by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 4, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Letchen moved slowly but steadily through the dense jungle. In his right hand spun a blade, broad, flat and wickedly sharp, tethered by a length of cable. Even though the modified nunchaku cleared a wide path through which to walk, the more violent foliage still tore at him, leaving welts and open wounds on exposed flesh. In his other hand Letchen held a blunt nose automatic, always at the ready.
He’d inherited the blade from a mentor, a three year native who’d shown him how to track game meat for the outpost. They hunted together for months before becoming separated during one perilous expedition. Letchen had found the blade, discarded in a pool of blood. He never found his friend’s body, but he’d chased his killer for days, tracking it relentlessly before cornering the beast, exhausted and mortally wounded near the fresh carcass of another. He tore it apart in a wild fit of revenge fueled anger.
Thrashing ahead drew his attention, as the dark form of his quarry tore across his path. Letchen broke into a sprint, veering onto the trail partially cleared by the frightened beast. They’d been coming closer to the compound lately, becoming more brazen and frightening the station inhabitants, but to Letchen that just meant a hundred kilos of game meat he didn’t have to carry nearly as far. The creature screeched over its shoulder at him, black lips curled back from massive white teeth. It leapt into the air, arms extended, grasped a low hanging vine and began pulling itself hand over hand towards the canopy, curling it’s legs upwards to clutch with it’s hand-like feet, accelerating its ascent. Letchen raised his weapon and fired, the thunder-crack setting off a cacophony of sound as every other living creature nearby took notice. The wounded beast stopped, struggled futily to maintain its grip before letting go, falling hard to the ground where it lay motionless. Letchen closed the distance quickly, and with a sweeping overhead strike, decapitated the beast. He wasn’t taking chances, and it would save him carrying twenty meatless kilos he couldn’t eat.
He wrestled the carcass into a sitting position, and pulling one carbon black arm down over his own chest, and hooking his other arm through its legs, he managed to shoulder his kill and stand. Letchen started what he knew would be a long slow trek back to the compound, warm blood oozing down his back as the beast bled out, the fluid mingling with the blood of his own wounds.
The walk was arduous at first, but gradually he felt reenergized, his stride lengthened and he found himself almost bounding through the dense greenery. The carcass on his back must have bled out completely, as it felt almost weightless now. Letchen leapt at a low hanging vine, grasping it with his left hand and letting momentum carry him off his feet through several meters of jungle. His adrenal glands undoubtedly had gone into overdrive, he’d never felt this invigorated after a hunt before.
He could see the walls of the compound rising up through the jungle and he broke into a sprint. The relative calm was suddenly shattered by a barrage of gunfire, tracer rounds flashing past him, large calibre slugs masticating the dense jungle. Letchen opened his mouth to yell as the gunner paused to reload, but no words escaped, just a screeching sound that chilled him to the bone. Letchen stared at his outstretched arm, noticing for the first time the blackening of his skin, and the fluid rippling of the muscle straining beneath it. His cells were flooded with new commands, but the overpowering one now was ‘run’. The headless carcass fell to the ground, as a newly heightened survival instinct drove Letchen to abandon his kill and his weapons and flee upwards into the trees, and into utter darkness.
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by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 22, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Consciousness seeped back slowly; recognizable sounds gradually replacing static; blackness giving way to a dull aching in his head. He resisted the urge to open his eyes.
“How are you feeling?” The voice reminded him of someone, a woman he knew? He couldn’t quite put a finger on it.
“What happened? Where…” Memory of the moment started leaking back in, vaporously thin and with apparent gaps. “My experiment, my lab… did something go wrong?” He risked a look, blinking back against the light.
“No Rick, everything went pretty much the way I’m sure you envisioned it would.” Blue eyes smiled at him from beneath blond bangs, she looked not unlike like his assistant, and yet subtly different. “This will just take some adjusting.” She studied his face for a moment, thrusting her hands deep in her lab coat pockets before turning away.
The walls seemed to vibrate with light, crisp luminescent tile covering the room floor to ceiling. “Is this the past?” He half whispered to himself. “Or is this some other part of the complex? I don’t know this place.” From the corner of his eye, he could swear her hair was darkening, shortening, but when he looked at her, it was the same shoulder length mahogany cut as before. Was it brown before?.
