I pulled in my botnet even tighter and ran through the white puffball, losing most of my vision for a moment. I came out on the other side and continued running.
I cleaved a subswarm and sent it out on reconnaissance. The recon went autonomous and soared high, looking for the intruder. A side window opened in my goggles and it transmitted a 270-degree spherical view from the subswarm. Thermal imaging was overlaid on the natural image and the people became more distinct. The recon swarm moved three or four times the speed I could run and soon it found him. The subswarm identified the man by his identat that the house surveillance recorded. My goggles highlighted him in white in the side window.
I lucked out. The man had an Anthracyte swarm. How was he able to use it to infect my wife? There are no applications that create zombie swarms that can do that. Anthracyte makes swarms that are fully SecureForce compliant.
Jailbroken. Damn.
Still, even jailbroken, Anthracyte swarms didn’t have hardware as capable as Gyphers. They focused on delivering content, there were no apps for body invasion and control.
The recon led me to him in a park. I recalled the subswarm and melded it into the mothercloud enveloping my body. Signaling the botnet into defense mode, I lost my extra-sensory vision. Instead, I gained gleaming black armor that covered my entire body except my goggles and face mask.
I ran around a large boulder in the park and there was my man. I flashed back to the scene in my house.
I had come home and sent my swarm to the recharging station. I walked to the bedroom. My wife was there, on her knees, in front of a man with no visible swarm, who was undoing his shorts. She saw me, tears streaming from her eyes and red in the face. But she leaned forward, eyes still on me and her mouth opened.
“Jon!”, she said in a mangled way since she didn’t close her mouth.
Rage filled my body. Without my swarm I was powerless. But so was this guy. Where was his swarm? I grabbed the house wand and slammed it across the man’s head. The man screamed in pain as the house wand splintered in metal and plastic bits. I didn’t care at all that I could no longer control the features of my home without my swarm on. I hoped every shard went into that man’s face.
My wife breathed out in relief as she sat back. I stared at her. Looking closer, she wasn’t just red in the face and body, but she was covered in small red marks. Suddenly, white bots were leaving her skin through those same pores. They came out in multiple colors, finally coalescing into a white cloud that covered the intruder.
“Jon… it was horrible. The pain!” She started to cry.
I kneeled beside her and rested a hand on her shoulders. Her skin had tiny droplets of blood all over it. Her hands, her neck, her face were all covered with tiny drops of blood that smeared when I touched her.
“They moved inside of me, in my skin. I had to do what they wanted, I moved with them so it wouldn’t hurt.”
She started to cry.
I looked at the rapist, fury once again rising in my belly. The white bots had almost finished repairing the damage I had done. In a few seconds, faster than I could respond, the man sprung up and jumped out the window.
That man was now standing in front of me. His swarm billowed out, making it difficult to see him.
I sent a small stream of only a few bots to penetrate his cloud. They sent back a reconstruction of what was inside. I had to be careful because of the delay of the representation. I could improve the lag time by sending in more bots to compensate. Sending in more would degrade my armor, this was good enough.
And then it wasn’t. Two more bodies showed up in the cloud. In a second, the cloud imploded creating a white second skin on three people. That was fine, Anthracyte armor sucked.
I formed four projectiles from my swarm, taking the supply from my back and shoulders. Aiming with my hand, I fired a projectile along my arm and fingers at the middle body. It hit with enough force to break the poorly constructed armor.
The humanoid dissipated completely. Decoy! The swarm that made up the decoy congealed into the two other bodies.
I reformed the remaining ballistics into a long thin serrated blade that extended from my hand and ran at the two shapes. I swiped at the left body and watched it dissipate just after the blade struck.
I turned to face the intruder. The man who would have forced my wife to pleasure him if I had not happened to come home. The entire white cloud had coalesced on his body. It formed Anthracyte armor up his waist, over his shoulders, and finally his head. His swarm created a gleaming white mask, turning his head into the shape of an exaggerated skull. The armor on his shoulders, arms, and legs thickened, forming body musculature like some comic book character. A six-foot sword grew from his hands, with no obvious reduction in his coverage of armor. My word! He must have had a huge number of nanites.
I launched my blade directly at the skull. He easily knocked it to the side with his sword. It was a stupid move. Organizing bots like that for highly kinetic moves exhausted their energy until they could recharge. Each move like that depleted my supply of nanodrones. I was down to half, most of which were acting as armor on my front side, leaving me rather vulnerable on my back.
His huge blade slashed at my left side. The bots moved to intercept. I was unharmed but the force of the blade contacting my armor sent me stumbling to my right. He wheeled around and went to attack my right side before I could regain my balance. The sword struck again. This time only some of my swarm placed themselves in time to block the blow and the weapon pierced my skin, drawing blood.
He struck me again on my barely protected chest with the sword which was now enlarged to a ridiculous size. I could hear the man laughing. He went to swing again.
I created another ballistic, far smaller than my previous one. It wasn’t intended to kill, just distract or harm. I straightened an arm, giving the projectile a surface to increase speed. I shot his foot.
