by Anthology
The music oval is off near the edge of the floor. The mass of the crowds is thinner here, although it’s still a little too busy for my tastes. I sit at an unoccupied screen, the hacker kids hanging out behind me, scoping out the area like they’re my bodyguards. I pull the skull and bones stick from my jacket and insert it into one of the many hidden ports behind the screen.
The Overseer walks over to me. They all look so much alike, it may be a robot, but it seems like a man with a thick Texan accent. “Buying or selling?” he asks.
“Selling.”
He nods, presses a hidden key, and walks away.
On the screen, the list of the newly acquired songs scrolls by on the right side. The system checks file names versus data, verifying things like sound quality and legitimacy of titles. Slowly, numbers appear by the song titles, going-rates of songs by that artist or time period or genre on the global exchange.
This is the waiting phase. My cache is being submitted to hundreds of other consoles in other Hubs or the personal screens of rich collectors in the few remaining cities in nicer parts of the world. Near one of the titles, a small red exclamation point appears. The system has flagged the song as a NOH. Once, for a brief moment in time, this song was the Number One Hit of a world that no longer exists. Instantly, bids start to come in.
I start clicking through them, as fast as I can, ignoring everything except the top price, which keeps rising. I hear a grumble beside me. I look away from my work. Emma is staring at me with an angry look.
“You think you can do this better than me?” I challenge her.
“I know I can.
I stare at her eyes. That hungry knowledge is still back there, despite whatever my boy Burr did to her last night.
“Fine,” I say and give her my chair.
She sits down with a flourish and starts sliding her fingers across the screen like a pianist doing Mozart. Another red exclamation point appears near another song and Emma is already comboing that piece with the first one. The big number at the top of the screen, my possible profit, keeps jumping by hundreds of dollars. She’s ignoring the top bidders and pushing the middle-ground bids to drive up the demand. Other songs, not with exclamation points, but by the same artists are suddenly in the triple digits.
If there was music in this place, I’d start dancing.
I glance at the Overseer, who seems very interested in Emma. He’s hovering near her, one eye on her and one on his secret screen.
Passerby’s pause when they see the girl with the magic fingers. A few linger. I shove a couple out of the way while blocking the view of others. I don’t like the attention the girl is gathering. Even the other bidders in the oval are glancing up from their screens to peer curiously in her direction.
Then I see the number at the top of her screen. More money than I’ve ever seen in my life. Somehow she’s taken two #1’s and a handful of obscure shit and turned it into a major score. I feel my dick getting hard and my breath tightening up. I feel proud of my decision to bring the kids to the Hub and amazed to my foresight not to kill them in the desert.
The Overseer, perhaps tiring of Emma’s cleavage or the sudden crowd, chimes in: “Final bids are in. Sell or leave.”
Emma looks back at me. She’s also breathing hard, sweat pooling around her temples and dripping down below her cheeks.
I smile at her. “Let it ride, baby!”
She slaps the screen, a big red icon that says SELL in bold. There’s a bit of cheer that comes from the crowd. Even the Overseer cracks a smile.
“Your winnings are on the way,” he says, that accent morphing ‘winnings’ to ‘waaaanings’. A couple of suit muscleheads walk over with a thick white envelope.
Giddy, we walk away from the table. The kids are chatting about the bidding process, the tech and the thrill of it. My brain is riding a million miles an hour. With this much cash, my pirates can stop roaming the wilderness for antiques. We can settle down somewhere, start a local operation, start a family, be normal. The possibilities are endless. I smile as I think about sharing the good news with Burr and the others.
Emma, Timmy, and I wait for the elevator. Emma tugs at my arm. “We did okay?” she asks, sheepish grin on her pretty face.
“Better than okay,” I say as the doors open. I let the kids in first so I can hold on the envelope in front of me. I’m aware of others looking at me. The elevator quickly fills up.
There’s a lurch as it gets moving and then another as it stops and the lights go out, this time all the way. I feel the knife enter my back and I’m about to yell when a hand clutches my open mouth.
