by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Teddy shifted into second gear as the pickup crested the hill, her forearms burning from the long climb and having to fight a leaky steering pump the entire way.
“I don’t understand why you disabled the power assist Teddy, you make things so much harder-”
Teddy cut her passenger off in mid sentence. “I’ve told you Max, the controller on the power steering system was misbehaving, I couldn’t trust it anymore.”
Max’s attention darted between Teddy and the road ahead, fingering his seatbelt nervously as Teddy fought with the old truck to stay between the trees. In a flash of blinding sunlight, they burst into a clearing. Teddy reflexively stood with both feet on the brakes to bring the truck to a halt before they drove over the edge she knew was there but couldn’t see through the glare. When the truck had come to a complete stop and the dust had settled, she threw it into park and killed the engine. The sudden shift to silence unnerved them both.
Max dropped his head and reluctantly unbuckled his seatbelt. “Teddy, I-”
She cut him off again. “Shut it Max, you know I need to do this.” She unbuckled her own belt and pushed open the door to climb out of the truck. The front wheels sat barely a foot from the edge. “Might’ve been my last trip too,” she breathed, “damn.”
She pulled on a set of heavy work gloves from the door pocket, walked to the side of the truck and started pulling pieces from the pickup bed. First she hefted a microwave, carried it over her head to the edge of the drop and threw it into space, counting the seconds until she heard the satisfying crash that reassured her it was broken beyond repair at the bottom of the hole. She followed the microwave with a toaster, then a coffee maker, a flat screen television and a laptop computer. For the next hour Max watched her as she tirelessly launched DVD players, clock radios, electric mixers and digital scales, calculators and automatic vacuum units off the edge and down into the hole.
“You could give me a hand Max, you lazy shit.” She yelled across the truck at him, not pausing to look.
“You know I can’t Teddy, I’m sorry.” His shoulders dropped, and he kicked absently at stones on the ground, unable to look at her.
Teddy kept emptying the truck.
When the last piece had rattled off the rock floor of the great hole before them, she walked around to stand beside Max.
“You know what this is about, don’t you Max?” She looked sideways at him as she spoke. “You know why I have to do this?”
Max stared at his shoes.
“Yes Teddy, it’s about the virus. I understand.”
“You’ve been my best friend for as long as I can remember Max,” she took a few steps back, produced a large calibre handgun from her coverall pocket, and leveled it at Max’s head. “I’m sorry Max, but you don’t know you haven’t been infected, or that you won’t be.”
Max raised his head finally to look at her, and she saw her own reflection distorted in the chrome of his flesh.
“If you loved me Teddy, you’d find a way to-”
There was clap of thunder as the slug tore Max’s head nearly in two, the force throwing him back against the fender and then off into space.
She listened long after his body stopped making noises below.
“Love,” she talked outloud, turning the window crank to close Max’s window before slamming the door shut, “for a second there Max, I thought maybe you weren’t sick after all.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 23, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
They lay together for hours after they’d finished, he propped on one elbow, she on her back, eyes closed for the most part, but opening one occasionally to watch him watching her.
“It’s the way the sun reflected in your eyes that caught my attention Captain, it was as though your eyes shone only for me.”
He smiled slightly, running his fingertips from her shoulder, along her collarbone and down the valley between her breasts. Millions of tiny receptors translated the sensation to her as one of pleasure, while he simply recalled what it had felt like to draw his fingers across real flesh. Not these fingers mind, ones he remembered from a long, long time ago.
She rolled onto her side to face him, curled her free foot behind his calf and pulled her leg up until her thigh was at a perfect right angle to his.
He found it ironic how they continued to engineer their bodies to resemble so closely the humans they despised so greatly, and still, even in something as messy and chaotic as sex, they were all perfect angles and predictable velocities.
“There’s something different about you, something…”, she paused, considering him for a moment before continuing, “Empathetic.” She grinned, pleased with herself for identifying the characteristic. “It’s your differentiator. Hereinafter you will be known as Empathy One.”
“But my designation is Maddox Three-”
“Nonsense.” She cut him off abruptly. “I declare Empathy One to be an immutable pointer to Maddox Three, Maddox Three to be a private designation accessible only to me.” She drew one perfect fingernail along his jawline, then placed the finger on his lips for him to kiss. “I am your Queen, you would be wise not to argue with me.”
He nodded. He had no intention of arguing over any decisions she made that further embedded him with her.
“Good. You will be my private Empathy One from this point forward, with all the privileges of a Prime.”
