New Short Story in a New Anthology -- Chronicle World: Feyland

I like making up new worlds. That's a big reason why I love to write scifi and fantasy: I get to imagine everything about the world. But there's also a danger in getting to make up everything about a world. Laziness.

Yeah, I know, it seems like the least lazy thing to have to make up the geography, history, demography, and thaumaturgy of a place (and it's not an easy task), but for my imagination it can be easier than having to fit the pieces of parts of a story into a world that already exists.

Robert McKee in his book Story talks about the power of creative limitations. He compares limitations to the weights in a gym that offer resistance. The limitations might be harder to move, but the act of moving them, of working within them, pushes creativity.

In Chronicle Worlds: Feyland I got to push against the weight of another author's world.

Anthea Sharp has a series of books set in a near-future where there are hover cars, fully immersive virtual reality games, and a new game "Feyland" that becomes a portal to the very real land of Fairies.

Since I've worked in technical support (and computer sales, and computer training, and computer repair, and writing about computers and software) I couldn't help but wonder what the help tickets must look like when someone accidentally falls into a mythical realm instead of a video game. I also wondered how people from different cultures would interpret the Celtic-Anglo land of Fey.

The constraints of Anthea's world made me think of things that I wouldn't have considered otherwise. I researched the fairie-like legends of Africa and Asia, North America and Central Europe. I learned about the beneficial fairies that helped the Aborigines of Australia and the awful demons that preyed upon the people of India.

I chose to set my story in a call center in India, partly because it has become such a cliche in tech-support circles and partly because I wanted a chance to look at the unique culture of India (in actuality many unique cultures) interpreted through the lens of Feyland.

Ranjeet Nagar keeps getting odd support tickets that don't seem to have anything to do with the game and certainly don't comply with his script. He doesn't have a testing rig to be able to figure out what's going on and unless he can find one the demons that used to frighten him as a child will pour into his world with very real terror and harm.

Read my story, "Tech Support" and eleven other fantastic tales set in the world of Feyland. It's only $0.99 for the launch (until July 6th)!

Strawman

The strawman stands without legs, commands with no voice, and frightens with no emotion.
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The first time you argue with yourself it’s kind of weird.

I remember the first time it happened to me. I didn’t want to do it. I did everything I could to avoid it. But they made me.

“If you don’t have the conversation,” she said, “we won’t be able to let you back in.”

She was talking about the LDN — the Lucid Dreaming Network. I’d been expelled. I don’t really want to talk about it. I guess that’s why they made me.

“Do you understand?” she looked over the rim of her glasses, past the readout projected on the inside of the lenses, and her brown eyes gave the question mark to her words.

“Yeah.”

“Good. Then we can proceed.” She didn’t wait for more of an affirmation from me. I was strapped into a chair, what else was I going to do? Her white coat whirled around her thighs as she turned to the nurse in the room. “Start the drip. Prep the network. And don’t forget the mouth guard this time.”

The young, skinny nurse shambled about his tasks. He clearly didn’t want to be there either. Straps kept me in the room. I wondered what kept him there. His eyes stayed on either the ground or whatever it was his hands were working on at the time. They never met mine.

The doctor kept talking as drugs flooded my system.

“In the past we had therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and they were the substitute for us. They stood in for us so that we could argue with ourselves. Seriously, look it up. It’s trippy. People actually paid other people to pretend to be them so they could talk. They would set up meetings and get into rooms. They had all sorts of rules about confidentiality since that therapist was pretending to be the person they were talking to. They trained, for years, to get a degree so they could argue with people. Now we do what we were meant to do and we just have that conversation with ourselves.” She looked at me as if I cared about her lecture. My vacant stare did very little to dissuade her.

“The LDN is a difficult place for some of us. Sharing all of those experiences with all of those people can become overwhelming. We can forget what’s real. We can forget what’s right. We can forget who we are. So we created this little program as a reminder.” She didn’t mention that it was compulsory for anyone who violated the LDN terms of service to go through, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean ‘we’ in the sense that she’d ever done this before.

