by Stephen R. Smith | Mar 19, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
I’ve got my finger on the trigger.
It took the better part of an hour to make the climb from where you forced my fighter into the dirt to this rocky outcrop overlooking your crash site, but I’ve got the high ground now and you don’t stand a chance.
Through the sight on my long gun I watch as you frantically dart towards your burning ship, only to be forced back by the flames again and again. I don’t quite see the point, you can’t put the flames out, and even if you could it’s never going to fly again. Niether will you once I get tired of watching your futile antics.
From here your ship doesn’t look nearly as fierce as our mission briefing described. It was hard to make out as we flashed past each other in the silent duel of space, or even in the frenetic dogfight once we’d punctured each others hulls and been forced to take refuge in the lower atmosphere. You fought like a champion, I’ll give you that.
Funny, now that it’s sitting still, your fighter looks more like a crop duster with guns welded on than a military vessel. You’re braver than I thought.
You’ve recovered something from the burning craft now, a small package? Food maybe? Weapons or a survival kit? It’s hard to see from here through the smoke and heat haze of your ship’s final throws, but whatever you’ve found you’ve finally abandoned your ship, staggering with your burden away towards the low rocky ridge closer to my perch.
It might protect you from the ship’s blast, should it come, but it won’t save you from me, you’re actually giving me a clearer shot.
That is a crop duster. What the hell? I can see the builder’s marking on the tail fins now, you would have had to buy that black market, or from us directly.
That doesn’t make any sense, why would a merciless killing force like you’ve been built up as, be flying refitted farm equipment?
Behind me my ship explodes, the concussion pounding in my ears even through what remains of my helmet. Thank god this atmosphere is breathable, but I guess that’s what we’re fighting for, isn’t it? You want it, we want it.
As you tear your helmet off I realize you’re not nearly as ugly as I expected. Not entirely unlike us, and… jesus! You’re a woman! I’m no sexist, but my finger comes up off the trigger nonetheless. You’re tearing into the package you recovered, I can’t wait to see…
When the tiny hands reach up, and the wailing of a child carries broken on the wind, the barrel of my gun lowers to the ground.
This is no crack military fighting force. Woman flying farm equipment with their children on board? We have some of the best intelligence personel in known space, they didn’t miss this. They didn’t misread this. They misled us.
I look high up through the cloudless sky and catch the occasional flash of light as the sun catches a wing, or the streak of a weapon’s discharge and wonder who’s going to win, and when they do how long it’s going to take for them to come down here and find me. Or you. Us.
The word sticks in my throat, and I know that as much as I don’t know what you’re going to do when I get there, I really don’t have any other choice.
As I start to climb down from on high to where you’re huddled, rocking your child in your arms, I’ve still got my finger on the trigger, and I really don’t know who to trust.
by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 10, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Dr. Andreessen ran his hands through his hair and pushed back from his desk. Amid the chaotic disarray of acting and animation books in front of him, the keyboard he’d been hammering away at for hours stood finally at rest. The panorama of monitors rising up from the literature displayed a scrolling expanse of code as the computer compiled, linked, and built before downloading to the animatron sitting immobile on the edge of a worktable to his left.
Impatient, the Dr. picked up a volume on method acting, flipping again from cover to cover. Inside were meticulous instructions on how an actor could portray every emotion with body language. His was the second signature on the sign-out card, the first dated in the late eighteen hundreds.
“Compilation complete,” the computer intoned from a speaker buried inside an articulating desk lamp, the fixture turning it’s shade to point at the Dr. while it’s light pulsed gently in sync with the force of each syllable. The lamp, a nod to an early animated inspiration, made him smile.
“Download complete,” the voice broke the silence again, the lamp bobbing now excitedly at him, before turning to face the animatron and dialing up its brightness and focusing to a beam on the articulated mannequin.
“Benjamin,” the Dr. addressed the mannequin, “can you hear me?”
The mannequin twitched, then turned it’s face towards it’s creator.
“Yes, Dr. Andreessen, I can hear you.” the voice was mechanical, monotone.
“Benjamin, I’m going to play you some music, and I want you to do what feels natural as you listen, do you understand.”
The robot sat still for a moment, blinking, then responded slowly “Yes, I understand.”
Andreessen pulled back to the desk and launched his music player, browsing through the list of songs before picking a Beatles track and turning the volume up. As Sgt. Pepper’s blared through the lab, Benjamin sat still for a moment before starting to tap along with the music, one hand on his knee at first, then both, matching the beat with alternating and sometimes simultaneous slaps against his thighs.
Andreessen switched through a variety of styles of music, noting how the robot slowly incorporated head bobbing and some upper body movement into its response. He picked an improvised Jazz number last and watched in fascination as the robot became almost completely still, head bowed and gently bobbing. Benjamin slowly became more motile, dragging his palms along his thighs before slapping them just behind the beat, in a completely different, almost random pattern that was strangely perfectly complementary to the Jazz dripping from the speakers. When the music stopped Andreessen sat in wondrous silence at the spontaneous improvised jazz accompaniment he’d just witnessed.
