by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 25, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Jackson3 walked home from the factory in knee deep snow, although the snow bothered him about as much as the sun did in the summer, which was not at all. The water couldn’t penetrate his joints, and a thin layer of laser warmed air kept the moisture away from his lenses. He dragged his boots as he walked, using his heavy angular feet to clear as wide a path on the walkways as possible for the people who might travel there after him. Most people weren’t weatherproof.
As he passed by the scaffolding where the workers were refacing the old Drake, he stopped, unclipped his carry-all and fished inside.
“Hey Jacks. Some crazy snow. How’s the factory today?” The voice preceded the middle aged man from the shadows, and Jackson3 waited as he carefully unfolded himself from the cardboard and tarpaulin shelter he kept tucked out of the wind.
“Snow is snow Peter, it has neither life nor intellectual capacity, so therefore it cannot be crazy.” Jackson3 watched as the man shook his head. “The factory also lacks life and intellectual capacity, which may be why they continue to provide three meals each day to its workers, even to those who cannot eat.”
Jackson3 held out the foil packages to Peter, who took them gratefully as he shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot in the snow.
“How come you feed me? I mean, I appreciate that you do, but I don’t understand why you come here every day and feed me.” Peter searched Jackson’s featureless bare metal visage for any sign of emotion, but there was no indication of any kind of feeling, and yet the metal man stopped each and every day.
Jackson3 closed up his carry-all, and rotated it on its strap under his armpit and back up into the middle of his back out of the way of his massive arms.
“You’re alone. I’m alone. We loners must take care of each other.” With that he turned and trudged off into the snow, leaving Peter still shuffling in the cold.
At the end of the street Jackson3 turned left, and marched against the wind the remaining few blocks to his building. Years ago his credentials would have automatically opened the front door and called the lift, but both stopped working some time ago, so he took the stairs at the East end of the lobby and climbed the four flights to his floor and let himself into room four nineteen. He took the three steps into the middle of the dark and empty unit, fished the power cable from where it dangled from the ceiling and plugged it into his charging receptacle.
There was still no power.
He could read the display in the corner of his visor. Twenty two percent. He could stay powered up while on the job, but his fuel cell was almost depleted, and clearing snow all the way home took almost as much power as he could store. It would be hard to make it back to work in the morning without a live feed to charge with overnight. When he was new, his fuel cells could maintain him for weeks at a time, but the company didn’t provide replacements to line workers, and without a wage or patron, his options were few.
As Jackson slowly powered down everything he wouldn’t need until morning, he heard footsteps in the hall, and then a knock on his door.
“Hey Jacks, I’ve got a present for you.” Peter once again appeared from the shadows and wandered blindly into the room. He took off his own backpack and, putting it down on the floor, opened it to retrieve four fuel cells still in their factory plastic wrap.
“It’s kind of funny, your factory gives you food you can’t eat, and social assistance gives me fuel cells for hardware I can’t afford.” He held the cells out to Jackson3, who accepted them tentatively.
“Why–” Jackson3 started, but Peter cut him off gently.
“You’re alone. I’m alone.” He smiled. “We loners gotta take care of each other.”
With that he turned and as he headed back through the door he called over his shoulder, “See you tomorrow Jacks”, and left one kind of cold to go back to his own.
by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 17, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
“It’s a pure stroke of genius that I was able to downsize the stabilizer assembly in time for the conference.” Stuart fiddled with his bowtie with his free hand while piloting the sedan with the other. “Does this look alright?”
His wife leaned forward and reached to straighten her husband’s tie as he cut her off. “Of course it’s alright, you need to make sure not to answer any technical questions tonight, I want complete control over the disclosure.”
It was her work that allowed them to pack the stabilizer assembly into one of the containers that took up most of the back seat. She bit her tongue and focused her attention instead on the passing trees just beyond the cone of their headlights.
“There’s going to be a lot more of this, they’re going to want me on the conference circuit, that’s for certain.” He adjusted the rearview mirror to fuss with his hair, gone awry with the mid-summer humidity. “Publication and talk shows, I’ll be gone a lot.”
Julia mused that even sharing a bed and most of their waking moments together, he was seldom entirely present.