The gigantic blade had finally started using bots from other areas of his body. The intruder’s heel was exposed. Now it was a bloody mess.
The man howled. He raised his knee and grasped his foot. I almost laughed watching this huge, skull faced man hopping around, holding a foot.
I initiated Thor’s Hammer and got a burrower ready. Almost all my remaining bots formed into a large hammer. I swung it, knocking the man off his good foot. The hammer was massive to whatever it impacted, but it was virtually weightless to me. The weakness was that after only one or two swings, the nanites that make it up become exhausted. I only got one swing. After impact, the tiny bots fell to the ground like dust.
I launched the burrower at the man’s heel. I wasn’t going to watch what happened next, though I could hear it well. The rest of my swarm formed into a leech shape, finding exposed skin. He screamed as it entered his body and looked for a specific target. I had given it an objective of boring into anything that gives off electrical energy between 40 and 200 times per minute. I listened as the man had one hell of a heart attack.
I walked back around the boulder, naked and vulnerable except for my street clothes and headed home.
* * *
Robert S. Hirsch is an engineer turned writer, who has been in a midlife crisis for most of his mid life. He came to Troy, New York to go to RPI as an eager teenager who wanted to make things. After a stint in Hollywood making creatures for movies, he finished his bachelors, masters and even a Ph.D. in 1998. Since then, he has continued to work in the area, recently completing about 25 years of engineering experience. Currently, Robert lives in Troy, with his wife Gladys and his two children. His first book, Clash of the Fae, is available now.
8
Workaday
Jonathan David Baird
It took supreme effort of will to not break my gaze from the screen in front of me and look up at the stupid bitch standing in front of my desk. She stood silently holding what looked to be a large rolled up piece of paper in her hands, most likely a CAD print-off. She was always on about CADs and how the
y wasted paper. “Mr. Henderson, why do you insist on printing this off?” Her voice was high-pitched and demanding. “How are we expected to stay green when you refuse to abide by the simplest office protocol?”
I refused to look up and acknowledge her. “There is no we. You don’t work for Epikouroi. You are merely the EPA person who tells us what to do with our waste.” I looked up and into her eyes and spoke to her the way I would speak to a child. “The Engineers have to have the CADs or they cannot do their jobs.” The bitch stalked out of my office mumbling about worthless plebs and quarterly government mandates.
When I looked back down at my desktop I noticed the screen flickered a bit and my mouse icon wiggled slightly — time to get to work. Somebody from Epikouroi’s HR had just logged into my desk remotely. I think HR could fix their snooping so that people would not be able to tell when they were spying, but maybe the paranoia of waiting and watching for the telltale signs of a remote user logging into your system was much more conducive to keeping us all on our toes. I am sure there was some sort of study about that, and I bet the HR people were all atwitter over how the study showed this and that about controlling our work habits.
I wasn’t all that concerned. HR had it worse than us. There were so many of us that needed to be watched that HR couldn’t watch us at all times, but all the upper level HR employees at Epi had cameras trained on them to make sure they were doing their job harassing us. I am sure the guys that watched HR had someone watching them as well. Who knew where it all ended? I have heard rumors that somewhere up the line there are supervisors working for our parent company Phylakes who have had their brains compartmentalized so that they watched themselves. I was sure that probably wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true.
Anyway, Gold Star for me, as the HR guy or girl logged in just as I was finishing one of the endless TPS reports and sending it down to the IT department. Making me look like I had actually been productive for once. Back to work.
Ten minutes later, Polly from the next cubicle over stormed in and passed my desk. “Stop whatever you are working on and come with me.”
“I can’t. HR is logged in, if I don’t keep working they’ll report me.”
“Never mind that.” Polly grabbed my arm and dragged me out of the cubicle.
“Where are we going?” I struggled, but Polly had a firm grip.
“Shipping. We need you to translate.”
I was flustered. Yes I had a very good rapport with the hoi polloi in shipping, but I have never actually been down to their department. I didn’t think any of us office workers went down there. Mostly we spoke to them on the phone or communicated by email.
“Polly, are you sure it is wise to go down to shipping. Have you ever been down there?”
“I was just there, that is why I came to get you. Shipping has a major problem. No one has been able to get them to see reason.”
We entered the freight elevator and traveled down past the lobby and into the depths of the building. We were in a new territory for me. A place I had never been, although I had been curious about what they did down here.
It was dark. It took a minute for my eyes to get adjusted to the low light conditions. The room was cavernous and filled with boxes, materials that had just arrived or products which were leaving the factory floor. Along one wall was a series of docks. Each of the docks had a shipping container backed up against it. Just a little light filtered in from around the containers where they did not fit perfectly into the docks. Computer screens flickered in the distance, phones were ringing off the hook, and no one was answering them. At one of the docks, ten or twelve men stood stock-still, all seeming to look into the container there.
“These men need to get that up to R&D.” Polly pointed past the group of men. “Can you get them into gear?” Polly was almost pleading.