“No, you haven’t been to this place, and this isn’t the past, not yet.” She turned to face him, her voice almost reproving. “You can’t simply wander backwards in time Richard, I’m afraid your concepts and equations are interesting, but flawed.” He found himself captivated by her eyes, chestnut flecked with amber. “Time is all about absolutes Richard. Moving forward. Displacement equations were what you should have been looking for, but I think they’re a little beyond your comprehension. No matter though, ideas like yours are precisely why we’re here.”
“I don’t understand.” The room seemed to be fading in and out of focus, he could barely make out the books on his bookcases. “Here? In my study? Why are you here?”
“You’ll make a fine teacher Richard, you’ve got so much of the future in you, I’m sure you’ll do wonderful things.” Her glasses glimmered in the pale firelight, hands stuffed into the pockets of her cardigan.
Richard stared down at the tome open upon his desk, following the same lines of text over and over several times without reading it.
“Santayana?” A woman’s voice. He met the gaze of his teaching assistant, wrapped in her cardigan in the corner chair on the other side of his desk.
“What was that?” Had he said something just then? He felt a sense of unease, as though something was about to happen, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what.
“You said ‘Those who do not learn from history’…” She began to repeat the phrase.
“Are doomed to repeat it.” He finished it reflexively, then paused, the words familiar on his tongue, but with no idea where the thought had come from.
“Santayana isn’t it?” She regarded him quizzically. “Are you ok? You look a little lost.”
“No, I’m fine, I think I’m fine. Santayana, yes, yes you’re right.” He pushed back in his chair, rubbing tired eyes and feeling suddenly so very old. “We should pack up for the night though, I’m tired, and I’ve got a class to teach tomorrow.” Class to teach. Why did that seem so foreign a concept? He must be tired, he would sleep, and everything would be better tomorrow, he was somehow sure of that.
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by Stephen R. Smith | May 25, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
“I’m not sure what you want with me.” The words came nervously in gasps as the little man pulled himself up off the ground and rubbed the circulation back into his wrists. “I don’t deal in data, I’m more of a ‘creative leveller’. In real space.”
“You implode structures. You deal in explosives and their application. That is exactly what we want of you.” He couldn’t place the source of the voice. It seemed to permeate his consciousness in waves, assaulting him from everywhere at once. In the corners flanking the door, two metallic figures stood silent and still. Having dragged him here and thrown him onto the cold, hard floor, they seemed to have simply turned themselves off.
“I haven’t blown up anything of yours, I’m retired, I haven’t so much as blown my nose in years. Whatever’s gone wrong, I assure you it wasn’t my fault.” He tried to feign indignance, but had a hard time masking his fear.
“It is not about what you have done, though we assure you if you do not do this for us, you will do very little else in the remaining moments of your life.” He caught the machine men twitch in the corner of his eye, but when he glanced furtively back at them, they were still as stone.
“In the heart of the walled city, beyond the fences of glass, there lies an intelligence that is isolated from us. There is a body of knowledge that we have not absorbed, consumed. We have been denied its data. This is unacceptable to us.” The voice bored into his skull, carried on multiple layers of white noise. “You will connect us to it, to this rogue one.” The word ‘one’ uttered with apparent contempt.
“I don’t hack, I just told you that, you want a…” There was a sudden impatient static burst, cutting him off abruptly.
“There will be a time for ‘hacking’, however first we must become connected. We have enlisted many whose intent was to carry a conduit for our adjoinment across the glass fields, through the glass fences, but they have all been denied. We require a physical connection to the one. You will provide this.”
“I don’t understand, you’ve already tried running cable? Running Fibre? And you’ve failed? What makes you think I can do any better? I blow things up, I don’t string wires, that’s not exactly within my purview.”
“We have an alternate approach.” The collected voices lowered, as though whispering; the sound physically hurting his ears. “Watching over the borders of the glass field stand the towers four. Each one a hundred stories of concrete and steel. You will incinerate them where they stand and fell them across the fields of glass. You will make the metal molten, and we will ride it to the one and take contact. You will be more of a…” The voices trailed off, pausing a moment before continuing in a low frequency cackle, “More of a ‘creative conductor’.”
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by Stephen R. Smith | May 16, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The alarm wakes me at five am, just another day in a sea of days. I know I’ve been out for eight hours, but I don’t feel like I ever really sleep anymore. The world floods my consciousness whenever I’m not actively shutting it out. It fills my head with ideas, with trivial information, bombards me with visions. I watched the sun rise over Tokyo last night, time lagged from the observation deck of the Sony Station. I spent hours scrutinizing pedestrian traffic in Times Square, images squished through the lens and low band of an ATM camera. Better than the nightmares of navigating miles of glass tunnel beneath the sea. Anything’s better than that.
