Category: Astounding Stories

 

Klaxons drown out the screams.  I smell smoke and the dust from shattered concrete.  I’m standing just inside Johnson’s lab, surrounded by stainless steel fermenters and rows of refrigerators, in front of shelves of shattered glass vials and test tubes trembling in their racks.  At the end of a counter I see the desktop monitor that Johnson must have used and I lunge toward it.  There’s another rumble and the lights flicker.

It’s a computer that got me here.  Four months ago, a machine intelligence on a Defense Intelligence Agency server registered my intrusion.  It reached out through the web and followed my encrypted trail back through a series of rerouted networks, past a proxy server and onto my firewalled laptop.

I thought I had escaped detection.  I spent a fair portion of the last afternoon of my normal life trying to convince my girlfriend that I had not just blamed her for my hack of the Department of Defense.  “I was only saying that I wouldn’t have figured out the connection on my own,” I explained in my best reasonable-sounding voice.

“If I had thought that would make you start breaking federal laws I probably would have kept my ideas to myself.”

“I had to see what they were hiding.”

Jenna had been doing research on computer architecture for the past six months, and for reasons that apparently had not involved wanting me to break computer abuse statutes she had traced a handful of patents to a pair of shadowy government contractors and started to speculate about their use.  What if the Defense Intelligence Agency’s hypothetical surveillance-directed artificial intelligence, publicly disavowed by Administration officials, wasn’t just hypothetical?  What if it already existed?  She was only interested in computers peripherally.  Because she was dating a software engineer, she wanted to explore the potential of biocomputing.  But once she’d asked her questions, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about them.

“These are people who can put you on trial without even letting your lawyers know what the charges are,” she said.

“I know what I’m doing.  They’re not going to find me.”  By the time I said that, though, her comments were already beginning to sow doubt.  One of Jenna’s defining attributes is— was— that she was almost always right.  Whatever the critical issue was, and no matter how deeply buried it was beneath compelling distractions, she usually homed in on it instantly.  It’s what made her such a brilliant biochemist.  Unfortunately, that was not always a skill in high demand among people whose sense of worth or career advancement depended on self-delusion, obfuscation or generally sloppy thinking, which seemed to be the main reason why her department chair and academic colleagues never let her rise above the position of adjunct professor.

“If you get a trial,” she said.  “If they don’t just lock you up immediately.”

“Jenna, you were right about the AI.  But that’s only the beginning.  I saw digital copies of signed construction contracts for something called the Impregnable Stronghold.  It’s a massive underground fortress to house government leaders.  They’re preparing for nuclear war.”

Jenna looked up.  Three black SUVs with tinted windows glided up the driveway and stopped in front of the split level.  The armored doors of the closest vehicle opened and two men in black suits emerged from the 12-cylinder Ford hybrid.  One scanned the street and yard while the other walked back to the middle vehicle and opened one of the rear doors.  A large man with a graying buzz-cut and a fashionably tight-fitting charcoal suit climbed out and strode up to Jenna’s front door.

“I guess they found me after all,” I said.

The guy with the buzz-cut asked to see me.  When I stepped past Jenna he introduced himself as Colonel Henrick Forsman.  “Would you care to take a walk, Mr. Young?”

I wondered what would happen if I refused, but not quite enough to test it, particularly since it seemed like a good idea to find out what Colonel Forsman was there to say.  I also had the irrational thought that getting some physical distance from Jenna would help to insulate her from my felony.  We stepped out into the half acre field of ryegrass behind the house.  The development was a few years old, and there were no fences between the houses’ back yards, just a long open space bordered on the far side by oak and maple trees.

“How did you find me here?” I asked.

Forsman ignored the question.  His body language seemed remarkably relaxed for someone who might be about to take me away in handcuffs.  But his pale blue eyes were studying me, appraising.  “How did you break in?”

I wasn’t going to make things worse by lying.  “The random number generator you use for encryption isn’t actually random.”

“Keep talking.”  Forsman stopped walking, and I stopped beside him.  We were midway between the woods and the house.

“One of your contractors posted a reference to the encryption key system on an internal message that was copied in a document that was very briefly posted online.”

Forsman nodded.  “I’d like to offer you a deal.  A chance to help your country.  Hell, maybe the whole human race, if you care about that kind of thing.”

“I have a choice?”

“You can go to prison.  If we have a country left when this is all over, you might even get out someday.  But you already made your choice, didn’t you?  You hacked into one of our servers.”

“I didn’t know—”

“You passed a test.  We were looking for someone with your skills, and you let yourself be found.”

“The server was a honeypot?  Is that how you normally find hackers?”

He looked at me.  “No.  But you’ve seen our files.  You know how desperate our leaders are.”

If they had been waiting for someone to hack their server, they also could have planted false documents.  But I had already found enough external data to mostly corroborate what I’d seen.  I believed him.  Maybe not everything, but I had no doubt the desperation he had mentioned was genuine.  “What are you asking me to do?”

He started walking again, his back to the house.  “You’ll have 24 hours to pack and say your goodbyes.   You can’t tell anyone where you’re going, even your friend back there.”

I hadn’t decided what I was going to do yet.  But obviously either way I was going to tell her.

The next morning I crossed the same field with Jenna, before the sun was fully up, when mist clung to the trees and colors had not yet emerged from the gloom.  The grass was wet with dew and the bottoms of our pants were damp.

“If you go you’ll never come back,” Jenna said.

“I can help, or I can risk going to prison and possibly not get out anyway.”  I turned to her.  “I have to do this.  War is coming.  The plans for the Impregnable Stronghold mean that the Coalition’s chances are better than the government is letting on.”

“Where do they want you to go?”

“They’re flying me to Baumholder in Germany.  I’m not supposed to tell you that.  That’s why I took you out here.  I don’t know if they have ways of listening at your house.”

“How long?”

“You said you didn’t expect me to come back.”

“But what did they say?”

“As long as it takes.  Until the Coalition is no longer a threat.  Hopefully not more than a year.”  I looked at her, trying to meet her eyes, but she was looking at the tree line.  “I love you.  But your whole life is still ahead of you.  I don’t expect you to wait.”

“Can I still talk to you?  Will you have Skype?”

She had on the chunky aquamarine earrings we had gotten on the road trip to Rehoboth Beach and even though her eyes were thoughtful, because they were always thoughtful, because she was always looking just beyond anything I could see, I could hear a new, strained note in her voice.  I absorbed all of it— the emerging uncertainty between us, the grass crunching as we shifted our feet, the cool morning air, the smell of buttonwood and azalea—and I knew that all of these perceptions, my whole subjective world, would sooner or later end, and no one would ever have these thoughts or memories again.  No one would know how much I wanted not to leave her.  “Everything has to be by email.  My messages to you will be monitored.  The colonel didn’t say it, but if they wanted to they could rewrite our messages and we wouldn’t even know.  The AI you correctly guessed they have can mine the web to learn how we think and mimic our communication styles.”

