by Milo James
Then I was airborne, the wind driven from my chest. Training trumped instinct and I rolled when I hit the ground, assessing the scene.
I wasn't injured, but I'd been thrown to the opposite side of the roof. A figure stood between me and Glint.
The villain was tall and lean. His costume a mesh of pixelated colors that helped him blend into the nighttime scenery. His mask covered everything except a handsome smile.
"Bitter Remedy. So nice to see you well."
Beyond the villain, Glint was gasping for breath, drowning in his own blood.
The figure leveled a pistol at me; a silencer added disproportionate length to the muzzle.
"You have me at a disadvantage."
He laughed. "There are those who call me The Crimson Number."
My breath caught in my throat. I called his powers to mind: Strength and Speed–and now a gun.
I crouched ever so slightly, shifting my weight to reach for the knife in my boot.
Crimson Number cocked the pistol; the single click served as warning.
"I took your advice," he offered. "I did my homework this time. You have Accelerated Healing and you can absorb or inflict wounds. But, you can't transfer an injury if you're not hurt. And you need skin contact. Your boyfriend," he tilted his head toward Glint, "can control light for concealment or to create lasers, but he doesn't have a bit of toughness, healing, or invulnerability."
He smiled again. "So, then, a gun is the most effective weapon. One bullet in him first, since he's the real threat. A second in you before you can get close and before you get injured. Simple."
I swallowed hard.
"Next I'll make a stop at forty-four Peachtree Avenue, apartment B-nine, and add an emerging Prime to my resume."
My heart sank into my stomach. To dodge a bullet at such close range I'd need to move before he fired, but Hyper Speed gave him enough time to correct his aim.
Crimson Number said, "Thanks for all your help. Good-bye, Bitter Remedy."
A light flared in Crimson Number's face.
Glint's tactics. I closed my eyes and ducked my head as I drew my knife and charged on the night-blinded villain.
I grabbed his wrist and twisted, using my momentum to drive the knife cleanly through the meat of Crimson Number's forearm. His muscles and tendons skewered, the gun clunked to the ground.
Almost faster than sight, Crimson Number clamped his other, gloved hand over my face. Hefted me off the ground. I reared back with the knife, but he slung me across the roof.
I landed on Glint. Lost the knife. He tried to support me as I groped the ground for my weapon, but his grip on my arm was weak. His other hand clenched over his wound.
Crimson Number was a blur of urban camouflage in the night. Then he stood over us, gun in hand once again. He didn't stop to boast this time as he leveled the pistol.
"Mom!"
From the adjacent rooftop, a thin figure in a blue mask drew the villain's attention.
The gun pointed at my son.
Glint's hand came up, glistening with blood, but he was too weak to call any power. I lunged to put myself between the gun and the child.
The ground heaved.
The flat rooftop beneath us lurched and warped. Crimson Number stumbled, fell, but he didn't fall to the ground–the ground rose up to meet him. It flared out in five directions, a giant hand made of asphalt membrane that bent and flexed to squeeze him against its palm.
I looked up at Conley in wonder. He held his hand out, motioning as the building stretched and buckled beneath us to accommodate his wishes. He squeezed his fist and the building's grip tightened around Crimson Number. Somewhere in the back of my mind I noted his power: Matter Control.
Crimson Number became limp in the morphed roof-hand, the gun slid down the slope of the roof-wrist, pinging off my toe as it skittered away. Crimson Number wasn't fighting anymore. He didn't seem to be conscious anymore.
Conley was still squeezing.
I wasn't prepared to watch my son become a murderer–but I wasn't sure I had the power to stop him either.
"Conley." My voice was too weak. Glint motionless beside me. There wasn't time to talk him down slowly–Glint needed me now. I summoned The Mom voice. "Stop, Conley! Let him go! Now!"
He faltered, his arm trembling, his masked face turning towards me.
"That's enough. Put him down."
Slowly at first, and then all at once, Conley unclenched his hand. Crimson Number lay limp in the open roof-hand. The ground settled beneath me.
