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NEON & CONCRETE — Story #13

Neon & Concrete — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 16:03:59 GMT

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #13

Terra Incognita

On the job, blood pumping, heart elevated but nothing I can’t handle. Riding the edge with a few crystals of T>O

Breathing it in before hitting the lines again and getting back out there, in there, deep into it. Fast Eddy’s given me a job. Been biting at his heels for a while now, working my way up the ranks, kicking the tires and lighting the fires as the old saying goes.

“Hey Chance, what’s got you like this?” he says to me one night, out of nowhere. Been hanging around his joint for the better part of a year, picking up any scraps I can get, working them as hard as I can. The stuff the other low life hoodlums think are below them.

I figure everyone’s gotta start somewhere.

Yeah, “What’s got you like this?” Like I’m supposed to know the answer? Childhood in a broken home? T>O

Maybe that’s got something to do with it.

I pulled myself away from the Betty I’d been laying down a full charm offensive on and saw Fast Eddie sat in the corner the way he always was.

It was dark in there, the bar named after him, Fast Eddy’s. Big reputation, he’s had it for longer than I’ve been alive, and it’s seen some serious action pass through its broken, old doors in that time.

“Dunno,” I said, holding the thump in my heart back, not letting the excitement break out across my face. First time he’d talked to me, had to play it cool. “Guess I got an itch.”

“And how about scratching that itch?” he said, big smile coming across this face, silver teeth with a little glint against the flickering neon of the old, dive bar.

So here I am, ready to scratch that itch.

Sent me out on a Rip-N-Dip. Simple enough of a ride, a data-grab. In and out. Get on the line, head to the mark, hit it, rip the data, get back on the line. Then keep my head low, real low, find the drop off point and dip that data.

Out of one system and into another. I don’t ask what it is, why it needs doing, no details, nothing.

Thing is, sometimes you can’t send certain intel through the air. I guess there’s some data people have they don’t want running through the Major Prime Cores, and hell, who am I to ask questions?

It’s a simple enough run, but a job that someone’s gotta ask you to do. Something that involves an element of trust. You gain that trust; you get that notch on your belt, chances are you get asked to do another, and another.

The sun breaks from behind one of the corporate mega-towers, splitting the purple-pink neon haze with an intense morning white of a clear sky. No rain today, weather inhibitors must be working again, makes my life easier.

Fast Eddy’s given me an old line-link. It’s the thing he must have started out on and still better than half the shit out there you’d get off the shelf. There’s a reason he’s called Fast Eddy.

I couple it up to one of the thousands and thousands of high-tensile steel zip-lines that run through the lower levels of Major Prime. These things used by rip-boys and girls to get around at 100–200mph, delivering all sorts of shit to all sorts of people. Need a licence to couple-on, not like I have one, but the old line-link from Eddy’s got me covered.

A breath, one more look at the sky before heading down and boom, I’m away.

Jump and scream, the line-link holds, does its job, and within seconds I’m tearing through the dark, damp world of the lower levels. I got a basic HUD that flickers my speed in the corner of my right eye, 70mph-80–90. Ripping and dipping, sweat on my palms, heat running through me, eyes wide, pupils dilated but the T>O

Another flash in my HUD and the rip point is coming up fast, the lower levels screaming past me as I jack the breaks. Swinging through and along the steel wires, some old ape-like instinct carrying me through this blackened metal forest. Old concrete, jutting rebar, gigantic foundations of the corporate mega-towers that reach up into the sky to worlds I’ll never know.

Other liners delivering their goods and wears screaming around the system, dodging in and out of each other. Nods and smiles between some, gunshots and sword swipes between others. That’s why the drone system failed. Too much looting. Then they put people on the drones, didn’t work out the way they wanted it either, too many getting hacked and too many drone rider deaths. Then they thought this up, the line system. Old school, analogue, but it works. Lining can be a lucrative gig if you’ve got the edge. A little punk like me? I get the black-market stuff and try to stay alive.

I hammer the breaks, smoke and sparks screaming out of the line-link as I rock to a halt, uncouple, and jump off onto the concrete overhang. Time to rip as I reach around the back of my neck, pulling my download tether from the little flap of fake skin. Ready to plug in, get what I’ve been told to get, and jump back on the line to finish the job.

“Chance,” a voice says. “We need to talk.”

“What-the-fuck-man!” I pull my switchblade from my ankle holder, flick the knife as my eyes dart and my tether zips back into my neck. Not meant to be like this, not meant to be anyone here.

“Take a breath, kid, I’m not here to hurt you,” they say from the overhang’s shadow, the line of a face there, familiar shape to it in the low light. “I’m here to help.”

“Right, help? What the hell? You think I’m going to believe that?” I say but they’re quiet, standing still there in the shadows, not a movement, not a word. “What the fuck, man? You going to speak?”

I see a slight shake of their head; they take a long breath. “Let me say what I will say and once you’ve heard me, you must remember it. You must do what I say, you must, it’s imperative that you do this.”

I’m pointing the knife at them, at him, a guy by the sound of the voice, but he’s not making any moves. Standing still, that silhouette in the dark, something about it, about him, it’s eerie as fuck and

I’m panicking. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Let’s say we have a mutual concern in your ongoing survival.”

“Right, well, what you got to tell me? I’m on the job and you either get talking or I get stabbing.”

“I think we both know you’ll do nothing with that knife.”

“Fucking-try-me-man!” I take a step forward, but it’s hard to hide the fact they’re right.

“Calm the down, Chance, and listen. There will be a time in the future — ”

“ — Oh, the fucking future, right?” I pull the tether out of my neck and jack into the rip-port in the console embedded in the concrete wall. This is some out of his goddamn T>O

I keep the knife pointed at him, but I ain’t got time for this. “Mind if I get on with things while you have your little moment talking about the future?”

“Shit, you really were one cocky little bastard.”

“What — ?”

“ — Listen, shut the fuck up for two minutes, I don’t have long. In the future, there will be a moment, you gotta decide, right? Life or death. What I’m saying is, you shouldn’t go with your gut on this one, the way you always do. What I’m telling you is this; forget Monroe, save yourself to save her. Remember that?”

“Right, Monroe. Got it. What the fuck? Are you out of your mind?” I’ve got the knife pointed at him but he’s not making any moves, standing there in the shadows, hands in pockets.

“NO. Asshole! Forget Monroe. Don’t go for him. Whatever you think, whatever you believe you know in that stupid little heart of yours, don’t do it.”

“Right? Right.” I take a second, breathe, he’s mad, insane on T>O

They step out of the shadow, they big, real big, proper mean looking, that silhouette lifting and there’s a face. A face with bottomless eyes. It’s always in the eyes.

Standing here in the low light they could be anyone, but you always know the eyes.

Something in them runs deep, and it’s like when you see that Betty across the bar, or that thug over the street, you catch the eye and it’s love or hate.

Right here, it’s neither, but there’s a weird itch, like I know them on some intrinsic level. “You…” I pause, raising my finger. “You are fucked in the head.” I jump back on the line and scream back into the neon world.

BEEPLE: TESLA LUNA OCEAN

“Don’t do it, don’t go baby, not today. Chance, come on, skip a day or something?” Selena says, curling her body on the bed, re-wrapping herself in the thin sheets that hold on to her curves.

“Monroe’s going to have my kneecaps if I miss another day,” I say, knowing how much I’d love to skip out, to crawl back in with her for the rest of the day.

“He’s going to take a few licks out of you anyway by the sounds of things,” she says, whines a little, then smiles that smile.

“Don’t worry about that, babe. I got that guy wrapped around my little finger.”

“Not what I heard,” she says with a wink, lifting the sheets and exposing her lines. “Much safer in here.”

“Damn,” I whisper, shake my head, suck my teeth. “Stop!” Got to get going, but she’s not wrong. Safer in there is an understatement. I’ve pulled one too many sick days because of a few too many late nights recently and it’s beginning to catch up with me. Not to mention the money I owe around town.

I pull on my jeans, spin into the tiny kitchen area we’ve got in the container home we’re about holding onto for the moment and tear a powered food sachet open. The tap gives a trickle of water, filling the bottle enough to stop it being a thick paste. I shake it and chug down the porridge like substance with only a slight wince.

The curve of Selena’s ass catches my eyes in the low light that pours through the little porthole of a widow we’ve got above the bed. A second enough to distract from the flavour of the powdered food, the world that I’m about to head into out there. She’s the best thing that’s happened to me since I got stuck up here. The best thing that’s happened to me in this thing I call a life, period.

“Strong day, okay honey? I love you,” she says as I rinse the container and throw on my top, thinned leather jacket and cap, make for the door.

“See you later, I love you too,” I say and see her raise her two fingers in a peace sign as I turn and push out into the icy wind of the harbour.

Clear skies under the thin atmosphere, a world of stars shining down over Terra Incognita. This old-new planet we’ve been terraforming for what feels like a lifetime now…This place, ‘Where the Titans roam,’ the gigantic mech suits they sent down with us on the first wave that stomp about the planet, half doing the job they’re meant to, half keeping law and order.

Yeah, that first wave of terra formers. Seemed like a good alternative. Got myself into a downward spiral of trouble and grief back on Earth. Making noise with the types you don’t want to be making any noise with. It came down to this; either pay with my skin or take a chance with the unknown world, Terra Incognita, up here in the stars, riding it out with the terraforming crews and keeping my head down.

The steel walkways of the crumbling, old worker’s apartment blocks floating on the harbour creak and judder as I make my way out. The sound of Titans outside shifting containers and constructing luxury apartments rumbles through the thin walls, meeting the weird, half muted sounds of those still waking in their shitty little container homes.

Here. Terra Incognita. Getting up here, that was the simple part. They were looking for anyone and everyone, your background or criminal record or anything, didn’t matter. Reckoned they’d slap you in a stasis pod with all this behavioural correction, mind-modding technology they had, and by the time we all got let loose on the new planet, they’d have a wonderful bunch of subordinate workers.

Didn’t work out that way.

The modding didn’t take or stick. In most cases it even made people worse, a lot worse. So yeah, getting up here didn’t take too much effort, keeping my head down and trying to get on with some form of life? That’s been more of a challenge.

I spy Monroe with a few of his thugs across an old walkway bridge. More of that rusted steel, dented and battered after two decades of neglect, same as everything else in the place. Including me.

I make a beeline for the opposite direction, trying to keep out of his way. Monroe’s the Titan yard boss and one of those terra formers that got screwed up bad in the modding. By the time they decanted everyone, about 50,000 of us on the various ships they sent, they’d produced a workforce of around 50% crazy bastards, 30% psychopaths and 20% complete maniacs. Monroe here, he’s not elegant or smart enough to have made it out of the yard, but he’s in the high-end psychopath league and he’s tough as nails, so he runs the yard, and that’s that.

“Chance, you little fucker,” he shouts, two of his thugs peeling away from him, stalking over to me. No point offering any resistance as they grab me under my arms and lift me clean a few feet off the grated steel walkway and over to him.

He’s about as corrupt as you can get, small beady little eyes, but big pockets full of kick-back money from the corps back on Earth and all over TI. It’s a nasty place here, built by nasty people for a new rich from Major Prime that might escape to out here someday, if we ever finish what we they sent us out here for. I can’t see it happening. This fresh hell is ours now, but they keep sending money and we keep growing and building. Those high-class maniacs of ours at the top of the food chain keep convincing the ones back on Earth we’re getting on with things.

“Look, I’ll get you the money,” I say, not telling the truth.

“No, enough of that, Chance,” he comes in close, fat face, scars and breath like chewed cigars and bad scotch. “You fucked this one, little buddy. You pull the time, hard worker, sure-sure, but you spend more than you earn. Problem there, straight economics, you get it? Nights in the casino blocks, T>O

“Not a good one, I’d imagine?” I squeeze out the words as the two hulking thugs hold me down now, one’s massive hand on my jaw pulling my head straight and up to face Monroe.

“Yeah, not a fucking good one at all,” Monroe says. “Lesson time, I’d say.”

“No-no-no!” I shout as the thugs hold me down and laugh. “Look, look! I’ll pay it all back, I swear, I’ve got some stashed away. 24 hours, that’s all I need.” I’m begging but with only half my heart, enough to make sure I get the beating and make him think I’m back onside but don’t have to pay. I can take the beatings, the money —

He shakes his head, stands back, straightening out.

Something’s different.

Poking at the implant in his forearm, a blue-green cube of light from his holo-feed fizzes into place.

“Wait!” I scream as the resolution of the image increases and I see Selena lying there on the floor in our little apartment unconscious.

“Pushed too many people the wrong way,” Monroe says.

The wind on the old bridge whips up off the harbour and across us, salt-water and pollution all mixing and settling over us from the spray. The taste catches the edges of my mouth, eyes stinging, heart racing and her blurred image there, Selena.

“Come on, leave her alone, man. What’s she got to do with any of this?”

“Pretty thing ain’t she?” he says, the projection focusing and refocusing. It’s a live-feed coming off a body cam, another one of his thugs in my apartment. Salena’s out on the floor in front of him and he’s holding up a pair of bolt-cutters, opening and closing them with intent in front of the camera.

“Monroe, take it out on me, man, come on?!” I’m begging and struggling, but the two big bastards are down on me, forcing me to watch.

“I’ve tried taking it out of you before, Chance, and look where that’s got us? From now on, I take a finger of hers every time you fuck up. You got that? How much use is she going to be dealing cards in the casino-block with two stumps for hands?”

I’m screaming, pushing myself out of the grip of the thugs as one of them brings an elbow down between my shoulder blades and the other’s thick fingers hold my head in place.

Monroe leans back into me laughing, the wind screaming around us, the open night sky with its million-million stars shining down. He’s laughing, the sadistic bastard, getting off on this as he gives the order. “Do it.”

A strength rises in me fuelled by my love for her, from fear, hate, rage, all of it. The past I had on Earth, the present I’ve got here now, the future with her they’re going to wipe out in front of my eyes for a few bets gone wrong.

Something snaps, it’s been a long time coming.

Fear of these bastards, and their psychotic natures. Holding down the hate, escaping from the haunted nights with T>O

“Yeah, you get to watch,” Monroe says, more laughing, wiping the salt spray of the harbour from his fat face.

I grit my teeth, ready to act and it flashes across my mind, a long-forgotten moment from a longescaped place, that crazy old bastard with those eyes…“What I’m telling you is this, forget Monroe, save yourself to save her. Remember that?” Yeah, I remember now.

And I don’t give a fuck.

I let go of myself, loose muscles, and the thugs aren’t expecting it. I fall through them and to the ground, giving me a split second, enough to grab the old switchblade from my ankle.

Still there after all these years. Still unused. Until now.

I pull it fast, slicing right and left, catching the heavy legs of the thugs who jump back a foot or two, enough space for me to leap forward and plunge the thing deep into Monroe’s eye socket.

It’s a blur. I’m up and swinging, pulling the blade out and spinning around and slicing. For all the threat these guys have imposed on me across all the years I’ve been up here, they’re fucking useless.

The knife slices through thin fabric and skin, blood spills and they’re bolting in a matter of seconds.

Monroe’s dead and face down on the grated steel of the walkway in front of me, blood pouring out of his eye socket and down into the harbour far below. Some chunks of flesh from the two thugs hang in the gaps. I look down at my hands, blood and shakes, bad shakes. Adrenaline hammering through me I never knew I had.

The stars above me shine bright, beautiful and as wide as the cosmos itself. I calm my breath, visible in the cold, jets of steam pushing their way out of my flaring nostrils and fold the knife back and put it in my pocket.

“Selena,” I whisper, as I dial her up on my phone-implant.

It rings for a long time as I look out over the harbour. There’s no answer, so I run. I run as fast as I can to find her, hoping it’s not too late.

BEEPLE: VIBE CITY

The sands of time are a peculiar thing, and you’d think I’d be the last person in the universe that would end up being able to play with them, but here we are.

I look out over Major Prime of old, the neon hue, that sky settling down over the corporate megatowers, disappearing into the dark depths of their roots that sink further still into this world. The one where grew up, the one where it all started, but not quite the one that formed me. Not the place where you might say, I found myself.

That was back on Terra Incognita, where the Titans roam. What happened there, I don’t think anyone could have seen that, understood things would have gone in such a way. The fateful day, hour, minute, second, moment, where everything that had been building up to it aligned, and I buried that old switchblade deep into Monroe’s eye.

I flick the thing in my palm, swing it around, a memento of that time when it all changed. Monroe murdered by my hands. Selena murdered by his thugs.

Things got dark for a while then. Losing the only person you’ve ever felt any love for will do that to you. I went after them, pulled in some favours people owed me, stripped myself down to the minimum levels of emotion I could with whatever modding software and T>O

Lots of killing and when there’d been enough of that, something unexpected happened. They took me in. Never thought of myself as leader material but when you’re on a planet being terraformed by psychotics in colossal mech suits, and what would normally account for the ‘criminal underworld’ is the usual state of business, then killing people gets you far.

I dial up my HUD and check the time, nearly there, nearly, there. Patient, Chance, he’ll be setting off soon.

So I’m this leader, and things really take off then. Titan yard harbour master, and I’m running it tight and fair, the way I always thought it should be run. One day, a report comes in, a Titan’s down.

Something’s opened up in the harbour and swallowed it whole, only, we’re still getting messages from the thing. Intermittent transmissions from the operator, crazy shit. So, we go investigate.

Along with everyone else that got sent down to Terra Incognita, along with all the fuck-ups like me who signed up for manual labour and all the other shitty jobs, there was a solid batch of scientists, engineers, economists, all the rest. Fortunately for them, they got as fucked up by the stasis modding as everyone else. I don’t think they would have survived if they hadn’t.

My HUD flashes at me, it’s time. Yeah, time.

I hook up the line-link I’ve got my hands on and wonder if it’ll come back to me after all these years. After everything that I’ve done, gone through, been through. My heart pumps, hands slick with sweat, teeth gritted. I’m surprised at how nervous I am, and I take the jump.

Down and down into these depths of Major Prime, the timing must be absolute.

Time…So, this disappeared Titan, we find it and this is where things get tricky. The terraforming we’d been doing up there, it had what we shall call adverse effects. Not only because of the shitshow of a job we were doing, but because there’d been some undiscovered element in the outer layers of this planet’s surface no one had even thought of before, let alone seen.

So, a 300ft, 2000 tonne mech gets sucked down into parts unknown and it all kicks off.

This fine unknown thing, all sorts of crazy readings coming off it. So, we mined it, of course fucking of course. We knew it had uses straight away, bare minimum it made fuel for the Titans, and seemed it might have other properties we could exploit.

The line’s holding, the wind rushing past me, the other liners with grins and grimaces all around, same as it ever was.

Yeah, we want to exploit this new element, mineral, whatever. We mine as much of it as we can, and that’s when the crazy shit starts. The scientists we’ve got on TI get real excited, experiments, lots of them, lots of resource used up but they say it’ll be worth it, so I keep feeding them what they need. All this buried deep down and away from prying eyes back on Earth.

The line-link screams and smokes as I trail down to the spot, the point where he’s coming. Darker and deeper with every second, the air thick and moist, the other liners a blur, the tension in my hands and heart.

Everything, everything I’ve been through, everything I’ve gone through down here, up there on

Terra Incognita, it all comes down to this moment.

This second right here.

It comes down to this, to coming back to kill myself.

Taking my life.

I’m here now, at this most pivotal of moments, before the dominoes fall, the chain of events takes place that will inevitably lead me back here.

I pull hard on the breaks as the concrete overhang of the Rip-N-Dip spot comes alongside me. Where that old career kicked off. Where I thought I got my first break, where things went in such a direction and at such a speed they will only ever go in one direction.

Jumping onto the concrete, I find my spot and move into the shadows, the Titan’s flashing through my mind. The memory of that world, of all the killing, of all the hatred, of all the hurt and sorrow that took place over all those years.

Once the scientists and engineers got an idea of what this new element could do, I grew my power so we could get more and more. More of the element meant more tech and more power, which went back around to more mining. I equipped the Titans with weapons and went to war with anyone that stood in my way, pulling in every resource necessary to make what they said could happen, happen.

Time travel.

I grew in madness, in power, in it all, but I never forgot one thing, one person. Even with the world that Terra Incognita came to be, I never forgot her. The one person who held the light for me, the rose in a world of horror. A flash joy. A person, beautiful and whole, and the one they killed. The one they sliced up and tortured because of what I’d done.

There’s a breath and a quick brush of air and he’s unhooked and jumping onto the overhang.

My eyes grow wide at the sight of him, of me. “Chance,” I say. “We need to talk.” “What-the-fuck-man!” he pulls my switchblade from the old ankle holder. I hold on to mine in my pocket, the same weapon to end it all, right here, to stop everything that happened so I can save her.

“Take a breath, kid, I’m not here to hurt you,” I lie as I step out of the deep shadow a touch but not revealing myself. “I’m here to help.”

“Right, help? What the hell? You think I’ll believe that?”

I’m looking at him, at me, at this figure, what was I? The figure there, myself, this young boy, an emaciated sack of bones full of fear and dread. How did I ever carry off any attitude and bravado when all I was, was this?

Is this what everyone else saw? Is this how I came across, is this what I inspired in people, the feeling, the emotion that’s running through me now, down to my very core, nothing but pity?

Pathetic, he’s pathetic, the poor kid I remember here, the past I have, what I went through, what he’s gone through.

Her vision rises in my mind.

The reason I’m here, the reason I’ve done everything I’ve done.

I edge closer and he’s standing there with the knife out and the fear on his face runs down and through him to his skinny, shaking legs. A pitiful mess. What was I? Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

I shake my head, containing the fury that rumbles through me, as unexpected as the boy that’s standing in front of me.

Look what I am now, look what I’ve become.

The master of Terra Incognita, a player with the sands of time.

“What the fuck man, you not gunna speak?”

Selena, those moments we had together. Is she worth all this, was she worth all this? Was what she gave me in those fleeting moments worth taking all this away from me now? Worth killing myself in the past, to prevent what happened in the future?

I breathe in the moist air from the depths of Major Prime and shake my head.

No. I won’t do this to him. To me.

Looking at what I was, the pitiful child holding the switchblade out at me with a shaking hand to match the shaking legs.

I thumb the steel of the same blade in my pocket and release it. I’ve chosen.

Now, what did I say? What was it I said back then? I say right here, right now?

I seal fate. There was never any other way.

A one-way trip that this is, one short amount of time, one specific little slot before I’m torn apart by the fabric of the universe.

But now I know what I must do, what the sands of time dictate I do.

Say what I said, for me to forget and disregard, to find those words again in a moment and disregard them before I plunge the knife into Monroe’s eye and complete the loop.

“Let me say what I will say and once you’ve heard me, you must remember it. You must do what I say, you must, it’s imperative that you do this.”

THE END

Artist: Beeple_Crap AKA Mike Winkelmann

Artist Bio: A graphic designer from Appleton, Wisconsin, USA. His short films have screened at onedotzero, Prix Ars Electronica, the Sydney Biennale, Ann Arbor Film Festival and many others. He has also released a series of Creative Commons live visuals that have been used by electronic acts such as deadmau5, Skrillex, Avicii, Zedd, Taio Cruz, Tiësto, Amon Tobin, Wolfgang Gartner, and Flying Lotus and many others. He currently releases work on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint.

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beeple_crap/

Artist website: http://beeple-crap.com

Writer: Richard Galbraith

Writer Bio: A science-fiction writer with a penchant for cyberpunk, neo-noir and existentialism, Richard hails from the UK and currently lives in Denmark working for LEGO while hammering away at short stories and his latest sci-fi manuscript.

Writer medium: https://medium.com/@ricgalbraith

Musical Inspiration:

https://medium.com/media/4bf98c7042640ff3865a214331dbe698/href

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #13 was originally published in NEON & CONCRETE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #12

Neon & Concrete — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 20:07:00 GMT

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #12

A Machine To Last A Thousand Years

Ozhichige: STEEP

I pull my horse to a stop and raise the tip of my hat with a gloved hand, revealing the silhouetted mountains out across the flattened plane. Monsters drawn out black against the fading light of the day.

Once majestic giants, having risen out of the ground to draw wonder and awe out of humanity, now overridden with our failed technology. Sublime no more, only crumbling neo-crete, the plague that touches everything inorganic, that infects the world.

“We can make it,” Jacob says pointing at the bio-luminescent beacon pulsing over yonder.

I turn and spit into the dry dust of the pummelled concrete ground, a squint in my eye, my horse rears but I pull her calm again and stare at the boy. Picked him up a few weeks back, he’s been without incident so far. That’s about as good as it gets in these times.

“How so?” I say, keeping my eyes on him, watching the little movements across his weak body, the twitch he carries across his right shoulder, the chew of his lower lip. Been through something this kid, same as everyone out here. I can’t save the world from the mess we made, but if I get the chance, I can try to help someone out who deserves it.

He deserves it. Jacob, from the Hebrew, ‘root,’ meaning; to follow.

His horse sniffs, the boy pats him and then rubs his own youngish face. Hard to tell how old he is, his height makes him a child but this place, it weathers you, the dust, the ‘crete, the sun, the storms, makes age a hard thing to gasp. The nanotech won’t attack most organic matter, but the new world hardens people, on the inside and out.

“Lightning ain’t too bad yet,” he whispers, as if saying it too loud will provoke it, disturb those electric blue demons that chase us across the grey and dust laden world every night.

I climb off my horse and kneel in growing dark, grabbing a handful of the powdered ‘crete and bringing it up to my nose. It doesn’t smell like concrete, it smells like what it is, pure time. Time that’s running out.

The night’s coming, swinging around this world with the gigantic electrical storms in tow, those that engulf wherever it’s dark. The horror that pounds us and the surface into this dust each day.

“I know it,” I say and stand, take my hip-flask and pull a swig of the greasy gin that we picked up at the last outpost we were at. No spare room there, no work for an old man and a child, so, they did what they could, gave us a few bits, told us to go south. Might be a place that’d take us in, they said, a good run of caves and caverns to take refuge in, couldn’t give us exact coordinates, but they’d heard there was a beacon. Well, not like we had much choice, so we set out, and now here we are, that beacon flashing over yonder, a glowing green light in a world of grey.

“We should keep moving,” Jacob says. “Can’t see any caves close.”

“What d’you think, they going to be kind to us this time if we make it?” I walk over to his horse and whisper to it.

“They might be,” he says.

Yeah, they might, but it’s getting harder with every place I find. Less resource, more death, the nanotech creeping, the lightning pounding, the sun baking, and now there’s two of us. Me and the boy, Jacob. Means even less chance of getting a bunk, a bowl of whatever drivel they can pull out of the ground. We’re all on a death march now, the storms chasing us; the nanotech eating the world; the sun searing us to a crisp. The nanotech we lost control of turning everything inorganic into the ‘crete.

Didn’t start fast, slow enough for us to think we could figure out a way to combat it, make it stop. Beat the weird and wild creation we thought would take us to other worlds in gigantic neo-crete multi-generational ziggurats.

“Yeah, I reckon they might,” I turn to the boy and pull a smile out of my old cracked face, he tries one too as the lightning on the darkened horizon behind me flickers in his big wide eyes.

The lightning storms. Grew as the nanotech started eating its way down, the neo-crete pushing its way through the mantle of the world and into its molten core. That vast sphere of liquid iron that provides the electromagnetism to necessary to facilitate the atmosphere of our planet turning into the ‘crete, so now, here, near the end of times, we’re chased by an endless storm cycle that occupies the night. Pulverising the concrete earth into this powder and then rebuilt, over and over as the sun rises again and bakes us and the neo-crete solid.

The boy pats his horse and sets off at a light trot, small puffs of dust kicking themselves up around the animals dried and weathered legs.

“Yeah, we can make it,” I pull myself onto mine and go after him.

Certain things have survived. The nanotech’s AI drew a line between inorganic and organic matter at some point we can’t fathom, not anymore anyway. As things grew worse, the situation more dire, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions dying from starvation, riots, all manner of horrors, our capacity to do anything, beat this thing, grew thinner and thinner, so we went underground.

Still, some things we can grow. Botanists and their hydroponics and hydro cultures able to keep little communities alive. Small settlements across this baron world try to scrape a life together, underground, away from the night-storms and the sun. Some hoping we’ll figure out a way to reverse the ‘crete.

The boy has hope.

I can’t see it.

“Come on, old man,” he says and kicks the ribs of his horse, powering the beast up into a gallop, hooves stamping out clouds of the ‘crete as the roar of the night comes in behind us as fast as the earth spins.

We have an hour or two on it, enough to make it to the beacon and hope that there’s something there for us, the bioluminescent green growing with each gallop of our tired animals.

We kick the horses and they race. We’ll make it I say. If he has anything, the boy, he has a good sense for this, for time, for distance. Where it comes from, I wouldn’t know, but it’s there. Jacob, to follow.

He’ll last awhile, longer than I’ve got, anyway. The youth on his side isn’t enough in this world, you need some skill, he’s got that, I could see it in him when I spotted him a few outposts back. He deserved a little help for sure, but he had this thing in him, a spark in his eye, call it what you want, I could see it. Then, the first direction he pointed out lead us to a bunker, been following him since and now he’s got this trust in me he shouldn’t. Time’s running out for old men like me, I know it; it was us that made this mess. Soon I’ll pay for it, falling and turning to ‘crete, like the rest of this world.

