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.”
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.
