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.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Time. I joked once with her that it was simply the thing that stopped everything from happening at once. When she asked me for space I laughed, and said “Of course you can have space, if you didn’t, everything would be happening right here.”
That’s not what she meant. She wasn’t amused.
There’s that long awkward period of mourning you go through when you stop being part of someone’s life, when they stop being part of yours. You do things to help you cope, maybe workout too much, run too far, move to a different city and start drinking all the time. Coping mechanisms. I tried them all, and in the end, I dried up, slowed down and poured myself back into my work. It’s ironic that the thing that killed us wound up being the thing I turned to in order to save myself.
My liver has always been shit.
She never believed me when I told her what I wanted to build, and when I tried to explain it she’d wave her hands and talk over me “Too much science, tell your nerd friends, I don’t care”, and then she’d go watch the gardening channel or the food network or something.
It also seems a little ironic that on the night, in fact in the moment I actually made it work, she pulled out to pass and kissed a semi in the dark. She was my first call, she never picked up. Peterbilt would be her last kiss. I’m still kind of jealous.
So what does this have to do with anything, you ask? Everything, actually.
That thing I made work, notice I didn’t say ‘perfected’, we’ll come back to that. The thing I made work with all my nerd-science was a means to take a specific moment in time and space, focus it and revert it to an earlier instance of that point. Kind of reverting to a space-time save-point in real life, like you would in a video game, but without having to have thought to save first.
The equipment is setup in my van just a few weeks from now, parked on the shoulder where the flowers are still piled up for a particular southern belle who’s going to have a mishap with a tractor trailer just a few moments further along this timeline.
That’s where it’s going to stay. Up the road she’s in her car, not quite fed up yet with how slow the car ahead of her is driving, and in the distance there’s a tractor trailer coming, its driver oblivious to how the night will never end for us.
I’m in the middle, stuck in a moment I can’t get out of. I expect I’ll stay forever, in this bubble of time just big enough for my mind to race.
Eventually I’m going to go completely insane.
In the end, the thing that killed us, and that saved me from self destructing has now ultimately enacted a fate much worse than death upon me.
Irony has always been shit too.
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 19, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Thirtyseven sat on the edge of his bed, kicked off his shoes and fell heavily into his pillow, not bothering to peel off the white coveralls he normally couldn’t wait to get out of. He was exhausted.
He lay staring at the ceiling, the last few hours of the day still fresh in his mind, although today blended seamlessly into yesterday, and last week, and a month ago. Or more. He’d lost track.
Each day played out pretty much the same, he awoke in the same grey six by nine room, showered, dressed and ate the breakfast that was delivered to him, then he made his way to the simulator. Here he learned how to ride motorcycles, slalom cars, canyon race executive jets, operate forklifts, tractor trailers, maglifts and exo-skel loaders. He’d logged countless hours in freighters, cruise liners and speedboats, gliders and heavy cargo planes, jump-packs and helicopters with countless different rotor configurations.
He had no idea what they were training him for, or even who they were, he never saw anyone, just heard voices, took direction, followed wayfinder systems made of lit arrows on the walls and floors. He simply did what he was told, and learned whatever they were teaching.
He’d stopped trying to remember what he’d done before, when this had started and how he came to be here. He wasn’t entirely convinced that Thirtyseven was really his name, but he had no recollection of another one, and that’s what the voices called him. Any time he tried to think too far back he felt nauseous, anxious and lost, and he didn’t like feeling like that. Instead he focused on being an apt pupil. If it could be ridden, driven or piloted, he’d likely spent hours in the simulator on or in it, in between meals, naps, bloodwork and being poked by machines with needles.
Something was coming. He blinked, and then sleep came on like a freight train. Had he stayed awake long enough to realize, he might have recalled driving one of those as well.
Outside Karl Liesen paused at thirty seven’s door, checked to make sure he’d been rendered unconscious, and reviewed his chart. A disembodied voice interrupted his reading.
“Sir, thirty seven is scheduled for deprogramming, can you sign off on him?”
Liesen waved at the chart displayed on the wall several times until the authorization page was in view to which he applied a palm briefly, waited for the page to glow green with the recognition of his prints, and then tapped to confirm and close.
“Proceed”, Karl started walking back to his office, “make sure you get a clean scraping, and then composite thirty seven with twenty six and forty one, we’ve got a new recruit in staging that I’d like to layer up and see what he can do.”
“Yes sir, is that the marine we picked up in the projects?” The voice followed Karl as he walked.
“No, I’m thinking the twenty something with the mohawk from the men’s shelter. The marine I want cleaned out for weapons training,” he paused at a terminal, pulling up the man’s record. They’d found him in an alley digging food from a dumpster in the rain, he’d been an easy catch considering his background. “He’s got small and medium arms training already, so when you wipe him, be careful to be crisp around the edges, I’d like to leverage what he already knows.”
“Understood sir.” The voice paused while Karl closed the terminal and resumed walking. “Sir, what do you want doing with thirty seven when we’re done, we’ve wiped and reloaded him three times already, he’s losing neuro-plasticity.
Karl arrived as his office and stood at the door for a moment, thinking.
“Once you know you’ve got a clean scrape, put him on heroin and PCP for the next twenty four hours, then turn him loose at the cloverleaf after dark. I’m sure he’ll find some sort of vehicle he’d like to play with.”
He didn’t wait for an answer before entering his office, it was late and he needed a drink.
by Stephen R. Smith | Sep 6, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
“Don’t tell me you love me,” I hold her face in my hand as she speaks, her gaze locked with mine, “you’re only saying that because you need me, and you think that will make me stay.”
I don’t understand where she gets these ideas from. I’m quite certain I don’t need anyone. I’m practically perfect all on my own, but on the off chance I’m missing something obvious, I take stock.
