Mongrels

by | Feb 4, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

Marcus crooked his fingers around each of his eyeballs, and plucked them out with a small “pop.” He unceremoniously placed the squishy orbs in a small jar of salt water on his desk.

“Marcus! Look at me when I’m talking to you!” Stella was leaning against the door frame as she yelled; she hadn’t quite gotten used to the half- inch diameter pole that now connected the top half of her ribcage to the lower half of her pelvis. It was still a bit of a balancing act for her to stay upright.

“I can’t look at you,” Marcus said, slowly spinning around in his chair. The light glinted softly off the modular plugs deep within his empty eye sockets. “I’ve removed my eyes. In a minute I’m going to do the same thing to my ears so I can play Galactic Conquest Online. I just got to Level 546, so if you’ll excuse me, I have a spaceship to select.”

Stella looked at the game module in Marcus’s lap and seethed. “You spend more time on that game than you do with me! I go through all this surgery so I can look beautiful for you–”

“Don’t start that! I never asked you to remove your midriff! That was your decision! You’re always getting things removed. You know what I miss? Your toes! You think I like feeling those cold stiletto monstrosities you call feet up against my legs at night?”

“You know what I miss? I miss you! You’re always plugged in to this goddamn game!” Her multicolored eyes blazing orange and red, Stella snatched the game module away from her boyfriend.

“You bitch! You fucking whore!” Marcus waved his arms blindly. His left arm made contact with Stella, but only succeeded in knocking her up against his chest of drawers. The game module skittered across the floor. Stella found her body crumpled and unresponsive; the impact had broken her torso pole in half. She tried to get up, but only succeeded in spastically kicking Marcus’s desk.

Marcus got out of his chair in order to better feel about for the game module. He heard Stella kicking his desk, but he didn’t turn around to her until he heard the crash of glass, as a jar fell off his desk.

It wasn’t until he heard the squish and pop underneath his boot that he realized what the jar had held.

Open Source

by | Feb 3, 2006 | Story

“Let me tell you about the revolution.” said Hack as I lay back, enjoying my smoke. Hack and I engaged in the worlds’ two oldest professions. I sold sex, and Hack stole stuff. Recently, Hack had been doing well enough to become a frequent client.

Hack wasn’t so bad, for a geek. His hair was a greasy mess and his stubble was scratchy on my skin but he always brought weed when he came over. I considered the drugs a peace offering for what would happen later. Hack pulled small black box out of his backpack, which was made of melted tires. “This box will unlock your house.”

I watched the smoke leave my lips in a stream and raised a sleepy eyebrow. “What do you mean?” The more time we spent talking about his projects, the less time I would have to spend naked. I might actually get another hour out of it.

“Just this, Jack.” Jack was the name I had told him, not very feminine, but I thought it sounded edgy. He slapped the box on the wall, and it whirred, blinking red. I found the color mesmerizing as it faded in and out, a soundless chime.

Hack stroked the box. “This is something I put together from old parts, but it’s made on a code that I found floating around the third world net. It unlocks all the content in your house, the music, the shows, even the programming on your PC. It configures your whole system to open source.”

I sat up, trying to shake off the haze. “Oh shit Hack, what the fuck did you do?” I looked at the evil box on my wall and felt nauseous. “Holy crap! If the cops get a link on this I’m fucked!”

“Calm down Jack, this is very new stuff. Third world. They are not going to get a link on it.”

I couldn’t be pacified. I was not a child. The red blinking light suddenly looked like a police siren. “Hack! You know how illegal open source stuff is. Why the hell did you bring that here? If the cops find it, I’m going to be in jail forever.” I got up and pulled on my soft velour overcoat, not even bothering to throw on my dress. “I’m leaving. I do not want to be here when the cops arrive and find the open source.”

“Stop freaking out Jack! The drugs are making you paranoid.” Hack got up and walked over to me, putting his big hands on my shoulders. “I configured this thing to avoid police scans. I’ve had it running for weeks at my place and I’ve yet to see a cop.”

It occurred to me that his program to avoid police scans must be why he was tipping so well. “Really?”

“Yeah, really. If you want, we can reset your house’s program when I leave.”

I shrugged. It wasn’t my house anyway; the place belonged to the madam. “Sure, okay.” I said, and giggled suddenly, thinking about Bera getting busted for open sourcing. It would serve her right.

“With this, you can get your shit to play on anything; you can rip it and trade it or whatever. You don’t have to buy new tech to make things run.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“No. The third world uses this kind of thing to rip and sell stuff back to us on the cheap. It’s illegal, but the laws in some places are pretty flexible.”

I wondered how long I could keep him talking. “That’s cool.” I said, playing nice.

Hack handed me another blunt. “Smoke up babe. This is the revolution.”

No Exit

by | Feb 2, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

This way, she says, and I follow.

There was no real direction, of course. The surface had been frozen beneath a mile of ice long before humans evolved, but still, I follow. Two hours after we lost our way in the snowstorm, all directions have become meaningless.

When I was a child I read a story about an oceanaut who followed a rope to the bottom of the sea. That was how they did it, then: you held on to the rope, buried beneath suits of rubber and glass to hold off the thickest weight of the ocean, and when you were ready to surface, you followed it. Anyhow, he somehow lost his grip at the blackened base of the sea, where the heaviness of water prevented anyone from floating to the top. Down was up, up was down. So he chose a direction and swam.

