knew he was expected to find, but must be careful not to. Whatever she was, whatever piece of knowledge she represented, it must remain out of his reach, and thus the reach of his interrogators until his message arrived and a trace negotiated back to him.
The song fragment raised itself again, and he pushed it aside, humming instead a Gaelic tune he’d practiced for such an eventuality.
It was a song he could lose himself in for days.
by Stephen R. Smith | Mar 2, 2015 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
“It’s not meat you know.”
He’d slipped up silently beside me at the meat counter and was pointing to the shrink-wrapped flat of striploin I was holding.
“They print those, from meat flavoured engineered inks, but they’re not meat.”
As I turned to look at him, he withdrew slightly and glanced furtively around, shrinking into the hooded sweater he was wearing.
“LeGrange and Baxter, those are real meat. Grown in a field, real. Not those ones though, they’re all printed.”
I put the steak down and looked further down the coolers at the LeGrange display.
“Your jeans too, not cotton. They sell them as cotton, but it’s not organically grown cotton, it’s engineered. Ever wonder why it itches? You should stick to Levi Strauss and Company, quality clothing for over one hundred and sixty years.”
It took a moment to process that the man was just talking about Levi’s. I stopped and took a look around. This was the strangest man I’d bumped into at the grocery store in recent memory.
“You’re a jean snob too?” I grinned despite myself at the man’s odd phrases.
“Quality never goes out of style.”
I noted that he was without a cart or basket. “Are you shopping, or just here to help me make better choices?”
Before he could answer, there was a shout from the end of the aisle.
“Hey, I told you buggers to stay out of my shop!” A heavy-set man in a green apron tied at the waist was hobbling up the aisle towards us, pointing.
The man beside me blurted “Pick Energizer, keeps going and going and going,” as he turned and ran, making it almost to the top of the aisle before another man in a white butcher coat rounded the corner weilding a large aluminum shovel. The strange man skidded, turned sharply and sprinted back past me, arms and legs pumping in a manner that suggested he wasn’t used to this level of exertion. He raced right at the green aproned grocer, then tried to dodge around him at the last instant. The shopkeeper raised one meaty arm, catching the strange man around the neck and clotheslined him, lifting him clear off his feat to drop like a stone on the floor unmoving.
I abandoned my steak shopping and my cart and rushed to kneel beside the man lying motionless on the floor.
“Jesus, that was a bit unnecessary don’t you think?” The storekeeper stared at me, seemingly just noticing I was there. Behind me I heard the butcher arrive with the shovel and grunt as he leaned on it. “He was just making conversation,” I continued “weird conversation granted, but he wasn’t doing any harm.”
The shopkeeper reached down and roughly unzipped the supine man’s sweater.
Where the still man’s hands extended from the cuffs, they were convincingly flesh toned, and his face was similarly real looking, but beneath the fabric he was merely a pale plastic shell, more like a carefully articulated mannequin than a man.
“Jesus.”
“You keep saying that. I assure you god had nothing to do with these things.” He stood back up and toed the thing none too gently where the ribs would be. “I get at least one of these a month in here. They’re paid advertisements, corporately sponsored. Mostly they’ll walk around the big box stores where there are no real sales staff to discover them, but occasionally they’ll wind up here in the independents.” He kicked the thing again. “I’ve got four in a bin out back. I’m pretty sure they’ll have them GPS tagged, but nobody’s come offering to buy them back.”
As I stood again, I couldn’t help noticing the shop keeper was wearing Levi’s.
I nodded and smiled, then backed away slowly to where my cart sat abandoned. Without a word the butcher folded the thing at the waist and carried it past me up the aisle to the back room.
I decided to have chicken instead. That’s probably what the steak was made out of anyways.
