by submission | Aug 22, 2014 | Story |
Author : K. J. Russell
The moment of transition was 7:34 AM today, July 17th, and this one was unique in that nobody saw it coming. Haverforth Diedeli finally stirred awake thirty-four minutes after his alarm clock began to buzz at him, and at the moment his eyes popped open and his brain started to churn out thoughts, he was the main man. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Hatherforth was the single pivotal human out of the entire species, and in a span of seconds, we are sure you all noticed.
We would like to apologize for any inconvenience and offer this explanation:
Transitions like this are usually prepared for by S-Mundi network adminstrators. The Mindshare Protocols most often focus on a single human for a few decades, since they automatically route into the most intelligent human brain hooked into the network, and that doesn’t change as often as you’d think. Ninety-five percent of human intelligences fall naturally into the range of below-average through super-genius, but there’s a few outliers in the mega-genius range, and one stand-out. For the past thirty years, the mindshare protocols have been routing through Flynn McKermin, whose IQ is an entire standard deviation above the next highest human. So the Mindshare Protocols automatically utilize his intellect, via the S-Mundi network, to increase the intelligence of all connected human brains. So great has been McKermin’s contribution that for these thirty years, the mean intelligence of our entire race was raised by slightly over a standrad deviation, with a mean of 120.
As near as we can tell, however, something in Haverforth Diedeli’s brain switched into place this morning and his IQ shot up, however temporarily, to over 250. This, of course, triggered the mindshare protocols to switch to him and within minutes of that moment, the human race suddenly had a mean IQ rating of 175.
Everything stopped for a moment, and then moved beautifully. Thought became fluid, smooth, vibrantly colorful. In a whirl of ten minutes, novels were plotted, algorithms resolved, models of the universe were turned upside-down, old religions collapsed and rose as newer, more morally superior institutions. Here at S-Mundi Corp, we underwent the quickest and most efficient coporate restructuring in the history of business! The entire universe seemed to move under our feet, but it did so deliberately, and we watched its each and every twitch with complete understanding.
At 7:42 AM, however, Haverforth Diedeli died of hemorhaging in the brain, and the S-Mundi network suffered a complete collapse. He was found dead standing up, leaning against a wall, his hand clenched around a pen so tightly that it had shattered between his fingers. Written over cheap, hideous wallpaper, were the desperate words: “You fools! It’s so obvious! It’s right in front of you! It’s in your eyes! It’s in your eyes! It’s in – rathgn mthrath senesh in your eyes mthrath rathgn sle the gods in my tumor the fsleshr say it aloud-”
S-Mundi network administration would like to warn all of you to show extra care in your decision-making while the network remains down, as the current mean intelligence of humanity has returned temporarily to 100. Downtime is expected to be minimum, and we are all doing our best to fix the problem in such a way that it does not occur again. We are also taking this opportunity to apply a hotfix to certain teritiary functions, improving the system as a whole. The Mindshare Protocols are expected to revert to Flynn McKermin when the network comes back up sometime tomorrow morning.
– Office of the Chair of PR, S. Mundi Corp
by submission | Aug 21, 2014 | Story |
Author : Tamara Rogers
They gave me a million eyes. Well, not a million, more like a terra-billion, a bajillionzillion. All x to the power z equals I want it I see it.
Excuse me if I’m not too precise, there’s buzzes coming in and network trails running through. Dope data distraction.
Take the details of my promotion. You could read it if you like but it’s all clauses and multipoints and corporate trash. The upshot is that my work on Animal Farm Mark 4: Kids’ Revolt was just too fucking good. I ran it smoother than if I was taking candy from a baby. It was a bit harder when they’d activate the RattleBattleTM weapons but that only usually happened at level 4 and mostly they just stuck to the kindergarten stages talking weed and dates and shit.
But this is something else.
<HTTP ERROR 400: Bad Request>
Ignore that, just glitching. You know, first day ripples spreading out, settling in.
Where was I?
That’s it. It was all toddler play, pissing about monitoring kids and their pumped up avis, throwing my weight around in their digital playground. This is just something else. You should have seen this guy just then; paging through the usual facetime porn they all go for, then he only goes and gets his ferrets out. Bloody hell, I don’t think they liked it. Cardboard tube Armageddon.
<HTTP ERROR 404: Not Found>
Forget that.
Tell me – what would you do if you were everywhere? Cos that is what it’s like. All the tentacles of the world, they’re all right here – hardwired fingers dripping into my brain, all hot and sticky and delicious.
<HTTP ERROR 403: Forbidden>
Of course, this is technically probation, but, you know, fuck that – how can you be on probation when you’re the one in charge of the grid? I make the rules. I am the rules.
Jesus, this is awesome. You should be here, you should be me – get to see it all, take it in. But, hey, there’s only one of me and it’s fucking busy.
<HTTP ERROR 429: Too Many Requests>
It’s coming in quick now. Faster, harder. I’ll tell you more but, hang it, I’ve gotta see this… There’s a woman in China and her voice is leaking through like it’s pure fucking silk… There’s a kid in Devon and he fancies himself a crackhack. He’s sending out reams of cover-emails that ain’t even coming close to hiding his bandwidth Ponzi scheme… There’s a guy in Belize and he’s running sermons and preaching his church, making noise over the web and calling himself God.
I squeeze down on his network supply, watch his face flicker into nothingness.
I turn him to black.
Cos he’s wrong. He can’t be God.
Cos I am.
<HTTP ERROR 418: I’m a Teapot>
by Julian Miles | Aug 19, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
“What the hell is he riding – or is that piloting?”
“Riding. Even though the round bits front and rear aren’t wheels: they’re gravtac repulsor loops.”
Blake turned to stare at Neville: “Nice. So what the frack is it?”
