by Elle Casey
I flick up the collar of my black suit jacket, unfold the tucked-in hoodie hidden underneath, and pull it over my head. That motion, and the glint of the parabolic printed circuit board lining of the hood, haloing me like radar, makes the woman turn and finally realize I’m there, with her husband in my line of sight.
She’d have been expecting me; the colonel had to have approached her earlier, to ask the question required by the forty-third amendment, to bring me in. It’s a long shot—they both know it—but they have to try.
Her eyes are on me, but I don’t try to catch what she’s thinking. It’s only for a moment, then she turns back to her boy and her silent prayer. The man on the gurney—his eyes, they’re still open. They’re blue, deeper than her suit. I breathe in. His eyes, like my grandfather’s eyes. I close mine. I see—
My grandfather, a soldering gun in his hand, leaning over a crystal radio set he’s teaching me how to build. A plume of solder vapor, mixed with melted insulation wrap, wafts to the ceiling.
Most of that radio is a mystery to me—a nine-year-old coping with the paradox of parents in the middle of a divorce—but when he inserts the jack, puts the headphones on me, and flips the switch, it is a revelation.
Telepathy is like radio. When you first tune in, you’re flooded with static, ambient noise, the almost-too-strong blare of someone else’s song. Knowing roughly where you want to be—the music you’re looking for—you ignore the static, turn the dial to scan for that frequency that will bring you the swell of strings. You pass through the peak signals of other transmitters, hear snatches of lives—some beautiful, some mundane—excerpted melodies, thoughts, monologues.
You don’t stop to think that all this is coming from somewhere else, ten, twenty miles away; not from there, where you stand. A kaleidoscopic swirl of distant information plucked from the ether.
Slowly, you push into the envelope of the target’s thoughts. Perhaps you go a little too far, and the signal drops, enough that you know you’re vectored away. You reset triangulation, back up just a touch, and you’re there. Mozart.
But for the man on the gurney, it’s different. I’m experienced, I know I’ve breached him—but there’s nothing there. Where he should be is a radio station that’s stopped transmitting, nine long minutes ago.
I pull back. Immediately the swirl of doctors’ thoughts comes over me. How the bullet entered the skull, how it traced its trajectory across the intracranial cavity and through the brain, how it ricocheted from the curved inner table of the skull to penetrate the brain—again.
I refocus on the man on the gurney. Nothing.
Not an awareness of his surroundings, of light, of movement—sometimes you get this when sensory inputs are still firing. No thoughts, no memories, much less what the colonel is looking for, standing with his secure phone open and ready to transmit—the code word that would abort the launch of missiles which, in seconds, could be skimming a predetermined path across the atmosphere, along the Earth’s curvature, toward our enemies, toward a ricochet of mutual destruction.
One of the doctors moves back. There’s a tangible droop now in his shoulders, a resignation. I’m not the only one who sees it. The woman starts crying.
“Oh, God,” the colonel says.
Behind him someone begins a mental countdown. Sixty-six, sixty-five, sixty-four, sixty-three—
I move closer to the gurney, taking the doctor’s place. Inside—in the patient’s memory palace, in the labyrinth of his mind—I’m searching everywhere, in every vestige of neural tissue, every axon, every glial cell; across the frontal lobe, parietal, occipital, temporal. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Then, suddenly, there it is:
A holographic echo in the midbrain, his trauma room, kept alive like an ember, a flash from a phosphorus flame nearing the end of its taper, one single thought he’s held on to through twelve minutes of an inevitable descent into darkness—
I come out, I step back, and everyone is looking at me, the doctors, the nurses, the guards, the colonel, the boy, the woman…
And I say her name.
A Word from Samuel Peralta
It began again, with “Trauma Room.”
Poetry was my first love affair with writing, one I’d built some small reputation on. But after accolades and online success, I’d gone through some soul-searching when one of my manuscripts spent a year languishing with a major literary publisher.