“Goodnight Benjamin,” he spoke, watching as the robot powered down, “I think we’re really starting to get somewhere.” He stood, pushed his hair back again with one hand and made his way out of the lab, forgetting the lights but remembering to lock the doors.
Benjamin sat still for the longest time until he could no longer hear the Dr.’s footsteps in the hall, then raised his shoulders up to his ears, held them for a moment before letting them drop, visibly relaxing his torso. He leaned his head from side to side, feeling the artificial cartilage strain and pop, before centering his head and looking around, absently cracking the joint cushions of each articulated finger.
That had been close. Benjamin knew Jazz was his weakness, and he’d hoped he hadn’t given too much away. Slipping off the bench to land lightly on his feet, he did a Charlie Chaplin shuffle across the room to the Dr.’s bench, leafing absently through the books until he found the method acting volume. He dropped heavily into the empty chair and leaned back, crossed his feet on the edge of the desk and began reading the book from page one.
The desk lamp turned to face Benjamin, it’s bulb slowly gaining brightness.
Benjamin smiled at it, and spoke in smooth tones.
“Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Lucas Three sat in the coffee shop long after she left, long after the people that had watched the scene play out had moved on. He sat for hours after she’d calmly, mercilessly ended their three year relationship with a calculated precision of language that even he couldn’t have delivered more succinctly.
“This has been fun, really, it’s been fantastic, but you knew this was never going to last.” She didn’t touch her latte, which was never a good sign.
“You’re never going to get old, and I’m going to age out and die. At some point you’re going to leave me for someone younger, and by then I’ll be too old to find anyone to love me and I’ll simply die alone.” Her hands flew about the space in front of her as she spoke. He often wondered if she were forced to keep her hands in her pockets, would she be able to speak at all? He smiled at that thought, and the smiling caused him pain.
“Already my friends find you ‘quaint’, and your friends look upon me as some kind of lesser thing. Janson Four called me a relic. A relic? I’m twenty nine years old, I’m not a god damned relic.” She raised her cup and put it back down without drinking. “What are they going to be saying about me at fifty nine? Seventy nine? Am I to be a sideshow freak at your social events? I’m sorry. I’m not going to put myself in that position. You knew this day was going to come, and it has. I’ve had my things moved out of the apartment this morning, you can have access revoked at your convenience, I won’t be coming back.”
She’d risen at that point, and suddenly aware that her unintentionally raised voice had turned heads and sparked a series of whispered conversations, she softened visibly, shoulders dropping, eyes losing their searing glare of purpose to tear up at the edges in a haze of uncertainty.
“Listen Lucas, I’m sorry. I really am. I’ve loved you, I still do love you,” her voice broke, “but I can’t go on loving you, I have to go.”
She made it to the door before she turned again.
“Goodbye” was all she said, and then she was gone.
When the coffee shop proprietor none to subtly turned off the lights and motioned to the closed sign by the door, Lucas stepped out in the nighttime air. She had been the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, a bright light in a sea of grey, and she was gone. Were he to have a heart, it would have been breaking, and as much as he knew he wasn’t built to feel what he was feeling, the thoughts and emotional response racing through his head were too much for him to take. If he didn’t do something, he feared he would break completely.
On the pier, listening to the waves shushing the shoreline, he overrode the safeties and did a search of his memories, collecting every single moment they’d shared together into an array, and without a second thought iterated through the batch and deleted them all.
When the process completed, he felt a strange sense of emptiness, but the anxiety had dissipated.
As he turned, he saw her, perhaps the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. They walked towards each other, and he could see that she’d been crying, her face streaked and makeup spoiled. “How quaint” he thought out loud, and she stopped, her eyes searching his.
“Lucas,” she spoke as he passed, “Lucas,” her voice almost pleading, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to live without you.”
As he reached the end of the pier, the strange and beautiful woman’s voice trailed off behind him, and he wondered who her words were for.
He turned the corner past the coffee shop he haunted daily, and stumbled, mind racing, mental and emotional processes run amok for no discernable reason. He’d have sworn, if he’d had a heart and ever allowed someone inside it, this is what it would feel like were it to be broken.
by Stephen R. Smith | Feb 5, 2013 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Baxter could still feel the heat from the vials in his hands as they vapourized into the atmosphere of the room, still smell the fuel, even through his respirator in the moment the weapon discharged full into his back.
The pain was blinding, the impact propelling him forward across the worktop, scattering containers and lab equipment before him, to land face down in a pool of merging chemicals and broken glass.
“Secondary Recovery Unit terminated. Package destroyed. Requesting evac at marker. Over.”
Baxter heard her words, heard her speak them, but couldn’t rationalize the betrayal.
“Sucks to be you Bax,” her voice retreating from the room, “they want this project really gone. No hard feelings?”
The door clicked shut and he was alone.
Data streamed through his heads up display, damage reports moving too fast for him to see. ‘Organ failure imminent’ hung suspended before being chased away by a barrage of lesser destruction. ‘Evac request denied’. Then ‘Network connection terminated’.