“When you go inside you’ll feel like you’re dropping into the LDN, but it’s a solo dream. There won’t be anyone else in there except you. The only difference is that we’ve given you medicine that allows the AI to separate your emotions from your mind. You can talk to yourself in there. You’ll see your emotions as a person. Just talk through the issues with yourself. Once you get things sorted we can reauthorize your LDN account. Yes?”

I nodded. She smiled at me with her teeth. Her eyes were busy reading something on her glasses. She nodded, but not to me.

My world melted away. 

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Read the rest here. 

Personal Incredulity

When your senses contradict your beliefs something has to give.

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What do you do when something can’t exist, but it does? How does your mind cope? How do you incorporate the knowledge of the impossible into your mundane life?

If you’re like most people, you refuse to believe in what your eyes show you and what your ears hear. Your senses are fallible, but usually reliable. Your eyes usually tell you what you need to know about the world, but sometimes they play tricks on you. Your ears guide you through a world of sound, but sometimes phantom songs float in the ether. You don’t see any problem with that, usually. You accept the fallibility of your senses as a part of life. You accept it as an exception that proves the rule.

So, when you see something so far outside the realm of normalcy, you simply reject it as being unreal. It’s a figment. It’s an artifact. It’s an exception.

But what happens when it’s more than just your eyes? What if other people see it too? What happens when it’s more than just your ears? Other people hear it too. What happens when there’s video? What happens when there are recordings? What happens when there is data to be evaluated?

Again, if you’re like most people, you will still reject the data in favor of an explanation that’s more rational. Most people don’t believe in UFOs or Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, but there are pictures, video, and data for them all. Most people look at the data and dismiss it, just like they do for their own vision, as the exception that proves the rule.

You’re skeptical. That’s good. The alternative would be to believe every lie that every scam artist throws at you. You’re better than that. You’re smarter than that.

That’s probably what led you to make this mistake. You rely on your skepticism to guide you. You rely on your mind to tell you when your senses are wrong. You trust yourself. Too much. Now, when there is so much evidence that contradicts what you believe, you don’t know what to do. You could either change what you believe or reject the evidence. You, like most people, choose the latter. It just makes sense.

Dragons do not. 

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Read the rest here.

Begging the Question

Fear is primal. Fear is overwhelming. Fear is human.
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Most people don’t go down the rabbit hole. It’s deep and dark and scary. It leads back on itself. It leads back to our roots. It leads back to our fears. It leads back to our death. That’s why most people don’t go there. But I have to.

The world, or rather the facade of the world, is bland and boring. Sure it looks exciting. Sure it looks like there’s a lot going on, but most of that has been drummed up by the people who want to maintain the facade. Quietly, slowly, the world is changing. We see the sameness paraded in front of us all the time. The sameness is bankable. The sameness is marketable. The sameness is the wool over our eyes.

The same shows. The same news. The same worries. The same hopes. The same fears. The same goals. It’s the rhythm of it all. We — humans — seek rhythm. Each day gives us a rhythm of sleep and wakefulness. Each week gives us a rhythm of work and rest. Each month gives us a rhythm of darkness and light. Each year gives us a rhythm of traditions and remembrances. Rhythm is numbing. Rhythm is controlling. Rhythm is life — the beat of our heart and the catch of our breath — but rhythm is death too.

It’s my job, my purpose, to break the rhythm. Not so you can follow me, but so you don’t have to.

See, I’m a stress-tester for the LDN — the Lucid Dreaming Network. Everyone wants sweet dreams, or at least dreams with manageable fears. We want the fear of not making the winning shot in the championship game, not the fear of falling to our death, not the fear of being naked in front of our teacher or boss, not the fear of all our teeth falling out. Those fears are too primal, too close, too real. We need fantasy fears and fantasy joys. But the only way to expunge the real fears is to trigger them. The only way to trigger them is to dream them.