He’d laid his hand on her hip when she’d turned, and he slid it up the curve of her waist, to her back then over the top of her shoulder to draw his palm slowly across the curve of her breast, noting her eyes half close again as she hardened beneath his touch.
He remembered laying like this with women once, when he was as much human as this Queen was machine. So much of him had changed, and while the memories were available to him with crystal clarity, so too was the fact that they belonged to another life, another time.
Generations of gene manipulated breeding, then countless surgeries, constant training and maniacal amounts of social engineering had brought him to the front row in the Queen’s parade, and an iris filter designed to be the atomic complement to the Queen’s and no small amount of chance had brought him ultimately to her bed.
“I will be yours and yours alone, my Queen.” He closed his hand gently and watched the rapturous effect that played out across her face.
In the end he wasn’t sure how much of his mass was human, and how much was no better than she, but he knew that at his core he represented humanity, and that he was a portal now in a position to wield much power.
This was the longest of long games, and they were playing to win.
Empathy One, indeed.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Branson felt the rhythmic thrumming of the helio-copters long before he saw them, and instinctively he curled into a ball, pulling his hood over his head and pulling his hands up into his sleeves. There would be no heat trace when the copters passed by; no exposed flesh, and he wouldn’t breath for the minute or so they were overhead.
Behind him, tucked safely under the rocky overhang was the flyer he’d arrived in just a few hours ago, a polymer air-car stripped clean of everything non-essential, kitted out with a military grade chiller to keep the surface temperature equal to the ground below, and a powerful anti-mag drive that pushed against the iron rich crust of the planet to stay aloft and propel itself in any directly quickly and quietly. Trackless, traceless, for all intents non-existent.
That’s what the helio-copters were searching for now.
He closed his eyes and could hear as though he were back in those combat airframes the chatter of the gunners, amped up vision picking up the urine traces of the indigenous wildlife, the neon lines tracing days of animal traffic patterns across the sparse landscape. When they were fighting for this moss covered rocky shithole of a planet they would find their quarry by spotting the splatter patterns of the animals killed for food, work out how close and how many by the colour of the drying blood on the rocks. Now the gunners looked for other patterns on the ground, had other orders, other targets.
There was barely any disturbance on the ground as two aircraft crested the hill over the valley Branson crouched in, and he held his breath, willing his heartbeat to slow to almost a complete stop, and he waited.
There was a gentle tug at his sleeve as something left the ground and added its weight to the inside of the fabric. He felt crusty legs slowly pull a soft hairy body up between the back of his hand and the sleeve lining.
Stil he waited.
The copters slowly cruised the length of the valley, and Branson could smell the thick sweet smoke of the Granjee leaf that at least one of the gunners was smoking. He smiled despite himself. The narcotic effects of the plant had been the native’s best defense against the military intruders. The soldiers they were trying to kill, and that were trying to kill them became their best reluctant customers, many dying from overdoses, or being cut to ribbons as entire patrols ventured off on missions of bravado with all their senses torqued out of their control.
Branson learned an awful lot from the natives of this world.
As the copters cleared the ridge at the far end of the valley and dropped below the horizon, Branson allowed himself slow, easy breaths. When he could no longer sense the blades disrupting the air, he slowly peeled back the sleeve of his jacket, exposing the rock spider that had perched there for safety. Keeping that hand perfectly still, he slipped his k-bar from his thigh and gently slipped the blade between the spider and his skin, letting the creature readjust itself to the new perch before relocating it to a nearby plant. It would eat any smaller insect that might endanger his crop, and so as long as it didn’t bite him, they would remain friends. Survivors alike, adaptable.
Standing he checked again the woven camouflage netting he’d just repaired before he was disturbed. A razor beak, or maybe a tear wing had undoubtedly tried to land on it, leaving a large gash which he’d sown and repatched with moss and scrub.
Branson locked his hands behind his back and pulled against the stiffness of his shoulders until his spine cracked several satisfying times. Ahead of him stretched a deliberately stochastic pattern of Granjee plants, their long blue leaves curling in tight spirals around their trunks, reaching skyward toward the suns. The military trained him for combat, combat trained him for retirement.
Branson had learned an awful lot from the natives of this world.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 1, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Shadow coloured stones crush and scatter under boot heels. Their passage unheard, two figures have slipped silently across the rooftop expanse to its eastern face. Lumbering mechanicals presenting themselves at intervals, drinking heat from the spaces below to exhale in great humid sighs. These are the only sounds to disturb the pre morning air. There are no bird songs, no passing vehicles, no murmuring undercurrent of peripheral lives. It will be hours before the first ships climb to the stars.