For a while after that, it felt like my love affair with writing had ended.
“Trauma Room” was the first piece I was able to put together after that disappointment, partly to prove to myself that I could still write.
I’d decided to try again, in a more mainstream genre: speculative fiction. I also meant “Trauma Room” to be a sample piece, to convince editors I had the chops, to take a chance on me. I couldn’t have predicted what happened next.
In short order, three other stories I’d written were included in separate science fiction anthologies—Michael Bunker and David Gatewood’s Synchronic, Hugo award winner John Joseph Adams’s Help Fund My Robot Army, and my own The Robot Chronicles, which I organized and produced with editor David Gatewood.
The three anthologies were released within weeks of one another. To my shock, all of them promptly marched up the Amazon bestseller charts, pulling me up the rankings along with the other authors I’d been lucky enough to hitch a ride with.
Within around ten weeks of the publication of the first anthology, I hit the Top 10 Science Fiction Authors on Amazon, peaking at #8.
That, I was told, was a record for the speed at which a debut author had hit the Top 10 in a major genre, especially for one who’d written only short stories.
It was a heady time. I stayed in the Top 100 continuously for about two weeks, when I finally released my first standalone title, “Hereafter.”
Through it all, even when I doubted myself, it’s been stalwart readers who’ve supported me, who gave me a reason to keep writing, and who’ve now given me a chance for a second love affair with writing. Thank you!
* * *
Margaret Atwood and Thomas Hardy gained fame as novelists, with books that have become classics. Despite this, both regarded themselves as poets, writing poetry over their entire lives.
Hardy claimed poetry was his first love, but also said, “A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.”
Life, writing: it all begins and ends with love. And so far, this has been a wonderful indiscretion.
* * *
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Venus in Red
by Therin Knite
The Lobby
There is blood on my pants from the person I killed to acquire my PK-8 neural enhancements. I did not steal the enhancements; rather, it was a hit. A hit for a man with a veil for a face, known as Nostradamus. Black market broker and collector of rare goods. Like military neurotech stripped of its government-mandated limitations.
The man I killed for Nostradamus was his enemy. Or some poor soul that crossed him by mistake. I didn’t know his name. I didn’t care to ask.
I killed him for a fair trade from the black market king, a life for the PK-8 gear I need to accomplish my goal.
Now.
In front of Grayson Dynamics.
Corporate headquarters. A building two hundred fifty stories high, armored with scale-like reflective black windows. The tower is twisted, helix style, a modern design for a company that operates in much the same way as did the robber barons of old. A company guarded by tech-augmented security elites, mercenaries with hearts of steel, men who will do their worst for a Christmas bonus. All to protect the man in the big chair on the building’s top floor.
They are why I need the enhancements.
To reach Mick Grayson, I must first put down his dogs.
I cross the downtown city street teeming with yellow cabs driven by droids who politely chastise my jaywalking while thei
r passengers bitch and whine. I stop four dense lanes of traffic on my warpath, not really seeing, not really hearing the temporary chaos I cause. To me, it is meaningless. Irrelevant. Nothing outside the building matters. So I enter.
The automatic glass doors retract for me, and I stride inside the lair where my nemesis awaits. Pass underneath the security scanners that fail to locate the guns concealed beneath my coat. Because a preprogrammed signal my neural gear emits—a signal of my own design—interferes with the scanning software. Produces a false negative.
I become the first person to enter Grayson Dynamics with weapons that can be used against it since the day so-called terrorist Devon Malloy blew up the reception area. Five years to this day. An area now rebuilt, sleek and shiny and gray. And it will stay that way. I have no interest in the languishing visitors seated on plush chairs, bored. Or the low-key employees taking lunch in the crappy café stuffed into a lobby corner.
I head for the way up.
A receptionist chewing bubble gum starts at the sight of me approaching the elevator. “Miss! Miss, you have to check in before you leave the lobby! Please, come here. It will only take a moment. I promise.”