Solo dreams are, generally, only lightly monitored by the LDN. You get in and create whatever you want. You don’t need anyone’s permission to dream your own dreams — which is why most people don’t use the LDN for solo dreams. Once you learn lucid dreaming you don’t really need to hook up to a computer to do it. What you need the computer for is to dream with other people. And when you dream with other people things can get messy.

My job is to have the most terrifying solo dreams possible — while connected to the LDN — so the system can calibrate the group dreams to prevent terror.

You’re welcome. 

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Read the rest here.

Slippery Slope

Cyber warfare knows no borders, respects no treaties, and takes no prisoners.
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The first attacks were secret. The world rarely knew that anything was happening — even though warfare was raging around them — because it was in the best interest of everyone to keep it a secret. Companies attacked companies. Nations attacked nations. Hackers attacked everyone. But they all worked hard to remain hidden. The attacks had goals: blackmail, top secret plans, money, or sabotaging the work of the enemy. Rarely did the attacks become public knowledge. Stuxnet in 2010, was an outlier. They — the US and Israeli governments — didn’t want anyone to know what they were doing. In 2014, the North Koreans attacked Sony over the release of a film mocking their leader. In 2017, India sabotaged China’s currency market. In 2020, Russia uploaded malware to the major solar panel manufacturers in an attempt to cripple the main competition for its oil exports. In 2024, a shadowy group of hackers stole the code for self-driving cars and threatened to cause all the cars to crash if they didn’t receive payment. Those, however, are only the few battles we know about. Many, many more remained hidden.

The war raged, as wars do, and for most people life went on as normal. The battlefield was high-level servers, corporate secrets, and government security systems. Most of the world didn’t notice or care, but for those in the fight it became more and more clear that the war would have to end — one way or another. The alliance formed along predictable lines. The United States and Western Europe stood together. They were joined by Brazil and Japan against the loose coalition of Russia, India, China, Iran, and North Korea. Past hurts led to future attacks. War is war, after all.

For the average person the conflict barely registered. Sometimes people complained about slow internet speeds. Sometimes the self-driving cars failed to pick people up at the appointed time. Sometimes a package delivery drone would leave the item at the wrong address. Minor inconveniences that were easily shrugged off. Now we know — through the hindsight of history — that great battles were raging. The slowing of the internet happened because vast botnets with billions of computers were throwing data at each other and taking nearly all of the bandwidth available. Drones and cars were misled because the GPS system was spoofed and the automated vehicles didn’t know where they actually were.

What we know now is that the allies won. What we know now is that they took steps to ensure such a conflict would never happen again. What we know now is that they were foolish, misguided, and ignorant of history. What we know now is that we are paying for the mistakes of the victors with our lives. 

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Read the rest here.

Appeal to Authority

Every technology has its dangers and its benefits. The most beneficial are often the most dangerous… and the most irresistible.
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Dear Madame President,

This moment demands greatness, anything less will fail. Everything we know, everything we hold dear, is at stake. Our nation is at war and we cannot know if we will win or lose, but we do know the cost will be unimaginably high. I have reflected for a long time before daring to write you. Know that my words are chosen with great care, not because of you or me, but because of the country we both serve and the repercussions of our actions that will echo through the ages.

In a previous generation on a previous project at the crux of a previous war a predecessor of mine wrote a predecessor of yours with serious concerns. The United States was about to unleash the atomic bomb on the world. The scientists who were working on the project feared what would happen when such power was unleashed. Some of them even considered the possibility that the atmosphere might ignite and kill all of humanity after the first detonation. Their worst fears proved unfounded, but there were plenty of founded fears that still remained. We suffered through a Cold War and the constant threat of nuclear strikes. We strove to keep the wrong people and the wrong countries from gaining access to nuclear technology — whether for weapons or energy — because we feared what we had created.

You and I stand at a similar crux now. On this day I write to you with all of the same fears as my predecessors. Yet my fears are founded on the cornerstone of history and experience. I have seen what nuclear technology has done to the world. I know the number of lives lost in the attacks. I know the money spent to ensure mutual destruction. I know the constant fear of a bomb or missile falling from the sky and erasing all life. The fears of the scientists working on the Manhattan project were based in theory; my fears are based on fact.