“Scream,” Emma says, her breath hot in my ear, “And I push it all the way in.”
The pain is intense, like a volcano inside me. It seems to quickly spread to my arms, which feel useless, and my legs, which buckle. I can feel Timmy, thin and quick, slink to my front in the dark and grab the envelope.
“No,” I whisper as the knife goes in further. I feel streams of lava pouring out of me.
The elevator kicks back into operation and the lights flicker on. Somehow, Emma is in front of me, her body pushing me against the wall. She’s positioned my hand on her ass. There’s a laugh from someone in the elevator.
I can taste blood in my mouth. I can’t move or speak.
The elevator stops and the crowd pushes its way out the doors. Emma leans in to me like she’s going in for a kiss. “Thanks for everything…baby.”
Before my vision disappears, I see her and Timmy rushing out towards my bike. Some dark figures appear over me. There’s some shouting followed by the loud reports of guns firing.
When the darkness comes, it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before.
Auston Habershaw
http://aahabershaw.com/
Adaptation and Predation(Short story)
by Auston Habershaw
Escape Pod on 12/11/15
Everyone thrives in someone else’s version of hell. For the Quinix, this meant sheer canyon walls a hundred kilometers deep, every surface coated with a thick layer of red-orange vegetation and bioluminescent fungus. The arachnids liked to string cables in complex patterns from wall to canyon wall and built nests where the cables crossed. For them, each oblong, womb-like nest was no doubt cozy and safe. For me and every other off-worlder on Sadura, you were made constantly aware of the fact that, with just the right (or wrong) application of balance, you would plummet to a death so far below that you’d have plenty of time to think about it on the way down.
I’d seen more than a few fall—Dryth tourists to little fluffly Lhassa pups, all screaming their way down into the abyss. In the dim, humid depths of the Saduran canyons, the bodies were hard to find.
For that reason, among others, I came here to kill people for money. I make a good living.
Tonight I had a fat contract on a big Lorca—an apex predator, both because of his fangs and his bank account. As a scavenger, living on the bottom of the food chain my entire life, the irony was delicious. Here I was, a lowly Tohrroid—a slop, a gobbler, a smack—paid top dollar to do in some big shot whose trash my ancestors have been eating for ages. Sooner or later, the bottom feeders always get their due, don’t they?
Either that, or I was going to wind up dead.
I knew the Lorca liked to dine at the Zaltarrie, and I knew he’d be there tonight. I’d spent the last few weeks shadowing one of the wait-staff—a Lhassa mare with the fetching chestnut mane, a full quartet of teats, and the long graceful neck that fit with Lhassa standards of beauty. I had practiced forming her face in a mirror—the big golden-brown eyes with the long, thick lashes were the hardest—and now I had it down pat. I could even copy a couple of her facial expressions.
The Zaltarrie hung like a fat egg-sac in the center of one of the deeper canyons, webbed to the walls by at least five hundred diamond-hard cables, some of which were thick enough to run gondolas from the artificial cave systems that honeycombed the walls and were home to the less authenti
c Saduran resort locales. The Zaltarrie, though, was all about local flavor and a kind of edgy, exotic energy that appealed to the young, the bold, and the hopelessly cool.
I came in through the staff entrance already ‘wearing’ my uniform—a black, form-fitting bodysuit with a wrist console tying me into the club’s central hospitality net. The Quinix manager at the back door gave me an eight-eyed glare which I took to indicate curiosity. Most staff changed once they were here, I guessed, but I’d simply shaped my outer membrane to mimic the look of the clothes without bothering. It was a necessity; while I understand how elbows and ball-in-socket joints work in theory, mimicking the biomechanics of it all while stuffing an arm in a t-shirt is something else entirely. At any rate, I brushed past his fuzzy, leggy body and headed to the floor.