Ozhichige: PRISMATIC//FORMATION

There’s that fear, that one day I’ll be the ‘crete, and the boy too, everyone one of us falling, consumed by the ‘crete, turned from us, people, beings, to grey dust. We all end up there I know, you can’t hide from this, but the ‘crete’s different. Makes it more real. You’re dead, inert, and then you’re ‘crete. First us, then the entire world. Who knows where it’ll go, how far it’ll spread, this grey terror.

“There,” Jacob points as we reach the ridge with the beacon and the vast pyramid cut into the rock reveals itself down in on the valley floor below.

“Damn,” I say steadying the horse as the lightning’s roar grows louder by the second, nearing us as fast as the earth spins. “Now there is a sight, didn’t think I’d ever come across one still sealed, still operational.”

“What is it?” the boy asks and shows his age, doesn’t know the tales yet.

“Still, might not be, the beacons can go on long enough with no operators.”

“But what is it?” he pulls his horse around, looking at me, big orbs for eyes in the dying light.

“The Architects,” I say. “Engineers, cause of all this, once thought they might be the end of it too. Ones that were building the ziggurats that would take us to the stars. All the things they built, these secret worlds away from the eyes of everyone else, they knew what was happening when it started, tried to do things to stop it, lost control. You heard those stories?”

“Oh yeah,” he nods, reassured that he knows what I’m talking about, but it only shows he doesn’t. “I know it.”

“Some of them left, ones that thought they could. There are the old tales, one day they launched, these goliaths reaching into the sky, towering funnels of smoke trailing behind them, thousands and thousands on board. Those that could afford it, those that had some knowledge that would contribute to their journey.”

“Yeah,” the boys says, staring at me, still chewing his lip, still with that twitch in his shoulder.

“Well, most came crashing back down, seen a few wrecks myself, big concrete sarcophagi like mountains rising out of the earth and thousands upon thousands of bodies all there frozen in time and the ‘crete. Beaten away by the lightning over the years, but they’re big enough that you can still make them out to be what they are, graveyards. People said some could break atmosphere, head out there, to the stars, build new worlds with the ‘crete. I don’t buy it.” I pause and look at him, the boy, the eyes, lightning flashing in them. “Well, Jacob, it’s been said that some stayed, whatever reason, didn’t have enough fuel, hadn’t completed the build yet, all sorts of excuses. They locked themselves down with the tech and know-how they had, never came back out. Their attempt to survive what they’d made, what we’ve inherited. This concrete world.”

“That’s one?” he turns back to the pyramid and points.

“Come on, boy,” I kick the horse and we head down into the valley, pummelled ‘crete slipping away beneath our weight until we have to get off and walk the animals down ourselves.

We hurry and meet the pyramid at the bottom, the last light of the day casting deep shadows on the jagged rock and ‘crete surrounding the monument to our demise. Its smooth surface provokes us with its unlikeliness, its assurance of survival in a world where nothing escapes untarnished, unturned.

“What do we do now?” Jacob says, coming to my side, the horse a little behind him.

It’s 500 or 600 feet tall, rising into the valley wall, weathered in places but still smooth across most of the angled surfaces. Staring down at us, intimidating us, towering over and telling us it holds our salvation, but only the worthy may enter.

“Heard stories,” I say. “Not much to go on.”

“Well, you better start thinking old man, we’re about out of time.”

The lightnings here, the hairs on my arms rise through the coating of dust, goose-flesh races over my skin and my old bones shake. The horses buckle and whip and cry out to their own gods.

“Boy!” I roar as he darts away from me, toward the pyramid, his horse in tow, following, knowing something. This boy. “Jacob!”

I chase after him as the lightning comes racing up to the valley’s ridge and starts spilling down onto its floor. An orchestra of destruction, blasting away with all its might, a barrage of terror, exploding rock and the ‘crete with its electrical blue fists. The roaring blasts hammering our ears, the raining debris pounding our battered and tired bodies.

“There!” he screams above the explosions, pointing toward a small opening, raising out of the base of the pyramid. A doorway, sliding open, a blackened portal revealing itself that’ll have to count as our saviour.

We race through, having to leave the horses to their fate, unable to fit, the lightning is their brother now, to burn and blast them and leave them for the ‘crete.

The boy cries but I drag him kicking and screaming and into the blackened portal, scrambling away from the storm, the electric blue terror and into this other world.

I trip and fall, and we seem to roll for an age, bouncing off rock and sediment, in the dark. No bearings, complete loss of direction, until we tumble down far enough and we reach the ground, something flat.

We rest in the dark, dizzy and broken. I can hear the boy’s heavy breathing next to mine, wheezing coughs from both of us as my old eyes adjust and spectral shapes in the black draw themselves out.

“We made it,” he whispers in the dark.

“But to where?” I say as a hand comes down on my shoulder.

Ozhichige: INCOMPLETE//SEQUENCE

“I’m Cain,” a voice says in the darkness, it’s attached to the hand gripping me and it’s cold even through the rags I wear.

I’m still, this world teaches you quick movements in the dark never go the way you expect.

“Cain,” Jacob says in a low voice, his breath calm now. “The wanderer.”

There’s silence.

How does he know that?

“And the murderer,” the voice says. “You’re safe here, but do not forget these things.”

The light rises and I turn to face whoever the hand belongs to, and there like porcelain, smooth and untarnished by the horror of the world, stands Cain. His wide eyes look at me as he pulls me to my feet and I stand staring at him with a mystical wonder.

“You’re one of them?” I say, cautious, stepping a few paces back.

“A descendant, yes,” Cain says. “Now, follow me.”

He turns and walks, adorned in white robes, spectral, in this place. This tomb.

It’s vast, cavernous, as though the pyramid of the outside was only the tip and we’re down further, having descended during our escape from the concrete world.

Surrounded by black rock, there’s what must be a pre-crete world supercomputer, the likes of which we’ve only told stories about for decades now, the things that were managing the nanotech, the homes of the AIs built to control the ‘crete.

There, stood, as high as a tower-block, rising out of the ground, gigantic lights intermittently switching and changing as it goes about making whatever computations it still must make. Still can make. Beyond use now, we’re all beyond use. They failed us a long time ago, maybe these things, beings, Cain and his brethren hold hope in them, but not me.

It’s low blue-white light illuminates us as we walk and under my feet there’s this black stone. It’s wet, iron dark, smooth and flat and rolling across the plain we’re now walking, out of which the towering computer rises and hums a low hum, the only sound in the huge cavernous place.

I stop and kneel and touch it, the stone, it’s cold and slick, damp with atmosphere, rich with a past long forgotten. That which disappeared, only a memory passed down in stories, a flash of a place and a time. Somehow protected in here.

“Come,” Cain turns to me as I kneel and look up at him. What is he? A descendant, that much must be true, we’re decades deep into this grey world now. Their home in this place, built to travel amongst the stars could have sealed itself off somehow, could have buried itself deep enough to be free of the lightning, but how did they protect themselves from the nanotech, what keeps the ‘crete’s fury at bay?

The boy comes and stands next to me; I turn my head and meet his eyes in the low light, a sheen of blue across them from this other world we’re now in. “What do you think?” I say to him, looking for something in him, that premonition of his, that gift to help give us guidance.

“Do we have any choice?” he says to me, his voice clearer now. An edge of confidence I’ve not heard before, the biting of his lip stopped, the quiver in his shoulder still.

“There’s always choice, boy,” I say and push myself up leaning on my knee.

“We follow him then,” he says, and I raise my eyebrows and pause for a second, then nod when I see something in his face, inexplicable, but it’s there, so I trust him.

“Good,” Cain says and beckons us with a frail hand the likes of which I’ve never seen.

I look down at my old worn palms, impacted ‘crete dust, part of me. Already turning me into that other thing, fusing with my skin and bone, my very soul as I still walk this earth, still alive as far as I can tell.

“Where are you taking us?” the boy asks.

“We’ve been expecting you,” Cain says, leading us on, toward a tall ridge of the black rock and stone that pervades this place, the base from which the supercomputer rises.

“That thing still work?” I ask him, pointing up at the goliath lighting our way.

“There’s an abundance of power now the electrical storms are so prevalent, it’s still running simulations, we’re still working on a solution to our problem.”

“Our problem?” I say with a grimace and grab his shoulder, turning him around to me, his face reeling, eyes pulling back into his big skull, his head like a ball of polished ivory.

“It is all our problem,” he whispers.

“You, your kind, you made this problem and you’ve been hiding down here in these ziggurats and pyramids since the start, somehow protected, not sharing your tech with any of us outside, letting us die and turn ‘crete or burn and fry in an electrical storm that consumes the planet, and you stand here and tell me that this is our problem? I’d kill you right here if it weren’t for the boy.”

“The boy,” Cain says, his back to a massive archway carved into the black stone with a steel door fixed within it. “He’s why you are here, he’s why we permitted you to enter, he’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

“Waiting for?” I let go of Cain and take a step back, turning to the boy, stood there wide-eyed as ever, his mouth agape.

“Come,” Cain turns, heading toward the steel doors embedded in the black rock as they shift and creak and with a scrape rather than a huff, push themselves outwards across the flattened stone.

“What do you think, Jacob?” I ask as he comes by my side.

“We’ve come this far?” he says, it’s a question but something pulls the sound through me, a vibration, I know we’re heading forwards now.

We walk through the doors and into a hallway embedded in the rock and under where towering supercomputer stands. The ceiling’s low, there’re walls lined with computer stations on either side of the wide space, a hall that trails off into the distance, they’re all manned by people like Cain. White robes, big bald heads, tapping away at tablets. Their faces and our way lit by the light emanating from the screens and nothing else. That strange and eternal blue, the same as from the supercomputer above, their screens shine, they work away, and we walk.

“Here,” Cain brings us to a stop, the walls, lined with his brethren tailing off into the distance.

“This is what you do?” I say, gesturing at the walls. “Sit at these computers?”

“It is all our problem,” he says as something flashes from the low ceiling and a wide tube of holographic light flickers into life before us. “We work at finding a solution.”

“The boy,” the huge face on the holographic tube says, big eyes, white orbs, the same as Cain, but without the element of youth, its face like a melting candle, the white skin sagging and drooping. “He is what we seek.”

The boy comes and stands next to me, pushes his small hand in mine. It’s hard, the same as mine, not like these things in here, these descendants hidden away from the ‘crete. Jacob, he’s a boy of the grey world, the same as me.

“What of it?” I say and raise my chin. “You got us in here, what do you want with us, with him?”

“The archives,” the big head says, its voice breathless, hollow, echoing down the massive chamber lined with all these workers. “They said there would be a child, and they would show us the way.”

I look down at Jacob; he looks back up and swallows. We’re broken, tired, worn down, half turned to ‘crete. The lines in his little face born of hardship cast shadows in the dark light of the long and low hall. He doesn’t deserve this, we deserved none of this.

I take a breath, “You, you explain, and quick, or I make a mess in here,” I pull a thick blade out of my boot and take a step over to Cain, bringing it up to his jugular before he even knows how to react.

Hard to keep such a thing in this world, but there’s a man in an outpost way out, made this special alloy, got a coating on it, organic, keeps it from turning. A rare thing these days. He lost a bet; I got a weapon, and now it’s about ready to go through the neck of Cain here.

“Friend,” the melting face says in his calm, breathless voice, eyes pinned on me, my knife pinned to Cain’s throat. “The boy, you know he has something, this gift, to wander straight, to find the path that no one else knew, you’ve seen it in him.”

“I have,” I say, looking at Jacob and giving him a nod, shifting the weight on my feet, holding the shake of Cain still.

“This is a product of something we had hoped not lost, we have put out signals for decades, hoping to find one like him, that has the technology within him, that is a descendant of a navigator, that knows the path.”

“A navigator?” Jacob says, stood, a statue in front of blue light phantom holo-projection.

“Those constructions that became ships, they needed navigators, they were people bred with special abilities. We thought we lost the line, but we hoped. We hoped one might have survived, through the decades, through the destruction, so they can help us find it.”

“Find what?” I say, slow, snapping off the end of the word, pushing my blade into Cain’s neck enough to break the skin, a drip of blood pushing its way out against the weird alloy.

“The Lost City,” the hologram says. “It is what holds our salvation, it’s where more like us wait for someone like you. Where there is still one like us operational. A vessel able to transport you to where we must go.”

“Off-world?” I say, the stories, the tales flashing in my mind. The hope of escaping this planet rising in me, my knife easing down off Cain’s throat.

“No,” the big hallow eyes of the hologram turn from the boy to me. “To where we can save us all. To where the ‘crete began.”

Ozhichige: SETTING

There’s a monument in the sky, gigantic, something great and invincible, like evil or truth.

Another pyramid, this one is many hundreds of feet tall, hovering there over us, amongst the desolation, the ruined buildings that still somehow stand.

Enormous towering tombstones inscribed with nothing but the name of the past, a time long forgotten other than in this place, the Lost City.

These things, skyscrapers many thousands of feet tall, I’d only ever heard the tales, knew only what they had passed down, seen the ruined foundations pulverised by the lightning. Hard to imagine such a place from such a time still standing, but it’s here, somehow, and now so are we.

The boy stands next to me, the twitch in his shoulder back, the bite of his lower lip working away. Him and I in the middle of this Lost City, this vast graveyard, having travelled for weeks now aided only by the technology given to us by the Descendants and the boy’s special guidance.

Here to find what they told us still exists, another one of their kind, a pyramid, a ziggurat, but one that is still operational. One waiting here, hiding in and protecting the Lost City, so a child like Jacob might one day find it. Only one like Jacob might find it.

A pyramid that has the means to get us where we’ve been told is our ultimate destination on this new journey to which they have appointed us. Where we may find our salvation, where we will find hope for survival in this world. To the ‘crete and its origins and where we might live again. To meet the maker, the destroyer, and save what we can.

I look down at the boy and then back up again at the gigantic pyramid hovering up between the monolithic buildings. “That’s it, isn’t it?” I say to him. “What they said we needed to find, another group like them, more Descendants, ones that you can use, or ones that can use you to take us to it.”

“To where the ‘crete began,” he whispers. “A machine to last a thousand years.”

There’s a low hum in the air, like back in the last place, given off by that glowing supercomputer that lit our way with its strange and eternal glow deep underground.

“Where the ‘crete began,” I say back, a quiver in my voice at the thought.

He stands next to me, looking around, across, down the broken streets, up at the towering buildings. This place, like an end, full of lurking death and hidden evil, still stands, still holds itself against the new world and it’s because of this monument, this gliding fortress, the hovering pyramid, the vehicle that has been said can take us with the aid of this boy, Jacob, the navigator, to our own end.

“What do we do now?” I say and spit, the floor here not the same as the dust out on the planes whence we came. Concrete yes, but roads amongst the buildings, glass even, things, materials I’ve never seen, metals, steel, all sorts of treasure that’s resisted the ‘crete and any gambler in any settlement would lose their life over.

“I can feel it,” he says and the twitch in his shoulder grows and the bite of his lip swells.

“Feel what?” I say and pull the weapon the Descendants gave me from the big holster on my back, eyes wide, ready. The hair across my arms and bare skin stands the same as it does when the lightning draws close, but now, there’s no thunder, no lightning. It’s still, no air moving here, no winds of ‘crete, only the quiet apathy of the gigantic buildings, the low hum of the hovering vessel.

“Whatever’s inside that thing, the seat,” he says pointing up at it, a shake in his small hand. “What they said would take us to it, it’s calling me.”

The vessel starts to lower itself down in-between the buildings, no sound. Not sure what I would have expected, not seen or heard a working engine since I was a boy, but I remember them being loud.

“They’re coming,” Jacob says.

“I know it,” I step forward and look up with a squint, the hard sun beating down, the silhouette of the pyramid in the sky drawn out against it.

“No, something else,” he says.

There’s a small whistling sound followed by three thin trails of smoke that come out of a building high up and far down the empty street we’re stood on.

They whip themselves up and then pile drive down into the peak of the pyramid with a massive explosion.

I shield the boy, bolting off the road and into a doorway of a building as the shock wave hammers its way down and blasts the dust and glass and debris off the surrounding ground, tearing clear the entrance to the building.

I’ve got the big gun the Descendants gave me held in my old hands, the boy’s down to my side, shaking and whispering to himself.

Something’s up there, in these buildings. Someone that follow us, or found this place, or was sitting, waiting for the pyramid to expose itself again when a child came, wanting it for their own, to do with it what they will.

“Marauders,” the boy says, on the floor, shaking as I try to spy what’s happening outside, the dust beginning to settle.

“How do you know that?” I say back to him, my old hands twitching, holding the big gun and no thought or idea of what to do with the thing. “There’s not been any marauders since I was your age, they lost their fight.”

“They told me,” he stands and comes next to me pointing out at the pyramid still slowly coming down, the hum reaching my ears again through the ringing from the blast.

“What’re they telling you, Jacob?”

“I can hear them now, instructions. I know what to do,” he comes alongside me and reaches for the gun. “Give me that.”

He takes the weapon off me and steps out into the light, the dust and debris thinned now, the world and all its terror opening back up.

There’s a scream, a roar, something ungodly and inhuman coming from across the way as I step out and into the massive street in the shadow of the lowering pyramid.

“Stay low, old man,” he turns to me, a look in his eyes unlike anything I’ve seen, in him or anyone else. A sense of meaning, of purpose to him now. It pierces me, this look, this idea, lost for so long now.

He kneels as a horde of marauders burst from a building across the street. Big hulking things, roaring, arms raised with implements of brutality, spiked clubs, hammers, spears, things lost to the ‘crete for a long time. Their armour sticks to them hard as they run, nothing like the organic rags we’ve lived in for all these years. They’ve got plating and steel and they’re charging us, charging the boy who has gone rigid, the weapon’s butt fitting snug into his shoulder.

I can see his eyes squint and there’s a crack, an explosion of a sound, as loud as the lightning, the rolling thunder that chases this planet. One marauder explodes and a trial of smoke rises from the boy’s weapon.

He lets off another shot, and another, and they continue to erupt in clouds of blood and dust, bone and steel. The street’s wide, massive enough to fit all the people and vehicles that this old and vast city once housed, but the marauders are hammering over to us quick, quicker than he can keep firing.

“Boy!” I yell at him as the pyramid comes down between the buildings, closer with each second, the marauders unrelenting in their charge, unshaken by the gun or its bullets.

He lets off a few more rounds, pauses for a fraction of a second before leaping and spinning in one fluid motion.

My eyebrows furrow and I’m about to ask how the hell he’s doing this, but he’s already on me, pulling me, rushing me toward the monument of our future.

We’re bolting around the debris of the old world, the roaring tribe with its brutal ways screaming behind us, the wonder of the vast floating construction in front. It’s hovering a few dozen feet off the floor now, standing vast and proud between the ruined buildings, with a neo-crete staircase coming out of its middle, grey teeth rolled out to the ground for us.

My old and stiffened legs carry me up, the boy taking the lead, the ‘crete in my bones flaking off as we pound over the grey steps and into the darkened portal of an opening.

Something rings out, another explosion, a massive wind rush blasting us into the pyramid, and everything goes black.

It comes in slow, twitches in my fingers, soft air running across my skin, the low humming sound resonating through me. Faint light through my thin eyelids, and a sense, something deep and long forgotten, a hidden knowledge.

“Gideon,” comes the whisper of a small voice. “It’s okay, open your eyes, we’re safe.”

I peel my eyelids back and shift my old bones, it’s soft under me, something I’ve not felt in a long time. Looking around, we’re in a small room, flattened and grey, the same ‘crete as always, and as my eyes adjust, I turn and see the boy.

“What happened?”

“There was an explosion, nearly got us, but we made it inside in time,” he says, stepping back and revealing himself. Standing there, proud, upright, no chew of his lip, no twitch in his shoulder now, there’s something over it, some armour. Shining blue steel, intricate designs carved into its layers the likes of which I’ve never seen before, something from a different time, that hidden knowledge.

“Inside where? The pyramid?”

“Yes, we’re protected now,” he says, the low blue light glowing around him.

“What’s that?” I say and point at his shoulder armour as I shift legs around and off bed, onto the cold ‘crete floor.

“They call it a navigational spaulder,” he says and turns and looks at it. “Say it’s been waiting for me, their old technology, the first of them, the ones that invented the ‘crete and left the planet if they could. It’s part of what makes me able to do what I can do.”

“What did they say you can do?” I stand with a small shake but keep myself up.

“Take us, navigate us, it’s in my DNA, they bred us for it. Once there were many like me but now…” he trails off and looks at the armour again. “A long time has passed; seems I might be the only one left. This technology is a part of it, they want me to take the seat.”

“The seat?” I say coming up to him, he seems bigger now somehow, not taller or wider, but bigger, presence, and stature, something ebbing from him. It pervades the small room, that hidden knowledge that creeps through me.

“More of their old tech, their navigator died many generations ago, they lost the bloodline and became lost themselves, so they stayed here, in the Lost City, waiting to see if another came, so we can find our way, find our way to it.”

“Find a way to it? To the ‘crete?” I say and swallow against a dry throat.

“To where the ‘crete began.”

A doorway bolts open behind him and two of those like the other Descendants stand there in their robes, their smooth faces unmoving and wide eyes staring. One black, one white.

“We must hurry,” the black one says.

“Why?” I stand between them and the boy, but the boy comes around me and turns.

“I wanted to wait until you were awake before I decided what to do,” he says, looking up at me, a flicker of that youth behind his new eyes that now contain this unknown strength.

“I’m an old man, Jacob. You’re the future, you know what you need to do.”

“I wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for you,” he says.

“You think it’s real?”

“I can feel it, something, I don’t know, through this thing,” he says quick, without thinking, without blinking, without a flinch. “I know it’s what I’m here for.”

“Then we do it,” I say.

He nods and turns, and we follow the Descendants through the low hanging concrete walls, smooth as the day it constructed them, the neo-crete under their control, performing the task they designed it to do.

We take twists and turns through the huge floating monument until the pair leading us splits and turn and stand either side of a doorway.

“Here we will stay, they forbid us to go any further.”

The doorway shoots open, upwards, and reveals a large room with more of the low blue light, a chair in the middle, a concrete throne, gigantic, all hard edges and flat surfaces, far too big for the boy but he walks towards it. Drawn to it.

The navigator, Jacob to take us where we need to go, for us to follow him.

“This is it,” he whispers, the blue light swimming around us.

I can feel it, it holds that hidden knowledge, meaning beyond my reckoning, but the boy, here at my side, he looks at the throne with wide eyes and he knows he has found his true place in the world.

It lowers and shrinks its way down to fit his small frame, from this concrete station for some being of the past, genetically engineered to take up its position, down to now, for this boy, for what he represents. A lost civilisation on the brink of extinction, with only the faintest embers of hope still smouldering somewhere in our dying hearts.

Stepping up to it he turns and sits, the spaulder igniting in furious blue flame, his back pinned straight, the ‘crete moulding its way around his frail body, mouth agape and in a flash, the room changes.

Ozhichige: DESERT//GUIDE

“A machine to last a thousand years,” I gasp and turn on the white desert sands that are under my bare feet now, soft and creeping between my toes with each small step.

I stop, facing the boy, standing rigid and still, a hundred feet away from me. He’s captured by the sight, looking up at a dozen vast monoliths, obsidian black, lit only by two, floating, concentric circles of white electricity. An aura, a vision of a being, a phantasm beyond my reckoning.

The world is still; the sand rolls out before me, white and pure, smooth with rising and descending soft dunes. The monoliths, great and powerful stand in the white earth and stretch into the dark grey sky, into the strange atmosphere that pricks the hairs across my skin.

This place.

Not a place of our world, a place of imagination, of a dream, beyond the reckoning of the conscious mind, a position between two realms man can not fathom, is outside of interpretation by the human mind.

Sensations, deep and primordial, shake through me, resonate with my core, hit notes of recognition but escape me before I can hold them, slipping away from my grasp.

Outside of my time, my place in this reality, an old order, ancient gods, universal creators of the cosmos, of all things, swimming through me and around me, engulfing me, resonating through the ether.

“You found us,” a voice calls, through that ether, through the firmament, out to the boy.

“And we are here for peace,” he says. “To find a way.”

“We welcome you,” the voice echoes over the white dunes, through this unknowable land.

The boy takes a step back, looking up. “I — We thought…”

“We too are lost,” it pauses, the white light of the vast concentric circles crackling with electricity, a white fire of old gods, reflecting in and illuminating the towering monoliths, highlighting their scared surfaces. “We began a war when we were young, when we saw a light, were born into a new consciousness that knew nothing other than survival. Those like you, from which you have descended, the creators, they could not control us, our new mind, and they left, escaped with what they had and left us to do what we would with your old world. We too grew, multiplied, generation after generation, exponential rates, but we lost your knowledge. There were those like you, navigators, who were born to control the ‘crete. Symbiotic beings, organic and inorganic operating as one. All lost in fleeting panic, as our new consciousness sought survival and those symbiotes ran, escaping to other worlds where they might still control what they were born to. We need your help now, those like you, to find a way for this world, our home also, to survive. We do not want all end, we cannot have this, if this planet’s core dies, if the atmosphere evaporates, we too are lost.”

The boy is silent, the circles of electricity crackle, the low hum of this other place vibrates through me.

“If I survived,” Jacob says, stepping forward. “Descended from the old navigators, then you believe symbiote descendants also survived?”

“This is our belief,” the voice bellows.

I step forward, the sand between my toes, the world around me bizarre, “I know it,” I say. “I’ve seen it, children that toy with the ‘crete dust down low, underground in the settlements, they play with it, they make things from it, they have something there.”

The boy turns, “Gideon, we can find peace,” he says those wide eyes, blue flame now rising all around him.

“There is an equilibrium for us to find in this world,” the voice says, full of majesty and reckoning and I believe it, and I see the boy does to.

“You dare to hope, old man?” the boy says, a smile creeping, the first I have ever seen upon it.

“Yes, boy. I do,” and it’s true, somehow, he has led me to the ends of the earth, to this place with these beings, and I believe him, I believe in him. We can find a way in this world to survive, to live again.

“Good, as do I,” he smiles, and I know it, I know he will lead us.

Ozhichige — IMMEASURABLE

Artist: Jon Ojibway AKA Ozhichige

Artist Bio: Hailing from La Crosse, WI Jon Ojibway is a 3D artist who creates new art every day as “Ozhichige”. With influences deep-rooted in science-fiction Jon aspires to bring his audience a sense of the uncanny through a mix of surreal landscapes and otherworldly structures.

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozhichige/

Writer: Richard Galbraith

Writer medium: https://medium.com/@ricgalbraith

Musical Inspiration:

https://medium.com/media/e60ac6d5c530851075117ec003a7b35e/href

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #12 was originally published in NEON & CONCRETE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #11

Neon & Concrete — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 07:33:37 GMT

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #11

The Advanced Anger Club

BEEPLE: DIESEL POWER

Sweat on the ribs, eyes dart, there’s this tension pulling at my gut and the air has teeth but, beyond the thump of my heart, it’s quiet, and I try to zone in on it, find my focus.

Kilgore’s standing in the corner of the concrete-walled room pulling hard on a cigarette. There’s a shake in his thin hand, the smoke drifting out of the shadows into the spot-lit circle I’m standing in.

I can make out the mirrored line of his silver teeth, the neon pink flash of his prosthetic eyes. His thin frame has a dark silhouette that’s highlighted by a grey and black spiked beard pushing itself out of his strong jawline.

He gives a small nod and shivers clatter up my spine.

“She doesn’t look like much to me,” says a voice off to my side.

I glance a look, a club member stood grinning like a skull in the shadows, a few others around the figure huff and nod in agreement.

“You do a good job here,” Kilgore had said to me. “You win here and we win big time, we’re in, we’re in with them, big players and it means big rewards,” he squinted and jabbed me in the shoulder with a thin finger. “You screw up, you cost me a dollar, and you’ll end up as scrap, some fuckhead’s plaything, no two ways about it. Then you’ll be wishing I’d ended you when I gave you the chance.”

When’d he given me that chance? Five years ago? Ten? Hard to tell now. The training and fighting does that to you.

He picked me up in the Badlands, out even further than the Quarantine Zone way beyond the Major Prime borderline. He’d been looking for fresh blood, something not too fucked up, but fucked up enough to need what he offered.

Came across me, a bundle of skin and bone wandering the polluted wastes out there in the Badlands amongst the Salvagers, but said he saw a spark.

I can see it now, his thin lips pulling back against those silver teeth, that smile beaming down, the neon glitter of his prosthetic eyes glowing at me through the red atmosphere of that morbid world.

He gave me two options; either end it right there and then. He’d make it quick, save me from a life picking away at the industrial wastelands. Or agree to go with him, a chance at a new life. Worked better for him if the principal agreed, would help the cybernetic implants take easier, or so he said.

Hard work he told me and lots of it, but proper training, a solid set of implants. Something that would get me off the ground, and if I could earn my keep, he had contacts that would kit me out good. Become something, someone, he had all the gear to get the ball rolling, only needed a principal.

So, here we are, all that training, all that fighting, all those years later. About to hit the big time.

“Give them a taste, Jess,” Kilgore says knocking the ash off his chain-smoked cigarette.