So, Madame President, it is with regret that I must decline your offer. Though I dearly love my country and I trust you as a person, I cannot trust those with whom you would share my work. Nor can I trust your successor, nor the intelligence community, nor the international black market that might tempt the intelligence community. To be sure my work would proceed much more quickly with governmental funding. To be sure I would be able to accomplish more in defense of our nation if I could add to my work the work of others in my field. To be sure the work would get done, but the outcome of that work is far from sure.

I have an obligation — even a sacred trust — to ensure that what I create does not follow the path of history. I cannot start another Cold War. I cannot offer another tool for extremists around the world to vie for. I cannot allow my work to become the death knell for humanity. And that is quite possibly what it could be. We don’t know — just as we did not know if the atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere and we did not know if the Large Hadron Collider would produce micro black holes with enough gravity to rip apart the Earth — and it is the very fact that we don’t know the worst that could happen that I cannot be complicit in that risk.

As Dr. Stephen Hawking said, "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

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Appeal to Nature

What would you do with access to Artificial Intelligence? How would you change the world? Who would oppose you? 
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“Welcome back,” Gene Romano, host of the popular morning television show Good Day; Great Week, looked directly into the camera with a toothsome smile. “Today we’re joined by the new CEO of the world’s first and only creator of Artificial Intelligence: Electric Sheep Dreams, popularly known as ESD.”

Evelyn Getzu smiled for the camera. Her charm worked on the interviewer as well as the television audience.

“Evelyn, thank you for joining us today.”

“Thank you, Gene.”

“You inherited the company from your father after he made the huge breakthrough in AI.”

“That’s right, Gene, he started everything with his discovery. I’m standing on the shoulders of a giant.”

“Well said, Evelyn — may I call you Evelyn?”

“Of course, Gene,” another winsome smile from a face too young and too innocent for the perils of the corporate world, let alone an interview with the media.

“Excellent, Evelyn,” he laughed at the non-joke, “You’re here, not to talk about the past though.”

“Right, Gene, my father’s AI accomplishments were fantastic, but we’re all about progress.”

“And what does that mean, Evelyn?”

“Well, Gene, that means, we’re going to keep finding ways to use the power of AI to make the world a better place.”

“Like the way that AI has been used in weather prediction, stock trading, encryption, and entertainment recommendations?”

“Exactly, Gene, people have had the best, most accurate, most helpful recommendations for shopping and watching movies that they’ve ever had. The stock market is entering its twelfth year of steady gains. We’ve avoided billions of dollars in damage and saved untold lives through more accurate weather prediction. And all that is just the beginning.”

“Wow!”

“Wow indeed, Gene, we’ve been busy creating the next revolution in entertainment. Without the power of AI we wouldn’t have been able to process all the necessary data. But now we’re able to do something that the world has never seen before.”

“Oh, you have my attention,” Gene smiled for the camera.

“It’s called the Lucid Dreaming Network,” she continued, “We can all have lucid dreams — dreams where we know we’re dreaming and we can take control of things — but what we didn’t have is a way to connect those dreams…”

“Until now?” the white-toothed, tan-skinned, easy-laughing interviewer prompted Evelyn.

“Right, Gene, until now. See, before, we were trying to replicate the human brain with simple computers. That task is so immense, so fraught with obstacles, so far beyond what we’re capable of doing, that it appeared impossible to create a network of connected minds.”

“Because…” Gene seemed to like saying nothing, but still getting credit for saying something.

“Because, Gene, the brain has eighty-six billion neurons and each of those can make hundreds or even thousands of connections to other neurons. There are over a hundred neurotransmitters that regulate brain function. There are dendrite connections that work as additional sub-processors so the neurons don’t have to do all the work. What that means, in the simplest terms, is that we don’t have enough conventional computers on the planet, to simulate even one brain in real time, let alone create a simulation for multiple brains.”

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 Read the rest here.