“Then until you come back we won’t know if we’re really hearing from each other.”

“I’ve thought of a code we can use.  Not even a code, a pattern.  As long as you see it, you’ll know the message came from me.”

The car came to pick me up that evening.  We were only ten minutes away from Jenna’s house when I knew something was wrong.  “We missed the turnoff,” I said.

“We’re not going to the airport.”

“You said—”

Forsman grinned, and I saw that the casual air that had struck me earlier was due to the fact that he would say or do anything to get what he needed and not spend a moment thinking about it afterward.  “We have a base here in Maryland.”

I realized then how difficult the next twelve months would be.  It would have been one thing to think about Jenna continuing with her life without me, and to mislead my friends and my parents about where I really was, if I were across an ocean.  It was something else entirely when I was less than an hour’s drive away.

The driver took us through hills forested with ash and maple and off the main road, up a single-lane strip of asphalt, past two razor wire-topped fences and into spreading fields of wheat and corn and hay.  We passed a few outbuildings and approached a modest farmhouse that stood in the shadow of a solid-looking barn and a grain elevator.  I didn’t see any apparent defenses.  “Where’s the base?” I asked.

Forsman just grinned again.  The barn doors slid open and we drove down a concrete ramp into a vast underground garage.

I’ve been underground ever since.  There are—were—close to fifty of us.  Engineers, programmers, scientists, soldiers, Defense bureaucrats, janitors, cooks.  The facility they’ve built down here can hold at least three times that many, but that doesn’t make it feel any less claustrophobic.  The main halls have full spectrum lighting that brightens and dims in tune with the daylight above, which I guess is supposed to make us forget that we can’t see the sun.

I share an office with half a dozen fellow coders.  I’m quartered with three other men, two techies and a bioengineer from Minneapolis named Keith Johnson who has a lab down the hall from my office where he tries to coax prokaryotes into producing propane and proteins and other useful resources.  But I have my own plans for his lab, and now that I’ve decrypted his lock and gotten past the security door I’ll find out whether I can get my idea to work before I’m shot in the back by one of the soldiers or the roof caves in on me.

“This is where we’re going to win the war,” Forsman told me the day he brought me here.

“The war that we’re not officially fighting.”

“The last president had to make the enemy think we were prepared, because we weren’t,” Forsman explained.  “That was the only way to establish credible deterrence.  But the new Administration reversed course because it was afraid that if the Coalition knew that we could withstand their nanospheres and pulse-nukes and biobombs they’d immediately start upgrading them.  As it turns out, they were already were being upgraded, and we weren’t as prepared as we thought we were, so our attempt at obfuscation accidentally turned out to reflect the truth.”

“What’s my role?”

“You’ll be working on the next-gen artificial intelligence.”

“I take it that’s supposed to help guard against the Consortium.”

“The AI you’ll help complete will build a real-time strategic map of the entire battlespace, with the ability to use contextual information to fill in gaps in real-time.”

“You think war is coming.”

“There have already been attacks.  All minor so far, meant to probe our defenses.”

“But you think we’ll win.”  This was an optimistic but not unreasonable assumption.  I couldn’t quite bring myself to frame it as a question.

For the first time I saw a serious look on his face.  “Our mission here is to win.  But there is a Plan B.  The Midnight Legion.”

“What’s that?”

The grin came back.  “If we do our jobs here, no one will ever find out.”

Despite his self-assurance, over the next few months my job constantly changed.  First the AI was to supplement the war effort, then it was to find out what the enemy was working on and when and where it planned to attack, then it was to serve a backup command and control function in case military leadership was decapitated, then it was to preserve human knowledge if our civilization collapsed.

When I received that last order I knew we were in trouble, because if civilization truly did collapse an AI would be useless.  There wouldn’t be anything left to power it.

One morning about sixteen weeks into my assignment I sat down in front of one of the computer terminals that had limited access to the Internet.  Being unable to move freely online felt almost as constricting as the physical isolation of our underground facility.  I had been told that our web restrictions were meant to prevent us from inadvertently exposing our base’s existence and location, but that didn’t make it any easier.

I started typing my daily message to Jenna.  My themes had evolved since the first few disorienting days.  Then, I had mostly discoursed about how much I missed her.  Now I skipped that and went straight to nonclassified details about my work and new life.  I didn’t want her to lose interest, or to feel guilt or ambivalence if she’d decided to start dating again, because either of those outcomes might mean that eventually she would no longer remain on the other end reading my emails.  So on that occasion I wrote about my bunkmate Johnson.

I focused on the personal because I didn’t think other details would get past the censors.  I had plenty of drama to mine.  Johnson took every opportunity he could to let me know that he didn’t trust hackers like me.  But I wrote to Jenna about him because apparently he did trust one of my programming colleagues, and from what he had told me about Johnson’s work I knew that Jenna would be interested in it professionally once I got out and had the chance to explain it to her.

Recently Johnson had begun looking at ways that his fuel-generating bacteria could eat some of the toxic chemicals our facility was producing.  Given enough time and refinement this might solve several problems, including how to make the AI viable after the grid went down.  My colleague had designed a visual programming language to let Johnson easily manipulate and recombine the bacteria’s DNA as easily as shifting around boxes on a screen.

I was almost finished when a new email arrived from Jenna’s address.  It was about accompanying her grandmother to her oncologist the day before.  Almost everything about the email was convincing.  The writing sounded like Jenna’s voice, and the narrator’s facts were impeccable.  I didn’t have Mrs. Reinherdt’s checkup schedule memorized, but this was about the right time for her next one, and it made sense for Jenna to mention it.  The doctor’s name, the street, the type of cancer, the treatment and remission history—all of it was accurate.  The only thing that was off was a reference to Mrs. Reinherdt’s offhand dismissal of one of Jenna’s recommendations.  That might have been plausible for many grandmothers and their grandchildren, but not for Mrs. Reinhardt and Jenna.  Mrs. Reinhardt didn’t dismiss Jenna’s ideas.  No one did.  When Jenna had an idea, you took it seriously.  It’s not that the exchange couldn’t have happened, but it would have warranted some additional context.

Up until then I had been worried about censors doctoring messages I wanted to get out.  It hadn’t occurred to me they would also be censoring messages coming in.  What would be the point?