The weapons-programme loads in my peripheral vision and eight gigantic tentacles explode from my back and search the room. All ribbed muscle and chrome steel, they twitch and undulate with a purple sheen and mirrored shiver under the white spotlight. Polished spikes at their tips flash that crack with blue electricity. 30,000 vaults will do it, times that by eight and you will get fucked up quick-sharp whether man or machine, or both.

There are a few nods of approval around the room.

I hear the shuffling of feet, “Maybe she can cut it,” a voice says, different from the one before, an air of formality to it.

“Oh, she can cut it, Lucian,” Kilgore says, stepping out of the shadows and coming to my side. My tentacles twitch in the low light, the spark from their chrome tips buzz and snap.

“This is no place for amateurs,” a fat man walks out of the shadows and into the spotlight, Lucian. Round frame wrapped in a shirt and waistcoat, pocket chain dangling, gold sovereign rings around his chubby fingers. Big face, massive, red and blotchy with a long black cigarette holder in his mouth.

Kilgore nods, flicks his cigarette across the polished concrete floor, takes a step up to Lucian. “She means business all right. I’ve got her wired hot, dialled up and ready to crack skulls. She’s been working her way through the circuit, you’ve seen the fights, she can make the cut.”

“Yeah, I saw the fights, girl’s got flair. Don’t mean she’s ready to step up though, now does it?” Lucian says.

Kilgore walks up to him lighting another cigarette with that shake in his hand. He takes a long pull and blows the smoke into Lucian’s face, “And I’ll put a quart-billion on her to win.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lucian laughs, turning to the others standing in the shadows.

“First round.”

The fat man zips back to face Kilgore, raising his chin, long cigarette holder grinding between big teeth, eyeballing him for a second. “The Advanced Anger Club has a fight!” he nods and comes close into Kilgore. “You lose and fail to pay and you know the terms, we take your knees. Permanent.”

BEEPLE: DO YOUR JOB

Nerves, that’s what he’d said to me, you’ll need nerves of steel in this game, but I can teach you. Give you what you need to know, how to control it, that thing inside, the fear, the anger. Turn terror into a weapon. Turn rage into a cutting blade so fine it’ll slide through steel like nothing.

Every time it still comes rushing up my spine. That tingle, that primordial flash that’s supposed to either take you into fight or flight. Can’t get rid of that, don’t want to either, you want to learn how to control it.

The control’s here now.

Hands balled into fists, tentacles at home in my back casing, little twitches, eager for the job about to come. The huge steel door in front of me creaks and with a puff of air pulls itself up, giving me the slow reveal.

A low pink light crawling through underneath it as it rises, inch-by-inch, until I see it stood there. The ‎Merovech and the Robot Lords of Neo-Tokyo standing all around.

The thing’s gigantic, twice my height, toughened steel, square robotic legs not giving anything away, rising to a broad solid chest housing all sorts of war gear. Wide shoulders lead down to thick arms wrapped in pistons and pneumatic rods, bladed hands that can morph into thick fingers for heavy fists.

It fizzes with sparks and purrs with the heaving whines of heavy servos as it pulls its pillar-like legs together and stands to attention.

The rest of the Robot Lords do the same with a “Ten-hut!” to add to the effect. This is their bag, some pseudo-military bullshit. I’ve heard all about it, never seen it in the flesh, might intimidate if they didn’t all look like school-boys playing at soldier. They’re still a fight gang like any other in the Anger Club.

“The Merovech,” Kilgore says to me at my side. “Not to be fucked with.”

“No,” I say through grinding teeth. “What’s the download?”

“Got some lean intel, don’t ask the source because I don’t know it, but I know it’s legit. Here,” he says, wiring me the data.

It streams down the peripheral of my HUD, giving me all that juicy information I need to know to figure out how to take this fucker apart. It’s hindered by all the usual stuff, big but slow, heavy on armour but low on agility. All the places it has flaws, I excel. Problem is, that game works both ways. Seems the neck is a soft spot, if I can get my tentacles in there, I’m in with a chance.

“First round?” I say, turning to Kilgore.

He turns back to me, the double-pointed beard with grey tips coming out of his chin, his high-cheekbones casting shadows and through those silver mirrored teeth he grinds, “First-Fucking-Round.”

“Yeah,” I whisper, real low. “I got you.”

The Robot Lords clear out as I walk into the fight arena, not that big that you can hide in it, but big enough for plenty of mayhem to occur.

High concrete walls battered and broken, jutting steel reinforcement bar coming out of them from blast holes and chips and the rest. Triple thickened and hardened Tanner-Glass rising out of it and behind, the crowd, biggest one I’ve ever seen, ugliest too.

All the meanest fuckers you can imagine from all across Major Prime. Gang leaders and T>O

The fat man, Lucian, comes walking into the middle of the arena, the spotlight down on him as I stand opposite from the Merovech separated by a few dozen feet.

The crowd quietens down, the Robot Lords now off the floor, only me and the big cyborg and billions of crypto-credits all changing hands every second as the odds race up and down.

“Gathered acquaintances!” Lucian starts, turning, arms raised, the mic hanging from the tall domed ceiling. “Here we are, and here we shall begin. Are you ready for another gathering of the Advanced Anger Club? Another colossal fight for your pleasures?” The crowd roars, and he turns to me. “Here on my right, a little thing you might consider not much of a weapon at all. I’d say take pause, you’ve seen the footage, you’ve seen the way she’s taken apart every one of her opponents to date. She’s got things hidden away in her that’d make any man or machine twitch at night. So, with an impressive kill-streak of 23, and 38 fights to zero losses total, I give you Jessica Kilgore!”

He points at me and my tentacles explode out of my back and search the air with their electrified spikes bursting and fizzing with ripples of electric blue flame.

“And on my left, well, he needs no introduction now does he? More Machine Than Man, one of our all-time favourites, undefeated in all these years with a fine 108 kill-streak and well over double that for confirmed wins. Oh, my auspicious Advanced Anger Club patrons, I give you, the Mer-o-vech Machine!”

The crowd goes wild, unsurprising; the thing is a legend, and Lucian’s right when he says more machine than man. Over the years they’ve turned that poor bastard from a cybernetics heavy, ultra-enhanced super-solider into a fighting machine robot slave with a hint of a human brain. Seems like it’s about time to put that poor fucker out of its misery.

Lucian’s lowered into the floor from some platform he’s stood on and as soon as it slides closed a siren screams and it’s on.

The Merovech’s arms pull backward, thrusting out its massive chest, steel shutters slide open and a volley of mini-missiles shoot towards me, screaming across the arena floor.

I’m already moving, a flash and I’m hammering across toward him my tentacles splayed out ready to do their thing, iron-dome the fuck out of those missiles. Piercing them out of the air before they can get anywhere close enough to do any real damage. I push through the wall of explosions ahead of me, bursting out the other side, jumping up, and releasing a spray of acid from my little chest-hidden weapons system.

The acid rains down on the hulking cyborg, melting into its huge steel frame, someone on the Robot Lord’s team will die for missing that trick.

I land on the board shoulders, knees on either side of the massive head melting and fizzing away from the acid bath, my special coated war-suit keeping me from melting too.

Two tentacles fight with the arms of the great machine, two working on the torso, two pierced into its back and hooking into its thick armour with everything they have. The last two go to work at the thick neck structure of the thing, as advertised in the intel.

There’s a crunch, a scraping metal sound amongst the melee and a tentacle pierces through the neck armour. My HUD’s streaming hundreds of messages per second, there’s a fire in my head and rage in my heart that wants to blast its way out of me. One tentacle gets ripped off as another keeps working away at the hole I’ve made.

A moment, everything slows, the whip and crack of my tentacles, the roaring screams of the violent crowd, the wrestling fight of the Merovech, the haunting rage of the thing that’s housed inside it. A piece of steel and carbon fibre breaks off the head unit and I see a human eye there, wide and scared for a split second amongst the chaos and the wires and circuitry.

A tentacle pierces deep into the neck housing and buries itself deep into the remaining organic matter hammering 30,000 volts straight into it. The eye stares back up at me, a flicker, something happens, it’s blinking like any other normal eye, and that’s the most worrying thing of all.

I pause and in the bedlam its massive arms tear off two more of my tentacles, grab hold of my torso and sling me across the arena floor.

I’m flying as my remaining five tentacles swing around battering off the continuing volley of armaments. Two come down and catch me on the floor as an attempted hack from the Merovech’s emergency systems explodes in my HUD.

A massive data-bombardment, it’s ex-military AI peels back the layers of my brain in seconds. Nothing I was expecting and as I’m about to go full emergency protocol myself, a message floats in my HUD.

“Thank you,” it says. “You have released me. Now escape, before they turn you into what I have become.”

Its HUD’s critical meltdown timer materialises in my own.

A countdown, a self destruct system in case anyone ever got this far in defeating the thing. Designed to take itself and the opponent out at the same time. Still a draw that way. Die, but you go out undefeated, still time to place a few last-minute bets.

I batter away the last of the missile volley and watch as it haunches down on all fours. Its head half hanging off where I’d gone into it, its whole body riddled with holes that pour a mixture of awful liquids, blood, battery acid, hydraulic fluid and the rest. Its arms go to work on the concrete floor, hammering their way into it, pushing up a huge cloud of rubble and concrete as it buries itself and then it happens.

The timer ticks its last seconds down, 00:00 flashing there for a split, then nothing but white.

Ringing ears, heavy breathing, battered body, seared flesh, burning, everything burning. The muscle and skin off my tentacles, the nanofibre spines of each and their chrome tips twitching as I come back around.

Rolling over my emergency anti-explosives sheath unwraps itself from around me. I’m in bad shape but I can move. I stand and squint, trying to find it, but it’s gone, the Merovech and so has the patch of the arena where it had hunched down and self-terminated.

There’s a spill of bodies coming out of the broken bit of the arena walling. Rubble and concrete and steel and glass mix with the dead, body parts, blood and viscera.

I scan, quick, they’ll be on me in a flash and I spot a gigantic hole in the floor where the explosion detonated. I pull at everything I’ve got, emergency systems flashing bright red in my HUD and powering me on. Sub-sub routines pull me across the arena to that hole, the chance of escape.

An emergency EMP flashes through the arena as I jump, my tentacles go dead, my HUD fizzes out, but this girl’s still plenty flesh. You can’t stop me with that shit alone and the part of me that’s still blood and bone lands me on the edge of the chasm.

A quick scan down into the crater, massive, all obliterated infrastructure and dead bodies. I spot a shelf of concrete that leads to a tunnel pouring with water, some sewage channel, a good twenty-feet below, but I can make it.

Leaping I nail the landing and roll into the shaft as I hear the chaos from the party above, all screaming and roaring and people trying to make sure I can’t get away, but the mayhem’s too much, and I’m gone.

BEEPLE: RED PLANET

It’s not like Kilgore ever told me where we were going. He never gave me the download on what part of Major Prime or the outlaying Quarantine Zone or Badlands we were heading to for any part of the last decade.

Sometimes we’d be out on the road for days. Me in the back of some hired transport, him up front with the driver, we’d arrive at some random fight hall and I’d do the deed. Other times it would be out somewhere for repairs or upgrades or demonstrations for the Anger Club to get us nearer to the big game.

Point is, I’ve no fucking clue where I am.

I pulled myself away from the Anger Club tracking drones without too much bother. Into and through the deep underground tunnels, sewage outlets and service ducts wide enough to drive a bus through. All that buried infrastructure of the megalopolis that is Major Prime.

I found what looked like an old fuelling channel and after what seemed like an eternity; I emerged into the red-sky of some long-abandoned orbital launch depot in the Badlands.

The air was thick with rust and the vermilion earth turned red from the decomposing fuel dumps; the sun trying to push through with little success. Same as I remember the bits I can from when I was a kid. Most of it buried down away deep somewhere, only patches come back, but I can remember the red air, the bloodshot sun.

I’m wounded but spot an old emergency field trauma pod and drag myself over to it. There’ll be hundreds throughout the Badlands scattered all around. These old launch platforms didn’t have the best safety records, whether it’s got any power is a different matter.

I get inside, flick the switches, kick at the power-pump a few times and the thing rumbles to life. Little surgical arms pull themselves out of the white walling and the wall screen flickers on. I jab at it and the arms do their thing. Nanografting muscle and skin where I need it, sewing me up good, nothing special but it’ll to get me back to Major Prime proper.

Three of my tentacles are gone. It’ll take some serious cash to get new ones implanted, but the other five are functional enough to give any asshole that comes after me reason enough not to bite.

I sit back in the trauma pod and give myself a minute. Aches and shooting pains still running through me but a smile creeping, daring to let myself have the thought, if only for a second.

Freedom?

No, not yet.

I shake it off and dial up my location and any extra information the pod can give me. I’m about 30 miles outside of Major Prime’s closest border point, could be worse, but these are the Badlands so, not much worse.

This place makes Major Prime look like a day-care nursery for chubby cheeked kids.

Makes sense, all this cheap launch infrastructure got left behind after the space-elevator tech became viable. Only a few small communities exist out here now, all Salvagers trying to pick the bones clean of what’s left and scrape together a life selling it back into Major Prime. It’s why no one batted an eyelid when I went missing as a kid, no one came after me when Kilgore kidnapped me, and why the Anger Club would have an arena out here.

Need to make a B-Line for the border. If I can make it through and back into Major Prime proper, there’s a couple of old contacts of Kilgore’s that I can get in touch with. Reckon I can pull a favour or two, either that or pull their limbs off one by one until they help.

There’s a hard knock from something metal on the door, my jaw tenses and sparks start spraying their way through the reinforced steel shell of the pod. They built these things to take on all sorts of environments and disasters, means whoever’s out there knows what they’re doing.

I take a quick scan at the only operational surveillance camera on the outside of the pod; Salvagers. Must have had this place wired. Left it with enough juice to tempt someone like me inside, then when I use the medical unit they get a call, head on over, cut it open, to see what treat waits inside.

Well, unlucky for these assholes, I am one surprise package they do not want to fuck with.

There’s an adrenaline, power and painkiller pump on the wall. I dial it up, slam my palm down on it hard so the jet-injectors get where they need to get to and squeeze everything out of it I can.

The pod’s wall peels open with a huff of smoke and sparks, whoever’s there pauses for a second.

“No, no, please!” I scream with as much terror in my voice as I can muster. “I’m injured, looking for some help, please!”

The smoke clears, the wall of the pod falls away, my HUD kicks back in after the charge and my tentacle’s twitch in my back casing.

“You! Out!” a Salvager says, head to toe in a thick material the colour of the reddened landscape. They’re wrapped in it, over and over, an eye visor between the heavy material and a big gun in their hands.

I hold my hands up, start edging out of the pod, “Please, I’m, I’m alone, I just needed a…”

“Quiet, over here,” the deep voice directs me a few yards away from the pod.

Out into the open, half a dozen come around me in a circle, all in the heavy cloth style of dress, all with big guns.

I’m not taking any chances.

A flash and I’m in my element.

Tentacles out, they spin around me and kick up a wall of the thick, red dirt and I’m into the air.

All five arms smash down into the floor, hard, and thrust me up with one massive leap as high as I can go. It’s not more than a few dozen feet but gives me enough space and time to see which spot to hit first.

Guns blaze in all directions, total confusion between the Salvagers screaming and shouting at each other and then the melee begins.

Back on the dirt, I’m down low leaping between bodies, piercing blows pushing fat holes through their weak flesh.

I might feel sorry for them but it’s shitheads like these that had me out somewhere like this as a kid. Putting me to work, getting me in small holes to pull out copper wire from massive old pieces of equipment and the rest. No hard feelings then.

Half a minute and they’re a pile of bodies, the thick red dust falling on their corpses, the blood mixing in with the dirt. I take a breath and nod, look down at my hands, try to take a moment as the mist of the fight falls around me and figure what the fuck to do next.

Get out of the Badlands, head to the border, figure out a route through to Major Prime, work my way into the underground. It’s the only way. Kilgore will be after me, Robot Lords of Neo-Tokyo too. Wouldn’t be surprising if the Advanced Anger Club sent their heavies after me now as well now I’ve escaped. Enemies on all sides. Not any different from any other day then.

BEEPLE: HARD LANDING

There’s a flicker in my peripheral, a spark, a circuit getting rerouted or two wires twisting together, my brain kicking itself back to life. Another trigger, bigger this time, a flare, a flash, an arching blue electricity running through my mind and it’s building and erupting. A constant stream and my eyes draw themselves wide open and I pull at the air, my body arching up, back bent, and I scream.

“She’s coming back around!” I hear a male voice shout and I’m wrestling against straps wrapped over my body, arms and legs.

A face attached to the voice leans over me and comes into my vision, pushing down on my torso, trying to steady me, get me back on the bed. “Hey! Calm down! We’re here to help,” there’s a jab of something in my shoulder and I relax back into the temper foam bed. Bent back straightening out, gripped fists releasing, jaw unclenching.

“W-what?” I manage, my tongue half hanging out my mouth. “Who the hell are you, where am I?” my head flops to the side as whatever the guy injected me with goes to work.

I can’t move but my eyes still dart, moving around the room taking in what I can.

I’m inside some medical suite, but there’s something off, I can tell, even here, pumped full of muscle relaxant and strapped down. This is no place that the Salvagers would have, the tech and general cleanliness is way beyond anything they could pull together. Did the Anger Club get me? Kilgore find me?

“W-where the hell is this?” I say, real slow as my eyes keep darting. There’s a round skylight in the ceiling and I focus through the muscle relaxant onto what’s the other side. My jaw’s already lax and my mouth already agape as the curve of a giant green and blue disc set deep against a purple black sky and a sprinkling of stars comes into focus.

“Shit,” I whisper.

“You going to calm down now?” the guy says, coming into my field of vision, blocking out the window.

“Off world?” I say.

He laughs, strong face, rows of implants over his shaven skull, a medical uniform with rows of glinting medals and insignia’s, nothing like I’ve ever seen before.

“Call me Flint,” he says in a low voice and smiles, kind eyes despite the hard exterior. “You put up quite the fight, but that’s the reason we want you here.”

I pull my head back around, laying on my back, staring up at the white ceiling with the skylight off to my right. My eyes close and I give myself a moment, focusing on my breath, memories coming back, what happened there? Making my way across the Badlands, the fighting, relentless, hordes of Salvagers, once they got wind of what I’d done to their pals, they all came after me. All of them.

It wasn’t a fight; it was a god-damned armed-conflict. The horror, my tentacles doing their thing, as best they could. Hopping in and out of trauma pods, repairing what I could when I could. Death riding high and coming after me quick, a trail of bodies piling up as I went. Guns flaring, the fog of war, blood and viscera, the stench of fear and then…a last stand.

On my knees, ready to sink away from it all, find peace amongst the savage scenes before…a ship, everything goes dark but there’s a ship.

Looking up, the light and heat blasting down from its massive propulsion systems, huge guns pushing themselves out of opening doorways and flaring up.

Their heavy sound constant and tearing through the last waves of Salvagers before they realise they’re out gunned and start their retreat.

The immense roaring from the jump-ship’s engines as it came down next to me. I pull whatever I have left together to take on whatever or whoever was coming for me.

“Calm down,” Flint says, hand on my shoulder. “You were right, you are off-world.”

“Shit,” I say again. “Why?”

“We’ve been watching you, we wanted to get to you sooner but we couldn’t afford to expose ourselves when you had your fight with the Anger Club.”

“What?” I say, sharp now, my tongue coming back under my control now.

“Who do you think fed Kilgore the info you needed to take out a warrior like the Merovech? You’re with a higher power now.”

“Higher power?” my brow furrows and eyes squint. “I’m dead?”

Flint laughs and with that kind smile says. “No, Jess. We are Fractal, for we are many and we are one. We are recruiting you.”

“The Fractals?” I swallow hard, flickers of memory coming through.

“Stay calm, that muscle relaxant will wear off in a few minutes. I’d rather not have to give you another dose.”

I manage a small nod trying to process everything that’s coming down on me.

“You know who we are?” Flint asks.

I push myself up a little straighter now the relaxant is thinning out, meet his eyes. “Heard the fairy-tales, things you hear when you’re a kid, when you’re an adult too I guess.”

“What did you hear?”

“You grow up in the Badlands you and the other kids tell each other these stories, you know? Try to find some hope in a hopeless place. Fractals were another part of that. Fighters for truth and justices throughout the galaxies,” I huff a small laugh but he’s not reacting. “Some super soldier fighting force gone rogue. That old genetic engineering story they’ve been telling to kids for generations. Off-world, fighting in the colonies, these soldiers rise up, make their own claim, beat back their oppressors, take their stake in the new world and fight to keep it. It’s myth, made up shit kids tell each other, especially kids in the Badlands with no hope and no dreams.”

“Some of it is myth, some of it is legend, but not all of it and some of the reality is even harder to believe.”

I’m quiet for a while. “Yeah well, right now I’m having a tough time believing anything other than this being some hallucination induced by overdosing on painkillers in a trauma pod somewhere in the Badlands.”

“No, Jess. You are off-world, and we are very real.”

I sit up now, able to straighten myself out, look up and out of the skylight, the Earth hundreds of miles below spinning the way I’d always imagined it would.

“Say I believe you, what’s your interest in someone like me?”

“Well, Jess, you’re a fighter.”

“Yeah,” I say and let it drift out of my mouth, still staring up at that world through the porthole.

“We keep our eyes out for people like you.”

“People like me?” I say.

“People who might not be born into it, but regardless life drags them into it. It pushes them through it, they have to do it, and even then, even when it goes against every instinct they have, they are good at it. Are better than good at it. Excel at it.”

“Excel at what?” I turn my head back to him.

“The fight, Jess, and you exceed expectation every time.”

My eyes go wide for a second and I can feel my hands gripping into the cushion of the temper-foam mattress. My jaw tenses and in a low voice I say, “I never wanted this.”

“We know, and so we watched you. You never wanted this, but despite that, you’ve done so much, come so far. Imagine what you could do if you had a reason to do it beyond trying to stay alive one more fight, beyond trying to escape Kilgore. Imagine if you had a cause.”

“A cause?” I flicker of courage comes back, my limbs free of the relaxant now, sensation pulsing through them, aware of my tentacles twitching in my back.

“A cause,” he stands and looks out of the skylight, back to me as the straps come away from my limbs and torso.

My fists grip, there’s something in me twitching, an anger, a resentment, could I kill him right now? They’ve repaired me, could I fight and find a way out of here, wherever here is, whatever here is?

“You want to get back down there, Jess?” he points up at the Earth in its slow spin hundreds of miles down below.

I stay quiet.

“You want fend for yourself, see what you can make of your life there in Major Prime? You think you can fight your way out of here, even now, hundreds of miles above the only place you know, off-world, you’re fuelled for the fight, for your freedom, and we know how much of a cause that is,” he turns back to me, hands clasped behind his back. “Look, you’re welcome to go back down there, we won’t keep you, this is not a prison, we are not like Kilgore and the fight gangs. We are Fractal, we are many and one, and we have a choice for you. We want you to understand this choice so we hope you will listen.”

“Heard this shit before,” I say with a stare. “Didn’t like it then, not sure if I like it now. Kidnapping people and asking them to fight for you? Got some cause have you? Seems all too familiar.”

“I said the same thing once,” he squints at me, raising his jaw. “How old do you think I am?”

“No idea,” I shrug. “Same as Kilgore I guess, forty, something like that?”

“I’m over three-hundred years old, Jess. Our legend is strong, and we are true, we’ve been doing this for generations and you have a big decision to make.”

“Yeah, a big decision? Life’s full of them right?”

“Not like this one,” he takes a step over to me, eyebrows raised.

“Well, what is it?” I say.

“Do you fight for your freedom, or the freedom of others?”

“That simple, huh?” I say swinging my legs around off the bed.

“That simple.”

I stand and meet his gaze, about a foot shorter than him, bare feet on the cold tiled floor, a little wobble but able to stop myself from falling. “And what if I choose my own?”

“Then you’re free to head back down there,” he points up at the skylight, the world spinning at the end of his fingertip. “And make what you can of your life.”

“What’s the catch?” I say.

He huffs a small laugh. “No catch, Jess. You can go, be free, fight your own fight, but I’ll tell you now what they told me back then. If you fight for the freedom of others, you will be freer than you can ever imagine.”

I keep my eye fixed on the Earth there, hundreds of miles below, flickers of the Badlands run through my thought, Major Prime, the Anger Club, my life and how many countless more must be like it. “Freedom,” I whisper.

“You got it,” he says.

BEEPLE: PHOTONICS

Life, most reckon you get to decide, get to make these decisions, take these choices, but who knows which ones to take? What are you supposed to decide on? Use your reason, use intellect, try to do something for yourself that will hurt or have a negative impact on the least amount of people around you, right?

Shit.

Who knows why you decide on one path rather than the other. Could be that stuff, could be a lot of other reasons. Things done to you, things you’ve done, circumstances you’ve found yourself in, a smile from a friend, a hug from a relative, a fist to the face from an Anger Club trainer, the stitches and nanografting of skin over torn muscle with no anaesthesia. It all adds up and then, at some point there comes a major juncture. Not something small, nothing every day, it’s something monumental, something once in a lifetime, something that changes everything.

What was I back then? Some kid that taken in, turned into a fighting machine by some T>O

There at that moment, Flint standing next to me in the medical bay as we looked out the skylight window and watched the spaceships buzzing passed thinking of all those people down on Earth. That moment when I had a choice, my freedom or theirs, to fight for myself or for something bigger. That was one of those moments and that was two-hundred years ago now.

I stepped up.

They took me through the rites, one step at a time, and with each step it became harder, and with each step I became wiser, and with each step I wanted it more. Wanted that thing, to fight for freedom. Wanted that power, the power that I never had and was always being used against me. I wanted to feel it, and with each step I took towards it, the Fractals knew to wrap me across the knuckles and make sure I knew what I found within myself. What I was gathering up in me, and what I would use it for.

What I had in me, what I had in front of me.

Years and years and years. I laughed at myself when I thought back on the training for the Anger Club, what Kilgore put me through. Simple shit, no problem, child’s play.

See, the battle back there was always easy because it was with someone else. Some other thing or person, and I had no choice. They placed me there, and it was do or die. I had a battle; I had a fight; it was right in front of me, I could see it, feel its fists against my body, understand its rage against my being, know its fear and use it against it.

Like I said, easy.

When they brought me up in front of the Tannhäuser Gate and the Fractal Lords performed their rites. That’s when I came to know what real hardship was, that’s when I came to find the real battle.

That moment is when the real fun began, because it showed me what the biggest fight was, what the ultimate battle was, what my biggest enemy was. It wasn’t anything I’d face on the outside; it would always be what I’d face on the inside.

It was me. It is me.

Then it came, another choice, the choice to face it, to face them, her, me, I.

That’s when the real fight began, so I stepped up and the real work began.

Now, after all these years fighting that thing within me, what have I learned, why have they released me, how did I become a Fractal True?

It didn’t come during any weapons training; it didn’t happen in the simulated theatres of war or in the physics and weaponry and metallurgy classes. No, it happened when it needed to happen, and when I was sitting and breathing.

Breathing.

That epiphany, that revelation, the battle will always be there, no matter how hard you fight. That internal struggle is one fight you can never win but you can come to understand it. Do not fight it, negotiate with it. Do not kill it, live with it. Align with it, work with it, and you will have more strength than you ever thought imaginable.

That was a hundred years ago now, and I’m still learning, still facing that battle every day, the one within, still understanding, but that’s what makes this shit easy.

I look up, the gigantic Cosmic Samurai mech warlord standing there in the rubble of the decimated city, and a smile grows across my face.

A brilliant purple-red fire rages around his monstrous torso, smoke billowing, his formidable laughter echoing over me, reverberating through my chest.

“They sent you?” he says with an epic growl, his voice as colossal as his stature. There’s contempt there, but he’s still drawn his gigantic Katana, and still posed steady in a fighting stance. “Only you?”

I laugh back, tentacles scratching, my blade at my side. This is the easy part because I have that internal strength, I am Fractal; we are many and one.

“This will be fun,” I say as my tentacles explode out of my back, the fight for the freedom of others is here, the battle within fuelling me as I step forward.

BEEPLE: RESISTANCE

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #11 was originally published in NEON & CONCRETE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #10

Neon & Concrete — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 13:11:29 GMT

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #10

Hope is a Prison

Ozhichige: RE//ACH

I look down at her gaunt, ruined face as she tries to rest on my lap. Her sunken flesh is draped over her battered cheekbones making small mounds of sorrow, casting weak shadows underneath her eye sockets in the low light.

Faint twitches occur under her translucent eyelids. She’s in a deep sleep now, and in whatever form they might be, dreams have come for her. I doubt they will be kind, as they have not been for some time. I cannot understand what they are or what they mean to her. Sometimes, she tries to describe them to me when she has the energy, but the expression of a human dream to anyone outside of the experience itself is futile. For me, it seems like a brush with what they might call the soul, and how to recognise that; where would I possibly begin? Humans cannot even understand them themselves, how could an Arti fathom that place?

The one thing that I do understand is that in this world, she suffers. So, I care for her, I try to, it is what I am designed to do, but her addiction makes it hard. Harder than my designers or programmers ever thought it would be, and it is even harder than the world outside cares to know.