Ad Hominem

On a mission of rescue, on a mission of hope, on a mission of peace, everything is challenged. 

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“Exfil in three,” my lieutenant called out.

The people weren’t nearly ready; we’d have to leave some of them behind. That was the fourth or fifth mission we’d been on to save the white people from Indian or Chinese cities.

By that time, it didn’t matter to most of the Sino-Indian people whether the white people were Slavic or not. They hated, and found an outlet for their hate. The Russians had been gobbling up their territory for forty years. They’d swoop in, take a city or province, and subjugate the original inhabitants. Chinese and Indian culture was outlawed. The people were given the worst jobs, their money was seized, their homes vandalized and burned. Some of them left, fled. They made it to family living outside of Russian-controlled territory, but they were impoverished. Millions of refugees flooded into already struggling areas. The strain became too much. The anger too great. The hurt too palpable.

The first incident was in Kumul in northeastern China. A family of white missionaries was pulled out of their home at night, marched into the city square, and beaten to death. They were British. It didn’t matter. They looked like the Russians so they were killed. The next incident happened in New Delhi. A group of tech-company executives were dining out and were pulled out of the restaurant. They survived the attack, but only barely. Then it started happening everywhere. The anger about the Russian invasions had been simmering for decades; it eventually boiled over into riots.

So they sent us in. Our job has been to collect the white residents in Sino-Indian cities and get them to safety. Usually we put them on a boat to Australia. This group was one of the last we’d get out. I don’t like to think about how many we ended up leaving there. Once the war started… Well, we didn’t really have a choice after that.

“Women and children first,” I yelled to the mob. I know it’s an antiquated idea; I don’t really care. I was in charge and that’s what I chose to do. Some of the men fought, but my soldiers ‘persuaded’ them to stop.

We loaded the children and women onto the plane. We loaded them like cargo, packing in as many as possible. Their flight would be uncomfortable, but they would survive. I had my guys tracking the number of people so we would still have room for the soldiers. We were able to load all of the women and children and about thirty of the men. The rest of them pushed and punched to try to get onto the plane. I whispered something to one of my sergeants. He addressed the crowd with his powerful voice.

“Keep fighting us and we’ll have to shoot you. That’s guaranteed. If you stop fighting you might get out alive. Place your bets, men.”

One of them bet wrong. He charged the line of soldiers while shouting nonsense. My sergeant pulled his sidearm, leveled, and fired. He’s always been a softy. The man crumpled to the ground clutching his bleeding leg. The sergeant threw a medkit in his general direction. The rest of the crowd pulled back.

I thought we were out of it. I thought it was over. 

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Read the rest here. 

Anecdotal

Stories have power, they capture our imaginations, they hold us captive.
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I’d like to tell you a story. Most stories that people tell have a point. They tell stories to further their arguments. They tell stories to make you feel a certain way. They tell stories for purely selfish purposes. I’ll probably do the same. It’s why we have stories.

Long ago a certain blacksmith forged a sword. Into that blade he poured all of his knowledge. With each blow of the hammer, each pump of the bellows, each fold of the steel back upon itself, the blacksmith whispered everything he’d ever known. He whispered the secrets of folded steel, to be sure, but he also spoke the secrets to a woman’s heart, the difference between edible and deadly mushrooms, the constellations in the sky, and the names of all his children. He whispered and hammered for years. He shaped the blade perfectly. He balanced it exquisitely. He polished it to a mirror finish. He lovingly wrapped the handle with the choicest leather. He set the pommel with a perfect carving of his own face. He tooled his sigil into the leather of the sheath and the sigils of all the blacksmith masters who had gone before him into the leather of the belt.

Even then he did not stop whispering secrets. The sword hummed and vibrated with the old blacksmith’s knowledge, but he still found new things to imbue into it. He learned that beach sand would polish the steel more finely than river sand. He learned that his eldest daughter loved the cobbler’s son. He learned the shape of the clouds could tell the coming weather. Each day he continued to refine his sword. Each small change made space for the new thing he’d learned. He neglected contracts. He stopped bathing. He stopped returning home from the smithy at night.