I skipped my shift to read through all of the emails I’d received from Jenna since I’d arrived.  Now that I was looking I saw that she had been using the same simple pattern I’d applied to my own messages.  Her first email to me started with a sentence containing 133 characters and consisted of 133 sentences.  The next email was 420 and characters and the same number of sentences.  The characters and sentences had matched until about a week ago, when the pattern stopped abruptly and did not return.

The day after this discovery I saw Forsman talking to a group of senior base officials.  By that point he spent most of his time at other sites and I rarely ran into him, so I knew that if I wanted to speak with him this was my chance.  I hovered in the hall until he started to turn away and then strode up to him.  Two soldiers immediately turned and blocked my way.  “Are our incoming messages censored?” I called past them.

Forsman stopped and stared at me.  He no longer looked relaxed.  He was impatient and tired and irritated at the interruption.

“My girlfriend, Jenna Crenshaw.  There’s something she’s trying to tell me.  But it’s not getting to me.”

Forsman looked torn, but then an aide tapped him on the shoulder and impatience won out.  “She’s gone, Young.  Frederick was hit a week ago.  We’ve lost a dozen towns to suicide strikes since you came here.  I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this.”

I felt a rushing in my ears.  “I don’t—how come—how—”

“Whoever you were doing this for before, you’re not doing it for them any longer.  You’re doing it for yourself, and maybe the United States if it survives as a country.  We’re saying publicly that we have the attacks under control, but the Coalition has demonstrated that it can get through our defenses, and there’s only so much longer we can deny that.”

The next day the walls and ceiling suddenly vibrated like the earth was trying to shake them off.  A deep rumble came from above.  I knew instantly and viscerally what was happening.  The farm was being bombed.  Even though it was midmorning I hadn’t yet gotten out of bed.  Sometime during the night we had lost external communications, and I could no longer reach the AI that I was supposed to be helping to program.

There was a half-minute of shouts and sirens, and then the walls shook again.  I imagined dying where I lay.  The base no longer mattered.  We were marooned underground with no knowledge of what remained above us.

It was my feeling of helplessness that spurred me to action.  The people I loved were gone, and the artificial intelligence into which I had poured so much energy was unlikely ever to come online.  I could no longer communicate with anyone I knew.  Even if I left a message, it might not be found for years or decades.

I thought that meant my existence here would simply vanish.  There was no sign I could leave that would survive this war.  And then I realized I was wrong.  We might not survive, but there was a way for our work here to remain.  I jumped up and ran toward Johnson’s lab.

Now I reach the monitor and my proximity turns it on.  For a panicked moment I expect to be waylaid by heavy encryption, maybe something biometric, but of course there’s nothing so sophisticated—with only fifty of us living in an enclosed space, if people are incapacitated others need to be able to access and carry on their work.  The only thing blocking me is a password, which takes me about ten minutes to crack.  Then I’m in.

The lights keep flickering, but the computer I’m using must be generating its own power.  It’s a visual interface designed for someone who doesn’t know programming.  I know programming, even though I know very little about biology.  I hear booted footsteps in the hall outside.  “Young!  Are you in there?  You’re not authorized to access this lab!”

The program is meant to let Johnson manipulate the bacteria’s genetic code, and that’s what I do.  My first step is to enable the bacteria to produce modified proteins that can communicate with each other and, theoretically, help the prokaryotes coordinate their activities.  The next step is more complicated, and I don’t know how well it will translate from computer programs based on brain architecture and emergent mind theories to living organisms: I adjust the way the bacteria respond to certain stimuli, primarily each other’s simple, repetitive actions.  I fine-tune my previous work, so that at as the modified bacteria start to interact they will provide a one-time signal to let me know if my interventions are working.  Then I set the bacteria on a course of accelerated replication.

There’s a huge roar from above, a boom that vibrates through my bones, and the ceiling collapses.  Someone is screaming in a nearby room, but I hear nothing from the hallway, and gradually the scream subsides into whimpers and then there’s only silence, a deep, absolute silence.  I feel pain so intense that all I can see are hallucinatory flashes in the darkness.  Gradually I become aware of a new sound, coming from me.  I am gasping.

At some point I realize I can see again, but I can’t move.  I am trapped in rubble.  Pain pulses in me, it pulls me open and lacerates me, it consumes me from within.  I can’t feel or see my legs.

The screen in front of me is cracked, but it still shows me a shattered image.  It’s the only source of light.  After a while I hear screaming again, whimpering cries, muffled and far away.  For the first time I am conscious of the weight of broken earth and stone above me, the depth of our tomb down here below.

I can imagine that this is the end of the base.  I don’t know if it’s also the end of the United States of America.  Perhaps it’s the end of the human species.

It’s my ending as well.  I know I am going to die and when I die this throbbing pain will mercifully end.  But through the pain a part of my mind is still racing, still observing.  Even if my plan works perfectly, it might take half a decade before the new biological network is self-aware.  Now all I can do is watch for the signal I programmed to tell me that it’s on the right track.

I wish I could see the sun again.  I wish I could see Jenna.  But I cannot move.  All I can do is watch the broken screen in front of me, watch the bacteria swim and divide, swim and divide.

And then a pattern forms, a spontaneous alignment of single-celled bodies.  The bacteria have formed a number: 133.

Here in the subterranean darkness a new consciousness is being born.

 

END.

By Aaron Emmel

Aaron’s fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.  He is also the author of a graphic novel, dozens of essays and articles, and the science fiction gamebook series Midnight Legion.  Find him online at www.aaronemmel.com.

 

The fault was Joel Pratt’s own, though he tried to blame his niece, Patti, and then his wife, Donna. But Patti was young and exuberant. How could he fault her? Nor could Donna be culpable. She’d left him the year before. He couldn’t blame either of them for the damage to his Nivens Patch when he let Patti use her illicit mood enhancing wand on him. The “hancer” sat now on a table next to the sofa, the short brass tube sparking every few seconds, its internal battery too run down for the wand to be of use.

Patti sprawled in an armchair across the room. It was a plain and empty space, this room. It lacked the shiny chrome and well-appointed trimmings Joel saw when his patch functioned. Without the aid of the chips, which he always pictured as small black buttons adhering to the faux skin material embedded under his scalp, the apartment looked barren. Plain stairs led to the loft bedroom, not the spiral staircase made of decorative black steel he saw with the help of his patch. No pictures on the walls, but, rather, bleak yellowing wallpaper peeling in the corners, with slap-dash farm animals – pigs and sheep and cows – faded to the point of obliteration.