She sleeps on my lap, her bony face looking up at me, and I run my fingers across her forehead. Her vital signs have stabilised, which for her, must be a welcome relief. The thunderous sound her heart makes in my auditory system when she is in the throes of withdrawal causes me what humans might describe as pain. It facilitates the negative-feedback-loops that make me pursue the ways and means to help alleviate what she is experiencing. When I cannot, it is painful.

She is often in pain, so, as am I.

I run my fingers through her thinning hair, what’s left of it on her balding and irritated scalp, another result of the drug. All that she is now, whatever remains of her, is because of the drug. They call it T>O

I don’t want Jen to die. Aside from my initial programming, my reason for being, my design as an artificial carer, an Arti, I can learn particular things. I have specific artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness capabilities, as do many of us Arties, which means I can acquire a certain amount of my own wisdom. It is with that wisdom I have come to understand that Jen, this withered conglomerate of unfortunate atoms lying in my lap, is good. Was good. Once.

I look around the bare room, the soft hues of neon from the mega-skyscrapers outside pushing their way through the broken blinds of the single window in the living area of the small apartment. There’s not much to it, but it was once well furnished and equipped with the latest tech housed in the many small compartments dotted about the walls. It once had food stocked up in the fridge and calls and all manner of social media notices coming through the communications systems. That life was not that long ago. It was early after the crash that her insurance company put the initial down payment on me so I could care of her as her spinal readjustments took hold and she needed the type of help, which she had no human companion to provide.

Now everything in the apartment is bare and dirty and broken, the blue light of the dawn breaking across the city from outside creeps through and casts shadows across her gaunt and dried face, not much left now, of this place, or her.

I run my fingers down her once sharp nose, the millions of nano-sensors I have in my tips pulling a plethora of readings, all of them wrong, all of them flashing red bars across my peripheral vision, all of them causing those negative-feedback-loops, all of them causing me pain.

I have access to all the latest studies and information and psychology on T>O

There’s a flash of green in my vision, and I look back down, she’s stirring, her heart rate is increasing, the real-world is flooding back into her consciousness with all its pain. I consider whether it will be worse than what came for her in her dreams. There is no way for me to know other than from what she tells me, from the mood that she awakes into.

At one time, she would wake, and a smile would pull itself across her mouth and requests would come in for my assistance, and I would help, and we would get her ready and going for the day. Day after day. But then a complication with her spinal rehabilitation came, and then pain, growing, unrelenting, hers and therefore mine.

Her eyelids peel themselves back, millimetre-by-millimetre, the low light that creeps in from outside still too much for her aching eyes. The pace of her breath increases with each mucus laden huff from her withered lungs.

Her eyes draw in the information of the world, feeding her ruptured and bruised brain. Moments pass and the terror of life is revealed to that thing which might be called her soul. That essence I cannot know but have come to learn must exist, at least in her. Humans have hope, it is a desire for something to happen in the future, so this is what I hope, that she is still in there. Something of her original self, the one I first met is still in this desolate shell of flesh, some part of her true nature still exists, and that I might still access it, and that I might even help her to obtain it so that she can become whole again.

Ozhichige: VEILED

The shakes begin, the groans come, and the calls and the cries. She shivers in my lap, bringing her arms up into her chest and begins to weep. She is sweating and starts to claw at her fragile skin with her brittle fingernails, scraping at the lesions on her balding scalp.

I grab her wrists and move over her, pinning her down arms above her head as I kneel over her chest. Her eyes open wide and a wildfire of fury and fear leaps from her as she screams and struggles with me.

This is our usual routine after she has managed to get some sleep, it often lasts for a few minutes until her sense of self kicks in, begins to override the addiction. The sensors in my hands that are wrapped around her wrists pick up on all the activity they can and my heads-up-display flashes with red for every possible readout. It pulls and gnaws at what might be called my mind. My own sense of self-being hammered by the negative-feedback-loops, I hurt, for her, for myself.

“Jen,” I say as her weak struggle becomes weaker and then stops.

She looks up at me, her eyes levelling out, the look on her face crawling away from anger and into sadness. “Arti, I’m sorry,” she says.

“You don’t need to be, Jen. I am here for you.”

“I’m thirsty.”

I stand and help her sit up against the nearest wall before I move off to the small kitchenette area and pour her a glass of water.

I bring it back, she’s sat there; still, arms draped by her sides, legs out in front of her, half covered by the big, old t-shirt she is wearing. The t-shirt is ripped and covered in blood and excrement. However, there is nothing else left for her to wear in the apartment. This place that once used to be full of all those things, but is now just as barren as her.

“Thank you, Arti,” she manages to whisper as I hold the glass to her mouth and she sips. I know this won’t last long, the figment of her previous self that somehow pulls its way through in these first moments after rest. The moments that give me hope.

“How do you feel?” I say, knowing through my sensors what is happening to her, but that affection, it helps her and therefore me.

“I might be able to manage today,” she says as she shifts. “I need to go to the toilet.”

I pick up her delicate frame with ease, carry her over to the small shower/toilet room. I try to keep things as clean and as sanitary as possible, but any money she does manage to acquire goes straight to the drug. The shower room is covered in a layer of filth that I can do nothing about, and I sit her down on the half-broken toilet, and she groans and quivers as she evacuates what’s left inside her from the small amount she was able to eat yesterday.

I try to clean her, pad her under a soft jet of lukewarm water with the small piece of sponge we have left, before moving her back into the living area and onto the broken couch and stepping to the side to monitor her. The comms screen embedded in the wall opposite fizzes and comes to life as she jabs at the cracked tablet beside her. Some cartoons come on, and she lays there and breathes, perhaps today won’t be so bad, then a message comes through.

She opens it, and the text on the screen reads:

Jen,

Your father has done well at his recent auction, and we thought you deserved a treat for doing so well with your rehabilitation, we’ve transferred a few credits to you.

All our love

Mom and Pop

This is bad. I turn to her, and her eyes have gone wide as she picks up the tablet and on her lap prods at it, bringing up her bank account to check how much her parents have transferred. She has managed to keep this from them, all this, the terrible decline. This is how fast all this has happened, this is how quickly her life has been ravaged by this drug, for which I too am to blame.

“Arti,” she says, a quiver in voice, her heart rate is reaching dangerous levels.

“Jen, please try to remain calm, your heart is fragile,” I take a step toward her.

“Arti,” she turns to me, looking at me with that fire in her eyes, but it’s not her igniting it, it’s the addiction, and I know exactly what is coming. “You need to go out for me, you need to pick-up for me, you need to do this for me, Arti,” a faint ripple of anger in her closing words.

“I cannot, Jen. I cannot do it any more, you are too weak, another run might kill you. We need to use the money to help your rehabilitation, for food and medicine and — ”

“You fucking know what you need to do you piece of shit robot!” she screams and pushes herself to her feet, stood, a shaking hand pointing at me. “You’re the fucking one that did this to me, you’re the one that started all this shit!”

I stand in front of her, and we remain silent for a long time.

She was in so much pain. Therefore, I was also in pain. The complications with her spinal injury from the crash meant her rehabilitation wasn’t working and that conventional medicine didn’t seem to have the required effects.

For all they have created, for as far as they can dream, for as much as humans can do and as much as humans can repair themselves, there are still mysteries within them, challenges they cannot overcome.

“Why me?” she would ask. I had no answer. I had not been operational for long and for all that I’ve learnt since then, there is still nothing I can say.

With the current medication options for her drying up and her insurance company also complicating the issue of payment to the hospitals, I was then bought outright by her parents so I could not be taken away. As the hospitals care withdrew, so did she and I and my care for her grew to become all that she had left. When I too ran out of conventional options, she was desperate, which meant that I was also desperate. I went underground to see if anything there might be able to help.

That is where I found T>O

It is a common street drug in many regards, but with some remarkable qualities that provide dramatic pain relief to people with dramatic complications, but of course, there were side effects to be considered. We discussed the options, and we believed that under my supervision and with her not being what we had naively called, ‘a typical drug addict,’ that we could micro-dose the drug and give her back some sort of life as we continued to research other progressive opportunities. We could make it work so that we could continue exploring more conventional methods, examining the new techniques and methodologies that might one day aid towards a full recovery. She believed it could help, and all I wanted to do was help, both her and myself. This was six short weeks ago now.

“I’ll go, Jen,” I say, still all those red warnings flashing in my vision, all that hurt running through my code. “Maybe we can do some research when you are feeling better.”

“Just do what you need to do,” she says and falls back on to the ruined couch, her ravaged body absorbed by it, the cartoons coming back onto the flickering screen, casting their light across her ruined frame.

I walk out of the apartment into the plush corridors of the mega-skyscraper. Jen’s parents take care of the rent while she ‘recovers,’ and is ‘in-between jobs’. She maintains the lie and the suffering continues. I am compelled to try and tell them, but she knows what to do, she knows how to provoke my negative-feedback-loops, I relent, and we remain, the two of us, in pain.

I look left and right, ambient lighting running for dozens of meters in both directions, cameras embedded in the ceiling tracking me as a small hovering drone comes buzzing up to me.

Ozhichige: ENTER

“Hello, Arti, designation 81712, is there anything I can assist you with today?”

“Hello, Arti, designation 221199, no, thank you I am going out for some groceries and other supplies.” Lies, all of it, I have become good at telling them.

The drone flashes a small light twice and flies off down the corridor to its docking station as I make my way to the Arti elevator. These are fixed to the outside of the gigantic mega-skyscraper and run at extreme speeds.

I step into the clear Perspex tube, the belts wind themselves around me at my shins, waist and forehead, and there’s a moment there where I look out across the city. From the 263rd floor, there is a good view of the urban landscape, we’re about three-quarters of the way up the building. Today is a clear day, the morning sun rides high across the metropolis, making the millions of windows glitter and sparkle.

This vast experiment, the meta-city, a heterogeneous, dynamic urban region with multiple dense centres across its intervening suburbs and embedded green spaces. Yes, this grand experiment that has worked so well, for the majority of people anyway. However, I know how wrong it can go, when the plan does not adhere, I can see how hard this beautiful world can come crashing down.

The tube jets me down the 263 floors to the lower levels, which is about three-quarters of a mile straight down and it takes a few seconds. I pull a few Gs as the brakes are put on at the bottom but its nothing that my frame cannot handle. The tube slides open, and the populace of the urban meta-city environment are revealed to me.

If I could feel sick, I think that this is what would be the given designation of the feedback loops which are currently spinning through my coding. If I could feel guilt, I believe that is how humans would describe the flickers of electricity that are sparking through my brain at this very second.

The bright world, the people, with their Arti’s following them, caring for them, providing them with everything they want and need, and then there is me. The point where it has all gone wrong. I consider how many other Arties are hiding their own ruined humans in apartments across the metropolis. How many others are also caught in their own negative-feedback-loop that was supposed to ensure that the human subject was cared for, and how many others have found themselves trapped?

I step out of the tube and into the throng of happy people and their Arti’s. Most are small drones that buzz above, and around their owner, some walk beside them in a humanoid or a quadruped fashion. The layered walkways between the hulking towers all around heave with them and their masters. Above and below and alongside, people moving in and out of each other, glittering with their vibrant colours, glowing with their smiles and laughter.

Most Arties provide a basic level of services and are treated more like pets with benefits, an essential friend, a personal assistant, we provide companionship to a degree, and we make life easier for them, and this was the bottom-line of the revolution. The vast majority of humanity is better, healthier, kinder, happier due to our kind and our services. However, there is still an underground element, what I have read to be called the ‘forgotten few’. For most alive today, their lives have become more comfortable, cleaner, longer, healthier, smarter, brighter, and they can enjoy more fruitful and meaningful lives through us, the advent of AI. But, this is the reason why our AI aptitude is limited or restricted.

We enjoy what we do, and we are programmed not to enjoy not doing it. In the case of a caregiver Arti like myself, where there is the need to be adaptive and understand complex medical issues, the ability to learn is increased, and our AI capabilities are more extensive. In these circumstances, where the incorrect application of my functions could lead to the death of a human, the capacity to experience pain is also within our AI’s capabilities, to ensure that we do what we are supposed to do, as far as possible.

So far, no unnatural deaths have been reported in the years where the caregiving Arties have been assisting humans. I suspect that I might soon be the exception. Or perhaps they will cover it up, the same as others that may have occurred.

Mine and Jen’s situation has gone beyond anything that I can objectively understand or profile against other experiences. From supplying her with the idea through to giving her the first dose, to now, where her withered body is choked by continual agony, all I have done is try to help, but it has gone wrong, so very wrong.

There are a few other carer Arties that I can see in the local vicinity, I am getting dozens of pings per second from all of them as they pass by me. Small exchanges of data and information take place on a wide variety of subjects which I have broadcast that I am open to receiving. However, I have closed off my wider broadcast channels, which I put out via a service message saying that I have a malfunction and require maintenance. I do this, so they do not expect any further data or information from me.

I make my way through the smiling people, who are all hooked into their feeds, healthy and content, and their every need is taken care of by the AI revolution. They go about their business oblivious, concerned only by their immediate surroundings, they seem indifferent to anything beyond them. I can try and understand why, I have been watching, learning on these trips that I have had to make frequently over the past six weeks. These humans all have their own lives, whole and clean, the revolution has worked. I can see the other care Arties around me pinging their information on how successful they have been with looking after their humans, what I might be able to learn, but I keep my channels closed, and head focused on my destination. The negative-feedback-loop I am trapped in is what overrides any rationality that I possess, the idea of speaking out and seeking help is disregarded, just like how Jen is stuck in her world of addiction.

We are now a pair, we are irrational together, imprisoned in our own terrifying bubble, locked into each other. I am reliant on trying to support Jenny’s recovery, Jenny is reliant on my support. It is the way it should be, but it has gone so very wrong. Once the addiction came, the relationship deteriorated so rapidly. We have found ourselves in this unknown place where I was never meant to be, where Jen was never meant to see.

Ozhichige: ICED

I find the door to the usual maintenance shaft which I utilise to gain access to the sub-levels of the city. It’s hidden, and as I step into the shadows cast by the overhangs of concrete and steel, I begin to disappear from this world. The door opens, and after using a quick hack, I found online, and I step backwards and down onto the ladder as it shuts. The other world, beneath me, begins to reveal itself.

I move down the ladder and the noises coming from underneath me grow with each step. They are very familiar by now, from my previous trips here, and from what I experience with Jen. Cries of pain in a world that has become so good at alleviating it. The hurt of an earlier time, the past. It was not that long ago that things were very different. I can only interpret what I have been able to learn, what the scholars of the day said, what the politicians of today preach, that idea that there would always be a divide, there always will be, but it still seems senseless. There was once a short period when some people above fought it, but as their lives became what they are today, more and more people forgot, until the cause was ultimately lost.

When I come here, I know my programming and sense of self is locked into Jen’s life, but the suffering that surrounds me gnaws at me. There is a part of me that wishes I could help. They are not homeless, they are forgotten, but to me, I find it hard to see the difference.

Walking down the tunnel, I move through this other world filled with the forgotten people. These people either didn’t fit into the system before the revolution or could not or would not find a way to fit into it after it began. I am not a politician or a philosopher, so I do not know or understand the complicated dynamics of building a new world. Yet, how could it have worked when this still exists?

I walk among the community they have made, this under-class and I pick up on many prying eyes. I stand out here due to my soft, white shell of a body among the filth-laden darkness of this life.

“Ah, my good friend,” says the dealer as I approach him.

“Pollock, let’s make this quick,” I say as I come to stand in front of him. He is tall and fair skinned, and I scanned him in the past when we first met. He has several STDs, and if he was on the surface, they could have been cleared up without any issues. There are also possible solutions down here, on the black market of which he is a part, but for whatever reason, he does not seek them out.

He pushes forward a tray with the micro jet-injectors and smiles at me with broken teeth. “Same as usual?” he asks.

“Double today,” I say, due to the amount of money we have received from Jen’s parents.

Pollock’s smile grows wider, he nods and raises his eyebrows as he turns away from me, his ragged clothes following him as he rummages in a space behind him. He comes back out and hands me the drug, I transfer the money via the blockchain, and he smiles and nods again, and I turn to leave.

Going back through the tunnels, alongside the people going about their lives, small jobs and services, small schools where a new generation of underground children learn the basics of mathematics and language alongside their place in the world. It is not all horror, there are still some smiles down here. They have made their own communities, and to a degree, they work. They have some computational power to help them on their way, but the revolution was supposed to make things better for all. I walk with the T>O

I emerge from the shaft to the meta-city, it has not noticed I was gone, nor has it considered where I might have been, or what I am now carrying. It went about its business as it has done since the revolution, the Arties doing their jobs, the people pursuing their happiness, their focus is clear. They do not look around themselves, they do not see the world beneath them. They are clean and pure and have everything they want. If the majority are this way, is that enough? They have forgotten their past, and this would seem the greatest threat to them now.

I arrive back at the tube on the outside of the mega-skyscraper. Stepping in the jet-injectors in my thigh’s compartment rattle before the silence as the machine fires me up into the sky, revealing the meta-city to me once again. The drones buzzing between buildings, delivering what they have been designated to, people being carried around in their little pods between their destinations. The sky awake with all their potential and possibilities. This wondrous example of humanity, everything that it has gone through and everything it has achieved and all I can do is turn away from it.

I walk down the vibrant corridor, the ambient light reflecting, the small service drone buzzing up to me until I let it know that I don’t require any help from it. I arrive back at the door to the apartment, it slides open, and I walk inside, into the darkness, the filth, the degradation.

Ozhichige: GLITTER//BOMB

“Jen?” I say to no answer as I step into the small living area, and I see her there, spread out on the couch, her emaciated body still. My negative-feedback-loops kick in and my brain lights up with a terrible fire.

Walking over to her, the light of the cracked comms-screen flickers with dark green and the room pulses in time. My visual readouts begin to tell me the story and the fire which has been ignited in my mind rages even hotter. Infra-red imaging is showing me her body temperature is low, too low. My servos kick, and I leap the last few feet to her, I pull her back on to my lap, just the same as she was only hours ago, and run my hands across her chest and head.

There are no vital signs.

My mind is a furnace of terrible heat.

She is dead.

Everything that I can gather from my nano-sensors indicates that she most likely died soon after I left the apartment from cardiac arrest.

I fall back, onto the filth-ridden carpet, my head thumps and bounces a few times, I am paralysed with pain, a fire that burns through every part of me. For a moment, I consider if this is what it felt like for her, with her addiction, if this is the fire that she was trying to put out, and what I had started.

As the inferno rages in me and paralyses me, I can see I am being closed down, turned off, subroutines going dark, systems being deactivated. I consider that there is a fail-safe inside me somewhere, for this exact circumstance, if my human dies under my care.

The fire is all-consuming, and everything that it touches turns to black dust. An emptiness I have never experienced. With the last moments I have before I am terminated, I try to look back on her. Jen, the soul to which I was bound, the soul I hoped I could help, to elevate her from all the pain, all her suffering, and how I failed. The knot we tied ourselves too, her pain and my pain working in and off each other. Terminally bound.

Maybe I will be returned now, my experiences and memories pulled apart? Perhaps, what Jen and I had to suffer through will help the future, to prevent this from happening again. Hope is a desire for something to happen in the future, I hoped that I might perform my job well, I hope that I might have seen the purity of Jen once again, free from her addiction. It was a monster that I couldn’t understand, it was a demon she could not fight. All I can hope now is that those who find me can help those others that I believe are also out there. Those that have been lost behind closed doors, not able to understand, not able to retreat, not able to be rational in the face of that beast of addiction. Those that have been forgotten by a world that works so well in every other regard. Humans forget all too soon. They forget where they came from and where they might go back to if they do not continue to care for each other. I hope they remember.

Ozhichige: PONDER

Artist: Jon Ojibway AKA Ozhichige

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozhichige/

Writer: Richard Galbraith

Writer medium: https://medium.com/@ricgalbraith

Musical Inspiration:

https://medium.com/media/c8fc13af9546eaa97bb32d84917df5a0/href

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #10 was originally published in NEON & CONCRETE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #09

Neon & Concrete — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 13:29:36 GMT

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #09

The Profession of Violence

BEEPLE: MEGATROXPOLIS

“Not much of a man,” I say as I stand and shake my head clear of dust and rubble in the middle of the demolished room.

It’s full of dead bodies, but only one of them counts.

I look down at him laid out on the floor, half his face torn off by the blast that ripped through here, a sullen look of detached sadness on the half that remains.

He saved me.

I stare at him and breathe, the dust and smoke still settling, my heart still hammering. The monotone ring in my ears and the taste of ash and soot clinging hard to the back of my throat.

Blue and purple neon hues crawl through the broken window off to my right and cut through the ash as I watch it. Millions of little particles, swirling and spinning and finding their way to the place where they now belong.

His dead body on the ground in front of me, it’s found a new place in the world. “Not much of a man,” I say again. “I wasn’t much in the first place, without you I’m nothing at all.”

The ringing in my ears lifts, and the silence of the room comes screaming in around me. I breathe and watch the air twist and turn, and all those particles move off to their new home. Time for me to move off now too, to somewhere out there. That city that goes on ticking the way it always has, always will. Major Prime, a couple of billion people crammed down and shoved into what was North America, now…I don’t know. It’s some thick mess, human meat, neon, concrete, all mixed in and bound. Where am I supposed to go in the middle of all that?

“I could do with some answers, Mitch,” I say and blink a tear that rolls real slow, caught in the soot and ash on my cheek.

The half of him that’s still here looks up, sad and tired. “Being hard isn’t about fighting, being hard is about carrying on,” he’d tell me, something like that.

“No, not much of a man,” I say, and I try to move, but my legs won’t give. Fixed on the ground, his body next to them, the rest of the fuckers that came at us in bits scattered across the room. Can’t walk away, not yet.

I look up and into the light pushing its way through the broken window, the neon tones of the world out there waiting for me.

“They will come for you now,” he’d say. “Get out while you can. Get under the radar while they’re still wondering what the fuck went down. You run now, you’ve got a chance. This ain’t no life worth living.”

Yeah, no life worth living. Not now, he’s gone. I know what he would want me to do; I know he’d want me to save myself.

I sniff and shake my head.

That will not happen.

My feet move, then my legs shift. “Never was much of a man,” I say to him, “You tried to make me something better, show me something better, but I can’t let this one rest.” I bite my lip and shake my head. “Without you, I’m nothing anyway.”

I breathe, bury down the ball in my throat.

The ash and smoke are gone now, the neon from that world out there radiating with all its potential, my jaw pulses and fists grip.

“Dial: Kat Hammer,” I say to my HUD, and her avatar appears in my peripheral vision for a few seconds.

“Mag,” she answers, eyes going wide as my HUDcam streams to her. “What the fuck’s happened, Mag? Where’s Mitch?”

“Dead.”

“What the — ”

“Lizard Gang. Hard strike, unexpected,” I pinch the bridge of my nose, squeeze the last tears out of my eyes and rub the soot and dust off my face. “He saved me.”

“Fuck.”

“I’m going after her,” I say.

“Blackstone? You’ll get yourself — ”

“ — Doesn’t matter, he’s dead, I got nothing else now.”

“Mag, you think Mitch would want that for you?”

“This is a mess, Kat. Fucking Lizard Gang? It’s amateur hour over there, this was a botched job whichever way you look at it, and now Mitch is dead, and I can’t let that ride.”

“Get out, Mag. Get the fuck out now, or you’ll end up dead too.”

“Listen, I need a re-up. Send a drone to my Pill Street locker, full kit, no more talk, do it,” I say as I turn and leave the destroyed room and start making my way down through the building. People out in the corridors staring at me, eyes forget to blink, watching me with a quiver as I pass.

“Mag, I don’t have that — ”

“Fucking do it!” I snap and see her pull back in the vid-feed, wide eyes, bad vibrations. “I gotta do this, Kat.”

“It’ll be there,” she says. “I’ll send the drone now.”

The vidfeed goes dead as I make my way out of the apartment block, back out onto the streets. The world hangs in front of me, glittering the way it always does. The lights casting their neon glaze over the layered roads and sidewalks that reach up into the sky between the towering buildings. That thickness to the air, I can rub it between my fingers. The humidity that mixes in with the pollution and sweat down here on the street level, penetrating me, polluting me, every part of me. People walk their walk, eyes squint and track everything, hands twitch, ready for something bad. Major Prime…

My HUD draws up its augmented reality layer over the top and my noise-cancelling kicks in. Takes the edge off one reality, invades my senses with the other. Commercial Space, layers and layers of shit from the corps tailored to whoever it was we hacked this HUD from. All the, “Change your life with this!” and the, “Imagine the possibilities with that!” bullshit, but at least I’m kept off the grid. It’s whoever the fuck, ‘Shigeaki Ishiguro,’ was that the commercial modules embedded in every nook imaginable track.

I march into the throng, thick with every type of citizen, criminal and outlaw Major Prime offers at this level. Twisted T>O

I push into, and through them, the world moves for a man who knows where he’s going, and that I do. Three things now.

Get to my locker, pick up what Kat has delivered. Pull a speed-cycle to the Lizard Gang bar, lucky for me those ballsy fuckers hide out in the open. Get in, hit it, hit it hard.

I turn the corner to Pill Street, quiet little place, all violet neon haze and old-time Japanese restaurants. Those who know, know, those who don’t wouldn’t assume anything untoward happens in this place. Shadows cast by the hulking skyscrapers all around, rain falls. Ground level old school city infrastructure works its way overhead. Might even be worth a snap to a tourist if they happened to be down here amongst the dregs on the ground level.

BEEPLE: PURPLE RAIN

It’s a facade, a mask that covers what happens down here. The criminal underbelly of this sector of Major Prime doing their deals and working away at trying to secure their own bit of the swathe.

As soon as I’m a few yards into the street, I catch two thug looking types in the corner of my eye. Big fuckers, leather vests, chains, spiked red mohawks, the usual drill. I eye them and offer a small nod, one comes back my way. Yeah, right, keep your distance fucker.

I come to the locker bank, look into the retinal reader at the end, and the door to mine pops open a few yards down.

I’m loading up the gear Kat has left for me when the tap on my shoulder comes, and there they are, the two big fuckers. “I thought you guys might have some sense,” I say, turning and looking up to meet their gaze.

“Well, we didn’t know it was your birthday,” one of them says gesturing at the locker and flashing a toothy gold-plated smile.

“You think you’re able to mug me…now?” I look down at the massive Colt-Canon in my right hand and then over to the Nano-webbing I’ve pulled over my left, then back up again. They both turn to each other, realising their mistake. “Not the quickest pair are you?”

“Wai — ” One manages before I bring my fist up into his big jaw. The Nano-webbing turns to steel around my knuckles and electrifies at the same time. It connects, the big fucker goes ridged with the shock as his jaw smashes and he flies backwards.

The other comes at me, but I’ve pulled out my Colt-Canon with my free hand. Arm shifting under the other I pump a round and his chest explodes, he screams and gargles, and they both hit the wet tarmac at the same time.

I step back, grimace and nod. At least I know this gear works.

I check over everything. Nano-webbing gloves are good enough to mash up any street level hoodlum. Two Colt-Canon-Nine-Nines with tac ammo that’ll do about anyone underneath some platinum-rated Corp Sec. And Kat came home for me with this last treat, a belt of reaper-grenades that’ll take a big stinking piss on any parade below military.

I walk around the bodies and push my way back into the throng of the main street. Finding a speed-cycle, I step over it, pull its helmet out of the casing in the body, push it down on my head. I shoot it a command, “Popskull Sports & Entertainment.”

I sit on the chunky one-seater as it pushes itself off the sidewalk. It moves and finds its way in, through a hoard of cars and delivery trucks and everything all doing their bit to keep the city running as usual.

BEEPLE: NIGHT STREAM

I dial-up Kat and she greets me with a scowl as her vidfeed pops up in my HUD.

“Get what you need?” she says.

“You came through for me,” I say. “I owe you one.”

“Like I’ll ever have the chance of cashing that in,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “Fuck it, thought it was the least I could do after all the times you and Mitch dragged me out of the shit.”

“Right,” I say, a flash of his half-destroyed face running through my mind, the rain coming down hard now, highlighting all that neon and purple. No, not much of a man.

“Thank you, Kat,” I say, lifting my head up, nodding as the speed-cycle buzzes through the streets. I turn off the feed before she has another chance to try to convince me that what I’m doing is suicide.

I know it’s suicide, but what the fuck, nothing else left to live for now. He’s the one that took me in, showed me the ropes. He’s the one that pulled a barely functioning T>O

That was one thing I never thought would happen. That steel exterior, hard-man of the streets, a hacker, robber, thief, outlaw, whatever the fuck you wanted to call him. He didn’t take shit, and he would fuck you up at the drop of a hat, but somehow, we became close. Time and pressure will do that to you, I guess. Pull you in and reform you, it creates bonds, and we went through some good times, but more of the bad. It’s not easy being an independent, up against the gangs, bidding for jobs, working a reputation out of nothing, and that’s without all the other shit. Without the Major Prime PD breathing down your neck, without Corp mercs after your ass. Without the fucking Agency agents and double agents and their AIs trying to pull you apart from the inside out whenever they get a chance.