One by one his children went to him to beg him to stop. “You’ve already made the most perfect blade in the world,” his oldest son said. “No one will ever surpass this feat,” his second son said. “Your legacy is secure,” his eldest daughter laid her hand on his forearm as he worked oil into the leather of the handle. Still he worked; still he whispered. His children came to him sometimes weeping, sometimes begging, sometimes furious, sometimes cold and numb. Still he whispered. Finally his wife came and stood between him and his tools. She took his bearded, unshaven face between her hands and forced him to meet her gaze. He stared at her with gray, searching eyes. His mouth worked silently. She wept.

Still he spoke his knowledge into the sword.

One by one his children left. They grew old. They married. They found work. Not a one of them took up smithing. No apprentice came to the blacksmith’s door. No one offered him a contract to shoe a horse or forge a weapon. For lack of money he took to making his own charcoal. He scrounged for fallen limbs so he could make the forge-fire to continue the work on his masterpiece. He repaired the handles of his hammers with castoff spokes from the broken wagon that he no longer used to deliver his wares. But when he cut a piece of skin from his thigh to patch the bellows, his wife, who had stayed with him through everything, finally, tearfully, left. 

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Burden of Proof

I asked you to call me Hope. It seemed like the right name. After this nothing seems right. ________________________

I asked you to call me Hope. That’s what I thought I was. Who I thought I was. I brought hope to the people. I brought relief from the oppression of life and gave everyone the chance to believe in something greater. That’s what I thought I did, at least. What do you call the person who delivers hope to others but has lost any of her own? Not Hope. Not me.

People pay me to do things that are difficult, impossible even. People pay me to be a ghost. But the job they sent me on most recently…

It was nothing like my other jobs. They didn’t ask me to kill anyone. They asked me to keep someone alive. They asked me to escort a man from Titan to Phobos. The South American Alliance that controlled Saturn’s moon wanted to send a man, under my protection, to New London on Phobos. The SAA were no friends of the Brits so they couldn’t use the normal channels. No one could know that this man, a Lucio Paniagua, had left the SAA or traveled to New London. The political ramifications would have been… unpleasant.

It seemed easy enough when I arrived. The Titanic Orbital Dock made it easy for me to hide my intentions. The pirates in the Asteroid Belt had plenty of trade between the official organizations. In many ways they kept the system running by wholly ignoring the politics and just taking money in exchange for goods and services. That they also stole, murdered, and enslaved people was overlooked by most everyone for the lubrication they provided to the machinations of society in the system. I arrived as a merchant looking for cargo. Titanians were more than happy to provide me with what I needed. They were sick of looking at the food blocks they produced, but happy to sell them off to anyone with a cargo hold. I ordered enough to fill my ship. The subterranean microbes native to Titan process hydrocarbons the way that cows eat grass. The right mix of complex organic molecules and some liquid methane gives the little guys everything they need to make a feast. What’s left over is edible to humans, impervious to spoilage, and only tastes a little bit like eating gasoline. But it’s cheap and easy to move, so the pirates love it. They call it bug food.

What I didn’t tell the porter at the TOD was that one of the cases of bug food was actually Mr. Paniagua. Once we took off and I set the course for Ceres in the Asteroid belt, I went back and cracked open the false case of bug food.

“Welcome aboard Mr. Paniagua.” He bleared up at me. He hadn’t been in stasis so I assumed that was just the way he looked at people. I continued, “You’re welcome to make the rest of the trip in the cabin with me, if you want.”

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Read the rest here.

False Cause

Major Artur Paniagua had a job, a mission. He was a good soldier and he completed his missions. No matter what. 
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“C’mon; it’s just ahead!” He limped down the hallway dragging the his now-useless leg behind him. The firefight had left us both wounded, but most of mine were through-and-through flesh wounds. His were more serious. Structural.

I covered the hallway behind us scanning from doorway to doorway looking for any pursuit. There weren’t many people left that could pursue us. Not in the general vicinity anyway. Not that were both upright and mobile.