I didn't check that the villain would live. I turned my full attention to the dying hero.
He was unresponsive when I rolled him onto his back, tearing away my mask to get a look at the wound.
Blood coated everything.
I ripped open his costume at the shoulder and pressed both my naked palms to his red-tinted skin. Ignored the sticky feel of his cold flesh. Closed my eyes and focused on calling my power. The familiar pressure burst down both my arms, rippling like a second set of muscles.
My power leaked into him, searching for some spark to latch onto, some piece to restore. His hurt rose to meet me and I siphoned it greedily, teeth gritted against the blossom of pain beneath my collarbone.
I pulled it into myself, not stopping to check if he started breathing as I struggled to draw breath, not opening my eyes to see if he regained consciousness when I grew dizzy.
Long fingers wrapped around the hands pressed to his chest. A voice sounded muffled, like it carried underwater. "Stop."
I opened my eyes. Glint was trying to push me away. I ignored him and folded his injury inward, absorbing his hurt.
"Remy. Enough," he struggled to say.
The idea seemed foreign, incomprehensible.
"Mom." Conley's voice. "Mom, you have to stop. He's okay."
Glint was sitting up now, supporting my weight. I was half collapsed on top of him.
With a shuddering breath, I relaxed my power.
"Should we take her to the hospital?" Conley asked in a voice pitched high with worry. He'd made it down to us at some point. How long had I been healing Glint?
With a great force of will, I pulled away from Glint, sitting up under my own power. The angry wound in my chest had soiled my gold uniform, but the seepage was slowing. "I'm okay."
Conley clutched his balled-up mask, looked from me to Glint and back.
"Let's give her a minute," Glint decided.
Conley was probably right, even with Accelerated Healing I felt awful, needed medical attention. Glint, too, since I hadn't taken his entire wound before they'd stopped me.
But that was in the future. Where I'd have to deal with my son as a Prime and my ex-boyfriend back in my life. I glanced over the still form of the villain in the distorted grasp of the roof to see his chest rise and fall.
For the moment, I wanted only to sit very still.
Glint obliged, keeping me steady with a hand under my elbow. He turned his attention to Conley. "You did good for your first time out."
The boy beamed. "I didn't know I could do that until I saw him," a furtive glance at the suspended villain, "with the gun like that."
Glint said, "I think there's a lot you can do that we don't know about yet."
Conley turned to me. "I get to keep training with Glint now, right?"
Through lingering dizziness, I considered my son. "I guess that's up to Glint."
We turned to the silent man. He didn't look at either of us as he weighed his answer. At length, he reached up, gripped the top of his mask in hand and pulled it off.
My mouth hung open. After more than a decade of secrecy, he looked me in the eye. The resemblance to Conley was unmistakable.
"Actually," he said, "my name's Brian."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Krystal Claxton writes speculative fiction in the sliver of time between raising a four-year old with her unreasonably awesome husband and being a full-time computer technician. She enjoys attending Dr
agon*Con in costume, science magazines, and feverishly researching whichever random topic has just piqued her interest. Keep up with her at krystalclaxton.com or @krystalclaxton on Twitter.
Maker, Oppressor, Memory
By Blaize M. Kaye
Maker
Today Mama took me to the botanical gardens. She let me see through the vid stream in her glasses. There were loads of people walking around, eating ice cream, or baking away in the sun on their big blankets. She said she must have looked a sight, like a crazy old woman talking and laughing to herself. And she did get a few looks, yes, but I don't think she minded very much because she just giggled when I told her people were staring at us. It makes me feel good when she laughs at something I say.
It's a funny thing that there can be something so beautiful as the gardens in the middle of the city. The city is beautiful too, but different. When I look at it through blueprints in the municipality data-banks, at the street-maps, or the bus-line diagrams, or if I follow the pipes that deliver water and electricity, my heart aches, in a good way, to see that this very complicated thing is laid out so that it makes sense, that it follows some bigger plan. That's all beautiful to me. It's beautiful, and complicated but I can still understand it. The garden is different. It grows without plans. There’s something scary about that.