This is the silence before the break of day.
Two figures sit, silent, legs dangling into space from the parapet, the last of the previous night’s beer in hand, each absently slaking the thirst neither of them feels anymore.
It’s not the night’s antics that make this moment memorable, indeed those memories are lost now. Not even the rise of the sun itself, though I’m sure as always it was worth the wait. The rising of this particular sun on this particular day was merely an ending, it had no significance beyond that.
The memory, rather, is of two accidental friends sharing the last moment they’d know together, in silence, waiting for the sun to rise and give them permission to leave one another, to leave home.
It is these few moments, this shared time of solitude so exquisitely inscribed upon which I now reflect. A time remarkable in its clarity, plucked from a sea of murky memories, of happenings that have long since faded from view. Brought forth by the thought of a sunrise I can’t remember watching, and will never see again.
by Stephen R. Smith | May 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Sergeant Gains got the call at four am; lone white male out on the Golden Gate Bridge about mid-span. He spent the twenty minutes on the Harley with the throttle pinned, the lights up and the siren silent wondering what he’d find when he got there and hoping he wouldn’t be too late.
The man was still pacing when Gains rolled up, but as Gains powered down the bike, killed the lights and slung his helmet on the handlebars, the man climbed out onto the cord. They regarded each other with mutual apparent uncertainty as the officer closed the gap between them on foot.
Gains stopped a few metres away and hitched his thumbs into his belt.
“Be careful, it gets slick out there this time of night.”
The man, still wearing the previous day’s office attire, collar undone, tie pulled aside, squatted and looked around before speaking.
“Doesn’t matter. Don’t waste your time. I’ll be gone in a minute.”
The Sergeant scrambled to remember his training, to remember the dozen or more men and women he’d been called down here before to talk out of ending their life. He always felt unprepared, like each was the first time.
“If you wanted to jump, you would be gone already, I think you really just want someone to listen to what you’re feeling.” Gains moved slowly to the edge and looked over the side into the darkness below. “What’s your name son?”
“David,” their eyes met for a minute before the young man looked away, “David Parker.”
“Well David, what brings you down here tonight?”
David sat for a minute before looking up, catching and holding Gains’ gaze.
“You have no idea what it’s like to never fit in. To be smart, but treated like a freak, to be funny but treated like a joke. To only be able to make friends with the other freakish jokes that are just like you, and to know everyone is talking about you behind your back all the time.” He spoke in a steady tone, barely pausing for breath. “I meet girls who like me until someone tells them about me, and then they stop returning my calls. Do you know what it’s like to know you’re always going to be alone? Truly, completely alone? Even in a world packed so tight with people that you can’t even breathe, to know you’ll always be alone?”
Gains started to move forward but paused as David tensed up.
“I know what it’s like being on the outside looking in. You don’t do what I do as long as I’ve done it without becoming a little detached from everyone around you,” he read David’s expression and changed his tone, “but no, I don’t know what you’re feeling exactly. But there are people that are going to miss you if you go.”
David looked at the dim steel of the chord for a while before answering.
“No. Nobody will. Sorry you wasted a trip.”
With that he leaned sideways and was gone.
The second David did, he knew he’d made a mistake. He thought of Becky Six in statistics, of her sad eyes each time he declined her invitation to join their group for lunch. He thought of the last glimpse of resigned horror on the policeman’s face, a horror he knew would wake the man up for countless nights in a cold sweat.
By the time his back and shoulders impacted the water a few seconds later, his body was travelling at nearly one hundred kilometers an hour. The water brought him to a very sudden, very painful stop, shattering his spine and ribs, puncturing organs and caving in the back of his skull. His arms and legs cut a graceful arc away from his body, snapping as they too impacted the water’s surface.
He realized he could no longer blink or close his eyes.
Secondary systems powered up to try and maintain his consciousness and preserve his memory for a rescue he knew would never come. Pain recepters amped up and closed down spasmodically, sending shockwaves of pain through him. Sea water slowly seeped into his control systems, shorting out and shutting down his fine motor controls so even the feeble twitching of his shattered limbs stopped. He slipped beneath the surface and the lighting bolts of pain dulled into a steady ache.
He watched the moon until the depth took even that ray of hope away.
It would be hours before his batteries would flood out completely and grant him final peace, his pain transferred to those who loved him.