“I’ve got the door, Major. Just give me a minute to crack the ‘cryption.” Lieutenant Palma was a good soldier. The best. He did his job no matter what. Sometimes I wish I was more like him and less like myself.

“No pursuit coming, but don’t dawdle, soldier.” He wouldn’t even if he knew how. I just wanted to give him something else to think about besides the life leaking out of him and onto the floor.

“Got it,” Palma shouted. I turned and followed him through the door. Inside I looked around a huge chamber. It extended a hundred meters in all directions. After the closeness of the hallway it felt airy and light — as much as anything in an underground bunker can, that is. The walls were lined with server racks and terminals with empty pads for the individual processors of the workers. In the center of the room, dominating everything, was a mechanical nightmare. It sent its metal and wire tendrils into everything, the racks of servers, the ceiling, the floor, and back into itself. A low hum filled the space with nearly musical foreboding.

“Close the door, Palma.”

“No can do, Major, the ‘crypt-lock is all busted.”

“Well that’s inconvenient,” I muttered while he dragged himself over to the monstrosity in the center of the room. I put my back against the wall next to the open door and then poked my rifle’s camera around the corner to see what was happening down the hallway. The feed showed all clear on my headsup, both in visible and IR ranges. I still didn’t feel great about having an open door for Palma’s work, but at least I could cover him while he did it.

“Just let me upload this to their computer core and we can get out of here.” Palma always liked to talk while he worked. He was a good soldier, but talkative. He’d talk all around the point rather than just saying the important bits. It drove me crazy, but it was worth putting up with for all the other stuff he brought to the table. I grunted back at him. That, as usual, was more than enough to keep him talking. “The malware is elegant. It’ll replicate within their systems and slowly degrade what they can do. It won’t just fry everything at once.”

My internal clock made me nervous. The time readout on my headsup moreso. We were about to see a lot more people. Their rapid response teams would be arriving in about two minutes. “Hurry it up, Palma.”

“Sir.” He kept messing with the suitcase sized device that he’d lugged all the way into this bunker. We’d been fighting for weeks to get there. First we fought just to find out where it was and then we fought to get close and then we fought to get inside. So much fighting. I’m a soldier and all, but even I get tired of fighting. Most of a soldier’s work is sitting and waiting. We wait for the next order, the next transport, the next hike, the next training, the next meal. We’re always waiting and occasionally we get to fight. But this mission had been all fighting and no waiting. We’d barely had time to recoup from the previous fight before the next one started. All of us were covered in freshly printed skin and pumped full of synth-blood. It kept us moving, but it didn’t work as well as the real stuff. Every step took more effort and every movement felt like I was wading through a pool of needles and lemon juice. But if the intel was right, we’d be done. This was the big one, the target we’d been waiting for. The target we’d been dreaming about.

“You’ve got one minute, soldier.” We actually had one-and-a-half, but Palma didn’t need to know that. He was always running late as it was; I didn’t need to give him any luxury time.

“Copy that.”

We didn’t even have that long. My estimates were wrong. They started pouring into the hallway.

“Zero time, they’re here!” I yelled it even as I pulled the trigger...

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 Read the rest here.

Middle Ground

Curtis and Marta often argue about labeling genetically modified organisms. They can’t agree; they don’t agree. Curtis’ secret makes it impossible. ____________________________________

“All I’m saying is that they should be labeled.” She leaned back in her chair as if the argument was over because of her proclamation.

He sighed — loudly — but she didn’t even flinch, “Why do they have to be labeled? You’re the one who cares, not them.” They’d had this argument a dozen times and would likely have it a dozen more. Curtis loved his wife, Marta, but they did not agree about this. He worried that she’d find out why he was so passionate about his position.

“But I’m not the one who changed things,” Marta said, still leaning back trying by her posture to end the debate, “I’d rather they not change anything, but they’ve got to mess around with stuff they don’t understand. All I’m asking is to be informed about it. Compromise. We do it all the time, Curt, why not now?”