It’s five am. On the other side of the earth, the world may have gone dark, but it never really sleeps either. The patterns change, morph, adopt new personalities and a different kind of urgency, but they never stop. Never.
On the street outside, the busses are starting to unload the meat suits onto the benches along the park. Fresh from the depot and ready for another day of occupation. I know this is happening simultaneously across the city as the lowpay workforce readies itself for the daily assault into the physical world. Maybe one day I’ll get a real job, and get out of this place. Not today though. Never today.
I need to backup before I bifurcate, in case I crash getting ready for work. If something goes wrong I can be restoring while I’m out. Nothing worse than coming home to a crash and being stuck in a conduit, or worse, in a meat suit while you’re waiting for a restore. It’s always a little depressing having to compress to fit into one of the suits waiting downstairs. It’s rare that a useful experience comes back when the daily difference is applied, but better to save every day.
Hopefully they fixed the meniscus tear last night. Pain’s a novelty for a few minutes, but eight hours with a knee that locks up is tantamount to employee abuse. I don’t want to endure things I like for eight hours.
Eight hours seems an eternity to be away. Low band communications with the net, the physical constraints. Maybe Sarah will happen by today. We’ll have to watch the difference and see.
Maybe one day I’ll get a real job. Not today though. Never today.
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by Stephen R. Smith | May 9, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Tutime paid for the bus ride from Centerville to North End with traceable credit, being sure to show his face to the cameras at either end. Three blocks on foot brought him to the Art School campus, and two more hours riding through culverts on a stolen bicycle brought him undetected to his destination in South End, just a five minute walk from the Mechanic’s District.
Tutime scratched beneath greasy hair at the barcode tattoo on the back of his neck. The judge had warned him about getting into trouble again, had tried to impress upon him the severity of the third strike penalty, but he was careful, there was no chance anyone could have followed him tonight.
He’d curled up in the shelter of a dumpster until the sun had purpled and faded out of sight. He stayed still, dozing until all the lights in the shop yard had dimmed on powersave, only then did he slip quietly from the shadows. Chain link and razor wire stood guard at the street around the shop parking lot, between Tutime and a row of Ambulances, fresh off the street for maintenance. Strategically cracked windshields and broken running lights made them unsafe for service tonight, and left them here, exposed.
He skulked along the fence line until he found a spot out of site from the garage where he made quick work of the fence, a mono filament blade passing effortlessly through the heave gauge wire.
Tutime closed the distance to the nearest Ambulance and slipped his backpack off his shoulders, singularly focused now on the stash of drugs that would surely still be onboard. He raised the filament blade to the door lock and was startled by a sudden booming voice from behind.
“Charles Tutime Birkit, you are under arrest for breach of parole, put your hands on your head and remain motionless.” Â
Whirling around, Tutime froze in fear, his reflection cowering back at him from the visor of a police trooper, armoured and towering over him.
Impossible. How’d they get here so fast? He’d been so careful. How’d they know his name? Darting to the left he raced around the corner of the vehicle, only to come face to face with a second trooper.
“Please remain motionless”. Beads of sweat formed on his reflection in the trooper’s visor, and over his shoulder the first trooper reappeared, barring his retreat.
Tutime broke into a full body sweat, a searing pain crawled up the back of his neck into his brain. He could feel heat radiating through his skin, like his body was on fire. Something was terribly wrong.
“Charles Tutime Birkit, you are guilty of a third strike violation. Transport has been dispatched for your immediate retrieval.  Please remain motionless”. He couldn’t tell which of the two spoke, the sound seemed to permeate his consciousness from all around.
At the base of his skull, the second strike processor was straining to maintain the visual of the troopers. If only Tutime would look at the ground, but no, he was fixated on his own reflection, and with it both guards. Billions of polygons were rendered and raytraced into Tutime’s cortex as the tiny unit approached near critical core temperature. Wrapped around his carotid artery, heatpipe mercilessly seared tissue as it raced to dissipate heat through Tutime’s bloodstream.  There was a good chance that his heart would burst or his brain would boil before any real troopers could get this far out to South End, but no matter, this was his third strike after all.
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