Joel glared at Patti in her red underwear, her long blonde hair falling across her body like a frayed blanket. For a moment, he thought he’d resurrected the Nivens Patch, but then he remembered that his niece was beautiful and young and didn’t need dreamy enhancement.

He slapped the side of his head, as if that might stir the patch’s circuitry. He concentrated on images of push-down switches, metallic gearing, even toy pulleys with rubber band belts, but nothing woke up the patch. Named for a twentieth century writer who popularized “jacking in” before there was an internet or web or its current incarnation, the inter-web, the Nivens Patch had helped cure millions of people suffering extreme ennui. The patch made the mundane seem elaborate. It transformed ordinary into extraordinary.

“Are you awake?” Joel stood over Patti and looked at her pale flesh. Every bit of her so pale, her legs boney to the extreme and her elbows like sharp stones.

“Where’re my clothes?” Patti sat up. She didn’t suddenly hug herself. She didn’t blanch in embarrassment. She smiled and crawled on the carpet and pulled her ripped jeans from beneath the couch, then retrieved her blouse from behind a flimsy cloth chair.

Joel handed over her sandals, holding them by the thin plastic straps designed to hug her heels.

“That hancer fried my patch,” he said.

Patti shrugged. “How’s it feel? I mean, being free of that garbage.”

Joel squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t want to look at his dismal surroundings. The patch painted a much better picture, letting him adjust the level of beauty and the degree of electronic enrichment. He always toned down the enhancements when he went outside. He didn’t want to get lost in a beautiful cityscape without real landmarks.

“Enjoy it,” Patti said. “You don’t work today.”

Joel looked to the blank flat screen on the wall. It angled out above a shelf that his patch once filled with virtual books. Now the shelf was empty. Thinking about his schedule didn’t activate the monitor. He had to use the touch screen to turn on the display and then summon his calendar.

“You’re right,” he mumbled. “I’m off today.”

Patti snickered. “Isn’t it insane? You rely on that patch so much, you don’t even know your own schedule.”

Joel shrugged. True. He went to work on the days the patch “told” him to. He took the jitney on Milwaukee Road, the Loop Tram, or a Fast-By car based on what the patch deemed necessary, its cloud-based monitoring system measuring traffic congestion against time of day. Twice a week, Joel traveled to his office cubicle and a sometimes-interesting job helping end-users cope with household appliances and other automated gadgets.

“Don’t you have to go?” Joel said to Patti. “I’ve gotta get this patch thing fixed.”

“Uncle Joe,” she said with mock alarm. She always called him by the wrong name. It was a cute affectation when she was eight. At age twenty-two, she seemed rude. “You’ve got me for a month.”  She plopped onto the cushioned chair, legs under her body, her long hair streaming across her bare arms. She crooked a finger and wiggled it in a come-on motion.

“We really shouldn’t,” Joel said.

“We’re not blood relatives,” Patti said, a mischievous glint in her eyes. She’d said something similar last night when they shared a bottle of bitter tasting wine. That’s when she zapped his patch with her illegal electronic wand. They laughed together when it happened and fell asleep while watching a slapstick comedy on TV.

“You know,” Patti said, “it’s your turn.”

“But Donna’s not here.”

“I don’t need Aunt Donna to protect me,” she said softly, and paused before adding: “You’ll do just fine.”

“Don’t you think you’re too old to be relative surfing?”

She pouted. “Don’t make me grow up too fast, Uncle Joe.”

“Joel! I’m your Uncle Joel.”

“I know. But Joe is much more dignified. Uncle Joe. Sounds catchy.”

He didn’t know what she meant. She’d always been an odd child, even as an eight-year-old when Patti began moving from one relative to another following the death of her mother, a single parent, Donna’s older sister.

“Want to go out for breakfast?” she asked. “I found a cafe with old-fashioned puzzles and board games. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

Joel sighed.

“Cousin Bart took me there all the time when I stayed with him.”

Joel dreaded the idea of going outside without his patch in working order. He’d have to do it eventually. But couldn’t he put it off for as long as possible?

“It’s going to cost me a couple of thousand to get this fixed,” he said, tapping the side of his head.

Patti pursed her lips. “Sorry.”

In that moment, she looked like a remorseful schoolgirl, with a bit of fright thrown in. He couldn’t be angry with her. She’d warned him about the hancer. He knew about the effects from overhearing office gossip and watching TV and reading long articles that popped into his head when he summoned a newsfeed.

“You know any fixers?” he asked. The only ones he’d encountered in the past when his patch needed adjustment worked for Nivens Neural Systems. They charged a lot to repair damaged units. Off-grid fixers were cheaper.

Patti shook her head. “You’re making me feel bad, Uncle Joe.”

“Don’t. Come on. We’ll get breakfast.” He winced when he realized he couldn’t pull up a summary of his bank account, but had to retrieve his old cell phone, activate it – a tedious process that took several minutes — and manually tap into his financials.

 

#####

 

Embarrassed, Joel didn’t make eye contact with his fellow workers when he signed for a tablet computer at the office. With two weeks to wait for an appointment at Nivens Neural, Joel needed a physical device to do his job.

As he took a seat at an empty desk, he saw Elena Korefsky hovering at the edge of his periphery vision. He feared she’d seen him check out the computer. She’d ask him questions now, sound concerned. He shuddered when he saw the woman amble over to where he sat  Tinkling brass beads dangled against her boyish chest, her short black hair brushing her shoulders when she leaned over and said, “Trouble with your patch?” Her hand gripped his shoulder.

Joel swallowed, unsure of what to say. Elena wasn’t a customer service rep like everyone else on this floor. She never took a call from a distraught user. She had a special connection in her Nivens Patch that let her monitor everyone. Elena knew who slacked off, who ignored a call, who didn’t provide the proper help, who didn’t meet their quota.

“A bit flaky,” Joel said. “I think something got fried.”

“You remember how to use that thing?” Elena pointed at the tablet on Joel’s desk.

“Like riding a bicycle,” he said.

Elena narrowed her dark eyes, a puzzled look on her long face. But the confusion didn’t last. Joel guessed she’d latched onto some cloud-based video clip that explained his offhand remark.

“Oh,” she said with an exaggerated opening of her small mouth. Joel stared at her teeth. They glistened. Bits of saliva dripped from her incisors. He wondered why those two teeth were so pointed. Possibly genetic. He missed his patch, which would have given him more information about teeth, genetic nuances, and, perhaps, some clue regarding Elena. Every employee had a profile available for perusal by every other employee. A company rule.