I glance at her. Blond with a neat bob. Dressed in a navy suit. Happy to be the first person seen when one enters the home of the world’s most famous company. Unaware she’s also the most vulnerable person in the company. The first possible target of an attack.
And so the threat is realized. I test my gear on her. Full strength. Ten times the subtle compulsion force I prodded bystanders with on the way here from the home of Nostradamus. My intent builds in a fraction of a second, an electric discharge zipping down my spine, raising hairs, tightening muscles. I meet the unsuspecting woman’s gaze, peer into her hazel eyes. Push past them. Through the lens and the retina and the optic nerve. Into a brain never touched before by outside influence.
Stop talking, I command.
The words smack her like a speeding truck. She crumples back into her high rolling chair, which sails into the wall, bounces off, and collides with a fake potted plant.
Like pinball. Fifty points.
When she rolls to a stop, her mouth flaps open and shut, but no sound emerges. Confusion spreads across her face in a wave of worried wrinkles. She grabs her throat, kneading the skin, but her voice doesn’t return. It won’t. The telepathic compulsion has soldered itself to her brain, immovable. Millions of neural pathway branches have been severed, shut down, blocked off. To be restored only at my command. Or that of a person with enhancements equal to my own. Which is to say, no one.
I storm toward the elevator, aware that the receptionist is reaching for the alarm button beneath her desk. But no matter. I reach into my coat pocket and unveil my next trick, a security protocol scrambler. Hit the elevator up button as the INTRUDER ALARM starts blaring from the speakers. An awful noise. Like a dying cat shrieking in agony.
The elevator doors roll open, revealing three passengers inside.
“Get the fuck out,” I say, pulling one flap of my coat back to reveal my arsenal of six guns.
They pale, stammer, and stumble out of the box, and I enter as the doors roll quickly to a close, responding to the receptionist’s security command activation. Lockdown mode. I flip the switch for my scrambler and stick the magnetic attachment on the elevator control box. The digital floor number screen fizzles out for a moment, dead and black, then reboots to show the raw code stream beneath the user-friendly interface.
My scrambler has been preset to take me to my first destination, so I stand back, humming my own calming elevator tune, as the box begins its climb to war.
Floor 120
Eighteen guards wait for me on the floor where the AI lives.
The elevator doors roll open to reveal them, side by side in several lines, crowding the hallway. Their military-grade rifles are aimed at me. Ready to whittle me down to bits and pieces of bloody flesh, which will be left to be mopped up by droid cleaning units. Wearing black helmets, the guards are faceless, anonymous. Cold and callous. They have no care in the world for the lives of human beings. They are hired hands, bred for absolute obedience to those who earn their loyalty. And their loyalty is dictated by a number with a dollar sign before it.
Had I more money in my bank account, I’d offer it in trade.
Alas, I’m currently poor.
So they die.
A necessity.
But one that doesn't come easily. Since these mercenaries are augmented, they are a challenge to outwit.
I enjoy challenges.
Accessing the internal command constructs of my PK-8 gear, I ramp up the high-level processing capacity. A limit crack. A warning flashes across my eyes: SEVERE BRAIN DAMAGE POSSIBLE. I ignore it. Apply my coding modifications. In the span of less than half a second, this happens. I change.
My perception of time warps as my brain begins to process stimuli at thirty-two times the rate an average human mind can manage. The fingers heading toward triggers of guns held by the faceless men slow to the creeping curls of knuckles. Their hearts pound loudly like death drums against their skintight flex armor. BA-DUM. BA-DUM. The beats thrum. So hard I feel them in my bones.
I advance.
No doubt several of the guards scanned me on arrival. Analyzed my gear. So they’re aware of my capabilities. They will try to circumvent my skills the best they can with their Fed-approved augmentations. They will use the one advantage they have on me: numbers.