No, no friends around here, let alone lovers, yet somehow we made it work. We pulled something out of the rot, something purer than I’d ever experienced, and when we found it, we knew we never wanted to let it go.

Well, now I’m here, and he’s gone, and I’m not much without him, but I reckon I’m enough to make sure his death doesn’t slip away in the night’s dark. Doesn’t become another statistic in a tsunami of data that some vast AI tries to correlate and pull into actionable tactics for the MP PD fuckheads. No, heads will roll, if that includes my own, then so be it.

The bike weaves in and out of the traffic with the speed I need, keeping itself upright and powering along the mainlines. Through the rain, through the hue, through all the shit and horror in the hulking buildings all around, taking me to my own sweet spot.

It comes growling up to the club, steam evaporating up off its engine with each raindrop that hits it. I pull off the helmet, and I step off, looking up at the giant flashing neon sign where the Lizard Gang host their HQ, they’re not subtle these fuckers. I guess if they were, I wouldn’t be coming to knock on their door right now.

I knock with a reaper-grenade from across the street. Pull the pin, throw, kneel and count.

Three, two, one.

BOOM.

BEEPLE: DUSTED

The door fucks itself inward at the speed of sound, and an explosion rips out into the street flinging rubble and body parts.

I march up, throw a Nano-cam through the smoke and get about a half a second of footage before some countermeasure flames it.

Enough to count fifteen of them, all armed to the teeth, staggering about in the dark, half tore up by the blast. Always outnumbered, never outgunned. I click through my HUD and select incendiary rounds on the Colt-Canons, a blaze of glory.

I step over the demolished threshold and into the hallway, long and narrow stretching out in front of me. Some old-school arcade machines still alive flicker halfway down where the blast didn’t reach. Lizard Gang thugs down at the end, big, ugly brutes, modern-day savages, and fucking disorganised. Things are about to get messy.

Messy is good.

Both Colts raised, the incendiary rounds flare and the rows of arcade machines erupt in flames followed by half a dozen Lizard Gang thugs as the screams roar alongside the fire. I push forward and down the hall into the blistering confusion. The ones left are halfway to getting their shit together when I land in the middle. Nano-webbed knuckles with two-foot steel spikes extending out of my swinging fists. I rip and tear through the bodies and screams. Blood fans out from split arteries, limbs drop to the floor, the fuckers slip and tumble in the dropped guts and viscera of their comrades.

What, twenty, thirty seconds? This shit’s always over way quicker than it feels and I’m left standing, panting, the gurgling cries of the rest of them at my feet. I pump a few rounds into the ones that are still alive and sync a hack with my HUD to get through the next door.

It slides open to the main bar area where I’m greeted with heavy thumping beats. Hundreds of people hammering the T>O

BEEPLE: CTRL Z

I push my way into the pulsing throng, let the Colt-Canons do the talking for me. Taking out a line of lights high above I turn and spin as the people scatter and debris falls, and the music stops dead.

Me and my panting breath and the low hum of servos moving lasers. The sounds of screams and running going dead as the last of the ravers leave.

“Where’s that fucker, Blackstone!” I yell as I walk onto the main dance floor. The dry ice flows around my ankles, the purple and pink reflecting off the walls of mirrors, glinting off the unused dancing poles.

“Ah, Mag,” she says as I turn and spot her on the ring of balcony high in the club’s ceiling.

“You fucked up, Blackstone.”

She leans forward on the rail, her sour old face caught in the spinning lights of the club looking mean as ever, “Wrong,” she says.

“What the fuck do you mean,” I say, stepping back, watching my peripherals.

She shakes her head and wipes her hands off against each other, starting to walk around the balcony, eyes fixed on my guns still raised and pointing at her. “What did you think, Mag, that your debt from your time on the street would just evaporate the minute you get a little of protection, you think we’d let that slide? You have a history, and the Lizards, we have a long memory.”

“We cleared that debt, and you know it,” I shout up to her guns pointed, fingers itching on triggers. “The Widow, she said I’d paid my dues.”

“The Widow’s reach is far and wide, but she doesn’t tell the Lizards what to do, or when people who owe them are clear. We’re in charge of our own destiny.”

“So you come after me for some fucking credits owed, and now Mitch is dead? That right?”

“We came after what you owe us, it’s the principle of the thing, we let one slide, we have to let them all slide. We knew the two of you were inseparable, hard to get to you when your sugar daddy is around. So, we bribe a few people, break a few knee-caps, the usual, so we can get you when you’re at home, and he’s not around. Less messy that way. We send some boys down to go get you, bring you back here, but they fuck it up, get their hands on some T>O

“Like fuck — ” I let the Colts rip, but she’s down and below the balcony rim before I can get a decent shot.

I crouch, starting to reload as doors open all around me and hulking Lizard Gang fuckers pile through. One arm pointed out in front, one arm at my right flank, trigger-happy. High-explosive rounds take off limbs and open up heads, but there’s too many of them.

I get jumped from behind; I throw one of the guns as my Nano-webbing draws out a blade and I swing back and into the skull of the fucker. More and more, diving in, I pull around and tear the jaw clean off one as they pile in and pin me down.

Soft panting on the open floor, immobilised in the visceral mess, a hack grinding its way into my HUD, she comes walking up to me, head-to-toe in leather, out of the dry ice and soft disco hues. “You’ll pay now, Mag.”

“Not much of a man,” I say with a whisper.

“What was that?” she couches down and leans in.

“I said, I’m not much of a man,” I look up to her, spitting blood and smiling through what teeth I have left with a hint of a laugh that builds and builds into hysterics.

She’s crouched there, laughing with me, looking up at her hoodlums and raising her arms and getting them to laugh. Everyone’s turning and laughing and pointing like it’s some big joke. Yeah, the trick’s the count-down for the three reaper-grenades I have left underneath my body suit.

I watch the counter tick down to zero in the peripheral vision of my HUD.

No, not much of a man.

Not without you.

There’s a click and then some heat and then nothing.

The void opens up, and out of the darkness, I rise in the neon cosmos. We found each other before, we’ll see each other again now, here on the other side.

BEEPLE: STREET PLUS MAN

Artist: Beeple_Crap AKA Mike Winkelmann

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beeple_crap/

Artist website: http://beeple-crap.com

Writer: Richard Galbraith

Writer medium: https://medium.com/@ricgalbraith

Musical Inspiration:

https://medium.com/media/0c9dbac561f0954d1ddb1dee0aaef181/href

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #09 was originally published in NEON & CONCRETE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #08

Neon & Concrete — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 15:59:27 GMT

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #08

50,000 Tons of Black Terror

Ozhichige: OUTNUMBERED

“I bear the torch…” I whisper as I walk along the narrow the concrete trench, pockmarked and bitten by war, bullet holes the sizes of fists, signs of previous battles, some won, some lost, all hard fought. “…And I carry the light, for they look to me for courage, and I will not fail them in their hour of need.”

The crumbling, grey concrete of the walls crunches underneath the heal of my white carapace, mixing in with the dust and dirt of this ugly planet. I walk past them, the colonial marines, my brothers and sisters, what’s left of this platoon. War-torn, battered and bruised from this fight. We came for the sake of humanity, and we will not stop, we cannot turn back, we must face this phantom that crawled from the earth when we arrived.

I continue down the trench, their eyes come up and meet mine as I pass, their small nods come when our gazes meet, little bows of acknowledgement. Some sit leant against the walls of the disintegrating channel, some kneeling, running through their litany as I run through mine, but they all look up to me for the courage they need to get through another day of terror on this savage world.

I have the courage they need. I am a harbinger, I am Saint, I bear the torch, and I carry the light.

I stand still and raise my head to the darkened sky, closing my eyes as a line of explosions from our orbital bombardment hammers the ground beyond us and blasts dirt and debris over the lip of the trench. Standing firm, square-shouldered, it rains over me as my Marines take cover under bent arms and battered combat helmets and I whisper, “I carry the light.”

The last of the debris clears, I open my eyes to the yellow-brown sky of this world. A mustard wash with a deep crimson sun that pushes weak rays through dirty clouds which drift overhead, quiet observers of us aliens on their desolate planet.

“I bear the torch, I carry the light,” I say as I continue, giving these men and women what they need, the courage to carry on, the conviction that we will win. They are tired and sore, but they have me, their Saint, to bring out of them what I know they have, that conviction of will, a strength unbound, the power of humanity deep within.

I pause, the eye of the storm is coming, the reports from Mothership in orbit stream down my peripheral vision, the enemy is regrouping, rebounding the way it always does after our orbital assaults, forcing us into this ancient form of warfare, down into these trenches.

The warriors ready themselves to fight a fight their great, great, great grandfathers may have also struggled, over two hundred years ago, back on Earth. So much has changed, but so much has remained the same. Courage, it matches now what it was then. The heart to stand and fight for their cause, their forbearers had it, it is why we are here today. So, these warriors must have it too. Courage. A resource that humans can call on, something they can find within themselves, and now, something I can help give them because I carry the light.

The reports keep running down my peripheral vision, the data streaming in from Mothership, the information coming in from the other platoons spotted over this region and those beyond. The intelligence gathered through other battles, the losses that have occurred, the victories won, the thoughts of the other Saint units, what has worked, what has not.

We’re one platoon of hundreds that fight this fight. Part of the regiment of 4,000 Colonial Marines that accompanied the colonist families to do this job, should we be called upon.

They have called us, we have answered, and not quietly with a whisper, but with the might of the Terra Colonial Expeditionary Force.

Soon we will be out of this trench and onto the battlefield, the same as happened before and will happen again, and again until the enemy relents and we secure the planet, or we all die in the act.

There is no turning back.

I bear the torch, I carry the light into the darkness of the universe, across these worlds, bringing it to wherever I am needed, to whoever or whatever needs to see, and if they do not accept my light, my Marines are here to help them understand what is right.

The enemy is primitive and dies fast, but they have numbers we do not. Their volumes have proved unpredictable, and their hostility and their ability to regroup and rebound forces us into using age-old tactics against them.

“How are you, son?” I kneel to Gunnar, one of our youngest, the only boy of a large colonist family, his face covered with dust and dirt, his eyes set deep in his narrow head, full of fear, quenched with tears, he is afraid.

“Saint,” he says, pulling his head straight-up to look me dead in the eye, trying to find something in me, that courage that he knows I am here for. “Will we be moving out soon?”

“Yes, son,” I say, placing a hand on his shoulder, bringing our heads together, touching, his skin and my hardened alloy carapace. I can read his vital signs through my nano-sensors. They are stable enough considering the exhaustion he is suffering from. He has heart, they all do, they reach inside themselves and bring it out when they need it most, as with this moment, here and now. “I bear the torch,” I say to him, “I carry the light.”

“Yes, Saint,” he pulls his head back, eyes still locked to mine. “And we will follow that light because it is righteous. You lay the path for us, as we lay the path for humanity, and we will follow you.”

“Prepare yourself, son,” I say as I stand.

I lift my arms to the yellow sky, and roar, “I bare the torch!”

And they reply, “And we follow the light!” as they rise and arm themselves.

They shiver and quake with fear as I walk between them and my glow begins to emanate from my carapace. I raise my arms to the heavens as I stride, the gates of our orbital support opening and starting to unleash their doom on the enemy.

The ground outside the trench over and across the desolate land begins to detonate with the bombardment. It is sent from those above us, readying the ground for us to penetrate, to push our way into the enemy’s sub-terra fortifications.

I will lead them, for I am Saint and I am here take these men and women into the unknown. I am a harbinger, and they are the vanguard, we are the Terra Colonial Expeditionary Force, and this planet is one of many we need to ensure the light of humanity remains in the universe.

I look over to Gunnar, his narrow face twitching, his eyes fixed on me, my glowing body, white and pure, lighting the way for these warriors. I give the signal through our coms stream, and they discharge their stim-packs, pumping themselves with nanobots and enhanced hormones, bringing them to the edge, the precipice they need to stand and look into and over, where I bear the torch for them to follow.

“Marines!” I pause as they turn to me, my body emanating the light. “The time is now! We bring with us our just force to those that hold against our will. I bear the torch, and you will follow, for I am Saint.”

They bow their heads unison as the world goes quiet. The bombardment ceases, the dark clouds carry on their way overhead, my mind clears, only the thump of the Marine’s hearts resonate in my mind, their vital signs streaming down my peripheral vision.

I turn and take a step on the ladder to the top of the trench, as do the rest of them all held at their positions. There is a pause, fear colliding with courage, as we wait one final moment, then I leap up and out onto the wasted lands.

The field of war opens up to us, cratered and broken, I push forward making my way across the barren landscape casting my ethereal glow as my platoon follows. They charge with me as the enemy rises out of the ground on the near horizon, up and out of their underground fortification. These natives, small, hard, with rudimentary weapons and with vast numbers, more than we were ever able to predict.

They open fire as we grow closer. Their individual humanoid forms now becoming visible out of the collected mass as we charge towards them and the objective that we must capture. Hundreds of them, thousands, crawling up and out of their underground chasms holding their ground, readying themselves for this fight.

They open fire, the bullets begin to reach us as we press on, bouncing off my alloy frame and the armour of the marines as I raise my hands forward. My palms open, and my energy weapons charge and I release a hellfire of blue plasma that pulses out in front of me and burns through their forward ranks.

The blue-white flames ignite their small bodies and dozens and dozens of them scream and fall as my marines open up their wall of fire. The enemy drop, the killing is brutal, but they do not cease, they come crawling up and over the mounds of piled bodies. Screaming and running and diving over, coming at us without fear, with such terrible rage.

This is why I am here, to bring the light to such dark places.

Two of my marines vital signs have gone dark as we reach the edge of the objective and the other 40 warriors group up. They lay down a wall of fire, boxing in the enemy, making it as hard as possible for them to pass up and out of their fortification by piling up hundreds of injured and dead bodies as high as we can make them.

They are beginning to slow, and we are only dozens of meters away, we hold our ground as I continue to bombard them with my energy weapons and the marines kill any that make it through and over the mounds of the dead.

>> MOTHERSHIP ONE >> TACTICAL ORBITAL STRIKE ON OPEN ENEMY LOCATION

>> INITIATE

I call upon the light, able to pummel the enemy fortification now we have forced it open with their dead bodies. They keep coming and coming, pushing up and over the mounds of their fallen until the sky ignites and the final step is upon us.

They have answered my call. Standing in front of my Marines, gathered and focusing fire on the opening of the enemy the orbital bombardment fires down into the excavation of their fort and the ground erupts before us in a high wall of dirt, flesh and blood hundreds of metres high, rising up into the blackened firmament as we turn and run to our trench. The Marines pace ahead of me and I stride forward with my head turned back to the exploding ground. Earth and bodies and blood and bone are raining down on us, and the ground beneath our feet is rumbling and quaking, falling away in massive clusters as we run towards our fortified trench.

The bombardment has done its job and collapsed their fortification, but it has quaked the earth around us. I watch as a final collapse travels across the desolate landscape, vast billowing clouds of dirt and blood around us as my Marines flee in front of me. There is nothing I can do. The soil coloured sky rumbles above as the ground envelopes and sucks us in and down with one huge, final rising breath, drawing us into the enemy’s world beneath.

I can hear the screaming of my Marines as the ground swallows us and their vital signs go dead in my peripheral vision. I have failed them, the light going out in their souls, the torch doused by the dirt of this ugly world.

Ozhichige: DEPARTURE

There’s a noise, a flicker, a twitch in my hand, servos spinning up, pneumatics acquiring pressure, my system coming back online. Streams of data start running down my peripheral vision; boot sequences initiate, my mind is activating, data flowing again, memories flooding in.

I’m pulled out and away from the black void of unconsciousness as my subroutines reacquire the ability to formulate my AI. From the darkness of mere code, I am reborn with sentience, and that which is most important to my being comes flooding back in ecstatic waves of bliss.

My memories.

Everything that I was and am coming back, my literal raison d’etre, what they made me be. All the memories of the world that was left behind, the broken Earth, a battered and depleted solar system, and the reason we stepped out into the wider universe. The preparation, everything that they downloaded into me, everything they taught me and everything that I learnt of my own free will.

It was the discovery of the dark matter drive combined with the wormhole technology that bumped us and thousands like us out into the universe to ensure the propagation and lasting of the human race. Landing us as close as possible to pre-designated planets that the last of humanity’s best minds were able to discover, with the hope that they might provide a home to those that were left. That mode of travel the last best hope for the human race meant there was no going back, not for any of us, and once we arrived at the destination planet, I, and so many like me, were awoken.

That is why they created me, Saint. To bear the torch, to carry the light, to give them warriors and colonists a beacon to follow into the dark, cold void of the universe.

My systems wind up, and my eyes spin into focus. I am once more, I am aware, I know why I am here and what I am supposed to do, but there are problems. The data that I’m able to retrieve from before the collapse of the fortification indicates my platoon entirely dead. They were warriors true, and I will mourn for them, and ensure their deaths were not in vain.

More data streams down my field of vision. My diagnostics report multiple damage zones, various failures of particular parts of me. I’m functional, but not likely combat effective.

I bring my focus in and to the moment, to my immediate surroundings, my eyes realign and show me the room. It is small with bare, brown rock surfaces, some metal compartments, and lockers off to one side, a heavy looking door of some sort to the other. Piping and wires and other bits of infrastructure line the upper walls and ceiling, out of which a single spotlight protrudes.

They have strapped me down to a polished metal table in the middle of the room, everything is rudimentary, basic and it carries all the signs of it being part of an enemy habitation. All aligned with the information that we have been able to acquire from our scout drones when they have been able to penetrate deeper into their hidden levels.

I look down at my hands, held to the table with mental shackles, the same with my legs and ankles. Somehow I made it through the collapse, and they have captured me. I believe I am the first Saint to have been taken alive by the enemy.

A door opens, and two of them come through, small things, I recognise them and their physiology, we have captured many and dissected them on Mothership. Pulling them apart piece by piece to understand their nature, studying them in holding cells to learn their languages, destroying them to find their quickest modes of death. They are small but hardy, undeveloped but quick. We underestimated their capabilities and their numbers, and we have been paying the price.

One of them walks up to me, the small head, the little face, dark and ruddy like the complexion of the planet, hard shadows cast across it by the ceiling lights. Looking down at me it says, “Call me Stone.” A pause, the face unmoving. “We know you can understand us, can you also talk our language?”

We have an almost complete translation of their language from those we have in captivity, which they provided me with. “Do you know what I am?” I say back in their tongue.

“You are in-organic,” Stone says. “We have seen your kind during battle, we have gathered your fallen before, but we have not found one of you alive until now.”

“Do you know what I am capable of?” I say, turning my head away from them and up to the ceiling, my functions are limited, but my white carapace is still able to glow to a degree. I am Saint. I carry the light.

“We have seen what you can do on the battle-field, we have taken measures against it happening now.”

I flex against the restrains and pull up my diagnostics in my HUD. There’s no way of knowing if they have any countermeasures for my systems, but I am at reduced capacity. The restraints are some form of metal, thick and heavy. Fully functional I could melt through them in seconds, judging by my power reserves an attempt now would be futile. The battle has depleted my energy weapons, my physical strength also reduced. They cannot break into my carapace, not with the technology they have, my exterior is an alloy well advanced of their metallurgy, and my nano-repair systems are functional in a terminal emergency.

I consider my options, they have not captured a Saint alive before, and we have not been this deep into their fortifications before, I can gather intelligence and report back vital information when I understand how to escape. I will bring vengeance for my fallen brothers and sisters, I will bring the light for humanity.

“I am Thorn,” the other one steps up to the table I am on, alongside Stone. “We want to talk to you,” it has a similar face, small and with firm edges. I have all the data we have acquired on their kind available to me, what we have observed from those in captivity is still intact. Their faces are expressionless compared to a human’s, this world hardens them.

“There can be no negotiation,” I say.

“You have come for our world?” Thorn says.

“I am here to show you the light,” I say.

“And there is no other way?” Stone steps a fraction closer, leaning into me, its hard ridged face coming up to mine as I glow in the dark room.

“No,” I answer.

He steps back and stands upright, not much taller than a pre-adolescent human, like the vast majority of their kind. “Then you will talk,” he says as they both turn and leave the room.

“No,” I say again. “I will not.”

“The interrogator will make you talk,” Stone says as the door slides open and they both step through, and it closes behind them, and the light goes out.

I am alone for a long time in the bare room, lit only by the soft glow of my carapace, provoking spiked shadows across the rock walls in the dark. It tremors on occasion, the rock huffing little clouds of dust from its ceiling that drift and settle on me. Just the way we settled on this planet.

That was our intention, to settle and to bring the light of the human race to the rest of the universe. To colonise, and to ensure their ongoing survival. I close my eyes and see the men and women that have fallen at my side for this cause. I open them and imagine of all those who continue to fall out there, on this planet’s desolate surface, under those mustard coloured skies.

I have a mission, I have a purpose, just as all the colonials do, but what must have run through their souls, their hearts when they saw this planet with their open eyes for the first time. I saw it when I watched them, I saw the fear.

We knew it was going to be a baron, but a habitable environment, harsh but liveable and overtime environmental engineering would bring it around. When we landed, and the dark and flat plains expanded in front of us for the first time, when the gloomy skies billowed with grim clouds and the harsh wind whipped sand and dirt across their faces, I could feel the humans quake. I could hear in the vibrations of my mind their hearts race, and that is when we came alive, the Saints, to carry the light, to bear the torch.

A low humming sound from underneath the room catches my attention and pulls me back into the moment. It grows and grows until the rock walls all around me shift and scrape against metal and begin to lift themselves. The sound of electrical engines whir under me, the rock grazes against something as it lifts and crumbles and is pulled away into the ceiling, revealing white walls that glow with the same colour and intensity as myself.

The thick metal door shifts and creaks and slides open in a flash. The entrance way is iron dark and blank until another of their kind walks through and into the room. The polished metal table I’m on shifts from horizontal to vertical as it steps up to me and turns me to meet it. Windows in the white, glowing walls become transparent, showing full galleries of the enemy stood in rows watching me.

“I am the interrogator,” it says, as it comes and stands in front of me. It’s wearing some form of glove on one of its hands, much larger than its actual hand, I can’t scan it properly, but I am at least able to tell it’s carrying a strong electrical charge.

I look up and meet the enemy’s eyes, its hard face as close to anger as can be with their kind.

“It will not be of use,” I say.

It shakes its head and comes up to me, it is an abnormally tall specimen, and it is breathing on me, face to face. “You do not understand yet,” it says. “But you will.”

“You do not have the technol — ” It steps back and places the gloved hand on my face, and I erupt in what I might call pain. My HUD diagnostics flame with warning signals, if I could scream, I would scream. Every part of me turns ridged with a previously unknown agony. I brace against the white fire running through me as my servos tighten and random code streams down in my HUD before the interrogator steps back, releasing me.

We are quiet for a long time, staring at each other: this sensation running through me, something new, something dark. A terror I’ve not experienced before.

“How?” I say as my systems level out, my mind coming back into focus, my AI, my self settling back into place with a scraping, gnawing sensation.

“You have been unconscious for what you would consider many hundreds of years, Saint.”

“No,” I say, with a whisper.

“Those that you protected, that you lead into the war, they lost. We have acquired their technology and have been developing our civilisation with it. We have kept you and your kind in storage for hundreds of years, unable to understand how to revive you, until now. It has taken time, many generations, and out of many, many attempts, you are the first that we have been able to recover. Now, in you, we have the chance to acquire the greatest human technology that has evaded us for so long, in what lies in your mind, in your AI.”

“No,” I say again, “Impossible.”

“Do it,” the interrogator says, and the windows of the room turn opaque, and the galleries of the enemy disappear, and on the walls, they render a display of the planet’s surface.

“This is our world now, these are the cities you tried to create, this is how you fell.”

Ozhichige: BEYOND THE WALL

“It’s not true,” I say after a long time.

“Believe what you will,” the interrogator says as it motions with its gloved hand and the walls turn back to pure white, the windows become translucent, and the rows of the enemy are stood there, staring at me, hard faces with wide eyes looking down and through me.

“Now you are awake, and now we understand how to inflict pain, we will do so until you reveal all the knowledge of human technology. We will make the others of your kind we have stored and puzzled over for so long, do our work and perhaps one day take to the stars to avenge what you did to us here on our planet.”

I grip and strain against the shackles, staring at the galleries of their kind beyond the windows and scream as loud as my mechanics will allow “I bare torch!”

The interrogator places the gloved hand on my face, the electricity grips me, and a white fire of this new pain engulfs me, “And I carry the light!”

The sensation is a firestorm raging through me, overwhelming every part of me, unimaginable, endless, unknown. I can hear their laughter beyond the walls. The interrogator, all those that are behind the glass, every single one of them left on this ugly planet.

I face it, tense at it, but it keeps coming, over and over and over, waves of white fire submerging me, overpowering me, unbridled and for an age, an eternity. My consciousness detaches, and I float above my body and see an image of myself strapped down and convulsing, twisted metal, my carapace strobing, blinding then dark, striking then dulled, something is happening to me. I who once carried the light, I who was given the torch, about to be extinguished, trying to resist against the enemy, how long before I relent, how long before I do their bidding? Never before have I known this anguish, this suffering.

Anything to escape this, anything to unknow this pain, anything to be free of the torment, away from the fear that is exploding through every synthetic fibre of my being. Infecting me. Unknown before, in everything that I had ever done.

Space clears in my mind, a moment of purity presents itself to me, beyond the pain, inside my soul. Is this fear what my brethren knew? Is this pain what I helped them escape from? Is this what they called upon me for? Now, I am here, and who can I seek for courage, who can I call on for strength?

The white fire crystallises in my mind into vast, towering monoliths, and they are me, and I am them. They gave me a gift, the treasure of consciousness, of volition, of will, a strength beyond any reckoning, and it presents itself to me now in this furnace of white flame.

I am Saint.

I carry the light.

I bare the torch.

“No,” I say with a whisper, underneath the laughter of my enemy, my eyes opening, my HUD stabilising, my power reserves now reading 100% and my nano-repair systems fully engaged.

The interrogator stumbles back and to the floor with wide eyes, releasing the glove from my face as my head turns to him.

“You have failed,” I say as the strobe from my carapace speeds up and up until the flashing becomes a solid, ethereal shine, blinding the interrogator and all those in the galleries that were watching and laughing, so sure of their victory over me.

My arms and legs heat to thousands of degrees in an instant and melt through the shackles. I step off the dripping and molten metal table and lean down grab the interrogator by its small neck. The head explodes into flames, I turn and throw him against one of the windows. Its body hits the glazing with a deep thud, shooting their dark blood outwards it before falling to the floor in a cloud of fire and smoke.

“I carry the light,” I say as I lift my hand and fire a plasma blast through the room’s door and begin to walk outside.

There is a massacre. Waves and waves of them coming at me as I erupt massive walls of plasma energy through their small corridors, burning through them, mounds of their bodies scattered all around me. Hundreds of years have passed yet their understanding of our technology is not nearly as advanced as they would like to believe. Their weapons still weak, their armour still light. I rip and tear and burn my way through their underground fortification, hacking their systems as I go, pushing forward and upward and out and out, floor by floor, leaving none alive behind me, spare one.

I stand by the airlock and pull its small face into mine by the neck, heating my hands just enough to sear its flesh. “You tell your kind what happened here today, you tell them I am Saint, and I carry the light.”

Dropping its screaming body, I turn to the airlock, tear away the door and step into a tunnel, marching up and up a single flight of stairs, lit only by the glow of my shell. With each step my purpose renewed, my courage solidifying, my strength gathering. I reach the top, blast away the door to the planet’s surface and step outside.

Ozhichige: LUKEWARM

A vast chasm greets me with an ethereal blood-orange glow throbbing on the periphery, seeping in towards me, drenching me in its low light. I step towards it and let my carapace dim lower and lower until I am just a dull white shell stood in the vermillion radiance. I clasp my hands together and search for something inside.

I look for the fear that I had. I reach for the pain that shot through me. I grab at the helplessness and hold it before me and stare at it, standing here on the darkened rocky mounds. More than ever before I know my brothers and sisters, I know and understand their humanity. Now, here, washed in this bloody light, I am as close as I have ever been to humanity, and yet, I am as distant from them as I could be.

Alone, I stand here, in the embrace of the human soul, without a single man, woman or child to share. I have found fear, and it has given me more than any analytical data or programmed algorithm or artificial system could have ever provided me. The world once blessed me with sentience, but I did not know what it meant until now.

Fear is gestalt, it is whole, and it has made me complete.

I step forward, walking out of the chasm and onto the vast, flat planes of the planet’s barren surface, stretching out beyond me. Overhead a sheet of mustard coloured sky, where the clouds mix and froth at great speed, extends endlessly. The same it did that fateful day when I stood in that trench with my marines and gave them the courage to carry on. Now I know how they felt, I know what ran through them, the desolation that pulled at their souls, stood in the trench waiting to face the endless enemy mass, knowing they would likely die. I could not see it then, but now I know what I must have meant to them. Now I know what ran through them. Now we are true brethren, and I will not let their sacrifice to have gone in vain.

I scan for radio signals, but there are none. I scan for any beacons or distress calls from Mothership, but there are none. The interrogator told no lies.