“I’ve got a two week wait,” Joel said. “For an appointment with Neural.”

“What happened?” Elena asked. “To your patch?”

Joel didn’t want to admit he’d had a hancer used on his brain.

“Not sure,” he lied.

Elena smiled. “Playing games with the wrong people?” she asked.

Joel nodded. Vaguely. Wilting beneath Elena’s glare.

“Bad boy,” she said. “I have a fixer-upper. A guy I know. Off-grid. Reliable. And there won’t be a two week wait for service.”

“Thanks,” Joel said, his tongue clicking against the back of his upper front teeth. He watched Elena move along the wide aisle between the wall and the backs of the cubes. He turned to his tablet when she disappeared around a corner. Other heads poked back into their cubicles when she was out of sight. Joel made eye contact with no one.

He tapped the on-switch and his tablet came to life, flashing a spinning globe against a light blue background. The words, “World Wide Help and Aid, Inc.” flashed across the top of the screen. The company president appeared in an inset, but Joel tapped past the video clip. After twelve years of working for World Wide, he didn’t need a welcome speech.

Like riding a bicycle, he said to himself, and recalled the rudiments of handling the touch screen computer. A few taps. Read the icons based on their symbols. Get into the user call-in stream. Prepare to help the poor yokels who didn’t know how to turn on their ovens without somebody’s assistance.

An email icon blinked in the corner of the screen. He tapped it with a fingertip and a short note from Elena appeared with the name and address of an off-grid fixer. Joel pulled his cell phone from his shirt pocket and zipped the message to his personal notebook. Even if Patti came up with a name of someone to see, he knew he’d probably go with Elena’s recommendation.

But what if he had to admit what he’d done?

He assumed this fixer had some ethics. If they snitched on their clients, how long could they stay in business?

 

#####

 

Dr. Stein’s unsophisticated office didn’t inspire confidence, but Joel thought he could trust Elena not to steer him wrong. Unlike a Neural Systems facility, there were no floating holograms depicting an embedded array of chips, no wall-mounted monitors showing happy people waltzing along dismal streets one moment, luxurious surroundings the next, courtesy of a patch. Instead, Dr. Stein reminded Joel of a life he thought he’d escaped. He’d grown up with backroom practitioners who provided medical services, massaging away aches and pains, fevers and coughs, tumors and deep-seated twinges. His mother and father believed in Applied Homeopathic. Now in their 80s, they happily thrived in one of the movement’s retirement centers.

Joel rebelled against their beliefs when he finished high school and left home to live in a college dorm. Medicine practiced at the school’s clinic included annual exams, once-a-year inoculations that always felt like bee stings, and doses of syrupy medicine for seasonal colds and other mild afflictions. He liked none of it, but he believed in being cured, not massaged to apathy.

The doctor, with his hands in the deep pockets of his white lab coat, looked competent enough. Tall and stately, he had the curly white hair and sagging jowls, matched his watery blue eyes and protruding large ears that inspired confidence.

“At a party,” Joel said in response to several questions the doctor asked.

“So, you lost it at a party? A zap? A hancer? What?”

“Hancer. Somebody came along. I got hanced.”

“Hope it felt good,” Stein said with an air of disdain. His sweet breath bathed Joel’s ear as he probed with a proximity instrument. The warmth from its battery felt good. Joel’s hair tingled. A few strands stood straight out from his head.

Joel fixed his gaze on a narrow orange-red stain running from the curved top of the sink, down the side and into the exposed pipes below. Various knives and pinpricking rods sat in a jar of blue solution on a shelf above the sink. A bubble-strewn bar of soap left a film of suds on a slotted holder near the hot and cold faucet handles. The scene seemed important. Joel wondered why.

He pictured tiny beams of energy bouncing against his head and then penetrating his scalp. He envisioned his patch’s dead chips holding animated conversations with tiny men in white coats.

The doctor’s probe had something to do with these strange sensation, Joel assumed.

“I’m not even getting an ack,” Stein said. “You got fried but good.  A lot of times, these patches just go to sleep. I can wake them up.” He waved his probe in front of Joel’s face. “Poke them, sort of,” he added.

“What else can you try?” Joel asked in a whisper.

“You were in a bar?” Stein asked. “Someone came along and zapped you? For how long? Seconds? The damage I see here didn’t come from a quick hit. It’s too extensive.”

“What do I do?” he asked. He didn’t want to admit the truth, that he’d let Patti zap him to ecstasy over and over again.

Dr. Stein grinned. “It’s not the end of the world. Don’t look so glum. A new patch and you’re back in the bright great world that Neural Systems promises.”

Joel swallowed. “How much? Can you put it in?”

Dr. Stein waved at his surroundings. “You want me peeling back your scalp in a place like this?” He laughed. “I’m not in business to go that far. No, you need to go to Neural and sign up for a replacement.”

“But they’ll…” Joel’s voice trailed off.

“Ask annoying questions? Yes, they will.” Stein laughed. Like a man enjoying himself, Joel thought.

 

#####

 

The technician hovered, poking at Joel’s scalp, pushing aside the tiny hairs above his ears, creating an image of the damaged patch that appeared on a small monitor on a swinging mount extending from the plain white wall. Unlike Dr. Stein, the tech didn’t dress in a white lab coat. Like Joel, he wore a gray shirt not tucked into the waistband of his tight-fitting pants, the collar narrow and pointed, the front buttoned to the neck.

“What kind of work do you do?” the tech asked in a raspy voice, as though he’d been made hoarse by too many daily questions. Joel guessed he was the umpteenthed patient today. It was late, close to four in the afternoon.

“I’m a helper,” Joel said, not really wanting to talk about work. He’d spent the past two weeks struggling to keep up with his colleagues, logging half as many customer service calls as usual each day. His sub-par performance earned him an additional half-day per week shift, an early morning one tacked onto the usual six hours he spent in a cubicle every Monday. Without the additional three hours, he would’ve suffered a pay level downgrade. Which he couldn’t afford. Patti ate a lot. Drank a lot. Ran up the entertainment bill with incessant TV watching. And insisted on running from bar to bar two or three nights a week, making Joel tag along on escort duty.

“You guys do a good job,” the tech said in an offhand tone-of-voice. The monitor showed Joel’s skull-wrapping patch, the tiny chips in blue and the mounting material under his scalp in gray-white. “My fridge stopped sending me alerts. Got a helper on the line and no problems. Just needed a software jolt.”

Joel shrugged.

“I’ll tell you,” the tech said as his hands danced across Joel’s scalp, his probes digging softly under the skin, “when you’ve got nothing, no activity at all, not even a blue sky on a cloudy day, so to speak, it’s more or less certain you got a dead one under that head of hair.”

