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.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 24, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Martin became aware of taste of metal, then the sensation of his pulse amplified in his head. It took a few more minutes before the electric hum around him pierced the pounding, and the realization that he was bound made him open his eyes.
“Martin, you’re back, I was so worried that I’d done permanent damage there old boy.”
Martin recognized the voice, and through the haze of slowly returning consciousness found its face across the room.
“What,” he stammered, his mouth dry, “Jim, what the hell are you doing?”
“Excellent question my boy, excellent question.” Jim pulled a tray towards him on which a keyboard and display were mounted, positioning it between them “Do you know what this device is?” He gestured at the chair into which Martin was buckled, wrists, ankles and at the waist. “This is an emotion surgical machine. Isn’t it beautiful?”
Martin had hear rumours around the facility, but hadn’t believed they were true.
“You see, you competing with me for funding, for awards, those things I enjoy Martin,” he steepled his fingers and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, “however when I find you’ve been sleeping with my girlfriend, I’m afraid that’s an entirely different kettle of fish, old boy.”
Martin tried to look skyward as he rolled his eyes, but realized his head was strapped in as well. “Jim, you dumbass, Evylene is not and never has been your girlfriend, and I don’t think she ever will be, you’re delusional-”
“Shut. Up. You don’t understand how close we are, Evylene and I, and how much what you’ve done has hurt me. At first I thought I’d use my machine to remove my feelings of jealousy, anger, so that I could forgive her and love her more, but I realized you’d still be there trying to lure her away.”
Pushing back and turning to the keyboard, Jim started typing with furious intent.
“First, Martin, I’m going to remove your capacity for love, for joy and for happiness. You’ll be just as angry, jealous and lost as I’ve been these last months and she’ll never, ever be attracted to you like that.”
Jim grinned as he pressed the return key. Martin’s head was bathed in blue light and bombarded with radiation as a series of boring needles in the headpiece penetrated his skull. Nano-tech flooded in to scour his brain and strip away the specific emotional receptors and supporting memories he’d specified.
Martin heard himself screaming for quite some time, and then he didn’t hear himself anymore. Somewhere in there Jim got up and left the room, the novelty of the process having worn off. It may have been minutes or days before Martin was aware of the silence, the machine having gone to sleep upon completion leaving Martin alone with is thoughts.
The wrist straps were secure, but not very tight. He tried simply pulling his hands through at first, and then realized his thumbs were in the way.Balling his left fist with his thumb inside, he squeezed until the thumb bones gave way and shattered, then he pulled with all his might until it slipped through the wrist strap. It may have been excruciatingly painful. He wasn’t sure. It took some fumbling to undo the other wrist with only four working fingers, but before Jim returned Martin had released himself.
Jim stepped through the door into the swinging end of a fire extinguisher and sudden blackness.
When he awoke, it was Martin that stared at him from behind the keyboard and display, and he was strapped into his own device.
“Martin, there are people coming down, release me now and I-”
Martin cut him off. “The mistake you made Jim, is that the opposite of love and joy and happiness isn’t hate, it’s indifference. You know what you’ve done, and that knowledge will haunt you. I’m going to remove all of the emotions that might allow you to rationalize it. I’m going to take away hate, jealousy, greed. I’m going to strip out anger and the sting of betrayal. I’m going to leave you with just what you’ve taken from me, I’ll leave you unfiltered, unchecked love and guilt.”
As the machine started to hum to life again, Martin set it in motion, rose and walked to the door.
“Martin!” Jim screamed, straining at his bonds as the helmet bored into his brain, “Martin you can’t do this to me, you might as well kill me!”
Martin barely broke stride as he left the room, calling out over his shoulder.
“I really don’t care.”
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.