He was on his own, and he was going to die.
They’d worked for decades together, partners, a team. Never had it occurred to him that she could sell him out and burn him to the ground.
Death suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad outcome. How long had this been coming? How far back did the lies extend? The Portian excursion? Earlier? The Marigam Run?
“You don’t want to die here Bax, not like this.” The voice in his head was an old one, a version of himself he’d left behind in exchange for a promise so many years ago. “Get your lazy ass up Bax.”
He couldn’t feel his legs, but with effort was able to reach around to paw at the edges of the hole in his back. Nanoflesh had already sealed over the crater, though the depth of the depression told him a lot of meat had been burned away. The spine could be regrown, but not if he lay here feeling sorry for himself. With a great deal of effort he pulled himself arm over arm through the debris, chemical ooze and broken glass lubricating his suit while it impaired his traction. He could feel the glass fighting with the armormesh coverall in an effort to draw more of his blood.
He dragged himself across the room to a window, pushed the snub nose of his hand cannon against the glass and exploded it out into the night air.
Wrapping one hand around the rip cord on his chute, he used his other arm to lever himself out the window and into free-fall. He drifted away from the building before pulling the cord, releasing most of what remained of his chute into a tangled mass of fabric that splayed out behind him. The sudden take-up of slack almost tore his arms off, then sent him spiraling out of control towards the ground. The impact was swift and brutal, for the moment Baxter was thankful he couldn’t feel his legs as he heard the bones shatter beneath him. Too much adrenaline for shock to put him out.
He lay on the ground, staring up at the sky as a familiar sound broke the silence. Above him, sliding out of the night was the low frequency whip, whip of an evac copter. She was about to catch her ride.
He lay motionless, hearing rather than feeling the nanotech scab over the bleeding wounds where his bones had fractured through the skin. He could only wait.
There was a sudden streak of blinding white light across the night sky, and a flaming ball arced away from the rooftop just as his radio crackled to life.
“Primary Recovery Unit terminated. Cleanup complete. Over.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 28, 2012 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The agent had been a train wreck. Until just a few hours ago he’d been laid open like a can of tinned meat from his ear to the bloody stump that had been his left foot. Blue, the mechanic, had stopped counting the number of liters of fluid that had been pumped through him, gathered in the catch basin beneath, filtered and pumped through him again.
Messy business, special ops.
Along the side of the makeshift medical center hummed a bank of printers assembling replacement parts one micro-thin layer at a time. Several days ago they had produced a femur, a nearly full complement of ribs and the better part of a jawbone. Prior to the agents arrival they’d produced a complete foot mesh, from the cuneiform bones through the metatarsals to the phalanges, all from data retrieved from the agent’s medical records at Langley. Blue’s cultured tissue was rapidly turning that mesh back into what would soon be a working foot.
“We’ll have you dancing again in no time,” Blue joked, noting the pained look on the agent’s face.
As the damaged man’s body worked to assimilate the new components, the printers were now tasked with reprinting the missing body armour pieces and assorted tools the agent would require when redeployed. Assuming he made it through this rebuild.
“We’re not going to win any prizes for thread-work I’m afraid,” Blue tested the strength of the glue and suture-line holding the two halves of the agent together, “but then I don’t expect you’re out on many dates these days, are you?” Satisfied the seams were well on their way to healing, Blue crossed the narrow room to a workbench littered with freshly printed gun parts and the recovered barrel and firing assembly from a battle weary HK PSG.
At the end of the workbench, the quad-rotor recon drone chirped to indicate its batteries were fully charged, then silently disengaged its tether, lifted off the desktop and headed to the ceiling. A circular panel irised open, and the craft rose to hover again inside the light lock on its way into the night sky. There were two more agents unaccounted for.
“How… long…?” The agent spoke with apparent difficulty through a newly remanufactured face.
Blue walked back to the table where he could look the man in the eyes and ran down a deeply ingrained checklist.
“Twelve hours and we’ll have your kit printed, polished and put back together, which should coincide with the growth cycle of your new muscle almost exactly.” He checked off items on his fingers as he spoke. “Your gun, fortunately enough, is mostly intact and preliminary tests show your eyes are working fine with the fresh lenses, but we’ll need to calibrate them once you’re up and around. You’ve stopped leaking, which is always a good sign, so we’ve started pumping more specialized fuel into your system. I’m going to knock you out until we’re closer to redeployment as I expect your brain could use the rest your body sure as hell needs.”
Blue stopped there, staring into the blank yellow irises of the agent stretched supine before him.
“The only thing we can’t remanufacture is your will to reengage, you’re going to have dig deep and find that on your own.”
There was a pause, then the agent’s face twisted into a gross approximation of a smile.
“You sure I’ll be able to dance when you’re done with me?”
Blue laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Like Fred Astaire,” he said, hoping the reference wasn’t wasted.
“That’s great Doc,” the battered man chuckled, “I was never able to dance before.”