“How much?” Joel croaked. “To fix it. How much?”

“One hundred and fifty thousand.” The tech continued his examination. “That’s an estimate.”

Joel calculated how long it would take him to pay back the loan he’d need to take out, possibly from a bank or from Neural System’s credit bureau, or from the retirement fund he’d built up over the years. He’d paid for the initial patch using the government issued Starter Fund granted after six years of post-high school education.

He had options, Joel thought. He wasn’t as adrift as he felt. Just as he had started to learn – relearn – to use a tablet computer at work, he’d grown use to the sight of his apartment and its dirty brick surroundings, block after block of look-alike buildings. The garbage in the streets no longer bothered him. Nor did the heat of an early summer in late March. He’d grown use to his cell phone, using it for casual communications and information gathering, charging it when necessary. He didn’t mind that every interface, whether at work or at home, was manual now. He had to touch things and press buttons. Things that his Nivens Patch handled intuitively required physical intervention now.

“Yeah,” the tech said, drawing out the sound of the word. His young face betrayed nothing of what he might be feeling. Remorse for giving out bad news or glee about the commission he’d earn. Joel couldn’t tell. He searched the long white face, the freckles across the bridge of the boy’s nose, and the set of those thin lips. He wondered, who kissed this young man?

Joel shook his head. Too many odd questions invaded his mind lately. He blamed the damaged patch.

“You should at least have it removed,” the technician said, thumping the air with the blunt end of a silvery instrument. “I detect some leakage. Not poisonous. At least, not fatal. But that stuff can make you sick, maybe some auditory hallucinations. Maybe bad dreams. It various from patient to patient.”

“What’s that cost?” Joel asked.

The tech smiled. “Bet you missed the old days when you’d think a question and get an instant answer.”

Joel glared at the boy. So sure of himself, secure in his job, his life. “Aren’t you patched?”

“Of course. So I’ve got the answer. Thing is, you’ll have to get more specific about what happened to you.”

“I drank too much.”

The tech nodded, but his lively blue eyes said, he didn’t believe Joel’s story. “Didn’t your patch send you a warning about losing control?”

It had, Joel recalled. He’d ignored the prompts. He’d been having too much fun with Patti, a woman half his age who represented a forbidden land he longed to visit.

“How can you be twice my age?” she had asked, hands on her hips. “You mean, when I was ten you were twenty?”

“No. It doesn’t work that way. But you’re 22 and I’m 44. When you were ten, I was 32.”

“That’s not twice my age,” she said. “Here. Here’s some more of this.” She’d raised her hancer to his forehead.

The memory of that night made Joel shake. The chair that encased him rattled on its pedestal. The tech stood by a desk, a computer screen displaying a transcription of the notes he made into Joel’s file, the words jumping from his brain to the database with no key presses in between.

The memory of that first great night with Patti slowly evaporated from the front of Joel’s mind, replaced by the reality of living with the wild 22-year-old for nearly three weeks. She’d move on soon, onto the next friend or relative willing to take her in.

“Sometimes,” the tech said, “they need to know which bar. Maybe to investigate further. Maybe to run a sting operation. So, if you have friends engaging in this sort of zapping behavior, well…” The tech waved his hands in the air. He looked sad, as though he regretted not having that kind of fun himself. He wasn’t as frivolous as someone like Patti.

“I’d have to turn .. “Joel stopped himself from saying, “turn her in.” That was a giveaway. “Turn in the bar? What if I can’t remember which one?”

“That’s not up to me. I mean, I don’t make the decisions about these things. If they investigate and don’t believe what you tell them, you may wind up living with that decaying patch for the rest of your life. Who knows what kind of dreams you’ll have. Awake or asleep. Who knows.”

“And if I tell them everything?”

“I hear they give bonuses for cooperation. Maybe enough to afford a new patch.”

“Maybe,” Joel said in a whisper. Perhaps it would help Patti straighten out her life, put her on a better course. She’d be sent to a workhouse as punishment. But then she’d get out and sent to school and given purpose to her life. No more couch surfing. No more electronic stimulations. No more patch-destroying behavior.

And, Joel realized, no more being Patti Jarvis, the mischievous imp with the long blonde hair and frilly red underwear who delighted in making people take notice.

“I’m not going to remember anything,” Joel said, and hopped out of the chair.

“You may not like what that damaged patch does to your brain. You’re certainly headed for a life that’s a lot more difficult than – “

“Stop!” Joel raised his hand. “I know all that. Thanks for the warning.” He pictured Patti mouthing, “Thank you, Uncle Joe,” her lips puckering for an avuncular kiss.

He left the office. Out of the building. Onto the street. Patti would be with him for another week of games and fun and meals. His damaged patch and the dreams it might cause when he slept, along with the need to handle a tablet computer to do his job would be with him forever.

He’d get used to it. So long as he’d have Patti for a month each year.

 

END.

by David Castlewitz

After a long and successful career as a software developer and technical architect, David has turned to a first love: SF, fantasy, magical realism, and fiction in general. He’s published stories in Phase 2, Farther Stars Than These, SciFan,Martian Wave, Flash Fiction Press and other online as well as print magazines. Visit his web site: http://www.davidsjournal.com to learn more and for links to his Kindle books on Amazon.

 

 

Henrik Scharfe, a professor at Aalborg University, has created a robot in his image that was used to fire people in an experiment.-CBSNews.com                                                     

Whenever I get a call from Robot Resources, I know it’s not going to be good news.  The first time I went down there they wrote me up for excessive Eydie Gorme searching during work hours.  I’d forgotten to erase my search history, and Hank, the overweight guy who runs the IT department, reported me.

They put a memo in my personnel file and I was careful for awhile, but then on the Team-Building Outing my hand slipped down Mary Lou Pfenstrunk’s bodice when we did that trust-building exercise where you fall backwards into your co-workers’ arms, and all of a sudden I’m sitting there with two strikes and a foul tip, if you know what I mean.  I was told if there were any more screw-ups I could clean out my cubicle.

Then–I swear–I took Claudia Boul’s strawberry-banana yogurt from the 8th floor refrigerator by mistake.  All right, I figured she would never notice that I’d given her the nondescript wildberry flavor my wife bought me.  What the hell is a wildberry, anyway?

So when I saw Cyborg 3Rn’s name on my phone screen, I gulped involuntarily.  Time to face the music and dance, I thought.  I took the long walk down to the 5th floor, where the walls are lousy with motivational posters that make people question whether there’s something wrong with them because they don’t love their jobs.