I understood her consternation. She was up for a performance review this quarter and any delay or work stoppage in her department would look very bad on her evaluation.
We walked up behind the men and I could just make out a large glowing sphere. Sitting atop it was what looked like a giant hookah. The hookah was stamped with the letters L.I.B.E.R. and was strapped securely to a wooden pallet. It was the only thing in the shipping container. Snaking out of the glowing sphere were twenty to thirty hoses and each of the men were puffing on them. No smoke was escaping when they exhaled, but there was a shimmer in the air around them.
Why must dock workers the world over always test out each new item that comes into the warehouse?
“Hey guys let’s wrap up the smoke break and get this thing up to R&D.”
One of the dock workers ambled over to me with a hookah hose in his hand.
“Try some liberty.” He offered me the hose halfway giving it to me and halfway sticking it up to my mouth. As it waved under my nose I got a whiff of something. I suddenly lost control of myself. I grabbed the hose, sucking deep on it.
My mind exploded — not literally, but I wasn’t on the loading dock any longer. I could sort of make it out, the men around me and Polly standing just behind me, but they were more like shadows than real people. At that moment I realized that I had been living in a dream my entire life. The constant drudgery, the fear, even the job were merely vaporous illusions. I was not the sum of what I did or who I knew.
I had taken drugs before, during college, hell it was mandatory to use hallucinogens in college. If you did not conform to the expected norm you certainly would not have expected any sort of promotion or benefits. Nonconformists did not make good middle managers. This wasn’t like any drug. You knew somewhere deep inside that the drug high would wear off. Even if you were freaked out, some small part of you knew the LSD trip wasn’t “really” real. This was real. I knew it was real.
I stood on the edge of a cliff with waves crashing onto the beach below. Sea spray hit my bare chest. I was wearing a loincloth and holding a stone-tipped spear. Life surged through me. I could taste the clean, crisp air. The shadowy presence of the dock and my co-workers was slowly receding into a dark cave behind me. I was free and alive, more alive.
Suddenly I was back. Polly had struck the hose from my mouth. She was shaking me, trying to wake me from the effects of the hookah. The sensation however was not of waking but of falling back into slumber. Each time she shook me I fell deeper into sleep and began to have the nightmare about Epikouroi industries once more.
“No!” I wasn’t sure I had shouted, or if I dreamed I was shouting. My shadow self struck back at Polly. Moving was like pushing through thick molasses, but I pushed her away. I could just make out her falling as I fumbled for the hose. It was an eternity before I grasped it again and could get it back to my mouth. Instantly I was awake again. The shadow Polly was at my feet. She was cringing and had her arms up as if to ward me away. I had just enough sense of the dream world left to pick up one of the loose hoses and offer it to Polly. She tried to brush my hand aside. I was still half in both worlds and just enough in hers to shove the hose up to her nose in the same way that I had been offered freedom. She ripped the hose out of my hand and began huffing.
Polly did not fade. She became more solid, more real than she had ever seemed in the nightmare we had shared.
We both stood on the edge of the cliff in tanned leathers of our own making. A distant memory of restrictive suits and ties was dissipating. I was distracted by the call of a bird, yawned a little, and it was gone. We had just awakened moments before and stepped out into the invigorating air. The world stretched out before us free and unhindered, nothing was beyond our grasp.
“Polly, I had a really vivid dream last night. I think you were in it, but I can’t remember it now.”
* * *
Jonathan David Baird has worked as an archaeologist for the past fifteen years throughout the Southeast. He has a master’s degree in English (literary arts) from Fort Hays State University. His focus of study was the development of late Victorian Gothic horror. He has a second master’s deg
ree in American history focusing on the early frontier. Jonathan was recently elected District Soil and Water Supervisor in Burke County, North Carolina — the only registered Libertarian to win an elected seat in North Carolina in 2014. He is currently working towards a PhD in Humanities. Jonathan blogs at NukeMars.com.
9
Fluorescence
J.P. Medved
To me, my grandmother had always been associated with light. Not the golden ethereal light one thinks of angels having or, indeed, the harsh whiteness of a hospital, or even the sterile fluorescence that everyone else in the country endured. Grandma’s light was warm. It seemed natural, like the sun.
Before I was even old enough to understand what terms like “state-ordered,” “black market,” “environmental concerns,” “contempt of court,” and “the greater good” meant, I understood what it was that made grandma’s house so cheery, safe, and comfortable. It was the light.
I could play with my dolls for hours on her floor, late in the evenings, and never once get a headache, like at my parents’ house. I never had one of my “episodes” at grandma’s house. Hers was the only home I could fall asleep in with the lights still on. I would nod off on the floor, or while watching one of the old time cartoons she had saved for her grandkids, and as she would carry me softly to bed, I would drowsily mumble, “Grandma, keep the light on, please.”
Her whispered response was always the same, “Of course I will.”
Defiant, She Advanced: Legends of Future Resistance Page 15