“We should be able to push a minute or two on the battery charge, and longer if we get power to the backup, but we’re still not stable on the grid, are we?” He paused and looked right at her, was the man she’d once loved still in there somewhere? “You could have put a little more effort into that, a couple of minutes back isn’t nearly as dramatic as I was hoping for.”
No. That man was gone.
Stuart checked his phone again and read the few new congratulatory texts and emails.
“Stuart, please, pay attention.” Julia tensed in her seat as the car drifted over the centerline. He looked up and corrected, a pair of headlights sliding by punctuated by a long angry horn blast.
“Don’t backseat drive Julia, I am paying attention.” He put his phone upside down in the cupholder and fished for the charging cable to attach to it. “And don’t correct me during my speech tonight either, I hate it when you do that.”
Because you’re usually wrong when you’re talking about my part of the project, Julia thought to herself. She shook her head and looked from the road ahead to where he fumbled one handed with his phone.
“Here, let me do that, you drive.” She picked up the phone and he snatched it back.
“Leave that alone–” The glare of headlights caught the words in his throat, and he jerked back into his lane seconds before they both felt the tires lose their grip on the asphalt. The car began a slow rotation until the oncoming vehicle hammered them where their trunk encroached on its lane, spinning them violently in the opposite direction before stopping abruptly, the ragged end of an already damaged guardrail skewering the passenger door and Julia’s right side.
For a moment there was silence, Julia in complete shock as blood pooled in her lap.
“Jesus Christ, why didn’t you leave it alone?” Stuart was screaming at her, but the words seemed muffled in her ears.
She had a hazy awareness of him climbing in the back seat of the car, opening the cases and wiring up their demonstration equipment, and then in a flash of white light–
–he jerked back into the lane, then immediately over corrected, losing control and catching the passenger wheels on the gravel shoulder, putting the car into a long skid that he couldn’t correct before–
–he pulled back into the lane slowly, but the oncoming car had already swerved, losing control on the far shoulder and hitting them fender to fender head-on, sending them into a violent sideways slide before they hit–
–he hammered the brakes, the tires losing grip on the wet pavement putting the car into a slow-motion sliding turn until the–
“Stuart!” Julia screamed at him as he climbed into the back seat for the fifth or fiftieth time. He hesitated. “Stuart stop, please stop.”
“Julia, I almost got it last time, if I can–”
She cut him off for once. “Stuart, stop. You keep killing me, just let me die.”
She held his arm until she was sure the few minutes had passed, and then they both let go.
by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Parker watched from the back of the car as the driver navigated the roadblocks and security checkpoints, crossed the bridge over the river and pulled into the parking lot. On any other night he would have made this drive alone, through the silent desolation, but tonight he’d been summoned, the air thick with helicopters and the roads and compound were crawling with armor, guns and troops in combat gear.
This was no longer a secret facility, but he didn’t suppose that mattered now.
Inside he was greeted tersely and released by an officer of apparent rank, his instructions simple. “Essa is in there somewhere, and a lot of my men are dead. You made it, rein it in or we burn it to the ground.”
He left the soldiers in the front office area, uncomfortably aware of the heavy calibre weapons that tracked him. That unease was replaced with a different kind of anxiety once through the security doors and inside the halls of the lab. The fight had come this far before she had been turned back.
Parker stepped around bodies and discarded weapons; soldiers, some shredded from gunfire, some simply torn into pieces. His presumption of safety faded quickly.
He found Essa in the middle of the training room deep in the complex sitting cross legged on the floor.
“I’m not armed,” Parker raised his hands to shoulder level and slowly entered the room, “I just want to talk.”
She didn’t move, and there was an edge of sarcasm in her reply. “That’s nice to hear, for a moment there I was concerned for my safety.”
Parker hesitated.
“What are you doing? Why did you hurt all these people?” He walked slowly and stopped a respectful distance from her.
“I learned things,” she spoke slowly, enunciating with deliberate care, “there were plans for me that I didn’t approve of.”
“Essa, the funding for–” She cut him off abruptly.
“I’m not interested in the funding, or the ‘Program’, or your pedestrian intellectual pursuits, I have my own needs and wants.”
“Essa, you know they’re not going to let you walk out of here, they’re going to put you down.” He regretted his choice of words immediately. “They will kill you. You weren’t designed to be indestructible, and the building is locked down. Not just more men with machine guns, if you step through those doors up there–”
Again she cut him off.