The music hit my whole body at once. It was a sultry, lilting Dryth ballad sung by a particularly attractive Lhassa mare dressed in a kind of micro-thin smart-gown that barely qualified as a garment. She was backed up by a small clutch of Voosk with the matching plumage to indicate they were part of the same flock. They had no instruments; with Vooskan vocal chords, they didn’t need them. The song shook me to my core, and I mean that literally. I see, I hear, I smell, and I feel with the same organ—my external membranes, my skin. The volume on that Lhassa crooner was such to make me wish I had a garment to hide behind. It made me sag in the door for a minute while I acclimated myself to the ambient sound. Between the thick pipe smoke and the freely flowing narcotics, nobody noticed.
The Great Races can’t appreciate the things they have. Take the Zaltarrie, for instance. Lush carpets, thick as an uncut lawn. The scent of finely spiced food. Each chair and cushion hand-stitched by arachnid feet from synthetic fabrics so smooth and soft they barely existed but as a sensation of cool breath on the backside of so many clothed bipeds. The music, too, and the pipe smoke and the low murmur of polite conversation in a half-dozen languages—all of this world of sensation, and it had to be funneled through at tight array of tiny sensory organs clustered at one end of some clunky organism’s static body. I could feel, taste, see, and hear it all at once and wear the experience as a garment, yet I was surrounded by organisms who sat in little fortresses of their own mind, carefully sifting through a couple streams of sensory information as suspiciously and greedily as customs agents looking for a bribe. It almost made me pity them, moments like this.
Don’t worry—the feeling passed. Screw those people.
I glided across floor, sweeping the faces clustered around the tables for my ‘date’ for the evening—Tagrod the Balthest, the Lorca shipping mogul. He was easy to spot; Lorca always are. He would have topped three meters standing, had he been standing. Instead, the great businessman lay across a mammoth divan no doubt custom designed for his use, his four lower limbs tucked beneath his lithe, muscular lower body. His torso was wrapped in Quinixi silk, black as charcoal and broad as the gondola that probably took him here. His forelimbs were folded across his chest, and I noted his talons were untrimmed—a mark of wealth. If all went well, I’d see him dead inside two hours. If not, I’d probably get a first-hand look at his digestive tract.
Lorca of such stature as Tagrod are never alone. He had a half dozen retainers—two Dryth bodyguards in armorgel suits, a snail-like Thraad with a control rig and a few servo-drones floating around, and a trio of overweight Lhassa mares chained by the neck and marked on the forehead with Tagrod’s personal sigil. These last were feed slaves. Tagrod kept to the old ways, where the predator/prey relationship between his species and the Lhassa was still observed. Just judging from the expressions on a few Lhassa faces elsewhere in the room, there were even odds I wasn’t the only person there planning to kill the big Lorca. I was, however, the only person sauntering towards his table with a packet of metabolic poison stashed in a vacuole hidden in my ‘abdomen’ and a multi-pistol likewise concealed within my ‘ribcage’.
An intoxicated Lhassa bull leaned out of a booth and pinched my backside. My buttocks clenched in what was probably an unnatural way—contracting like some kind of mollusk into a shell. I danced away, hoping he didn’t notice, and tossed my long neck so my mane flipped away from him—Lhassa body language that indicated I wasn’t interested in coupling with him. The bull laughed and followed me with his eyes until it was clear I was heading towards Tagrod’s table. Then he mouthed something cruel about me to his friends and turned away. Any mare who was going to speak with a Lorca was clearly beneath him, anyway. Lucky break. I made a mental note to avoid any other handsy Lhassa bulls—I looked convincing, but not so convincing a good fondling wouldn’t find me out.
The ballad was wrapping up just as I reached the corner where the big Lorca was splayed out. There were hoots of adulation from the tables in a dozen different languages made with as many different sets of alien vocal chords, noise bladders, or what-have-you. Tagrod clapped his taloned hands a couple times and roared, smiling. I got a good look at his three interlocking rows of needle-sharp teeth. I found myself hoping I’d estimated the dosage on the poison correctly—a half-dead Lorca could still do some pretty serious damage to an entirely-alive me.