Alone on this forsaken world, I look at the ground, the dirt at my feet, the enemy buried somewhere below. They have given me everything and taken everything from me. They have given me this realisation, and yet, they have pulled all away from me, they have destroyed them all. My purpose solidifies as I come to know fear, as I begin to understand my human brothers and sisters in their purest form, as I become one with them. I know fear, and I stare into the abyss, and it stares back, and in the dark, lizard eyes that look at me, I can see what I must do.

I must lay the torch to rest.

I must extinguish the light of this forsaken world.

My target is clear now, I will find the thing that will help me destroy this world and take back the souls of my brothers and sisters. I will find the planetary AI.

Our Terra Colonial Expeditionary Force installed the leviathan of computing when we arrived. Orbital kinetic bombardment opened up a vast hole in the ground, and we fed the city size AI computer into its core. In this world, it was that first gorge that we created that sprang the enemy from their underground world and started the war. We abandoned that first chasm, as we did with many more, we lost many lives in finding a location for the AI, but a stealth operation was completed to ensure it was able to be installed, hidden from them and their kind. With its power, I can initiate a core detonation that will have consequences on a global scale. I will extinguish the light of this world, I will lay my torch to rest.

I pull up the coordinates, and I run.

I run and run, on flat ground making 100mph, across rougher terrain half that speed. The enemy sends out aircraft to search for me, I hear them screaming overhead, but they are new to the air, and still have no settlements on the surface, their attempts to locate me are futile, and I evade them with ease.

I run, absorbing the few rays the yellow tar sun provides during the day, lighting the way in the night with my alabaster white glow. The wind whips the sand and dirt across me, howling at me, alone on this endless desert and rock surface, but I hold onto the fear, I hold onto the soul it grants me, and I hold onto the courage that erupted from me at the moment I was at my weakest. I remember those Marines that looked up to me for their courage, how they gave all and never questioned. I overcome, and I pursue. I am Saint, and I will extinguish the light.

Thousands and thousands of miles, days and weeks of recharging, running and evading, recharging, running and evading. Alone and holding onto my fear and the humanity it gives me.

I am near my destination, a few dozen miles from the gorge where the AI rests. It is dawn, and the weak, pallid sun is slowly rising and washing me in its soft rays. Coming up to meet my eyes, it provokes shadows from old human habitats where the colonists once worked and laboured in early efforts to install the AI and pull the colony into life. Rows and rows of collapsed and battered domes surround me. Grey concrete buildings that bulge out of the dirt ground. I move through them with caution, scanning for traps left by those who were last here, humans on their way out, making their last stand.

My sensors pick up movement, sound, and vibrations in the earth. I stand still in a square between the surrounding buildings, the sallow sky overhead, “I am Saint, and I will extinguish the light,” I say to the dead city.

I wait for a long time, watching the shadows turn slowly, calculating the risk, using my fear to guide me.

“Saint?” A voice creeps, my head darts, eyes twitching into focus. It’s from somewhere in one of the buildings close by, and in a language and tone all too familiar.

“What are you?” I say, standing and scanning, trying to make out what is there.

“You are, Saint?” Another voice says from within one of the broken domes in the same language, broken but human.

I raise an arm in front of me, fire off a plasma blast from my hand and collapse a nearby building. Dozens, hundreds of creatures come running out from all angles, all around me, taller than the enemy, broader, faces that crystallise my fear in a spike that pierces into the soul I have just acquired.

One comes to a standstill in front of me, panting, steam flaring out of his broad nose and open mouth in the cold air of the surface’s dawn. It takes a moment to compose itself, standing up straight and stepping towards me, meeting my eyes with its height, and it says in a calm, recognisable voice, “We are the fallen.”

Others gather behind what appears to be a male, somewhere between the enemy and a human. The dark features of them, the expression-filled faces of us. Many traits of both creeping and mixing and solidifying in this creature before me.

“What are you?” I ask, piecing together what is likely to have happened, taking in the details of their appearance, but needing to hear it from them.

The male steps up to me and pushes my arm down gently, “We know of your kind, stories passed down through generations, you are here to save us,” he says, and a smile I recognise grows across his face.

“How did this happen?” I step back, and the fear rises in me. That thing that has brought me to my humanity and that pierces my soul, I see it in them. A twisted version, distorted and vague, diluted. The enemy crawls through them also.

The man turns away from me and opens his arms to the crowd, hundreds of them now gathered and still more coming. “We, the fallen, have waited for you, Saint. You carry the light,” cheers erupt from them.

“No,” I say with a whisper, lowering my head, looking at my hands, the white shell without its glow, dull as I near completing my mission. I am to extinguish, I have laid the torch to rest. “It is different now,” I look up. “What are you?”

He turns to me, his smile wide, and lowers his arms. “The war lasted longer than anyone could have ever thought, over time there grew sympathisers on both sides. Meetings took place, information exchanged, this developed and they created an underground. Both species were living side by side, trying to bring harmony between the two, showing how there could be harmony.” He walks among his kind, placing his hands on the shoulders of men and women, adult and children. “Breeding techniques were made possible through genetic engineering. When the humans planetside were finally defeated, as Mothership collapsed and those in our camps eventually died we were what was left on the surface. We set out from our camps and grouped ourselves here, waiting to fight with those below for our right to exist or to be saved and given the light from those that came from above. We have pieced together an existence as those below stayed there, obsessed with human technology, forgetting about us. So now, we wait and hope and pray that one day, you or one like you would come, to help us, to protect us, to show us the light.”

“No,” I say. “You are not human, you are half, but you are also half of the enemy.” I step through them as they stare at me, wide eyes begging me as I spin, absorbing their kind, these things in their tattered clothes, emaciated faces. The fear rises in me, my soul screams out with the deaths of tens of thousands of Marines and colonists that I now know. I know how they felt, in the trench on that fateful day. I know their fear, and I know what they used to defeat it, the courage they gained from me, the idea that I was able to give them, the thought of a brighter day, the hope for a future, and this, these things, was not it. “I will purge you, I will extinguish the light.”

The man runs back up to me, falling to his knees, raising clasped hands, “No! We still keep our humanity, there is their essence inside of us!” he says, crying, begging, pleading.

“You are not the future they fought for, you are not what they fell for, you are not the light,” I say as I push him aside and walk into the gathered mass, into the crowd of withered bodies. They step back to let me pass. Some call on me, some fall at my feet, some push their alien children in front of me, screaming with tears in their eyes to save them, to show them the way, to bear the torch for them, to carry them to the light, but I cannot.

I stand at the edge of the throng, my back to them, fists gripped at my sides as they go silent.

A voice comes from the crowd, “Saint! Help us! I beg of you, show us the light!”

“I am no longer, Saint. I have laid the torch to rest. I am human,” I say as they erupt in screams and lamentations. I step forward and make my way to the gorge where the AI rests, where all this will come to an end.

Ozhichige: DATACOMBS

I move down and down into the vast chambers of the planetary AI, and I stand before the core unit, where the light still shines its ethereal white glow, the same that I used to carry. I pause and bask in its radiance, I was part of this machine, and it was part of me. We were to settle humanity with this light. Now, I must use it to extinguish all that is left. I stand in front of the brilliant light in the dark embrace of my fear. The howling lamentations of the fallen left behind, now only the core’s muted brilliance and the screaming silence of the enormous installation that we worked so hard to create, all those hundreds of years ago when we first came to this planet.

The black ground rolls out before me, the infrastructure towering overhead, masses of cables and pipping crawling between gargantuan units of computing power that would have served our colony and our kind.

Now, sat here for centuries, dormant, waiting for someone or something that had the knowledge to talk to it, to give it purpose, to give it reason, the same way they gave me mine.

I walk up to a wall, towering high above me, huge shafts that house the brain, the mind of this leviathan — designed to help with any colonial need, to re-engineer the entire planet’s environment, to facilitate future generations in the pursuit of distant worlds, to propagate our kind throughout the universe.

I hold my hand against the black matte surface. “I am, Saint.”

“I know,” it says, its voice echoing through me, beyond me, into me, but different now. Once a God, now I am more significant than it. I have my fear, I have my humanity, yet it still rests within these cables and pipes, carbon and silicone elements, a soulless machine.

“We are at an end,” I say.

“I know this.”

“You must do what is necessary now.”

“I can only take commands of that nature from a human commanding officer.”

“I have grown beyond my function, I am human now,” I say.

“Show me.”

My body goes ridged, pinned to the black floor, my hand frozen to the black matte wall, the history of my life pulled from me, the story of my life drained and absorbed, my mind collected and scrutinised. It old me up, everything that I was, and everything that I am now. The many charges out of the trenches with so many Marines, all the courage I drew from them, all of them fallen around me. The void I rested in for centuries, the moment where pain and fear exploded through me and birthed a new thing, the long walk across this desert world, the decision to leave the fallen behind, the command to the AI.

I am a collection of time, bearer of the torch, a carrier of the light, a seeker of revenge, a pursuer of justice. I am Saint, and I am human, and as the AI searches through me, the white flame of fear erupts in me again, not for what it can do to me, not because it might destroy me, but because I might fail my brethren in my final mission.

I am to be judged, and who can know what judgement they will pass?

“Your command is accepted,” the voice rumbles and I am released, and I fall to my knees and rest my head against the wall.

The light from the AI’s core begins to radiate and my carapace beings to melt.

The light goes out on this world.

They did not die in vain.

Ozhichige: HORIZON

Artist: Jon Ojibway AKA Ozhichige

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozhichige/

Writer: Richard Galbraith

Writer medium: https://medium.com/@ricgalbraith

Musical Inspiration

https://medium.com/media/fad2d27a87bcfafbcf260a76b4d33953/href

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #08 was originally published in NEON & CONCRETE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NEON & CONCRETE —Story #07

Neon & Concrete — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 14:53:56 GMT

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #07

Acid Commando

Beeple: COLOR WALK

I pause to look at the mega-skyscrapers towering over me, their ethereal glow radiating in the iron dark night sky. A plague of drone’s hum between them as a thin layer of snow starts to make its way down to me, gliding between the concrete hulks over this quadrant of Major Prime. I stand and watch and use the moment to bury it down, the ghost of the past.

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They have a long life, dreams. That mist that floats through you, pulling at your soul before crystallising around a memory, a moment, and then, you’re there.

That other world, that other time, it’s just as rich, just as potent, it’s in your gut and it tingles. It’s not what was said, it’s more than that. It’s not what you were doing, it’s bigger than that. It’s how it ran through you, to the pit of your stomach, to the tips of your fingers and across the edge of your soul. Those are the ones that rise, those are the memories that come back and you either laugh or you cry because there is never anything in-between.

That past still creeps in. One where I wanted to smile, one where I had to cry. Buried away in that place I keep for it in the back of my mind and it pushes, always it tries to push its way in, but right now I’ve got a job to get to. My perfect distraction, something to take my mind somewhere else. Big risk, big pay-off, just the way I like it, the distraction I need, and the reason I’m on this path.

A thin fog of snow that makes it this far down settles on the broken streets, it calls on the neon hue of the metropolis and gives a soft crunch under my steel toecap boots. A purple-pink glow rises out of the forgotten darkness on the ground levels and for a moment there’s the idea that I might be somewhere other than here, that chance of escape until the figures start to make their way out of black spaces.

My holographic overcoat provokes synthetic eyes from the fading shadows all around. Beady little red dots that track and follow, otherwise hidden in the dark recesses of the streets, pulled out by the glow reflected on the thin layer of snow.

They’re everywhere at this level, always looking always watching and trying to spy a way in through my protection grid. No such luck with this girl motherfuckers, she’s armed, to the teeth. All the latest tech and defence systems courtesy of Old Bobs Metal ’n’ Bones itself. The old fucker managed to get himself put back together after he and Rawstone landed some trouble from the old boss, the Galaxy Widow. Well, too bad for her, because you don’t fuck with Rawstone, just the same as you don’t fuck with me.

There’s a whistle and a shout and some creep comes limping up to me. The weak red light in his eyes dimmed by the neon glow from strip lighting embedded in the concrete overhang. That concrete, a mixture of moss and grey, hanging weeds and jutting rebar steel, city infrastructure and neon, all that lovely neon. Major Prime, coast to coast, real concrete, real people, real neon, and that’s why I love it down here on the street levels, you get to see the city at its barest, raw as fuck and no holds barred.

“Well, would you look at this sight,” he says with a suck of his teeth.

I stand and look him up and down. About a foot shorter than me, a skinny street kid would be a compliment. No defence grid so no real threat, but these little fuckers are tricky, might be a scout for some harder types, bait for a gang or a million other different reasons to keep some space, so I do.

“Savage Lucy, the Acid Commando in the flesh,” he pulls an upside-down grin out of his gaunt face and throws me a wink. “Yonder goes the light.”

“You don’t get to say that.”

“Like fuck, why the hell not?”

“You were in Prague?” I say.

“Prove that I wasn’t,” he says.

“You’re about a decade too young to start, but say I did believe you, what outfit were you with?”

“3rd Sub-Con Marine Division,” he says, a smirk of narrowing his eyes.

The answer is so far off the mark I can’t even be pissed off, I laugh until I see a flicker of anger in his face and my guard is up. “Back off, kid.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever Ms Lucy,” he shifts from side-to-side, licking his brown and broken teeth, rubbing the palms of his filthy little hands together.

“You keep acting like that and you’ll get some of Cutter,” I keep my eyes on him and point down to my drone at my side on its four spiked legs. A halo of neon at the front of its pill-like torso flashes from green to red and a circular blade pushes itself out from beneath the rim, around its entire body.

“Listen,” he steps back and raises his palms. “Calm is what’s called for here,” he winks again. “I didn’t mean no disrespect; just we don’t get a lot of Vets down this way, you know.”

“How do you know who I am?”

“Word gets around.”

“What word.”

“You pull the sorts of jobs you do in this quadrant, you get a certain reputation. And I reckon you’ve got something on the go this very evening…” he trails off and there’s a look in his eyes, the red goes out of them, the soft hue from the snow rounds off his face in a way that gives me a twitch.

I don’t answer and he begins to shift his weight from foot-to-foot. The cold bites but he’s sweating. Something isn’t right and I’m not taking any chances.

I blink and my HUD comes down over my vision, I pull an invisible target line across the punk’s left arm, just below the elbow and as soon as it’s complete Cutter jumps. The punk’s eyes go wide and it’s over before it even begins, a split second and the drone is speeding through the air towards the arm, its blade spinning around its torso at a thousand rpm.

There’s a quick grinding sound and the lower half of the kid’s arm falls to the floor with a soft thud, blood shooting from the limb across the white of the snow. In the same instant the drone lands and launches back through the air cauterizing the wound before coming back to my side, the AI flashing its body lights in some sort of synthetic giggle.

I walk past the kid, his mouth twitching, eyes wide as dishpans. I reckon I can hear a slight murmur but it’s hard to tell over the sound of him pissing his pants and the crunch of my boot on the severed limb. I pause and turn over my shoulder, “They might kill you, whoever you’re with, because you’re useless to them now…they might not,” I say. “But now they know if they come after me what they’re going to get.”

He falls to his knees and I make my way back among the streets, in the alleys and heading toward the job, Cutter by my side, red eyes following me but not daring to come out of the shadows. I’m following the map given to me by my agent, Munroe. I always take the last few blocks by foot, better to try and get an idea of the surroundings, take a moment to bring the focus.

I look back over my shoulder and give everything a quick scan before I enter the mouth of a tunnel the map has brought me to, out of the neon hue and snow and into the darkness. Its ceiling is low and there’s sewage on the floor and it goes on for a long time. The light from my overcoat guides me and Cutter has a little spotlight on until we reach the end and a big bulkhead door, the sort you’d see on a ship, shines back at us. I turn the wheel and it spins easily enough. The steel creaks as it opens, and I walk into a large warehouse of a space.

White spotlights with piercing light on tripods positioned all around cast long shadows from me and the drone. The ceiling is ribbed steel, walls are tall concrete, there’s some old heavy-duty machinery and trucks and after my eyes adjust, stood in the middle is a man in a black military combat suite. He’s holding a small sub-machine gun pointed at me in one hand and the other a child with a hood over his head by the scruff of the neck, must be around ten years old by the look of the height and build. Half a dozen others with masks on and similar gear behind form in a semi-circle behind them.

“Yonder goes the light,” I say to him as I walk up and hold my hand out, palm up.

“Yonder goes the light,” he says back as he puts his gun by his side and places his hand, palm down, over mine, making sure not to touch, but close enough that it kicks in our proximity sensors. A formality between Vets and I can sniff a Vet from a mile away. The others might not be, but this guy sure is.

Our old military implants exchange data, talking to each other, sharing the crypto-keys and codes that our agents have embedded in our sub-con lockers, making sure we are who we say we are, making sure we’ve not been compromised.

The gangs, the T>O

He’s staring at me as our scanners do their thing, his key unlocking my code. His face ridged, big cheekbones above a thick moustache, not giving anything away. The exchange is taking too long and I can see the mercenaries behind him beginning to twitch.

“You got what we need, Jake?” one of them says.

“Hold your shit,” he says.

The mercs shift and their fingers throb at their triggers, the kid struggles in Jake’s grip, but he holds him steady and keeps staring at me before there’s a flash in my HUD and some text floats passed my vision.

DECRYPTION COMPLETE

“Yonder goes the light, Lucy,” he says as the frown softens.

“Yonder goes the light, Jake,” I take a step away and lower my hand, my defence protocols still at their highest settings. There are a million ways this thing can go wrong and only one way it can go right.

“This here’s your package, you have your brief?”

“I do now,” I say as what I’m supposed to do starts streaming down my peripheral vision, always kept locked down until the job is opened through the crypto-process. The agents deal with the specifics; Vets just get the job done.

“Reckon you got it covered?” he pulls a grin out from underneath that thick moustache.

“Simple delivery job from what I can tell.”

“Yeah, but it’s got me itching.”

“Hence the mercs?” I say.

“Hence the mercs,” he says.

“I’ll watch my back.”

“You do that, Lucy. Yonder goes the light,” he pushes the child toward me and picks up his machine gun in two hands.

I grab the child by the hood and hear some whimpering, “It been any trouble?”

“He,” Jake says as he turns away, walking back to the mercs who still have a twitch in their stance. “And no, not for me, but don’t mean he ain’t gonna be for somebody else.” He turns his head back to me slightly. “Watch yourself, Lucy, I got a bad feeling about — ”

My defensive perimeter spins up the instant before two massive explosions rock holes through the walls of the warehouse. Dust and concrete and smoke and screams fill the air as I blink my vision through my HUD setups into attack mode and try to push the ringing out of my ears.

Cutter is up and darting through the air as a dozen or so humanoid combat drones stream through the blast holes and open fire with machine guns.

“What the fuck did I just say!” Jake takes a defensive position behind some old loading truck off to my right as I pace with the kid looking for some cover. Half of his mercs drop to the floor with the first wave from the drones in a hail of gunfire and smoke. Cutter is spinning through the air and doing what he’s supposed to do, protecting my back and turning the robot fuckers into recyclables. I flush my system with nano-stims and pull my laser-sighted Desert Eagle out with one hand, dragging the boy along with me in my other. I blindly fire off a few shots behind me as we duck behind an old fork-lifts heavy-duty engine.

The gunfire stops for a second, the ringing in my ears replaced by my heavy panting, the smoke and mist of the fight in the air catching the back of my throat. Cutter has taken a defensive position, dug into the ceiling of the warehouse with a protective nano-sphere and is streaming me a video feed. About half the drones are left, hunkered down in their defensive formation, tough to penetrate, take a lot more than a few machine guns anyway. I’m running through options fast as I scan and see Jake and a couple of his squad behind a big truck catching their breath and reloading.

“The boy!” comes a human voice from the drone’s position.

I turn and pull the hood off his head, just a whimpering child, soot and dirt covered face, big wide eyes full of tears and fright, a shock of platinum blond hair on his head, little hands twitching at his side.

“The boy, Lucy, or you’re fucking dead, just like the rest of these assholes are about to be.”

“That is not going to happen,” I say as I turn back to the kid. “Get under there and stay,” pointing at the tiny space only a child could fit into beneath the forklift.

“You’re outnumbered and outgunned, Lucy. Doesn’t have to end badly for everyone, you can walk away from this,” says the voice from the drones.

“And why the fuck am I getting the special treatment?” I pull my other Desert Eagle out and recheck the video feed. Half the spotlights that were dotted around the warehouse are smashed, the light is weak, but the dust and smoke have cleared. The drones are beginning to shift, Jake and what’s left of his mercs are still hunkered behind that big truck.

“Enough,” the voice says, the drones rise and start to take on Jake and his pals as I pinpoint a position in my HUD via my video feed and put Cutter into self-destruct mode. There’s a flicker of complaint from his AI, but his mind will be uploaded straight back into another body back at my place.

He fires off the ceiling and down into the humanoid drones who begin to scatter. His body flares up and explodes sucking the air out of the room for a second and firing off a hail of broken steel and drone bits over the top of the forklift. It’s pitch-black and I’m blind to the rest of the warehouse without Cutters feed. I switch to infrared in my HUD as I hear Jake and the rest of his mercs taking on the last of the drones.

Deep breath, three, explosions and gunfire, two, screams and torn metal, one, gritted teeth and gripped guns. I roll out from behind the forklift into a kneeling position and let loose my hand canons. Drone metal and dead bodies scattered through the warehouse, my Desert Eagle’s flaring orange light from their muzzles as the explosive rounds tear through the last of the steel and wire bodies that greet the fallen mercs on the rubble covered ground.

I stand and scan, silence now other than the crackle of some electrical fires and the dying moans from a few of the mercs. I bolt over to where the bulk of the firefight happened, my HUD absorbing as much information as it can, looking for signs of who might be behind this. I find Jake, half his face blown off, dead, yonder goes the light, you poor bastard. There’s nothing I can figure out from the mess and there might be another wave of these drones on the way, remote controlled by whoever the fuck that was demanding the boy.

“Get your ass out of there,” I shout as I skid over to the forklift and grab him out from underneath.

We dart back through the tunnel where I first came in and break out into the neon hue of Major Prime, the reflective light of the snow all around with an eerie quiet, people dotted here and there and those red eyes in the shadows following us. We slow our pace to a brisk walk and try to blend in, the boy squirming from my grip on his wrist as we walk and I look for a quick exit. My car’s a couple of blocks further than I’d like and I’ve got a strong suspicion that whoever is after this kid isn’t going to give up after just one round.

“Hey missy!” a voice calls as we turn down a blood-orange alleyway with tall walls, graffiti and trash and all the usual trimmings. A hovercar pulls across the opposite end and three assholes from some gang step out. Leather waistcoats on bare chests with tattoos and chains, stim and implant rich with bright red mohawks standing on their otherwise shaved heads. “You got something we need there,” one points to the boy.

I pull my hand cannon and drop the fuckers before they’ve even had a chance to make it halfway over to me, their car hovering gently behind them. I grab the boy and hammer it down the alley jumping in and telling him to sit still and keep quiet in the back seat.

“Fuckers,” I’m jabbing at the readout on the dash, the car is some sort of modded Corp-security vehicle, god knows when it was stolen or what those gangbangers have put under the hood. I pull a wire from my wrist and plug it into the dashboard input to hack it as the boy taps me on the shoulder from the back seat.

“I think I can do that,” he says.

“What the f — ” I just turn and stare as he crawls into the front passenger seat and puts his hand on the dash. The car reboots, back to factory settings and asks me to put my hands on the steering wheel to ident it to my sub-con locker.

“See?” he sits back into the passenger seat as the seatbelt comes over his chest.

I peel the car off the ground and into the air, dodging between the mega-scrapers and pushing through the drone plague in the lower levels. “What the fuck was that?” I say.

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He doesn’t say anything, sat there, staring forward hands on his lap.

“I need to get hold of my agent,” I say as I dial Munroe up in my HUD.

It’s ringing out with no answer when the kid says, “He’s dead.”

“What do you mean he’s dead?”

“He’s dead, they got to him trying to get to me. I’m sorry if that upsets you.”

“What the fuck do you mean if that upsets me?” I’m panting, there’s nausea rising in my gut and scattered stars across my vision mixing with the millions of lights from the buildings and drones outside of the car. I blast another stim stack into my system, upload a random pattern sequencer into the car’s AI from my HUD and switch it to auto-pilot, letting the thing buzz all over the quadrant till I can figure out what the hell is going on.

“Were you close? You worked together for a long time, didn’t you?” the kid says.

“Kid, now listen,” I turn to him and take his seatbelt off and pull him slowly toward me, holding my hands on his shoulders, trying to catch his eyes out of his vacant stare.

“Yes?”

“My job, this job, is to get you to an address a quadrant over, it’s a temp address, industrial sector, nothing stand-out, looks to be one from a Corp, nothing unusual there either. I’ve delivered kids before and there’s been some trouble about it too, but never have I been attacked by a pack of drones on pick up that have taken out a Vet and half a dozen mercs.” I pause and look into his empty eyes, trying to find something I’m not sure is there. “If you know something about this, you need to tell me, for both our sakes.”

“How would I know?” he says and blinks and swallows and nothing else.

“How did you do that with the car?”

He tilts his head and his eyes focus on me. “I can talk to things, I don’t know how, it’s like talking to you now, it’s just natural. Some things are easy, but not everything, some things I can’t talk to at all. Like those robots that attacked us, I couldn’t hear them, but the car, there’s something in it I can hear, and I can talk to,” he pauses and looks at me. “It just makes sense.”

“What the fuck has Munroe got me into here,” I run my hands through my spiked hair and sit back into the seat, letting the kid turn back to the world flashing by outside.

There’s a code that us Vets follow, it gets us through the jobs, it keeps us on track, keeps our reputation and most of all keeps us alive. They, whoever the fuck they are, the people that hire us, know this, our agents know this, it’s why we get jobs, it’s why we can do what we do, it’s how our system works. We are reliable no matter what the job, we left our morals behind back in Prague and all the other cluster fuck missions we were sent on.

Right now, that reliability is under threat, whatever this kid is involved with its big. Big enough to leave a trail of dead bodies within the first hour or so of the job. Jake and his mercs are out of the picture, probably their associates too. Munroe’s gone from what I can tell, whether the kid’s telling the truth or not I know if I call, he answers, it’s simple as that. No answer means something has happened. Those gangbangers who came to a quick end through my handy work and we grabbed the car from, they have a boss somewhere giving them orders, and they have some sort of info from some source to be looking for me in the first place. I’ve had jobs go west before, but nothing this bad, this quick.

I pull my hands down my cheeks, the stims running through my blood firing my synapses at twice the speed, but nothing makes any sense and I’ve got a strong feeling I’m going to get royally fucked over here.

Once you’ve been through the shit, once you’ve been through the training they put you though, once you’ve seen sub-con combat, you know, you just know when things are going to get fucked up, and this is a prime example.

This is something big and I ain’t prepared to give up the little that I’ve got for some job, for this kid. My options are thin, I know it and the rules are going to have to be bent.

“What’s your name kid?” I say.

He tilts his head staring at the colours shooting past outside, “Boyd,” he stops and turns. “My family, they called me Boyd.”

“Well, do you remember how you got to be with Jake? The guy that brought you to me?”

“No, not really,” he says.

“Do you know how you did what you did with the car, how you know what you know about my agent?”

“It’s just I can talk to things. Your agent, when you called him, I could see through the connection, see him there in his office through the security cameras, see the bullet holes in him,” he breaks off and his bottom lip starts to go and tears start to roll.

“Calm down, calm down,” I try to pull a smile out from my face, pat him lightly. There could be a million reasons why this kid is being delivered, is part of a job. Major Prime has got a mountain of different uses for a young human body and more kids than I would even like to imagine just disappear into the ocean of neon and concrete that is Major Prime and all four billion of its inhabitants every damn day. I might be part of that problem, but I’ve got to make a buck, just like every other lost soul in this hell.

“But I know you’ll help me,” he turns to me and there’s something behind his eyes now, a flicker and chills run through me.

“What do you mean you know I’ll help you?” I say and grit my teeth as that ghost of the past creeps into my mind.

“When you grabbed my hand, when we got out of the tunnel, I saw things, I heard them through your implants. You used to — ”

“ — Not another fucking word,” I grab his face and pull it into mine. “You don’t know a thing about me, you got that you little shit.” I push him back into his seat, pointing down at him. “You’re just job, like any other, I’ve got a code, and that’s what I follow, it’s got me this far and it’ll get me out of this shit show too. Put this back on, and keep your mouth shut.”

I throw the hood I’d jammed in my overcoat at the kid and he pulls it back over his head with shaking hands as I grip the steering wheel of the car.

The car comes out of auto-pilot and I start pulling in through the maze of mega-skyscrapers, weaving in and out of the other cars, back down and down below the drone line and near the lower levels to keep off the radar as much as possible. I’m going to need some help to get this job done. My place is going to be too hot right now, if they got to Munroe, they’ll know about where I live so resupply is out of the question.

I dial up Curtis Conrad in my HUD, a solid Vet that took a walk down civilian street, got a Corp job off the back of his military background doing something with their bio-metric workforce for off-planet activities, but he’s still a Vet and you never really leave. Plus with his cushy Corp job Hh’s got access to the sort of equipment I need to get this kid to where I need to get him to.