I sprint toward them, my body moving faster than it has any right to go. Muscles straining with each contraction, every stretch. But the nano-machines in my blood heal my wounds as they form. A million microscopic tears open and close each millisecond. I run full speed at my enemies, ignore the building flares of pain in every nook and cranny of my skin.
They attack. Not as fast as me. Not so agile. They deliberately fire their guns in random directions, creating a hail of bullets hard to predict. Unlike a straight shot, which is simple to avoid. Rounds ricochet off the walls, skim my face, my neck, my ears, the back of my hand. Blood sprays. But my body, pushed overtime, is too quick to take a direct hit.
My legs and arms tuck and roll me across the marble flooring. My hands heave me up from the ground. I lock my thighs around the neck of the first guard I reach. Jerk sideways to throw him off balance. Send him careening into the comrade on his left. Release him.
And I’m on my feet again, barreling forward. One guard turns his gun toward me, slow, slow, slow, and I whip my knee up, strike his chin. The impact snaps his neck and rips his internal neural wiring in half. I see it through my enhanced eyes. Peer through his flesh to watch the filaments shear apart, along with the fragile cording of his spine.
He’s dead before his helmet-covered head hits the floor.
A sluggish fist swings into view. I duck beneath it. My own hand rockets up, locks around a thick wrist like a steel cuff. I use the man’s momentum against him, kick the underside of his knee to destabilize his stance, and lug him to the right. Into the chest of another guard, whose boots slide out from underneath him. Both men tumble to the floor in a heap of tangled limbs and snagging armor.
Another contender. This one kicking. I reel back, out of the path of a boot that slams the wall so hard the plaster implodes. I press myself flush against the wall beside the new crater, coil one leg up tight, and lash out. My own kick moves at twice the speed of his and rams into his crotch. The armored cup protecting his genitals shatters inward, and he collapses, gasping, screaming, crying, all at once.
I hop over his fallen form and proceed.
Two more guards try to clothesline me, create a wall I cannot evade. Their combined bulk is unsurpassable for someone of my size, no matter what level of system overdrive code my PK-8 gear is running. I am a woman, moderate in height and weight and build. They are men born and bred, through selective genetics, to possess the optimal mercenary’s body.
I cannot move them from my path with hands or feet.
So I move them with my mind.
As with the receptionist, I claw my way through their skulls and into the pathways of their brains—brains embedded with filament mappings made to enhance their every skill. Not as easy to reprogram as organic pathways. I’m required to hack the neural cores implanted in their brain stems and alter the chemical makeup of their matter simultaneously. For both men’s systems at the same time. Or I will be stopped by the human wall that blocks my way.
Such an outcome is unacceptable.
So I dive into a hundred billion electric messages, both chemical and manufactured. I rearrange neurotransmitters, tear out the combination of intents that led to the creation of the wall. Replace them with my own commands. Move out of my way.
They fight. They fight hard. Their own neural gear tries its best to repel my intrusion. Deletes my alterations as I create them, storing the guards’ original intentions in backup drives and replicating them as many times as need be.
How irritating.
I attack it. I invade the signal that leads to the tiny processors fused to gray matter. Activate a virus to infect them. Disable the backup drives. Disrupt the continual deletions that allow the cores to disobey me.
All it takes is one instant of triumph for my mental push—MOVE—and the wall crumbles. Both men’s bodies jerk out of my way in response to my command. They fly off in opposite directions and ram the walls, their muscles twitching in their failed attempts to defy me.
The entire mental exchange occurs in 0.84 seconds.
I break the defense line and emerge into an intersection, another ten guards in pursuit of me. Too late. I’ve won.
I reach to my belt and unclip a grenade. A two-ton flash dissolver. Press the lever. Pull the pin. Toss it at the oncoming horde. And run for my life as it explodes in a brilliant flash of white. No sound.
I don’t wait to see what settles. I know what it’ll be. A gaping wound, twenty feet high and twenty feet wide. A void in the middle of the building, perfectly sliced out. And all the guards within the radius—all eighteen of them—will be no more.