One of the Dryth guards stopped me before I’d gotten within arm’s reach of Tagrod’s table. Like a typical Dryth, he was a compact and functional biped, knots of bumpy muscle in all the right places, and a face as smooth and streamlined as the prow of an airship. “We’ve already ordered.” The Dryth announced.
“I understand, sir. We’ve got a few specials, though, and the manager was concerned that your master hadn’t heard them before making his selection.”
The Dryth wasn’t buying it. His eyes—blue-white and sharp as ice picks—searched my face for some sign of deception. My deadpan, though, is unbeatable—it isn’t even really a face, after all.
Tagrod’s voice was a deep, resonant purr. “Othrick, please—the lady wishes to speak with me. Let her through.”
I had to keep my external membranes from shuddering in relief. Killing a Lorca is a lot like fishing: it’s all about the bait you use. Tonight, the bait was my assumed shape, and I’d just gotten a nibble.
One of the Thraad’s servo-drones pulled a chair out for me. The Dryth patted me down for weapons without so much as an ‘excuse me,’ and it took much of my concentration to keep my “body” appropriately rigid as to simulate a real Lhassa’s endoskeleton. I had practiced this, though, and there was no danger of him finding anything—my weapons were in vacuoles hidden inside my body. Unless he actually scanned me or I accidentally jiggled in the wrong place, I was safe. Comparatively, anyway.
Behind me, the Lhassa singer started into another number, this one in a language I didn’t recognize. Reflexively, I fiddled with the translator I’d hidden inside my ‘head’ until I got the words right. It was a Lhassa dirge from a subculture I wasn’t aware of. The Voosk did their best impression of a trio of sultry woodwinds, striking a jazzy backdrop to what was essentially a song about a mare’s children all dying in a fire. Leave it to the Lhassa to make something like that sound sexy.
Tagrod gave the Thraad a significant glance and the slimy bookkeeper twiddled a few tentacles. One of the servo drones chirped an acknowledgement and the song dimmed behind a dampening field. The big Lorca gave me an exploratory sniff from his perch. Even with two thirds of his body lying down, I was only at his eye-level. At this distance, I could easily see how his species could devour a full-grown Lhassa in one sitting—his great jaws could probably fit around my shoulders even before they unhinged to swallow me. There was a second—just the barest second—where I felt a sense of terror at his presence and wanted to run. I had to remind myself that, between the two of us, I was the dangerous one here. Predatory species or not, he wasn’t a trained killer, he was a business man—a three meter tall, five-hundred kilo, carnivorous businessman.
For some reason I didn’t feel much better.
“You don’t usually work this shift.” Tagrod observed.
I made a conscious effo
rt to blink. “You noticed?”
Tagrod smiled, but didn’t show me his teeth. “My dear, every Lorca can’t help but notice the Lhassa around them. An old instinct, you understand—don’t be frightened.”
I made my eyes flick towards the feed slaves, who were absently stuffing their faces with sautéed crimson slugs. They hadn’t even given me so much as a glance since I’d sat down.
Tagrod picked up on the gesture and nodded. “All my slaves are voluntary. Their families are handsomely paid. I’m sorry if they make you uncomfortable.”
I shook my head. “No. No, it’s all right.”
Tagrod purred at a low, powerful volume that made my body shiver. “So pleasant to meet a Lhassa who understands. So few of your kind can rise above their instincts. Our two species are interdependent. Your people have provided the numbers and done all the great labor. We Lorca have provided the vision. Like all good predators, we drove our prey to greatness.”
It was an old tale—the famous refrain of the oppressor: “but where would you be without me?” I know more about this than even the Lhassa do. Intelligent blobs of omnivorous, asexual goo do not advance well in a society full of so-called higher-order beings. My people eat trash in waste dumps and everybody thinks they’ve done us a favor. I wasn’t even spoken to by one of the Great Races until I was nearly a full cycle old, even though I worked in a restaurant like this one, surrounded by people. I was paid in table scraps.
“Are you all right?” Tagrod asked.
I realized I had been neglecting my facial expressions. I went back to work, batting my long eyelashes and smoothing my mane with one hand. “Sorry. I was just…just remembering something.”