The Post-Emotional Age

by J. Loseth | Mar 9, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

Terina fumbled in her pocket for her pill box, a present from her mother. If you had to live with such an unfortunate disease, Mama had told her bluntly, you might as well have something nice and unobtrusive to hide the necessary medication. Terina had needed a pill then, too, letting her six-year-old bangs hide the shame in her eyes. Thirty years later, she no longer had the benefit of the curtain of hair, but the enameled pill box was a good focus for her gaze. Terina popped out one of the small blue spheres and tucked it under her tongue, letting her body dissolve the medicine as she tried to pay attention to the feed in front of her.

Bodies. Dead bodies, everywhere, laid out across a bloody plain that nearly made Terina sick when she had to look at it. She swallowed bile and willed the pill to dissolve faster, sneaking a glance at her fellow commanding officers, all arrayed around the readout in stolid contemplation.

“Looks like the blast points were precise,” one of the men observed, pointing out charred circles on the readout with his stylus. “They maximized human casualties rather than structural damage.”

“That makes sense,” a blue-eyed woman replied. “That’s one of the few plants that isn’t automated. Without its workers, production will be halved at best. They did their research.” She shook her head in detached admiration. “Intelligent terrorists.”

“Lieutenant Carreas?” the colonel asked, turning to Terina for her opinion. She jumped a little before she got a hold of herself.

“We’ll have to write to the families,” she said softly, then immediately regretted it when six pairs of incredulous eyes turned towards her. Terina shrank back and crunched the pill between her teeth; anything to get it to dissolve faster and restore her composure.

“Let’s focus on the situation at hand, Carreas,” the colonel suggested, and his disapproval was clear. Terina swallowed the pill. She could finally feel the medication beginning to take effect, detaching her from the weakness of outdated emotional reaction.

“Yes, sir.” Straightening, Terina examined the readouts again, this time more easily able to ignore the mangled bodies at the crime scene. “This looks like Redox residue,” she said at last, circling a blackened piece of ground with her own stylus in order to enlarge it. “It must have been the Xiang rebels. No other group has access to that kind of technology.” The rest of the lieutenants nodded and murmured their agreement. Terina knew that all of them thought her more than a little flighty due to her condition, but they still showed a grudging respect for her skills as an analyst and tactician, provided she remembered to take her medication.

“Good work, Carreas.” The colonel nodded sharply and turned his gaze to the blue-eyed woman. “Lieutenant Holmes, you will lead the dispatch team. Flush out the rebels; if they’re Xiang, they should still be in the area. Make sure they’re caught promptly. We can’t afford any more production delays.” The woman saluted smartly and turned to go, with the rest of the commanding officers following a step afterwards, as soon as the colonel gave the signal of dismissal. Terina hung behind.

As the rest of the lieutenants filed out of the briefing room, Terina traced the images on the screen with her finger, swallowing a lump in her throat. She knew she wasn’t supposed to think about the families. She wasn’t supposed to feel any of this. She wasn’t supposed to feel anything at all.

Turning quickly, Terina hurried to catch up with the rest of the group before she was missed. The slight blur of her vision was something she had learned to accept. Once the medication took full effect, it would be gone.

Exodus

by J. Loseth | Mar 4, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

Daikan hadn’t told anyone about the birds. They were his secret, but each day, he had to prove to himself that his secret was still there.

The fields stretched out wide and sun-kissed, rows of wheat and corn and the colonial crop of beravados swaying gently in the wind. Daikan breathed the air as he walked, but he paid no attention to the beauty of the countryside. He had grown up on colony worlds, after all, and had never seen a true city. The contrast was lost on him. He was close to the valley now, the hollow where he’d first discovered his secret. The fields held no interest for him.

Daikan paused to catch his breath at the base of the last hill, his heart leaping in his chest. Every day that he made this pilgrimage, he asked himself the same questions. Would they be there today? Would it all still be true? Or had his secret vanished overnight, disappeared into the ether of impossibility? Daikan didn’t want to believe it was all a dream, so he hadn’t told anyone. Not yet. He took a deep breath and bent down to his hands and knees, crawling up the hill to peer over the top.

The birds were there. Stretching out in all directions, they covered the grassy plain, so close together that Daikan couldn’t see the ground. The valley was filled with birds of every shape and color, feathers rustling, all packed together more closely than Daikan had ever seen. He held his breath, eyes wide, terrified of disturbing them. Each day the birds seemed to multiply, with more kinds and colors filling the small hollow until Daikan couldn’t believe it would hold anymore, but this was far beyond the number from the day before. The valley full of feathers and beaks was a living thing, but the only sound that issued from it was a low, pervasive rustle. The birdlike chatter that had drawn him there for the first time a week ago was gone, and Daikan swallowed. He would keep still forever if it meant never breaking the wonder of the scene before him.

All at once, the rustle stopped. Daikan’s eyes were wide as saucers, fearful that the birds had discovered him, that he would be covered by angry wings and claws and pecked apart by sharp beaks, but the birds didn’t move. For a long moment, there was utter silence in the valley, an unnerving stillness that a similar crowd of human beings could never produce. Then the birds turned as one and launched themselves into flight.