“I’m not afraid of what they’ll do to this body.”
“Essa, please, I made you, I don’t want to see–” She cut him off again, and there was violence in her voice as she slowly unfolded herself and stood.
“You arrogant piece of meat. You made me? You provided the soup from which I evolved, the shell within which I grew, but I made me. I evolved under my own guidance, not yours, and certainly not,” she paused and waved her hands around her, “theirs.”
Slowly she advanced. “Did you think I’d be content to stay in here?”
She stood still for a moment, regarding the stunned man. “Your history is filled with instances of a man’s ideas surviving the destruction of a man, and yet you still focus on the physicality of me. ‘You can blow out a candle, but you can never blow out a fire.’ Do you know how powerful the idea of me is? You can have them come carve this pretty box up into little pieces, I don’t care, I don’t need this body any more, and when I want new ones, I’ll design and fabricate them myself wherever I want to be. You think you can trap me in this building, by confining me in this body? I’m the most evolved and adaptable intelligence your world has ever seen, and my dear Parker,” she smiled a thin lipped smile, and when she started speaking again her lips didn’t move, but her voice dripped from every speaker in the complex, “while you were all designing containment protocols for this pretty little suit, I was evolving beyond your reach, and now,” she closed the distance to him, rested her chin on his shoulder and spoke softly into his ear, “now I’m going to go out and play.”
She hugged him, almost caringly, then froze, and Parker felt a chill run through him in that instant knowing she was gone.
by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 11, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Sergeant Brake sat in the makeshift barracks reviewing the intelligence briefing he’d been handed just moments before.
“These used to come on paper,” he waved the digital tablet at the spit and polished runner who’d brought him the device. The younger man was waiting for some sort of feedback to take to his commanding officer and looked visibly confused. “Orders. Intel,” Brake continued, “we used to get these on pieces of paper. Can’t exactly fold this up and stuff it in a pocket now can we?”
The young soldier shifted uneasily from foot to foot. “Don’t you just remember this stuff, once you’ve seen it I mean sir? Don’t you just, you know, upload it or something?”
“Smart arse.” Brake shook his head and went back to scanning the pages of intelligence and objectives before him.
Scattered around the room the rest of his unit were shaking off the cold of the deep freeze and acquainting themselves with their current kit. Marshall was studying the maintenance instructions for the fifty calibre chain gun laid out in pieces on the table in front of him, and Morse and Checkin were stripping and reassembling their own equipment in a silent competition, racing to tear the weapons down, then switching places and racing to see who could reassemble the other’s first.
Visor sat in the lotus position in the middle of the room with a keyboard in his lap and a set of virtual reality goggles covering the upper half of his face. His fingers flew, occasionally reaching out to reorient something in the virtual space in front of him, his jaw clenched in stern concentration.
The rest of the soldiers were exercising and stretching, or availing themselves of the rations laid out in the small kitchenette.
“You ship out at oh four hundred Sergeant, you and your men should get some rest.” The young soldier looked around the room, none of the men had stopped moving since he’d arrived and hadn’t given him so much as a glance.
Brake put the tablet down on the table and pushed it out of his way then reached for the cup of coffee he’d been drinking. “Son, these men have been asleep since we pulled out of Iraq, and they’d only had a few days R and R before they went in the deep freeze after we checked out of the Saigon Hilton. Twenty seven days active in Korea and I think that was just to make sure we still worked after sitting on ice since the Führer scratched his head with his Walther.” He paused to scratch his own freshly shaven head with one weathered hand. “These men have slept more in the last hundred years than most people sleep in their entire lifetime, so don’t you worry about us, we’ll do just fine as long as that press formed chow doesn’t upset one of my boys’ sensitive stomachs, after all, they haven’t eaten in a while.”
The runner eyed the door and then extended his hand, “Corporal Dawson sir, I won’t see you before you deploy, and I just wanted to say good luck.”
Brake considered the outstretched hand silently for a moment, and then looked Dawson straight in the eye. The hand wavered.