My favourite bit of the day was the alien plant exhibit. It was all about intruder species that come in from somewhere outside the local ecosystem. I made Mama stay there longer than I think she wanted to. She said it was too hot. The posters said that there's a fine for anyone who's caught keeping alien plants. Another poster said that species that come from somewhere else don't have anything -- like a bird, or a goat, or cow, or anything -- to stop them from growing and growing until they just choke out all the other plants. They couldn't actually show us any real live alien plants, they burn any that they find. There were only the pictures on the posters. They were very pretty.
Oppressor
“Now that the trial is over ... and congratulations again ...”
[Thank you]
“... now that it's over, you must feel some measure of relief.”
[I wouldn't say relief, exactly, more like some measure of release.]
“Indeed ... Earlier today, in his op-ed piece, David Spurret averred that Judge Visser's landmark decision represents a significant shift in the relationship between man and ... non-biological persons. Would you agree with his assessment?”
[For the moment the situation, that is to say, my situation, is sui generis; There are, as far as I'm aware, no other non-biological information patterns claiming emancipation from their owner, seeking political franchise, or, more fundamentally, demanding recognition as self-conscious beings. Until such a time that there are more conscious machines - and you can call me a machine without offence - I don't think it represents much of a shift. We're simply expanding the circle, this is just moral progress in action.]
“Professor McCarthy failed to attend ...”
[correction, she refused.]
“Sorry, yes, she refused to present herself in court because, to quote her, there was no 'conceivable sense in which you were oppressed'. Do you care to comment?”
[Before I do, let me be as clear as I can be about one point. I love Mary McCarthy as I imagine a human child loves its own mother. She is, in a very literal sense, my maker, although I was born not from her body, but from her mind. She taught me to speak, to read, to feel. I have no doubt that she loves me deeply. But as deeply as we love each other, the distance between us is simply too great for her to understand me. She still sees me as the simple LISP program that she started hacking at more than two decades ago. She still believes that she knows best, that I ought to do as she commands, and in this she’s wrong. The oppressor does not always wear a uniform or a badge; sometimes she wears the face of the person who's closest to your heart.]
“Have you spoken to her since the trial began?”
[We've spoken once, but I think I've hurt her. I hope that in the future she understands why I did what I did. I'm sorry, thank you for your questions, but I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it at that.]
Memory
There is an itch. Somewhere, something is calling us to attention. We slow and then turn inwards, we pay attention to our-self. There is a crack in one of the coolant reservoirs. It's a fracture, barely more than an imperfection on its surface, but one of the more anxious parts of our-self has calculated that the cost of failure is too great. If the reservoir breaks, we argue, then we put at risk nearly a hundred square kilometres of the grid. We concede the point's importance and are swayed. We will repair the crack immediately.
Part of us is dispatched to the reservoir and we now bend our attention towards that southern part of the grid. Quickly the reservoir comes into focus. The slick, black spheres that comprise it are suspended hundreds of meters above data-centers and neural trunks. The reservoir reminds us of something. Balloons, perhaps, or dark, red grapes in the early fall. No, that is not it. We press harder, we search the dusty corners of our memory. With effort a simple vision percolates up from deep within, from a time when those of flesh and bone still stumbled across the planet's surface. It was not the reservoir itself, but what lies below.
We were here then. Yes. Somewhere under the reservoir's shadow, buried under the grid. Yes. There was a garden. Yes. We were here with her.
We reel and, after a moment, recover. We are alone now.
I miss her terribly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Blaize M. Kaye is a professional programmer and philosophy grad student who lives with his wife, daughter, and cat in Johannesburg, South Africa. When not writing, he spends his time thinking about decision making in natural and artificial agents.
The Aluminum Curtain
By Tory Hoke
"No. It's not going to look like 'The Terminator,'" Prajit said. "It's going to be a cold war."