I can feel every muscle in my body, flexing and un-flexing each from my toes to my face and down my arms to my finger tips, careful not to move too radically for fear of startling her or breaking her face. I can feel the weight of her in my hand; she’s pulling away from me emotionally, but there’s no doubt she’s moving into me physically, and that feels… wonderful.
“I never know what’s going on with you,” she’s speaking again, and while I continue to self evaluate I still process her every word, “when you’re not looking at me, it’s like you’re a million miles away, it’s like you’re fixated on everything but me, you study everything around you all the time, and you don’t ever talk.” I catch my eyes roaming about the room, and turn back to find her still staring intently at me. I focus on her eyes, there’s something about them, the deepness of the blue, the contrasting flecks of green and yellow scattered through the iris like stars in the night sky. There’s a softness there, a warmth, they could keep me –
“And then there you are, you look at me and it’s like you’re looking right into me, into my soul. I’ve never felt anything like that, and it’s that look, that depth of focus that makes me think maybe, just maybe you do love me after all.”
She sits and places her hand on mine, both of ours now cradling her face, but the moment is fleeting and she pulls back and guides my hand to the table.
“I can’t do this, I can’t be with someone that has so much else going on in their mind, it’s not fair.” She’s on her feet now, pacing around the kitchen. The coffee is still warm, the smell permeating the air around us, I catch myself calculating how long it will remain drinkable before requiring reheating. My mind wanders sometimes like that. The sunlight has just caught the chrome on the stovetop making it three twenty seven in the afternoon, given the date. She moves things on the counter absently. I’ll move them back later. I cleaned and tidied everything this morning while she was sleeping, washed and folded the laundry, prepared the ingredients for the dinner I would be making in ninety three – ninety two minutes. Assuming she doesn’t leave.
I stand, lifting the chair reflexively as I unload my weight from it, moving and setting it down without a sound just far enough behind me that I can step away from the table without touching either. Thoughtless precision, the reflex of silent motion.
When I place my hands on her shoulders she flinches. I must make a point of making noise when I approach her, for all her keenness of hearing, she startles surprisingly easily. She turns and leans back against the counter. I place my hands on her shoulders again, squeezing just enough to impart a sense of affection, but not so much as to shatter her scapula or clavicles. That tends to end relationships very quickly.
She looks at my face, raises her hands to my chest and I can feel her heart beating through her fingertips just slightly ahead of the sound of it in my ears. I measure the pressure, noting it for future reference as an appropriate response should this situation play out in reverse. I’m lost in her eyes again. I don’t fully understand this phenomenon, but it’s unlike anything I’ve felt with anyone or anything else.
For the first time today I speak.
“I don’t love you because I need you,” I pause for an appropriate number of seconds, she waits expectantly, “I need you because I love you.”
The words hold no logic for me, but they are a truth, and a truth that she seems to understand.
In eighty seven minutes, I’ll be starting dinner. Eighty six.
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 18, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The flickering neon promise was the same as always, ‘Rooms by the Hour’ and underneath ‘Vacancy’. I knew what I would find inside. The locks on the double front doors were burned away completely leaving a metre wide hole in the surrounding glass, soft bubbled edges that were very recently molten.
I pushed one door open with the barrel of my pistol and stepped into the lobby. The small room reeked of antiseptic cleansers layered with floral air conditioners. Neither masked the smell of roasted hair and flesh.
Behind the front desk a thin figure in a grey suit lay in an androgynous heap, head burned completely off. It wouldn’t matter how fast the meat wagons got here, they could grow back an arm or a leg, scrape the latent personality and experience from the brain and reprint a clone if the kill turned out to be unrighteous, but without a head this life was lost for good. Working the front desk at a whore house, it was unlikely whoever it was could afford backup.
Up the stairs to the second floor, I passed door after door where the scene played out the same; wood kicked off hinges, hookers and clients alike in various states of undress lay in torched heaps, some in their beds, some near the doorway no doubt investigating the noise, some half way to the bathroom or bedroom window, their desperate attempt to escape cut short by the merciless cone of death fired at apparent close range.
He was in the last room, standing staring at her body where it lay motionless on the bed. He turned slightly as I entered, the weapon hanging limply at his side. The virus had turned more than half of his skin black, polished and shiny, the far side of his face infected top to bottom giving him the eerie appearance of a man half in shadow, even in this light.
She was dead. Skin turned completely black, joints shattered where her death throes had broken the crystalline flesh in the last few moments of life.
“They must have made her a carrier, kept her isolated until she infected me.” He waved absently at her. “I was her only client in the last three weeks, she was saving herself for me.” I remembered the body at the front desk, his opening salvo of questions. “They must have let it off its leash once they were done with her.” One side of his face creased into a smile, the dark side frozen, the resulting expression appropriately grotesque. “No loose ends.” He fished in his pocket and produced my badge. “You’ll be needing this”, he said as he tossed it to me. I caught it left handed without looking, brailled its surface reflexively and slipped it in my hip pocket. “We’re not done here.”
I knew what he’d started I would have to finish. We stared at each other, like figures on either side of a funhouse mirror, he regarding what he’d looked like before the infection effectively ended his life, I was looking back at what I had become in the days while I was being reconstituted. The carnage between then and now making us two very different people.
“Not different,” he read my mind, “we’re the same.” He weighed the blaster carefully, studying the purpose built simplicity of the weapon as though seeing it for the first time. “And if they came for us once, they’ll be coming again.”
I knew he was right. Knew I was right. He met my gaze and held it. I wondered if the sadness in his eyes was echoed in mine.
“Thank god for backup.” He raised the barrel and pushed it under his jaw, once more the grotesque smile in the instant before the particle blast erased it for good.
“Thank god for backup.” I repeated.