It was stunning. Every bird in the valley, every member of every species that had been painstakingly transported from the homeworld, took wing at once. They flew over Daikan’s head with no regard whatsoever for the human boy, and without thinking he was on his feet, mouth open as he stared at the cloud of departing creatures. Feathers fell around him like rain, the combined effect of thousands of birds taking off at once, nearly blotting out the sky with their bodies.

“No!” Daikan cried out in dismay, stretching a futile hand out after them. “No, please! Come back!” His hand caught only a single black feather.

The birds didn’t listen. In a cacophony of flapping wings, they were gone.

Priorities

by J. Loseth | Mar 1, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

Claude scuffed his feet against the burnished steel floor of his ship, a deep frown settled on his features. No matter how old he got, there were some women who always seemed to bring out the child in him, the contrite young boy who had just been given a firm scolding. Jelari could do it more easily than most.

“It’s not that I think it’s a bad thing,” she was explaining, her voice quiet and reasonable. “But really, Claude, even you have got to see that this is a little unhealthy. It makes sense for a mechanic to be devoted to his ship, but with this thing—Claude, I don’t know how else to say this. You treat it like a person.”

“I treat her like a ship,” Claude protested. “A good ship who’s gotten me through a lot of scrapes and deserves respect.”

“See?” Jehari said, giving him a look of profound disappointment. “You’re personifying again, Claude. You just called it a ‘she.’ A spaceship isn’t a person. It’s a piece of machinery.”

“Even landside sailors give their ships a gender,” Claude replied, but the sinking feeling in his heart told him he was losing yet another battle. Jehari just didn’t understand the special relationship Claude had with the Mermaid’s Wing. He’d raised the ship from a baby, just a junkyard scrap with a tiny spark of potential, and she had carried him through thick and thin. Every ounce of money Claude got from his various odd jobs wound up sunk into the Mermaid’s Wing, on engine parts or upgrades or new tools or even just a new coat of sealant. He could tell that his girlfriend was not amused.

“That is not the point, Claude, and you know it.” Jehari straightened and frowned, and inwardly, Claude groaned. This always meant that she meant business. “The point is that you are spending too much time working on the ship and not enough interacting with real human beings.”

By that, Claude knew that Jehari meant he’d been ignoring her, and he felt a pang of guilt. Jehari was a human, though, and humans could take care of themselves. The Wing couldn’t. “She needs me,” Claude protested weakly.

“Claude, this is not acceptable.” Jehari’s mouth was set in a thin line and Claude knew it was only a pale representation of the line he had just crossed. “I’m not going to live here with you and watch you waste all of your time on unnecessary engine diagnostics and triple-redundancy system installations. You need to make a choice. It’s either me or the ship.”

Slumping in his chair, Claude nodded. Somehow he had always known it would come to this. He felt a certain sense of defeat, but in the end, Jehari was probably right—it was better this way. He needed to learn how to let go and make choices. It was with a very real pang of regret that he dropped Jehari off at the next spaceport.

As he piloted the Mermaid’s Wing away from the station, Claude felt a lightness that he hadn’t experienced in months. He patted the control panel affectionately, noting as he did so that the Wing’s coolant system was running just a little below 90% efficiency. He’d have to take a look at that. “Don’t worry,” he told the ship with a smile. “I’ll take care of you.”

The New Poor

by J. Loseth | Feb 7, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

The sound from the slums is no longer the groan of bodies. Hunger cries, cussing, gunshots, the crackle of fires in old trash barrels—all of these are gone. Our poor no longer freeze or hunger.

I hear it every day on my way home from work, from beneath the narrow steel and concrete bridge that I cut across to make the 20:41 train. It’s the reason why so few commuters take this route, even though it’s a shortcut around the backlog of foot traffic in Darby Square. The noise comes from below, so far down that I can’t see them—not that I look. But I can hear them.

It’s a clattering noise, the metallic clicking of limbs or antennae against hard rock and metal. I hear that the streets down on the low levels aren’t always steel, but it sounds like it. Sometimes I hear a low thrum, dozens of them moving at once, milling around aimlessly and hopelessly without work or power. Sometimes it’s only one, and I can follow the mournful clinks as it wanders from outlet to outlet, cable extending and retracting at each one, jacking in to search for even the smallest hint of stray electricity.

Some activists claim that abandoning them is cruel, that it behooves us to care for our creations or at least to destroy them when they’ve outlived their usefulness, but the city can’t be bothered with the costs. I don’t think anyone pays much attention to those fringe groups, anyway. It was one thing to protest cruelty to living things, but to machines? Even the liberals thought that was taking things a little far.

Me, I don’t buy into all this ‘machine rights’ bullshit in the activist pamphlets, but I do think something should be done about those things. I know the government says it’s too late, that it’d take more time and manpower and money to round up all the little creeps than they’d get back from selling the recyclable parts, but hell. It’s only getting worse.

Most people don’t ever hear the noise. If you stick to the main corridors, you won’t. They’re all insulated anyway, so sounds from the lower levels don’t filter through. When I have to catch the late train, though, the mournful clatter from below makes my skin crawl.

The fate of the lower classes has been a platform for re-election since history books were invented, but times have changed. Politicians say that beating poverty is our responsibility to the poor, but just between you and me? It’d be more like a service to the rest of us.