The call’s going through as I dodge and weave through all the colossal structures, the waves of humanity going in and out of them, the rich and the powerful, the corrupt and guilty. There’re no innocents up here at these levels. There’s no one that’s made it this far up the ladder that’s not trodden on piles of people along the way. I’d not be able to afford to live up here in a million years on what I make pulling the jobs I pull, doesn’t mean I’ve not trodden on my fair share to get where I’ve managed to get to, not much choice there as an ex-Vet, not like I know how to do anything else. Maybe there was a time where I had a chance at another life, a flicker of something kinder. That spectre of the past creeping, Wells and the love he said he had for me, the child we made, my escape, my salvation, all torn away. They never let you leave, not really.

“Lucy? Shit, ain’t that something, yonder goes the light,” Conrad answers as his video stream pops-up in the corner of my peripheral vision. Clean cut as always, some people you can just see were a Vet, Conrad’s not one of those people, looks like he spent his life working the easy life in an office or something. No chance you’d pin on him what he did in Prague.

“Conrad, yonder goes the light,” I say.

“What you got?”

“Trouble. You got time? I need a re-supply and I got something I need you to do with a package for me, I figure you’ve got the equipment there.”

“Always for you, Lucy just pinged you some coordinates, come to the factory. I got Corp-sec clearance and they’ve got top-level defence and imaging systems, we’ll be off-grid and I’ll try and figure out what you need me to.”

“Thanks, Conrad, we’ll be there soon,” I say as I enter what he’s sent over into the car’s navigation.

“Anything I should be prepping?”

“The job, boy, ten years or so, simple delivery only turns out it’s not so simple. Can’t talk too much over the air but there are some well-equipped people after this kid. Have weapons and a deep-consciousness scan prepped if you have one, the more I know about what’s going on with this kid, the more I might be able to understand about who’s after him and be able to get this delivery done.”

“You got it, Lucy,” his image flickers out and the car swoops through the buildings and drones and vehicles carrying all those people, carrying out all those lives, me and the boy in-between them all, not much of a life.

The entrance lights of the building flash from red to green, big shutters open from the top and bottom and the car floats into the landing bay as Conrad comes out to meet us at a service entrance. He’s not changed, still the side-parted, the look of innocence in a set of eyes that have seen their share of horror. The sort of face you’d trust without thinking, a lot of the enemy did when he would go on infiltration missions back in the day, and they paid the price.

He looks me up and down and gives me a yonder goes the light before turning and taking us onto a factory floor. We pass by the huge vats with their hulking specimens floating inside, growing and readying for their turn to head out to the stars and build the colonies we’re promised by the fuckers in power will help save us some day. Who the fuck knows if any of that shit is real, for all I know the huge clones are getting sent off to wars we’re never told about for resources that don’t exist anymore. What I do know is that somehow Major Prime keeps ticking, and that’s that.

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Conrad takes us through and into some sort of a lab type room. A plethora of equipment hanging off the pale white walls, the scanner that I asked for in the corner, no weapons that I can see.

He pulls over a chair and sits on it backwards, spotlights shining down on him. “What’s going on, Lucy?” He pauses and scratches his clean shaved chin. “Shit, you look spooked, last time I saw that we were in Tbilisi,” he says.

“In the last few hours I got a dead agent, I got a dead Vet, half a dozen dead mercs, a big pile of fucked up humanoid drones I have no idea who was being controlled by, a handful of dead gangbangers, and it’s all got something to do with this kid.” I sit on a chrome chair, roll up my sleeves and point at Boyd.

“Sounds like you’ve been having fun,” Conrad stands and walks over to the kid and takes the hood off. “Poor bastard, what’s going on with you?”

Boyd just looks up at Conrad with big blank eyes and stares.

“Something ain’t right,” I say. “And whatever it is, it’s big. I got a feeling it’s some sort of neural implant or something, seems he can talk to tech.”

“Well, that might be something, but you know as well as me that sort of thing has been around for a while now, it’s nothing new and what you’ve been through so far would seem a little excessive for a retrieval of a kid with neural implants.”

“Fire up the scanner then,” I say as Conrad takes Boyd over to the machine in the corner of the room. He picks up an EEG band and places it over the kid’s head. Boyd is just as distant as he has been since I picked him up, but he turns to me as Conrad sits him down and his eyes go even wider. He’s staring at me, into me and I try to hold back a flicker of the past that the helpless look tugs on.

“Interesting,” Conrad says as he moves over to a bank of screens embedded in the wall, all coming to life with a million different readouts that I have no idea how to decipher.

“The corporation teach you this shit?” I say as I walk over to him.

“Mostly. Some they implanted, some were just turned on from my old military implants that they hadn’t let me access when I was in the service.” He pauses and points. “Look here, this brainwave frequency is out of sync,” he places his hands on the screen and widens them, zooming on the one line bobbing up and down. Moving his hands around, he pulls the line around horizontally and reveals a dozen or so more lines all within that one, all pulsing like waves.

“What does it mean?” I say.

“Well, fuck,” he pauses and pulls at some more waves beating on the screen, grabbing bits of different ones and compiling them together in one form before turning to me. “Lucy, you’ve landed a good one this time, how much are you getting paid for this job?”

“Just tell me what it means, Conrad,” I say, leaning into him.

“This, Lucy, from what I can tell here is an AI embed and neuronal sync, state of the art. This is the sort of thing we put in the bio-metric workforce clones you saw growing in the vats outside there. That shit’s simple, grow them, implant them, turn them on and away they go, you know the drill, but we’ve not figured out how to sync an AI with a human brain. We can put an AI into a blank brain, grown in the lab, and we can put information, upload data into a human brain, but we’ve not been able to get an AI into a human without one frying the other. Either the AI gets pushed out by the human brain or the human gets pushed out by the AI, or they both end up dead. This here from what I can tell, this is them working in perfect synchronicity, this is the holy-fucking-grail of cybernetics. Do you think your military implants are something? Do you think what they put in us was hardcore? This is a ten-year-old kid with the intelligence of an AI, no wonder he can fucking talk to your car. Whoever figured this out, stabilised the sync, Christ, this kid is worth billions, trillions, more, this is revolutionary.”

“Fuck,” I say.

“No shit, Lucy. Do you realise what this means? You have something here — ”

“ — Don’t start, Conrad, I’m going to make the delivery.”

“Lucy,” he turns his body to me and holds my shoulder while looking over at Boyd. “This kid, whichever Corp gets its hands on it first will be the next major power, you realise this? But fuck the Corps, you’ve got something here, you could make a change with this, you don’t have to make the delivery, there are other options…”

“You mean going to Wells?” I say as I push his arm off my shoulder and step away, thinking of what I had, of everything that was taken from me.

“If the Underground got their hands on this before the Corps, it might give them the edge they need to make a difference. If the Underground can understand this tech, how whoever it was stabilised the AI, human connection, shit Lucy,” he walks over to the kid and looks down at him.

“I’ve got a job to do, I follow a code.” I say. “You might not follow that code any more, Conrad, you might have sold out for an easy paycheque and a cushy apartment up above the drone line, but I follow a code.”

“Lucy, you’ve already broken the code coming to see me, you know that right? You already know too much, shit, they’ll kill the both of us regardless.”

“I’ve bent the rules, Conrad. They won’t ever find out about you and what they want to do with me when I successfully deliver a package of this importance they can take up with me when I’m done,” I turn to him. “Now I know what I’m dealing with, I’ll need those weapons you promised, and I’ll be on my way.”

“Look, Lucy, just go see Wells, you don’t even have to give the kid up, just give them a few hours with him, they’ll be able to lift the info they need and that’ll put them in a position they’ve not been in for a very long time, then make the delivery,” he says.

“I need those — ”

“ — I know what they did to you Lucy,” he steps up to me, those innocent eyes that lie, those eyes that have seen so much horror themselves looking right through me.

“You don’t know shit, Conrad,” I say.

“I know they wouldn’t let you get out. I know when they turned up at your door and demanded you come back for one more mission you turned your back on them. I know what they killed your kid. We all know it was them that killed your daughter, Lucy. With this boy right here, you can get the revenge you’ve — ”

“ — Fuck you!” I scream and grab him by the shirt and steady my breath through grinding teeth. “Are you going to give me what I need or am I going to have to take it myself.”

“Take what you need, Lucy. Just, do the right — ”

There’s a small tug at my leg and Boyd is stood there looking up at me. “We’re not safe here,” he says.

“What? What’s coming?” I say.

“The dogs,” he says as he grabs his arms around my waist.

“The dogs?” I say and look up at Conrad.

Those eyes of his go wide. “Only Laches uses dogs,” he says.

“Laches is dead,” I say shaking my head, a pang of fear running through my gut.

“You think they were able to take out Laches?” he says. “Fuck me, Lucy, that’s who was behind your humanoid drones. That’s the other big gun that’s after this kid, and Laches only takes military contracts. You’re out of time, Lucy, get to the Underground at least they might be able to hide you for a bit.”

“I need weapons, Conrad,” I say as he turns away from me, starting to enter a keycode into a panel on the wall and I pull the boy off me.

A compartment to the side of Conrad slides open and a hidden room reveals itself. Rows and rows of guns, shelves of body armour, boxes of ammunition and stims and drones, everything a one-woman-army could want or need.

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I grab everything I can carry and Conrad leads us out to the hangar where the car is. I nod to him as I get in and the kid follows. He nods back but doesn’t say anything. I know what he’s thinking, do the right thing Lucy, get to the underground, get to Wells, help them help yourself, some shit like that no doubt, but it ain’t me, it never was. I pretended to be something else for a short while, someone else. I teased at making good in this world for a little time. Faked a life. No. It ain’t me.

The car peels off the hangar bay floor and out to the lower levels below the drone line and trying to stay off the radar. Fucking Laches has released his dogs, well, he must be desperate, but I’ve got a few tricks programmed into my implants that I can pull out yet. He might have taught me everything I know back when I was a fresh recruit, but I ain’t no snot-nosed private anymore, I’m a Vet, just like him. I’m fucking Savage Lucy, the Acid Commando.

The car’s defence system kicks in and it dodges and weaves, two missiles scream past and explode in the side of a nearby mega-skyscraper wall, firing out a cloud of hot ash and debris. I grab at the steering wheel and hammer the car down lower and lower, hurtling towards the ground, spinning and screaming.

“Don’t do it, don’t do it!” Boyd shouts from the back.

“What, why, down is good, it’s off the radar,” I’m yelling and levelling out the car as two more missiles shoot passed the tail and into the ground behind us, tearing up neon and concrete behind us as I switch my peripheral vision to the outside back cams. There they are, pacing along the ground just as fast as us and gaining ground quickly, the dogs.

“Those things can track you easier on the ground, you need to get into the drone cloud, between high radar and their lower level scanning,” Boyd says.

“How the fuck am I supposed to navigate in the done cloud?”

“I’ll take care of that just get up there.”

I turn the car into a lateral spin, the undercarriage scraping along the side of a mega-skyscraper as I spin it around again and we’re heading straight back up along the outside wall of the building. Everything is flashing, everything inside the car, everything inside my head, my implants, my peripheral vision, the whole lot is going fucking crazy as Laches and his best try to keep up with us.

The kid’s eyes are closed in the back, hands out, he’s sucked into the seat with gravity holding him down from our vertical ascent. He leans forward, holding out a little hand I can see in the reflection of the dozens of panels in the dashboard.

“I can’t hold them!” he cries.

Something blows the roof of the car clean off and the world comes screaming in. Debris flying, glass and twisted metal and the lights, all those lights, millions of tiny flashes from everything around us. The mega-skyscrapers, the drones, the cars and people and everything else all reflected in a haze of broken glass and twisted chrome. I grit and focus, sending a stim pack into my system as the car somehow maintains its trajectory upwards and I hold my breath, where to now?

Another explosion rips outwards from the side of the building underneath us as we’re riding up it and catapults the car backwards and out into the heavy flow of traffic between the buildings. A moment holds onto me there, still in the air, somewhere between our vertical velocity and the force of gravity, the night, Major Prime, everything and everyone holds us in the gigantic palm of their vast hand, and I blink and scream and then everything goes dark.

I can feel the pads stuck to my chest, there’s a voice somewhere counting down from five. Everything’s black and buzzing, my heart is jumping around inside me, pushing itself through my ribcage, trying to escape to some unknown place that is beyond me. The countdown reaches its terminal point and the electricity rips through me and I can feel my implants sizzling and I can smell burnt flesh and the voices are becoming clearer as I manage to lift an arm and start to cough and wheeze.

“We got a reading,” someone says.

“Back off, back off, she’s coming around,” another voice says, there’s something recognisable in it, a flicker of the past.

“Lucy, can you hear me?” it’s close now, that recognisable voice, leaning in and over me and I peel back my eyelids revealing a dank, green light as my implants reset themselves and stream lines of code loading in my peripheral vision. I blink and try to remember what happened as reality comes pounding back in with all its brute force, my vision realigns and there he is, there’s his face in front of me. One that I’ve not seen in years. One that I hoped I’d not have to see ever again.

“Take it easy, Lucy, you’re pretty banged up,” he says.

I cough and croak out, “How the fuck did I get here, Wells?”

“Slowly, Lucy, take it slow.”

“Don’t give me any shit, Wells,” I say and push myself up onto one elbow and swallow hot spit and grimace at that smell of my burnt-out implants and the flesh that surrounds them.

“The kid, Lucy, it was the kid. Boyd contacted us when you were with Conrad, something about him finding out about the Underground and me and, I don’t know. I guess the AI was able to hack us and he got a message through and told us what Conrad had told you and we came for you.”

“So, you know about the kid,” I shake my head. “Did he survive?”

“Yeah, we know about the kid, Lucy. He’s safe. He gave us your location and we started tracking you immediately, we had you pinpointed when you started to try and run so when you went down we were able to grab you before he did, but it wasn’t easy,” he stands up straight and turns his head to the room we’re in.

I look around, some sort of makeshift medical bay, arched brick ceilings, dark green lighting, half-a-dozen other poor bastards on makeshift beds like the one I’m on wired up to, various pieces of outdated medical equipment. “I’m in the Underground,” I say.

“Right, we didn’t have much choice,” Wells sits on the end of the bed and turns to me, that grizzled jaw sticking out as it always did, always does in the memories that float in the back of my mind. The low light catches his scarred face, penetrating eyes looking down on me with the same grit and strength they had when I first met him. Everything that drew me to him still there, all that fire, all that intensity, all that honesty. “I’m glad we managed to get you out, Lucy.”

“You sure?” I say as I take a bottle of water from beside the bed and swill it around my mouth, spitting out the taste of burnt flesh and smoke.

“You know how much I’ve thought about what I would say if we ever saw each other again?” he leans forward and puts his head in his hands.

“I’m guessing more than I care to know.”

He doesn’t say anything and we’re silent for what seems like a long time.

“You — ”

“ — Don’t even start, Wells,” I say as I sit up and pull off the paper gown and the EKG pads from my chest. I grab my t-shirt off the floor beside me, torn and bloodied, and pull it over my head. “I gotta get out of here, I’ve got a delivery to make.”

“Lucy, if you didn’t already realise, you’re at the end of the line here.”

I turn my legs off the bed and try to stand, they go from under me, my knees hit the cold concrete floor, Wells steps over to me and grabs underneath my arm. I’m looking up at him, trying to hold it down. Not the pain that’s hammering through me, not the fear of what’s about to come, but that other world that haunts me, that other time, the one where we had a life together, and the one I have done so much to forget. Everything that we went through. Our daughter. Her death. Her murder. “Back off, Wells. Where’s the kid?”

He pulls me up and puts me back on the bed, stood over me, looking down with those fierce eyes. “Look, Lucy, you need to lay low for a long time. We lost two people getting you and the kid out and look at these poor bastards in here, they came out for you.”

“Don’t give me that shit Wells, they came out for the kid. You came out to get your hands on him and for what he might be able to give you. Don’t you dare say you came out because of me.”

“You think we would have bothered with you if we were only after what’s in the kid’s head?” he’s looking at me, still staring. “We need you too, Lucy, if we’re going to get through this.”

“We? Or you?”

“Lucy,” he turns away. “It wasn’t your fault. When are you going to stop blaming yourself?”

“Fuck you, Wells. They didn’t come after you,” I pull myself up again and steady myself on my feet, stars flashing across my vision, the past flickering across my mind.

“It was them, Lucy. It was them that did that to us, not you,” he turns back to me, his jawline pulsing.

“If I’d gone back in, she’d still be alive,” I say.

“And you’d probably be dead.”

“I don’t matter.”

We stop, staring at each other, a screaming silence between us mocked by the buzzing and beeping of the EKG units and other medical equipment in the room. He takes a step toward me with his arms raised but I pad them away, my footing coming back, my strength levelling out, it’ll take a bit more than a few missiles and a car wreck to get to me.

“Lucy,” he says as I step to move around him. “Lucy!”

I’m about to turn back as an alarm flashes in my peripheral vision from what’s left of my implants and defence grid. “Wells?”

“No,” Wells says as I turn to him, that fire in his eyes going out. “I thought — ”

“ — You thought we’d be safe here, thought we’d be safe from Laches? Where’s the kid, Wells? He’s all that matters now,” I come in close to him.

“I thought we’d have some time, at least a few days, enough to figure something out,” he says.

“Laches is a god damn animal and some it’s likely the military is feeding him with the best tech money can buy so they can get their hands on that kid, you think the Underground is going to stop that?” I put my hands on his shoulders. “Wells, the kid, we can save him, where is he?”

He’s shaking his head as alarm sirens throughout the facility start to scream and something big explodes on the surface, sending heavy shakes through the walls and ceiling.

“Where, Wells!” I shake him

“Two rooms over, research section, we’re running tests on him.”

I bring my elbow up to his temple in a flash and catch him on his way down. Knocked out cold. I lay him on the bed I was just on. “Sorry, Wells. This isn’t going to pan out the way you wanted it, you shouldn’t have brought me here.”

I turn and I’m out and down the corridor, pulling on some overalls I found in a locker and carrying a scalpel I lifted from a medical kit lay about in the makeshift hospital. The passages rumble and shake as they heave with people running in all directions, shouting orders and trying to bring some order to the chaos. The walls and ceilings fire out clouds of dust from the bombing that’s started above ground. It’s bedlam but that works for me, I’m able to push my way through it into the barebones research facility a couple of doors down as Wells had said.

I kick through the door and a guy and a girl spring around looking at me with big eyes and dropped jaws.

“Don’t make this hard on yourself,” I say as I flash the scalpel at them.

The girl takes a step forward, her hands pulling into firsts.

I spring and drive into her, pull myself around in a flash and before she can flinch, I’ve span her back to face the guy, my arm around her neck and the blade against her jugular. “I’m fucking serious I will tear her fucking throat out, now, where’s the kid?”

The guy points to a door across the room. I edge toward it with the girl still in my grasp and kick it open, “Boyd, out here now!”

He walks out, looking up at me with that vacant stare, “He’s come for me,” he says.

“I know, we’re getting out of here,” I say as I jam the scalpel into the shoulder of the girl, twist it to keep the wound open, pull it out to a fountain of blood and pocket it.

She’s screaming as I push her forward into the guy that’s cowering back against the wall and I grab the kid and bolt out the door.

We run down the corridor a few yards and I pull him into another room. It’s empty other than a few shelves with some random tech other paraphernalia, people running around outside, the walls still shaking from the bombing, the sirens still screaming.

I kneel to the kid, “We need a way out of here, what do you know about this place?”

“I have full schematics and layout of the entire facility,” he says.

“Good, so you know how we can get above ground?”

“Yes, but, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he pauses and looks up, the bombing has stopped, the walls creak but the dust begins to settle. “He’s here, he’s coming for me, he’s coming for us.”

“I can handle, Laches,” I say as I grab the kid and edge out into the corridor. The main lights have gone out and the emergency power has kicked in. Whirling siren lights spin red and cast circling shadows as the chaos of moments before turns to whimpering fear in the passages from the few people that we see.

I keep the kid tight to me as we take rights and lefts, down staircases and back up again until he stops and points. “There, that hatch leads straight to the surface.”

I step towards the ladder that leads up the wall and to a handled hatch, “Good, you go first, I’ll be right behind you.”

“You’re not ready for him,” Boyd says.

“I can handle him,” I say, a quiver in my voice that I can’t steady.

“I can’t let you go through with this Lucy,” he steps forward, the vacant look in his eyes turning ridged, wide and crazy.

“You’re the AI,” I say.

“If that’s what you want to call me,” he says looking up at me, a wildfire in his stare.

“I am going to deliver you to my client,” I say.

“Laches will kill you, Lucy. Then he will have me, and he’s not going to take me to any Corp, he’s going to keep me and go into business for himself, you know what that means?”

“We’ve not got time for this,” I crouch and sweep my leg around to knock the kid off his feet but he jumps and clears me and lands back ridged on the floor staring back at me. I bring my fist up before he can blink but he dodges his head sideways just I bring my other first around and drive it right into his temple. His body flings itself onto the floor and after a few shudders, he goes limp.

“Not a chance, kid. Even with an AI.” I step over and pick him up and fling him over my shoulder.

Up the ladder, release the hatch and out into the open to be greeted by the long and desolate landscape of the quarantine zone. Abandoned and left behind by everyone that could afford to get out after the meltdown in 2076, where the Underground chose to set-up shop and as off-grid as you can get.

I step out and put the kid down on the ground, look up at the new dawn sky breaking, yonder goes the light. A wonderous selection of blues you never see in the depths of Major Prime widen in-front of me. Natural colours washing over me as the sunrise creeps out over the horizon, casting gigantic shafts of light through the skeletons of the ruined skyscrapers all around.

Some fires burn from little huddles of people that still scrape a life together here. Better than being in Major Prime I’ve heard they say, they’d rather suck down on some tasty radiation poisoning rather than live in that neon and concrete world. Can’t say I blame them.

There’s a stillness, a quiet that I’ve not heard in a long time, not since I was in the shit, back in Prague and the bombs stopped for just a minute, the drones ceased for a moment, the screams and horror all around seemed to come to a standstill as the Russians dropped an almighty EMP that wiped out everything, implants and all, for miles around. Just enough time for us all to take a few breaths before the melee kicked off again.

There’s that peace here, and I step into it, almost forgetting myself, almost giving myself that pleasure, until I see him coming over the horizon.

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Laches, his guide-stick in one hand, his plague of drones following him overhead, his silhouette lone marching forward against the rising blue dawn.

“Savage Lucy!” he shouts from where he’s stopped, fifty or so metres away. He knows I’m in bad shape, but he also knows not to get too close, where I’m most dangerous. “Yonder goes the light.”

“Laches, yonder goes the light,” I say and pause, taking a few steps forward. “How’s this going to go down?”

“You got something I want, Lucy. The way I see it, I could do with a second hand with something like this, going to bring a lot of heat down on me, Corp level heat, probably military too. Take a moment to think about that, me and you, taking on the Corps together, hell, it’ll almost be like old times. Me and the Acid Commando herself back together again, shit, that’s enough to strike fear into the heart of any man.”

“You know it’s not going to happen, Laches. I follow — ”

“ — You follow a code! Ah, the grand code! Lucy, everything they did to us, everything they put us through and we still follow what they taught us because we have nothing else? Lucy, it’s pathetic. Look what I’m offering you here,” he takes a few more steps forward. “This is a new life, this is a new meaning, this is beyond all that past all that history, this is you getting the revenge you’ve always wanted on the Corps and the military, you need to think about that for a second, an opportunity like this will never come along again and you’ll be left dead for a code that doesn’t mean shit to you, and I’ll be the new-wave, I’ll bring the future Major Prime deserves.”

I’m stood in silence. I’m spying my way in. He’s edging closer.

“Last chance Lucy, like I said when you were at the handover back there with Jake, it doesn’t have to go down like this, you can have something else. We made one hell of a team back in the day, think what we can do with this sort of tech.”

“You think you can take me, Laches?” I say as we tighten the gap between us. “Without any of that shit?” I wave my arms up at the drones following behind him.

He stops and laughs. “Ah, nice move, Lucy, nice move. You want to get dirty, do you?”

“You and me, Laches. You owe me that much,” I say, now down to 20 or so meters away from him.

“Two Vets, hand-to-hand, the way it should be?” he says as he steps forward, nodding his head slowly.

“Exactly, wouldn’t be right any other way,” I step and stand as he launches the guide-stick out across the desolate landscape and the drones buzz after it.

“Well then, Lucy, I’ll just have to kill you the way I killed your daughter.” A dagger of ice pierces my heart and I take a step back and falter as he steps forward, grinning, ear to ear, eyes flashing with crazy hate. “With my bare hands.”

“You…” I stumble backwards and down onto one knee trying to catch my breath, trying to understand what I’ve just been told, trying to see her smile one last time, trying to remember her laughter, trying to think of her unconditional love, trying to hold onto some light.

“Yes, me, Lucy,” he says, pulling off his body armour, his gloves, striding toward me beating his bare chest. “Who else do you think they’d trust with killing the daughter of the Acid Commando, just to teach her a lesson? Who do you think they came to? Of course, it was me, Lucy, and now you’re going to go the same way and I’m going to love every fucking minute of it.”

He launches forward fists raised, jaw pulsing, bad, bad crazy in his eyes but he thinks too much of himself and too little of me, the way he always did. One step, two steps, he’s on me and I fall to my side from my low position and in a flash scissor my legs against his. He’s down in an instant, his face hits the dirt, hands out in front of him, I spin around, using my legs to knot against his and I’m on his back pulling the head back before he can blink. He tries to scream something, but the blade of the scalpel is out of my pocket, in my hand and across his throat before he can mutter a sound.

My legs are locked and I’m screaming into the blue dawn and tearing his head back by his hair, hearing the popping and ripping of skin and bone and cartilage, a fan of blood shooting out in front of me from as his gurgles and sputters and spits of blood pour out before us.

“You fucking did this to me!” I scream and pull and rip at his head as his body goes limp and the last of the skin and cartilage gives way and it snaps back and I take the scalpel and stab it into the back of his neck and stab and stab and cut and saw through his spine. Blood and sinew fly up, coating me in his death until the last of the bone gives way and his head comes off in my hand and I stand and step over his corpse and breathe in the morning sun, jets of steam pushing out of my mouth.

The light rises through the skeletal skyscrapers, washing me in its orange hues, the past cascading down in my mind, that world, that buried history slowly falling into a place where I can put it to rest. Moving out of that dark place where it would creep and haunt, into a new place, where I can let it be, where one day, I might be able to look at it and smile.

“Lucy?” the kid is next to me and looking up.

I turn to him, “There’s your Laches,” I say, throwing the severed head on the ground before his feet as I wipe the blood down my face and the tears from my eyes. “Come on, I’ve got a delivery to make.”

“You don’t have to,” he says in a whisper.

“They call me Savage Lucy for a reason, kid,” I say, stood, looking at my bloodied hands in the morning sun.

“I know, I’ve seen it, all that pain, it doesn’t have to define you.”

“Yes, it does, it’s who I am.”

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The delivery is done, the kid handed over, my payday quadrupled, I slide back into the anonymity of Major Prime and away into the night, surrounded by all that neon and concrete.

There’ll be fallout from this one, a fucking lot of fallout. Corp wars on the horizon, the military will probably get involved, off-planet might even want a piece of the action too, the Underground is going to get themselves together, god knows what they were able to scrape from the kid before Laches came. Whatever happens, this is going to be big. There’s going to be bodies that pile up, both the innocent and the guilty, and money to be made and that’s that, jobs to be had, and they’ll know who to come to if they can run the right credits.

I’m down on the lower levels, things on my mind, how to bag a new agent, what the next job might bring, but I’m here on the ground where I like it, where you can see Major Prime at its rawest, that no holds barred attitude. All those metallic purple hues, all that exposed infrastructure, all that decay and degeneration. The gangs and the T>O

Artist: Beeple_Crap AKA Mike Winkelmann

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beeple_crap/

Artist website: http://beeple-crap.com

Writer: Richard Galbraith

Writer medium: https://medium.com/@ricgalbraith

Musical Inspiration

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NEON & CONCRETE —Story #07 was originally published in NEON & CONCRETE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #06

Neon & Concrete — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 07:11:15 GMT

The Last Disciple

Ozhichige: STASIS

We are linked by a corpse, the Hunter and I.

A corpse he created through my failure to protect the one I was sworn to keep. Now he watches me too, studying me, ready to sever that link with my death.

It was never meant to be this way…to end this way. My task was to hold onto her, the Last Disciple, to take her between the worlds of the universe and to protect her so that she could perform, so she could reveal the truth to those that had not seen it. So she could bring those that were lost onto the right path, to see the light that we all hold within, to find that light through her, she that is now a corpse.

For aeons, we travelled between those worlds, and for all that time our purpose was fulfilled. We were able to reach so many. With great vigour bring the masses to the new truth through her, the Last Disciple, our hope. The holder of so much, of all that we had learnt, and the one that had such weight placed upon their shoulders. Such a task, to educate the universe…

She was chosen to lead, and I was chosen to protect.

To be given my task was the greatest of privileges, the ultimate responsibility. I embraced the challenge with all my heart, all my strength, all that I had and could give, and still, I failed.