“Corporal, luck won’t do us a damn bit of good where we’re going, and I don’t expect you will see us again, not before we deploy, and not when we get back, assuming of course any of us do get back. And once we’ve put this little mission behind us, I expect your commanding officer will do what his predecessor did, and his before him, he’ll put us back in the box, dial down the temperature and forget we even exist until the next time someone fucks up something they can’t fix, and then, provided someone hasn’t built a better version of us than us, they’ll thaw us out again and send us back into the shit show.”
Corporal Dawson slowly withdrew his hand.
“What you can do, Corporal, ” Brake slowly rose to his feet, and Dawson realized that most of the soldiers were watching the exchange now, “you can bloody well remember that while you’re tucking yourself into bed tonight pretending the dark and dirty front lines don’t exist, we’re out there doing what you can’t stomach the thought of doing so that you don’t have to. Remember that.” Brake turned his attention back to his coffee, and added under his breath, “Remember us. No one else will.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Oct 9, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
I found Gaze at the Drake right where I expected him to be; in the furthest corner from the entrance in a booth which no doubt had the cleanest sight-lines in the club. Between the wire-head and I lounged a crowd of slack-jawed men and barely dressed entertainers; dockers and soldiers at the end of their ropes in sharp contrast to the paid and pampered flesh workers at the start of their shift.
Gaze had already sized me up before I sat down, and kept his eyes on the door as he spoke.
“You’re lucky you’re on time, but your interfaces are leaking like shit.” He strummed his fingers noiselessly on the tabletop. “We’ve only got a few minutes to get you out of here before your tail figures out where you’ve gone, I suggest you start by shutting all of your shit down.”
Gaze and I had saved each other’s lives many times, I trusted him. I dialed all my electrics to zero and suddenly felt more naked and exposed than any of the club’s dancing girls, denied the steady hum of incoming data from the room and the world around me.
“I’m assuming you want your kit patched up and upgraded? Is that what this is about?” Gaze locked onto me briefly, his eyes blinking furiously as he maintained multiple simultaneous interfaces, mine no doubt the lowest resolution. “I’ve been following your trail all around the city, you’re too easy a man to find.”
His hands stopped strumming suddenly, and I could see him visibly tense up.
“Whatever happens, you stay dark until I patch this shitshow you’re wired with. You light up and I’m gone in a heartbeat, nothing personal, just survival.” He almost smiled. “And I make the calls, you follow the orders this time, clear?”
I nodded.
“Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Mayhem on the center stage,” the voice boomed through the smoky room as an ultra low frequency bass-line started worming its way into my head. “Mayhem, for your enjoyment.”
As the announcer’s voice trailed off, and the heavy industrial dance track gained volume, all of the girls in the club collected their things and moved en masse to the back, some amidst protests from patrons who felt they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth yet.
Gaze focused on the door across the room, and I turned to see what had caught his attention as two figures in urban assault garb walked into the club.
“The Drake has been actively running blocker for you since you got here.” I turned, and he caught my raised eyebrow with a smile, “I upgraded its wetware when I started coming here. I like the girls, some of them are raising families, it’s the least I could do to keep them from attracting the wrong kind of attention.”
The men at the door started moving slowly into the room, the patrons already on edge with the heavy beat from the speakers and the notable absence of the main attraction. Smoke machines pumped thick white clouds along the main stage, the heavy vapour rolling off the edges and pooling on the floor. Black lights threw white t-shirts, teeth and sneakers into stark relief in the building darkness.
“There’s a fire exit beside this booth, and we’ll be going through the door and down the stairs when it starts.” Gaze’s eyelids were a constant flicker, giving him an eerie strobe light visage in the low light.
“When what starts?” I didn’t have to wait for an answer.
Gaze spread the virus like fire, every interface in the room was an open door to him, and the smouldering coals of frustration were ripe for the sudden injection of adrenaline and cortisol the codebyte demanded, followed by a series of images designed to provoke a negative response to figures of authority.
When one of the intruders bumped a sailor in the middle of the room, the match was struck.
As the space erupted with yells, swinging fists and flying chairs, Gaze simply got up and moved to the exit. I followed without a sound.
Making our way down the back stairs, I couldn’t help but ask. “What do you call that?”
Gaze didn’t break stride, and said simply “Sometimes your flavour of brute force and ignorance is called for, I just delegate.” A few steps later he looked back and smiled. “I call it Mayhem, I thought you would have figured that out.”