Neville smiled: “Vincent Black Banshee.”
“Aren’t they illegal?”
“Not yet.”
The ten-foot long vehicle they pursued – seemingly made only of flowing lines and reflections of the objects it passed – accelerated away from them without difficulty, then pulled an impossibly sharp left-turn and shot up the side of a tall building.
Blake punched the roof lining of their unmarked pursuit car.
“Bloody marvellous. How are we supposed to catch something that can do that?”
Neville grinned: “Vincent’s Black Ghost was the first gravtac motorbike. As the gravtac was like you get on the boots, it behaved like a motorbike. The Black Banshee added a gravitic field generator and Lenkormian Forever Drive. That means as far as it’s concerned, ‘down’ is whichever way the underside points.”
Blake clamped a hand on Neville’s shoulder: “He’s been causing chaos for months. Given the state of the streets inside the London Orbital, his antics were tolerated – until he started tagging secure vehicles.”
“He only showed the inadequacies of our security versus new technology. He saved lives: we revised our procedures and stopped two hi-tech assassination attempts cold.”
Blake nodded: “I’ll give him that, but the feeling is that he’s with the activists.”
Neville slammed the car to a stop: “They what?”
“They think he’s setting himself set up as a popular icon to heighten the impact when he pulls something grievous. It’s not like we could stop him.”
Neville chuckled.
Blake stared at him: “What’s so funny?”
Neville pointed out the window on Blake’s side. Barely twenty feet away, he could see his reflection in the gleaming black panels of a thoroughbred hybrid of drag bike and cruise missile. It hung inches from the pavement, the rider sitting relaxed with hands in lap and helmeted head turned toward them. The gloss black bodysuit, bulky from chest inserts, matched the gloss black finish of the machine. Just forward of a shapely thigh, Blake could see the word ‘Vincent’ in white block capitals on a curved gold banner.
He paused; shapely thigh?
“That’s no man!”
Neville applauded: “Well done, detective. That’s Metropolitan Armed Response Sergeant Suzy Mandrill. It was the only way we could think of to get urgent security improvements past the bureaucracy.”
Blake’s head came round so fast he winced: “’We’?”
Neville smiled: “You must have misheard me.”
Blake clenched his fists and pointed out of his window: “You just told me that two elite officers conspired to subvert security protocols.”
Neville peered over Blake’s hand: “Me and who?”
Blake looked back. Between his window and a shop entrance, only a solitary fox trotted by.
Neville drove while Blake swore himself out. After the silence had stretched for an hour, he stopped the car and turned to look at Blake.
Blake glared and snapped: “What?”
“I was wondering if you’d like to come round for dinner one evening. Bring Heather; I’m sure she and Suzy will get along.”
Blake’s face turned a colour normally reserved for beetroot: “Your girlfriend is the Black Rider?”
Neville smiled and shook his head: “You do have the strangest ideas, detective. We just thought you’d like a relaxing evening. Maybe even go for a ride. You know, see how pillion suits you?”
Blake rested his head in his hands: “We’re all going to jail.”
Neville patted his shoulder: “Only if you tell, detective, only if you tell.”
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 submission | Aug 17, 2014 | Story |
Author : RM Dooley
The rogue tampons rolling across the trunk floor and abandoned high heel tell me it’s a girl’s car. Probably this girl’s car.
I can’t move much. Duct tape binds her hands, feet, and stretches over her mouth. The taillight is kicked out and the flashlight next to her flickers in and out of life. She must have tried to get attention before I took control. I doubt she woke up in time for it to do any good. No glow from street lamp or car light slips in through the break, already too far down an empty back road.
Whatever drug he used still pumps through her, giving me a secondary disconnected dizziness. The throbbing head, a physical blow rather than chemical, registers to me more like radio static than actual pain.
The car stops gliding and begins a jolting trundle down an unpaved road.
Dammit. I bang her head against the trunk’s floor. I’d scream if I could. How far away can the driver be? Four, five feet difference in where my consciousness landed? If I’d taken him, she would make it.
I could’ve turned the car back around. Straight to a police station. I could’ve saved her.
I can’t cry. My body is at least twenty miles away, safely slumped across my couch. So she cries for me, hot angry tears over the five feet that killed her.
Not like I can aim. The mind wanders where it will. I should consider myself lucky I found her, working off a name and face until I latched on to one. Desperation more than anything let me find her, mine drawn to hers.
The crunching gravel goes quiet. Her heart thuds as the car door opens and shuts. She’s not aware and I keep my hold. Neuroimaging shows that while I’m in control the host’s brain functions as if in a very deep sleep, near comatose. She won’t know, won’t feel. And I can at least get a look at his face.
He opens the trunk and smiles down at her. At me. Clean shaven, early thirties. Even in the dark I know he’s handsome. Dark cropped hair, straight nose, hungry blue eyes. I carve his face into memory to bring back to my body.
I glare up at him. You’re dead asshole
I won’t report him to the police. No facial composite, no falsifying witness reports so the courts will believe how he was tracked down. Not this one. This is going to be personal. I have his face and I’ll share a memory. That’s enough for a wandering mind like mine to eventually track him down with.
He picks her up, almost lovingly until I start to fight. To me, the breaking nose feels like buzzing discomfort.
Whatever he does, I’m not letting go. And he’s not done with the ritual. One he carries out with disturbing efficiency.
But I won’t let go. She doesn’t have to know this. Let her last memory be whatever final prayer she clung to; another driver would notice bound hands waving out from the trunk. Someone would find her. Save her. She doesn’t have to know the climax to his gentle kiss, the pretty practiced lies he whispered to lure her away.
I’ll leave when she does. The last cut that bleeds us from her body. I can’t save her, but I can spare her. No one should have to experience this.
I would know.