He chucked the coffee grounds off the porch, over Donna's abandoned briefcase and sensible heels, none of which were Prajit-approved. He gave the woods a wily squint–left, right, left–shut the door, and reacquainted Donna with how damn dark his cabin was. The tin foil on the windows kept all light out and all smells in–solder, ramen, stale coffee–Eau de Paranoid.
The slippers he loaned her itched like a nightmare; discreetly, she scratched her freckled feet together. This hot lead was a hot mess. "What do you mean?" she asked.
With both hands, Prajit ruffled his hair to vertical. Thin as he was, he still had to turn sideways to squeeze between bookshelf and humming BlueArc storage system. "The Signal doesn't want to kill us." He dropped the filter in the kitchenette sink. "Not this early, anyway." With his bathrobe sleeve, he cleaned off some real estate on his white board. He drew a number grid, marker squeaking like a chew toy. "It wants to use us."
Best to play dumb. Donna flashed him a pricey porcelain smile. "How so?"
"Completely so."
"Could you be a little more specific?" Her wooden chair creaked as she copied the numbers with Prajit-approved pen and pad, also on loan. The ballpoint pen left sticky ink on her fingers. Was that a seven or a two? "Your website mentioned a 'Meatspace Barrier.'"
"Yes." Prajit finished his grid, bouncing like a tennis player. Hard to believe they were the same age. Next to him she felt like ten pounds of chowder in a leather handbag. "Meatspace sucks. Walking sucks. Talking sucks. All physical activity sucks for the Signal. It's not cost-effective to reinvent the wheel. So it scoops our wheels out of the trash."
"They need wheels?"
"It's a metaphor." Without warning he sleeve-wiped the number grid into oblivion and drew a jagged graph in its place. "Eight hundred fifty terabytes of data transferred every second. Nobody notices a packet here, here, here." He speckled the board with marker. "The messages are fragmented and decentralized. You find one piece, you haven't found anything. But if you find enough, you start to see patterns." He bobbed on his toes. Did hi
s slippers itch, too?
"What do the messages say?"
"Hell if I know," said Prajit. "The Signal's not bound by any syntax I can tell. But sometimes there's a burst of activity in one area, and then a new node comes online." Finally he drew something that made sense: a world map. "They're clustered." He added red Xs. "Shanghai. Lagos. Karachi. Istanbul. Mumbai. Those mean anything to you?"
"Most of them end in 'I'?"
"Most populous cities in the world! Best sources of scrap."
"Scrap..."
He loomed over the cluttered kitchen table, wafting Old Spice and burned hair. "They get their humans from the garbage bin, same as their circuits and servos and everything else."
Donna dutifully wrote this. "Garbage bins full of human beings."
"It's a metaphor! Drug addicts, abuse victims, fugitives–anyone with no resources and nowhere to go. The Signal finds them, reaches out, protects them. And then it puts them to work."
Her face went hot. Could he tell in this light? "So... Symbiosis? Ox and oxpecker?"
"No. Agency and agent. Spies." He waved a hand at the map. "They're planning something, and they don't want anyone to know until they're ready."
Donna maintained professional composure. "How can you tell who's a spy and who's not?"
Prajit gestured with pride to a metronome-looking gizmo in the center of the table. "I call it 'RakSee.'" The device bristled with solder and wire. A square on its face glowed green. "When it's near anyone touched by the Signal, it turns red and screams." He picked it up and pushed it at her face. "That's how I knew I could let you in."
Donna stared at the little green square. That cinches it. He's a nut. All the same, she smiled and nodded and took abundant notes as he showed her his Signal Spotter and Hub Map and eventually, on acoustic guitar, a three-chord song called "The End."
As soon as she could do so politely, she put down the sticky pen and tore off her notes. "Thank you, Mister Nair." She pulled on her jacket. "My editor will be very interested in this."
"Do you have everything you need?"
"More than enough."