Obviously, the guy survived to tell the tale. If you listen to it like that, it’s not even a very good story, but here’s what I remember: as he was moving, having committed to the direction with the last of his oxygen, the light of his helmet revealed small bubbles. They were moving quickly over the glass, and when he saw them, he knew. He was moving up. He was moving in the same direction as the air.

Here, though, that’s irrelevant. There are no air bubbles, and there’s no way to tell left from right. The needle of the compass has frozen in place and the horizon is a blinding blur of white and silver, so pale that I can’t tell the ground from the air. The sun pours over the atmosphere without revealing its position. Her body, coated in thick rubber and plastic and thrown blackly against the endless white, continues on. It leaves unshadowed footsteps in her wake. She says nothing further, though it’s possible that our communicators have frozen. They weren’t designed to stand cold for this long.

She keeps walking, as if she knows where she’s going. I follow, because that’s all I can do.

We All Fall Down

by | Feb 1, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

The first day the sun didn’t rise, it was business as usual. The trains ran, the offices were open, and we just used a little more electricity than normal. We went to work, fed our fish, and gossiped about the news coverage while waiting for the bus. Over dinner the television told us what a strange event this was and how many records it had broken.

The second day the sun didn’t rise, we thought it odd. Our gossip spread to the cubicles and the break room and we listened to the radio, curious and nonplussed. It was weird, we told our coworkers and our friends and the people we met on the bus. It was definitely very weird.

The fifth day the sun didn’t rise, we complained. Extra lights were brought in and the power companies grew worried. The television said that California had adopted a mandatory rolling business schedule in which workdays were completed in shifts to reduce power usage. There was talk of rationing and of national disasters.

The tenth day the sun didn’t rise, we were panicked. We went to our doctors, our psychiatrists, our personal trainers, begging for help. The pharmaceutical companies had to keep their factories open twenty-four hours a day to produce enough Prozac.

The thirteenth day the sun didn’t rise, a national emergency was declared. We heard that it was the same everywhere, that no country had been spared. Our crops failed and our businesses closed. Thousands of us were dead from exposure or suicide. Our leaders gave speech after speech and our scientists despaired.

On the eighteenth day the sun didn’t rise, we locked ourselves in our homes and apartments. We looted closed stores and fought over food. Our water stopped running and we pissed in the streets.

On the thirty-seventh day the sun didn’t rise, neither did we.

Chains Of Commerce

by | Jan 31, 2006 | Story | 0 comments

“The fact remains, ladies and gentlemen, we have to meet the Geert price,” Fawzia Chiranov said. “We ought to do better than the Geert price, but due to the nature of our company, we’ll probably get by merely with meeting them. But I will tell you this, we lose this bid, we lose the planet.”

Naturally, this was scoffed at. Fawzia was used to this. She charged a great deal for her opinions and consultations, and she was paid for them because she was always right.

“You mean, we’ll lose the contract.” Usamah Afifi had a tendency to bob his shriveled bald head when he talked. Fawzia found it difficult to look at him and not to picture a turtle in a Brooks Brothers suit. “We’ll lose the bid. We’ll get ‘em next time.”

“No,” Fawzia said. “We won’t. There won’t be a next time. We lose this bid, we’re finished. The Geert will have control of the Earth.”

“I think you’re being a little too xenophobic, Ms. Chiranov,” said Eugeny Ruzhan from the head of the table. Ruzhan was considered a war hero; he had designed the robot that won the Kasi War. He still wore his medal pinned to the front of his coat, though the Kasi War had been over long before Fawzia was born. “The Geert are shrewd businessmen, but they aren’t out to take over the world!”

The board laughed at this. Fawzia only scowled.

“That is where you are wrong, Mr. Ruzhan. The Geert are a conquering people. We forget what that means, these days. But they are. They have been buying up and sending out of business Earthan companies for the past few years. We’re one of the last ones, and if Aczel Interplanetary falls, the Geert will control the commerce and economy of the people of Earth.”

“How could they have done this?” Jit Shiew Han asked. She had recently had her face redone, and she looked younger than Fawzia, despite being twice her age. It made it difficult for Fawzia to take her seriously.

“By being single-minded on a cultural level. Despite the appearance of multiple Geert industries, they all have the same goal: overrun a planet, absorb its workforce as slaves, move on to the next. They’ve done this on a dozen worlds already.”

“What do you suppose we do?” Afifi asked. “We’re bidding as low as we can. How can we hope to compete?”

“We stop paying our workers,” Fawzia said. “We stop paying them, we work them day and night, and we provided them with only the most basic nutrition.”

“You’re talking slavery,” Afifi huffed.

“I’m talking of the only defense from slavery. We don’t do this, we lose this contract, there will not be another. Which means it will only be a matter of time before this board reports to Geert masters.”

“It can’t just be down to us,” Han said, her voice quavering. “What about Calaerts? Ghenadie Tech? Easwarau?”

“Calaerts is three months away from filing bankruptcy,” Fawzia said. “Ghenadie Tech is being forced into a plan which will downsize them considerably, and it’s only a matter of time before they are absorbed by a larger Geert corporation. And Easwarau—”

Ruzhan cut her off. “Easwarau was bought outright by the Geert. Saw it on the feed this morning.” Fawzia nodded. “Send out a memo to our employees. We’re following Ms. Chiranov’s suggestions to the letter.”

“They’ll never go for it,” Afifi said. “They’ll riot.”

“They’ll go along with the plan,” Fawzia said. “Just remind them their freedom is at stake.”