I knock lightly on 3Rn’s open door, and he looks up from his Sudoku.  As usual, he’s showing off by doing it behind his head, the way T-Bone Walker used to play his guitar.

“come in come in come in,” he says in that flat, uninflected tone you get from automated phonemail operators.  “have a seat sit anywhere.”  Since there are only two chairs, one for the employee and one for the witness that the legal department says must be present whenever someone is fired, I don’t have much choice.

“how’s the wife how’re the kids how ’bout those red sox,” 3Rn says after I’ve sat down, as if he cares.

“In reverse order, the Red Sox were just eliminated–ask for a software upgrade.  My kids are fine, but Christmas is coming and they’ll wonder why they’re getting shoes instead of scooters.  As for my wife–you don’t even remember her name.”

“sure i do sure i do,” 3Rn says, but he hesitates for a moment as he searches through his database.  “it’s linda right?”

“That’s right, but it’s not like you had it on the tip of your little plastic tongue.”

“no need to be bitter,” 3Rn says just as 4Zxi walks in to join us.

“hi there how ya doin’” 4Zxi says, all bubbly.  He’s usually slotted for campus interviews, and I guess they forgot to turn down his enthusiasm control to the “morose” setting.

Once the pleasantries are over 3Rn gets down to business.  “i regret to inform you that your services will no longer be needed.”

“Why?” I ask, although I know the answer.  My numbers have slipped steadily over the past three years, the by-product of a mid-life crisis that these guys could never understand.  I’ve been depressed, and when you’re depressed you couldn’t sell a life preserver to a drowning man.

The question calls for a higher-order logical response than 3Rn is prepared for, so he has to search his memory for a bit before replying.

“well, this place isn’t for everyone,” he begins.  “we’re an up-or-out type of organization, and you’ve essentially plateaued.”  I’m a little taken aback; I didn’t know 3Rn, with his robotic personality, was capable of such a nuanced assessment of my situation.

“you might be happier someplace else,” 4Zxi adds in a genial tone, playing good cop to the hatchet man’s bad cop.

“Look, I need time to find a new job,” I say, trying not to sound too desperate.

“like how much?” 3Rn jabs right back.

“I don’t think ninety days is unreasonable.”

“ninety days!”  I have to say, I’ve never seen an exclamation point come out of 3Rn’s grim little visage before.

“now three,” 4Zxi says, “that’s not unreasonable for a high-level professional job.”

“excuse us for a moment, would you?” 3Rn says, and I get up and go out in the hall, closing the door behind me.  The next few minutes are the longest in my life, longer even than my first time up on the ten-meter springboard at the town pool, with all the 13-year-olds behind me yelling “Jump!”

When the door opens it’s 4Zxi who beckons to come in.

“i don’t like long good-byes,” 3Rn says.  “so we’re going to give you three months’ severance, but you have to work from home.”

“That’s going to crimp my style,” I say.  “I’d rather be able to come into the office and pretend I’m gainfully employed while I look to make a lateral move.”

“you can do that from home,” 4Zxi says.

“It’s not the same–I won’t have an office, I won’t have a title.”

“i don’t know,” 4Zxi says.  “you’ll just be calling people on the phone.”

“I won’t have much self-confidence calling in my pajamas.”

“why not?” 3Rn asks.  “you’ll be better dressed than you are now.”

END.

By Con Chapman

Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer, author of two novels and a history of the ’78 Red Sox-Yankees pennant race, The Year of the Gerbil.  He is currently writing a biography of Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington’s long-time alto sax player, for Oxford University Press.

 

 

Heat.  

A burst of radiation, actually, signaling the beginning phase of what would grow into a stellar flare, but that’s what my sensors translated it as.  A warning that the sector my ship had just passed through was becoming dangerous for both ships and life forms.  

A token in memory of what I’d once been.

Other memories:  A different heat.  Laser heat, aimed at my one-man scout by a Spican corsair.  Memories of the civil conflict, before all grievances were forgotten in the face of the alien challenge — the new war, against a non-human invader.  Except I was no longer human either.

I’d been killed in the Spican’s ambush and, despite our worlds being allied now, that was a memory I’d never lose.     The heat dissipated — all at once — as if it had been something only imagined.  The last time I’d been a lot less lucky.  I’d been killed in action, but my scout had held together just long enough to be recovered by one of my own side’s battle cruisers.  The rest had been nightmare.

That heat had remained.

I checked my scanners, fore and aft.  The mid-ship visuals.  The infra-redders.  Loosed the sono-robs from their booms.  I even smelled the space ahead of me and was rewarded.  The trail I picked up was faint, but, to me, could not be mistaken.  Goranhauf’s spoor.

My hunch had paid off.  For nearly five years since my recommissioning, I’d cruised the sectors that life-manned ships preferred to avoid.  The dangerous sectors, that robo-merchants would sometimes sneak through, or occasional privateers like mine, whether manned or unmanned.  But I’d had a mission beyond the one that FleetCen gave me, ever since I’d scanned the roster of similar semi-independents and learned that Goranhauf had been classed as a privateer too.

I’d wondered why.  He hadn’t volunteered — none of us had, even back during the civil wars.  Even before the colonial navies had reformed under FleetCen’s umbrella, the general idea was that those without money or social connections — in other words, ninety percent of those who did the actual fighting — were simply “classed” into whatever part of the fleet the admirals felt needed help most.  Goranhauf, at the time we first met, had been classed as a picket by his own side.  He’d been given a single-manned ship, one better gunned as it turned out than mine, and then set to ambush scouts like me.

The visi-comp pinged.  The trail was fresher.  I took a sonic reading over a wedge of space off my starboard bow, then ordered a full-power magnification of what the visual computer had seen.  

A sickle-winged shape, its velvet black finish blending smoothly into the darkness that lay around it.  Goranhauf’s corsair — then picket, now privateer — in any guise, a shape I’d first seen only when it flashed out at me, guns blazing death, giving me scarcely a chance to  return fire before my shattered scout was sent spinning back to my own side.

“Identify!”  

Goranhauf’s challenge.  Again he’d seen me first, reacted first.  But we, allegedly, fought for the same cause in this new war.

“FleetCen XX-2,” I answered.  “Armed and on patrol under letters of marque.  Identify back — visual ID.  Is that you, Goranhauf?”

Minutes passed.  We were that far apart, even as our ships were closing.  “Identify — visual,” I repeated, knowing he had probably already sent his compliance.  “I’ve trailed you, Goranhauf, and, if it’s you, there’s nothing that you can do to hide.”  As I finished the words, my internal screen flashed into an image of a heavy-faced, black-bearded man.  