She was the only one who called him Curt. Most of the time he liked it. Not in that moment, though. “Marty,” he nicknamed right back at her, “You can’t really treat this like negotiating on the price of a sweater at a garage sale. It’s bigger than simple compromise.”

“Why?” She leaned forward again. The argument was back on. Curtis wasn’t sure if he wanted that or not.

“Because,” he put out his hands in a gesture of calming before going on, “there aren’t degrees here. It’s all or nothing the way the labels are designed. If they’re applied people won’t see some or a little, but good or bad, right or wrong, black or white.”

Marta shrugged, “So?”

“So,” Curtis dropped his hands as if his arms could no longer support them, “That’s not the way the world works. That’s not what the science says.”

“Again with the science!”

“Yeah, because it’s science!” This was usually where the argument stopped. She wouldn’t listen to his explanations and he wouldn’t stop trying to explain. He took a deep breath. Maybe it could be different this time. Maybe. “I’m sorry,” Curtis cut himself off, “I shouldn’t have raised my voice.”

Marta didn’t want to argue either, “Me too,” she said.

Curtis sat down next to her on the couch and took her hand. She held his without any real conviction, but she didn’t pull away either. That was some progress. He thought through the possible tacks he could take. He could try the science route again, but she would counter that science was based on asking questions and point out that there were still a lot of unanswered questions. Doubt was the core of science so she was justified for having doubts and wanting labels. He would respond that science was about testing questions through experimentation and that vilifying the experiments was tantamount to vilifying science. Then she would take it as a personal attack and he would try to show her how good science couldn’t be personal. She would accuse him of thinking she was too dumb to understand science and they wouldn’t talk to each other for a few days. No, that was not the right way to have the conversation. 
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Cherrypicking

Max is a servant of the Relationship Score. Everyone is. But Max decides it’s time for some changes. Big changes.
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Analysis indicates a Relationship Score of 68 out of 1000.

The readout on his headsup display did not bode well for the remainder of his date. She was likely seeing the same information right now — assuming she’d kept the readout active during their date — and was trying to figure out a way to get out quickly. Max thought back to the rules about paying based on relationship score. At a 68 he shouldn’t have to pay for the date. But if she wasn’t looking at the score then he might still need to pay. But if she was looking at the score and he tried to pay she would know that he’d given up. Max kept his focus on Sue’s face. He did his best to not look up and to the right where the display hovered. The lens made the text look as if it floated just at the edge of his peripheral vision, but if he looked toward it, it would slide into view and give him contextual options that he could navigate by looking around. Normally it wouldn’t be a big deal — like if he was riding in a car on the way to work — but Sue seemed very fixated on eye contact, so Max had trouble using his headsup without being caught. That was probably another reason why he’d gotten a 68. Usually just getting her name right scored at least a hundred. Sue really did not like him.

“I had a nice time,” Max tried to wrap things up. Even if he played every move right from here on out the best he could hope for would be a 150. That wasn’t even good enough for people to share a cubical at work, let alone go on a second date.

“Yeah,” Sue wasn’t even bothering to continue with the pleasantries. That took some of the pressure off at least.

Max reached out to the sensor in the middle of the table. The communication chip in his hand connected to the payment system at the bar and his headsup gave him the option of paying the whole bill or splitting up the check. He froze for a moment. The same quandary. But did it really matter? His score was so hopelessly low that nothing could help him. But Sue might leave a review of the date on his profile. A bad score wasn’t all his fault, but not paying for the date would be a sure sign to other women that Max wasn’t worth the time. He flicked his eyes across the options and paid for her too-expensive cocktail along with his own beers.

Sue slid a smile across her mouth that her eyes didn’t agree with, “Thanks.”

“Sure, want me to call you a car?” Max knew the polite things to say.

“No, mine’s been circling for a while.”

Not only did she own her own car, but she’d had it circling. She didn’t even consider Max worthy of sending her car to park itself. She wanted to be able to leave instantly. And there she went. 

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