“This is Goranhauf” — we were still closing — “I . . . geeze, are you really an early double-X?  I’d heard that most of them had been destroyed.”

“My name is Metler,” I replied.  “Alan Metler.  Perhaps you remember, when you fought for Spica. . . .”

The time lag that separated our messages and replies was getting shorter.  Nevertheless, there was still a delay.

“I . . . why would I hide?”

Why would he hide from me?  For the same reason that most of the early XX conversions had been destroyed.  Pain was the reason, when it came down to it.  Searing pain.

I switched on my own visual ID transmitter, knowing that all he’d see was a network of wires and tubing.  The pain hadn’t stopped when my ship had been rescued, but only started.  My combat record had been good enough for me to be given a second chance, so, just as my nerves were flayed from what was left of my body, my brain was revived.

“Because I intend to kill you, Goranhauf, just like you killed me.”

“But you survived, Metler.  The process worked for you. You’re one of the few. . . .”

The memory of survival was agony, without cessation.  This was survival:  Nerves cut from flesh, then spliced into circuits; eyes, ears, tongue, skin, every external part fused with sensors; spinal ganglia, locked in tungsten, laid as vertebrae into a new keel.  And, after, the testing in which lay the real pain as we became one, my scout ship and I, in movement and will, while most of the others did not survive.  The others, who underwent the conversion, as Goranhauf said, had been destroyed — as an act of mercy.  But, even with the worst of the failures, mercy came only after they’d been kept and tested long enough for FleetCen to learn how to make today’s man-ship conversions easy.

“Yes, Goranhauf,” I said.  “I survived.”

This time I fired first, in the moment he waited to hear my reply.  Heat beams and words struck his ship together.  

“Metler, for Christ’s sake!  We’re on the same side.  We could be partners.  We could forget what happened before and work together.”

I fired again as our ships flashed by.  “You were the one who did this to me, Goranhauf.  Made me survive on hatred alone — on what I would do when I finally tracked you.  When I was recommissioned, they made me a privateer because they didn’t know whether a ship like me could operate in concert with others. They may have been wise.  In any event, they did me a favor by giving me the freedom to search. . . .”

He checked speed and circled — instead of running, he intended to meet my challenge.  There wasn’t time for talk after that, or even for thinking.  I’d managed to damage his ship on that first pass, but only lightly, and now he came back with his forward lasers crackling on tight beam.

I fired again — didn’t know if I hit him — felt the pain as his first blast struck me.  Screamed with the agony, shrieking, silently, out to the stars as I disengaged.  This time the holes were burned in my own skin.  

“Surrender, Metler,” my com-circuits screamed back.  Goranhauf’s ship turned, as if the battle were over already, to finish me off.  “I’m a better gunner than you are — even if you’re joined with your ship, I always will be.  But we should be partners.  Metler, listen, I wish you would at least consider. . . .”

I switched my voice receiver off.  I thought of the stars.  I thought of one star in particular, one that I knew was about to flare.  I watched as Goranhauf’s ship fired again, but this time I took evasive action.  

I made him chase me.

I kept him busy, turning, evading, scoring an occasional hit as I drew him with me, doubling back on my earlier course.  I began to feel a warmth from the star, then a streak of searing heat arcing out toward our path.  I took hits as well — it wouldn’t be long until I was crippled.  Nevertheless, in spite of the pain, I made sure I kept him busy enough that, with his reliance on his ship’s separate warning circuits, he wouldn’t guess where the real danger lay until I was ready.

I flew with pain, but I’d felt it before, and enough that was worse that I’d long ago realized that permanent death was something I wanted more than life.  Permanent death, but a death with completion — I wanted a death, if it had to come now, that took Goranhauf with me.

I made a last distance and course calculation, then hit my retros, sliding into a spiraling turn that took me below him.  I watched as he flashed past — even when he’d killed me before, had it not been for the speed of his ambush, I would have proven the better pilot.  I listened — tasted the chemical flame — as he tried to brake into his own sliding turn, then desperately fired his stern blister cannon as soon as he realized I’d switched back to full forward thrusting power.

All he could do was to fire and fire again, riddling my body, helpless to stop me . . .

#

. . . to take the blow as my torn ship rammed . . .

#

. . . to accept my embrace as, together, we swept into agonized brightness.  Brightness and darkness.  Into the flare. . . .

#

And then brightness again.  

My ocular sensors felt different this time — the fixed scanners covered a wider angle.  I tested my nerve circuits, flexed my thrusters, realized that the conversion process was easier now.

They’d done it again — FleetCen had built me into a larger, newer vessel, without my even realizing they’d done so.  I tried to change course, this time to seek out not just a stellar flare, but a star’s center to drive myself into.  I felt resistance.  I struggled against it.  I felt an opening.

My mind fell through.

Goranhauf!  I didn’t have voice circuits.  Yet, at the same time, I didn’t need them.

You killed me, Metler.  You got what you wanted.  But FleetCen found us, just like your side’s navy found you the last time.

I tried to close my ears to what he said, but couldn’t do it.  It wasn’t a sound.  Then leave me, Goranhauf, I tried to scream — it wasn’t a sound, but something I heard within my own mind.  Even if you’ve been converted as well.  I’ll accept that, if you’ll accept that I got what I wanted and leave me alone.

I wish I could, Metler.  But you were killed too.  FleetCen has our records, the transcripts detailing your skills as a pilot and mine as a gunner, and, when they found our ships crushed together, it gave them an idea.  We’ve both been rebuilt . . .

I heard Goranhauf’s laughter — it wasn’t a sound, but something a lot worse — then heard the laughter rise up to a scream.  I joined it with mine as, a moment later, his words continued.

. . . rebuilt, Alan Metler, into the same ship.  Welcome aboard what, once it’s passed testing, is going to be FleetCen’s newest weapon — the first double-X-class two-man destroyer.

END.

By James Dorr

James Dorr’s latest book is a novel-in-stories published by Elder Signs Press in June 2017, TOMBS:  A CHRONICLE OF LATTER-DAY TIMES OF EARTH, while his THE TEARS OF ISIS was a 2014 Bram Stoker Award® nominee for Fiction Collection.  Other books include STRANGE MISTRESSES: TALES OF WONDER AND ROMANCE, DARKER LOVES: TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET, and his all-poetry VAMPS (A RETROSPECTIVE).  A mostly short fiction writer and poet working mainly in dark fantasy and horror with some excursions into mystery and science fiction, Dorr invites readers to visit his blog at http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com.