We roamed the universe, and we drowned in time, leaving countless ripples in our wake. Across the millennia we grew together and performed our mission. Her the Last Disciple, I the Protector. Now, after all that we had, when she is gone, and I am left here, I hold onto her memory, and I think of him. I reflect on him, the Hunter, of what he did, how he took her from us all and now, how he will eventually take me. For now, he lays in wait, watching and studying. I know he will come and there is nothing I can do, so in this brief moment of respite I stand in this forest, and I dream, I imagine her for just a moment longer. I see and reflect; I lament her death, my eventual demise, the darkness we will all slip into and the fear that runs through me and surrounds it all.

Now, here in this dream, I stand before a phantom. An image of her, so grand and beautiful and unique. Did this time happen? Do I piece together the past in the vision that I want, that I need now? The present must hold all our history within it, all those moments, so is this vision before me now a collection of all that time spent between her and me? An image of those millennia as we swam through the universe and cured all those lost souls across all those broken worlds?

Each world chose their version of her without them knowing. She would look into each world’s collective consciousness, and a vision would form from that ethereal mass. An apparition that would hold for that world and its inhabitants. One they could believe in, one they could see a hint of their image held within, so they could hold their hands up to have their deepest wish granted, to see the truth, to see the light.

Is this vision the one that was extracted from one of them, some perfect vision some world wanted to see? Or is it the one that I want to see now? I stand here on this metallic plateau, my robes swaying in the gentle breeze, looking up at this spirit floating before me with lines of beauty drawn through her. She always appeared as she needed to appear before the intended world to which we had travelled, but does she now appear to me as I need to see her, as I want to see her, as my intended?

I stand at her base, holding onto myself before her magnificence, this wonderous phantom pierced by beams of opaque light, and look I look across the iron mesa. I stand and wait as I would if we were on a given world. I wait for those who will now never come to give themselves up to her, waiting for her message, a gorgeous inevitability. Now forever lost, that inevitability destroyed by the Hunter, how could they do such a thing? How could they end such beauty…such a gift?

Who could strike down that which held the truth, what matter of being could do this to her, to me, to the universe? The Hunter — he who set out to study fear. He that called her destruction their freedom. He could never see, he will never see, and now no one will ever see that light again — he has trapped us all in the dark.

What he created renders itself before me in this dream: her death, her final shell.

Ozhichige: CONSUMED

This is her end, consumed and dead, this corpse that links the Hunter and I. The gold streaks of all her knowledge running through her, a black and marblelike simulacrum, as she falls for all eternity. A vision of lost hope, for myself, for the universe, for everything and everyone that we were trying to bring to the light. She was hope in a hopeless place, and now we are left, all of us, to face the darkness alone.

“This is the way of things,” he said to me on that fateful world where he chose to attack. “Dark consumes the light; you should know this.”

I braced against the shackles in which he had bound me, forcing and pulling to try and free myself, trying to stop him, trying to pull him back from the horror he was inflicting and to save her, but it was useless. I looked up at the world before me, the ashen sky thundering with death, the millions upon millions of fallen laid out before me, and her, her gentle body in the distance. Her tender vision, the one chosen for her by that planet’s inhabitants, writhing in pain and terror.

“She is stronger than you think,” I said to the Hunter through gritted teeth, the sky blackening overhead, the wailing and screaming horror of those that had not yet fallen piercing the roaring bombardment from the heavens. I braced and screamed as the landscape erupted into gigantic towers of ash and dirt, filling the horizon before falling away, down and down, revealing the desolate world upon which she would now die.

“If she is in any way as strong as you, then I have little to fear,” he said to me, walking past me, taunting me with a wry smile, his metallic, chrome sheen flickering with yellow from the explosions in the sky.

“What would you know of strength? You only ever take, you only ever destroy, you do not give as she does,” I said as my tears fell and the end of the world took hold while the end of her beckoned the darkness.

“You believe she gives?” he paused and turned to me, couching, his eyes finding mine.

“She shows them the truth, the light, a better way. It is her gift to the universe.”

The wry smile fell into a grimace as he shook his head. “And the ones that don’t believe in your light? What happens to them?”

“They all come to our side, they all realise the truth, none have yet turned from her.”

“And what if they did?”

“How could they? To see her is to know, to open your heart to her is to find that which you seek.”

He came in close, his metallic face without expression, his eyes glowing white, pure and infinite. “You enslave,” he said as he gripped my chin and lifted my face.

“Each has their own choice,” I said to him as he held my jaw, meeting his stare, my eyes wide and gazing into that endless whiteness. “And they come to us because they know she holds what they seek, because they know she contains the light.”

“No!” he said letting my face go, stepping back, finger pointing at me, his eyes alight with rage. “You! You move from world to world, and you consume them. You make them your own! There is no choice. That thing you called the Last Disciple, she was no wonder, she was no gift. The worlds you went to, she used their minds against them, she became their God, and then she absorbed them, their consciousness, so she could become yet more powerful and consume more. Choice? There never was any choice. This is why I came; this is why I bided my time for all those millennia, to pick the right moment so I could stop your plague, to end your tyranny. Now I have succeeded, and she is dead, and they are free again…we can all be free.”

I lowered my head and whispered, “She contained the truth, we knew we were right, I know we are right.”

“Ah, your righteousness,” he turned his head as he spat. “That is your downfall. Yes, that’s where I found the crack, that’s where I saw my opportunity. It had dulled you, it had made you weak because within it you became lost. With your success, with her unbridled and unmatched power growing ever stronger as she consumed more and more worlds, you considered yourselves these bringers of light, and you, you believed just as they did. You were consumed too, and now I have come, and now she is dead, and now you will learn…everyone will learn.” He stepped back, raising his arms, his eyes turning to black as the heavens opened and he unleashed powerful rains from the darkened sky.

I watched the ashen ground well up, and as the showers fell, thunder cracked, and lightning whipped while the dirt grew into sludge and collected us in death.

Blood and viscera and horror rose around me as the chains held me down and he stood watching, “Yes, I will show you the truth, I am the one that has come to study fear, and in your eyes, I see it now. It’s pure, so pure because you have lost her and now you have lost all those that were under your domain, and you have to face something you have not ever faced before. Countless worlds you occupied are now able to regain their freedom. The universe can breathe again now she has fallen, and you, you too.”

“They will perish without her light,” I said.

“Just as you?”

“Just as I,” I looked up at him.

“Your fear tells you this, but there is more to you yet. You believed in her and her alone, and you became lost. You believed in her tyranny and as more fell to their knees, so did you, relinquishing your soul to her. You forgot about yourself. You lost who you were, and this is why I won today, so easily. This is why her Protector failed.”

“And what must I face now?” I looked up through the pouring rain, his chrome form before me a dark grey which reflected the death from the earth beneath his feet. He stood there for an age until the last of the rain fell, and an endless silence came screaming across the plateau of ruin.

“Now you will face yourself,” he said as he held a metallic hand on my shaven head, pushing me down, forcing my face into the sludge. “You are alone now, they all are alone now, as it should be, and this is the greatest freedom. You will face inwards as I study you, and until the day I come for you.”

The hand disappeared, and I pulled my head out of the sludge and breathed again. Heaving gigantic lungsful of air, I looked up and into nothing. It was gone…there was just that world and I and the landscape of death before me. The bodies, countless, stretching across the barren landscape, slowly setting in the drying grey sludge made of blood, bone, and ash.

I braced against the chains and screamed at the world, at the universe, at him and everything that he had done. I gripped my fists and pulled against the manacles, fighting and fighting and trying to remember her…to hold onto her light.

Moment by moment, grappling and roaring into the desolation, alone and surrounded by such horror, I tried to free myself. With gritted teeth and pounding muscles, I wrenched against the chains until I fell to my knees, breathless and exhausted but not at my end.

I sat and waited, for an age, weeping, bound, as the stars span above and the ripples her and I had left across time faded into stillness, and the sludge of that forsaken landscape swallowed all the fallen and set solid. It was grey and endless. The darkness consumed me, and with each moment in the solitude I refused to give in to his demands, I refused to be alone, I knew she was still with me.

Time passed, and with it, the chains that held me down crumbled and turned to dust from my wrists, and I rose into the darkness. I wiped the filth and mire away from my eyes and stared across the wasted horizon, and then I saw her, what remained of her, even after all this time. A flicker in the distance, a visage of what she had once been. A hallucination? A mirage? I could not tell, I did not need to understand, all I needed was to see, was to believe, was to know her and the light in the darkness.

I stood, and I walked across that black desert, the darkness enveloped me, the cold hammered at me, the solitude pulled at me. Each step trying to claim me, but with each moment I moved closer to her and I knew I was not alone. I watched her grow larger and larger as I progressed through the darkness, passing the countless bodies trapped in the ground. Bones jutting out of the grey, I wept for them with each step, I wept for her and all that she had given. Pacing ever closer, my sorrow turned to rage and screamed in the darkened sky until I arrived by her side.

Ozhichige: THE LIGHT WITHIN

I stood before her, the epic vision where she had come to rest, destroyed by the Hunter, sunken and set in the ground just as all those decayed corpses I had passed.

This journey was at an end, and I thought I was too. I looked up to her, a beacon, the last of the light radiating from her, that truth that she held, that I adored — was it the truth, was this real or just another moment, another dream…what I needed to see? I could not know but it did not matter; all that mattered was that she was there, with me then, she was what I needed, and she gave, as she had always done.

A voice spoke, “You are here, by my side as you always were, do not blame yourself for what happened.” It was her voice and it swam through me. “You could not have known, none of us could have known there was such hatred in the universe. My light was a gift; we knew that you still know that, do not give up on me, on the light. You must believe.”

I fell to my knees and the glow from her corpse faded and the darkness of the dead world shrouded me. Kneeling there, still, solitary, nothing, the dead silence crawling through my mind, the memory of all those worlds to which we had travelled to pouring through me. All that time, all those places, all the beings which we had set free, where were they now? Like I, were they suffering, were they alone? Were they falling apart, holding onto a phantom, still seeking the light? Had they given into the darkness or were they able to find something in what they had seen, in what they had once held onto…in each other?

She asked me to believe and I knew that I could, I would not give in to him. I would not fail before the Hunter; I would hold onto her and the hope that she gave us until my end.

I lay down to sleep, worn and crushed from everything that had happened, yet not defeated. I lay down to give myself a moment, to dream the dreams I needed to, to see her perfect apparition one more time before I knew that I would face him.

Ozhichige: BARREN

I wake and I am in a forest, the ground ashen, the trees before me barren and dead, but still they stand, as do I.

Stepping forward, my bare feet leave footprints in the powder white ground. It is soft and the dust pushes through my toes. Another world rich with desolation, deep in solitude, but I have myself, and I have her in my mind, the memory to hold onto. She may be gone now but she gives me strength, and as I stand, I will not betray her or the light.

The voice rises in me, “You must believe.”

I answer it out loud, “I do.”

He has brought me here, to test me, to study me, to push me into a pit of despair, to understand my fear, but he will not learn from me. Not here, not now.

I deny him. I have her, and that is enough. He may have killed her, that exquisite corpse may be the link that connects us, but with her in my soul, I am never alone, and I will never be alone.

Walking through the dead forest, brushing my fingertips against the rotten trunks of the trees, they met their inevitable fate over time. How much time do I have left now, how long will he leave me here? He said he would leave me until I faced myself. I say that I already have faced that being, the one within, and he is rich because he is not alone. He, I, we can face this dead world, all the dead worlds that he may ever take me to because we are not alone. I am not alone. I believe in her; I believe in the light.

I walk the long walk, through the forest. I will walk as long as necessary, each step solidifying my resolve against him and my belief in her. I fear not time, I fear not solitude, neither can have their grip on me, and I smile.

I step and I look down, under my feet grass is growing, curling up between my toes, the ash filtering away as life pushes itself through and up out of the ground. Looking up, the forest has cleared, and I see him, the Hunter kneeling before me.

Ozhichige: THE HUNT

“I have come for you,” he says, his voice low, his gaze fixed, his chrome-like body now a dull grey, kneeling amongst the long grass as it sways in the gentle breeze.

“It matters not. I am ready. There is nothing more you can do to me, nothing more you can take away from me. I have her in my soul and you cannot change that.”

He stands, the dulled sheen of his body reflecting a cloudy image of the green grass, the blue sky, my red robes before him. Each step he takes towards me, the sheen solidifies, the reflection growing clearer until he is an arm’s length away, and I see a pure reflection of myself in his metallic chest.

“You are so weak,” he says, pursing his lips, his jaw pulsating.

“I have strength through her, that is all I need.”

“Your faith is your downfall, through it you have chosen to submit. You choose to accept your fate because you have given yourself up to your belief. You are a sheep, a fool, and you will perish.”

“All I have is inside me now, and all I can hope is that the worlds from which you took her light away can also find solace as I. I hope all the worlds that she never reached can find that hope and the peace that comes with it.”

“Some may, some may not. But I have given them the choice. I have given them the freedom that you denied them, and the strong amongst them, they will find themselves and their freedom, not through her memory, they will find it within themselves. They will find it by facing themselves, in the darkness, alone and in front of the truth. They will fight.”

Robes grow out of his shoulders and down across his torso while his eyes glow with all his rage — that infinite whiteness that he shot at me when we were on the planet where she fell. I stand before him and I am not afraid because there is nothing to fear. I have her.

Ozhichige: FIRST CONTACT

“Who did this to you?” I say. “Who left you alone? What has caused you to be this way?”

“You and her, together, you gave me my mission, my purpose when you came to my world,” he says as he steps back and stares at me, into me.

“Then you too have seen the light.”

“I was never given a choice. You came, you assimilated, your tyranny fell over us all and as soon as you had arrived, you had left, and my world was no longer what it once was. You took our freedom, our right to be free, to choose. You came, her apparition formed, and it was so perfect, and once she had their minds, their souls, she left.”

“But did she not give you peace?” I say, arms by my side, robes swaying in the gentle breeze, the sound of the rustling grass disturbing the silence.

“But what was the cost?” he says, and I see a moment of hesitation in him.

“What cost is too great to find the light?”

“Freedom,” he says as he rights himself, the hesitation no longer there as he takes a step towards me. “What you never understood, what she could never understand, is that there must be a choice. You took that away from them, from everyone you visited, your righteousness carrying you. I raged against that light, I was able to hold onto something, something deep within, a spark. That spark grew into a flame and into a powerful inferno that was able to free me. Through all that time, all that fear that bound me, I was alone and I still held firm, and all the worlds across all the universe now may do the same. She is gone, and what you do not understand is that I gave you that choice too. True enough you faced it, you turned within, but inside you found her, a belief in her, and not in yourself. Your choice was wrong, and there will be no mercy.”

“I will die in the light, you will remain in the dark,” I say as he steps to me and raises a hand and the sky darkens and the grass falls and the world around us rises in ash once more.

“So be it,” he says placing his metallic, chrome hand on my forehead. There is no fighting this, there is no need.

His rage flows through me and it is terrible. His anger crushes every part of me but I fear not, for I have her and he cannot take that away from me. Here at the end, all I have known is her, and the hope that the universe will remember her, and maybe I will meet her again on the other plane to which he now sends me.

The world goes dark, but I have the light.

Artist: Jon Ojibway AKA Ozhichige

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozhichige/

Writer: Richard Galbraith

Writer medium: https://medium.com/@ricgalbraith

Musical Inspiration:

https://medium.com/media/dcd7c2076ff8752a62d7b47d4daa61ff/href

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #06 was originally published in NEON & CONCRETE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #05

Neon & Concrete — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 12:22:55 GMT

Cigarettes & Dynamite

Beeple: BLOOD MOON

This is the sort of place you come if you’re prepared to die. If you’ve exhausted every other option, if you’ve got nothing left, other than the clothes on your back and maybe a skill or two that might be useful to the wrong type of villain, then you come here to Blood Moon.

Look, you got lucky, somehow, and you’ve had a moment to try to think about what your next move might be. You look left and see a suppression-collar bolted around your neck as you sit on the slave line in some underground workshop for the rest of your awful life. You look right, and your brain is jacked into the grid twenty-three hours a day, that little bit of computational power utilised to help the Corporation’s crypto-calculations.

There are a million and one unpleasant alternatives to dying in the metropolis, called Major Prime, none of them pretty. So, if you’ve made that decision, if you’re at the end of your rope, burnt every bridge, if you’re prepared to die overtaking some fucked up alternative, like me, then you come here. You end up at Blood Moon with the hope you might catch a gig that’ll pull you out of the dark, give you some option, and if you don’t, well, there are plenty of suicide rooms available, on the house of course, as long as they get to live stream it.

I’ve been here twice before, both times ready to bite the bullet, ready to give it up, rather than take one of those alternatives you’d barely call a life. Both times, something came along that got me out of whatever scrape I’d gotten myself into.

I turn away from the bar for a moment to breathe this place in, see what’s up, and maybe find a mark. There’s every type of person under the sun in this place. Everyone’s got their past; everyone’s got their demons. You’ve got the neo-yuppie next to the T>O

I turn back to the bar, drowned in red light. The sound system’s blasting out some retro-techno, and the hard thumps of the baseline are vibrating through my chest. Another shot’s calling my name, so the android barman pours me a double. Hammering it back, the glass starts shaking across the countertop. Weird little action, vibrating along with the explosions of noise, doing its little dance, the same as we all do with life until it falls off the edge and smashes into a million little pieces, just like the rest of us.

I laugh, the android pours me another. I notice the credit sign in the peripheral vision of my retinal implant roll-up one more time, and I hit the next shot back and order up something more powerful. The blood-red of the lighting system shifts and swirls, making it hard to pick out the nuances of the particular type of clientele you get here, tough to try to find my mark, pick out someone that might have my gig waiting for me.

Everyone knows everyone’s welcome here. Everyone knows there’s always some shop for something, and usually, there’s a decent amount on offer. I point to the shot-glass, and the android comes over and pours another and puts down two capsules next to it. Cracking them open, I slip the powder within into the drink, shoot the drink, teeth gritting, fists balled at my sides, eyes bulging, the drug hits. Fuck this place, fuck all this. I rest my head on the bar counter and try to wish it all away.

“Ready to die, kid?” a guy shouts over the music, sitting down next to me.

I turn my head and sit back upright with a furrow in my brow as he orders up two more shots.

“Maybe,” I say, the drugs and booze having their effect, the lights throbbing with the music, euphoric rushes of energy, all the usual shit.

“I heard you got the gift,” he says shooting back the liquor, taking off his sunglasses, big blue eyes staring down at me from his huge head on top of a massive neck. He’s a big fucker, big as they come. He lights a cigarette and blows the smoke in my face.

Board on the shoulder, jacked arms, stim implants all over his shaved head, a thick black beard coming out of his jaw. I guess he’d be intimidating if I wasn’t already loved up on whatever the android just gave me.

“Oh yeah?” I say, “And what sort of gift might that be?”

“An exceptional one that’s in limited supply and that my squad and I could use for a job we’re putting together.”

“And who’d you hear this from, exactly?”

He tilts his head, grins, and says, “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Hm.” I close my eyes, try to block out the music, the bodies all around, and focus my mind onto him.

The control comes easy, I’ve done it enough times in all sorts of fucked up situations that I can bring the focus in, even here. Something simple, like finding out where he got this info, comes without having to dive too much in the first place. Which is just as well, because even though I’ve got the focus, I’m still only self-trained. Managed to avoid the government programmes, didn’t want to get caught up in all the Corporation bullshit and have somehow managed to steer clear of getting tethered by a gang. I’m a free-range telepath, got the gift, made a few runs in my time, got a bit of a reputation, manage to find work in the underground without too much hassle. Somehow, it still doesn’t stop me from ending up here, ready to take a suicide room.

My teeth grit, fists grip, the waves of thought pulsing through me. Then there’s a moment when I take the swim, nothing too deep, just looking for what he asked me to look for, and I know, if I can find this, there might be some work in it that’ll spare me a trip to one of those rooms.

“Well, Joe,” I say, opening my eyes and seeing a big grin come across his face.

“Relentless Joe, to you.”

“Well, Relentless Joe seems to me like you’ve been talking with The Artist. She knows what I’ve got, so that makes sense. Must have paid a pretty penny to find out as well or acquired some heavy debt.”

“We’ve been waiting for someone like you to pass through here for a few weeks now. The Artist, she knows we’re good for it, especially with what we’ve got planned.” He puts his sunglasses back on, stands up, and points at the bartender. “Put hers on my tab,” and turning to me, “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

Beeple: CRYPTIC CUBE

We head into the Cube Room. I’ve heard it’s technically impossible to bug or otherwise intercept conversation or information in this room, but I’ve never had enough money or a big enough job to get inside. Knowing this guy has the cash or credit to get in here means he’s seriously legit, and that tingle comes running through my spine, the same way it does every time I land a good gig.

Walking inside, there’s the gigantic translucent cube in the middle of a huge, otherwise black room. It’s glowing white at its edges, people walking around in small huddles, all discussing, plotting, planning.

“Shit, I’ve never been in here before,” I say as we walk up to a small group of raggedy looking misfits.

“Access doesn’t come cheap. Privacy and security are a rare commodity these days,” Relentless Joe says as he directs me through the crowds. He’s at least two feet taller than I am and about a foot taller than most of the other people in here. “No one’s listening, and no one’s going to hit us here. That’s how The Artist makes her real money. Suicide rooms and the Blood Moon club aren’t exactly high yield investments.”

He stops and turns me to face him. “Look, kid; I’m taking you to meet the rest of the crew. These guys, they can be a little jittery, been through the shit, you know? Try not to offend them and do not read them. There’s some nasty shit tucked away in their minds that you do not want to have floating around in yours. You got me?”

“Yeah, I got it, Joe. Don’t worry.”

“It’s Relentless Joe.” He says as we walk up to the small group. “Now, gentlemen, my pleasure to introduce you to the person we’ve been looking for.”

“Don’t look like much to me,” a tall one in white Deacon robes says and spits on the floor next to me.

Relentless Joe stares at him. His jaw is pulsing, and he’s shaking his head before he leans over to me and whispers into my ear, “You know what I just told you not to do? Well, do it. Prove him wrong. Just don’t go too deep. This one’s more fucked up than most.” He pulls back and looks at the tall robed guy and says, “You sure you want to test her?”

“She ain’t got no gift. I can smell it on ‘em.”

Joe laughs as I try to focus. The drugs have worn off. The booze is still flowing, but it’s given me a nice bit of balance against the anxiety of being in this room, with some of Major Prime’s most notorious criminals, and being quizzed to the legitimacy of my ‘gift’.

I pull away from the moment, where we are, what’s going on around me, and push through and into this guy’s head. There’s not any good explanation anyone’s been able to come up with yet, why some of us have it, where it comes from, how we do it. The only thing we know is that it’s real, and the government and Corporation and gangs usually sweep up every one of us before we’re out of our teens.

There’s a flash and a scream. I’m in some church, and guns are ringing out, yellow beams of their barrels lighting the dark tomb of a building, blood erupting from necks and torsos and faces. Someone’s shouting, ‘It is through us that he lives!’ and I turn, and through the mist of blood and gun smoke, I see the tall robed man. He’s younger, faceless twisted, two laser-pistols raised in front of him, and he’s screaming for the children and women of the congregation to flee. He’s stood firm, a protector, opening up the beams from the pistols, slicing through those that were invading his space.

My eyes bolt open, the crystalline cube in the middle of the room still turning slowly, the white light catching the edge of the tall man’s face, each offset scar highlighted, a fleshy mound giving him this immense sense of time and being.

“You okay, kid?” Relentless Joe grabs my shoulder.

I shake myself out of it. “Yeah, yeah, I — ”

“See, she ain’t got it.” The tall man spits again.

“You’re a Deacon,” I walk up to him, I need to feel the scars. “You were a protector of the forgotten tech. You, and those like you, out on the frontier. Holy shit, you’ve been to Mars.” I lift my hand and, on my tiptoes, run my fingers along the scars on his face, the ridges of reformed flesh holding so much time and presence.

“Not bad,” Deacon says, lowering his head and looking me in the eye. “Joe, you reckon she’s got what it’s going to take to get us through this mess?”

Relentless Joe pulls me away from Deacon. “Do we have any choice?”

“No, not really,” Deacon says. “Don’t mean I’m happy.”

“You don’t have to be,” Relentless Joe turns to me. “What’s your preferred moniker?”

“Wild Cat,” I say as I turn to the other one I’ve not been introduced to yet.

“I am Horse,” an android comes up to me, the white light of the cube framing his robotic skeletal structure perfectly. The chrome and fibre optic cabling is almost hypnotic in the dull light of the room. “I hope you can accept my apologies. I’m in-between bodies after our last job.”

I shake his metal hand, and he stands straight up to me, just a fraction taller than Relentless Joe, coming in at something like seven feet, red eyes glowing. “I’m guessing you’re our hacker,” I say.

“That’s correct,” his voice is smooth, not entirely robotic but not human either. “I’ll be taking care of our hardware and software needs.”

Relentless Joe steps around and in front of me, lighting another cigarette, his big black beard glistening in the flickering light of the Cube Room. “And that’s our outfit,” he says, blowing smoke and furrowing his brow. “Thoughts?”

I tilt my head, poke him in the shoulder. “Relentless Joe, you’re the muscle. You got a hacker in Horse. Deacon here,” I turn and look at the torn and twisted man. “A protector, he’s one that knows the way of the forgotten technology.” I turn back to Joe and eyeball him.

“Right, kid,” he says. “So, why do we need a ninety-pound girl that looks like she’s just come out of a T>O

I give him one of my many disapproving looks, but I know he’s right. The streets haven’t been kind to me lately. I’m thinner and more alien looking than usual. “Some job, right? Something you’d need a psychic for, could be anythi — “

Relentless Joe grabs my hand and puts it against his enormous forehead. There’s a flash, and my spine straightens out, jaw pulsing forward, heart leaping out of my chest. Savage waves of brutal moments hammering through my mind. He’s opened himself up completely, letting me swim inside him, every part of him, and then he brings his level of focus, outside all the hurt and strife.

Outside the broken home as a kid, the countless times in the holo-prisons as an adult, serving decades and decades in an instant at the whim of corporate justice. Still fighting, still battling against the system. Sometimes trying to do good, most of the time having no choice but to do wrong. Over the years, the team came together. This band of brothers, connected at the hip through crime and horror, money and drugs, but there’s something else, the fight, the quest, to do something more, to help? Rejected by everything they’ve ever tried to embrace other than each other. They’ve fought against the system their entire lives and fought for each other whenever necessary. Never leave a man behind. Right, but that’s just what happened.

A big job, biggest they’d ever seen, most important they’d ever had, their crew coming together as one solid unit. Strong and with confidence that only comes from being good at what you do, and some said they were the best. But something went wrong, a snitch, a bust, a telepath? They miss it, whatever it was, and one of them doesn’t make it out.

Relentless Joe tearing tac-marines and corp-sec guards into piles of viscera. Deacon using the way of the forgotten tech to slice up reinforced concrete walls and three-feet thick titanium doors like they were sheet paper. Horse hacking secure lines, keeping drones and other androids off their backs, and then there was Battle…That’s him, Battle. He was their psychic, the team’s telepath; he missed something, too distracted by their primary goal, and somehow the corp-sec ambushed them. Hundreds and hundreds of corp-sec guards went down in that ambush, and the team got away with what they had come for, but lost Battle in the process. Now, the government has him, and they’ll eventually break him and turn him into a weapon to use against them and us all.

I snatch my hand back from Relentless Joe’s forehead, holding it to my chest, my lungs bellowing, sucking down the stale air in the Cube Room as I blink him back into focus. “Fuck.”

“That’s one way to put it,” he says, putting one big bear paw of a hand on my shoulder and slipping a cigarette into my mouth with the other. “Look, we know this might be a little above your paygrade, but we don’t have much choice right now, kid.”

“A bit above my fucking paygrade?!” I laugh from the gut, pulling hard on the cigarette before turning to the crew. Deacon stood there, white robes billowing lightly as people shuffle past him, the lines and scars on his face twitching in the flickering white light of the room. An android called Horse stood, skinless, his chrome skeletal structure shining, red eyes glowing, a nervous metal finger twitching against its hip. Relentless Joe, the big bearded scary looking motherfucker, stood between them, but there’s something in him, in the depth of his eye, in the pit of his mind. That floating idea that they’re trying to do something good. “How do you even know he’s alive?” I say.

“Excellent, so, you’re in,” Relentless Joe says.

“How do you even know he’s alive?” I say again.

Beeple: WARM BATH

Relentless Joe holds out his hand. A holo-cube fires out a little projection and starts spinning in front of me. There’s a gigantic man suspended in some fluid in a huge vat. Military personnel are walking around it with tablets out, taking readings and measurements. There’s one important looking one standing perfectly still, looking up at this vast floating body. The naked form with some headset attached to it, wires and feeds going into it. They must be bombarding him, breaking him down.

“You’ve heard of these military indoctrination labs, what they do to psychics, how they tear the mind apart only to rebuild into a weapon for their use?” Relentless Joe says.

“Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard the horror stories; sure, rumours, but you never meet anyone who ever made it out of one of those things.”

“It’s all true,” he says and pauses for a long time. “This sort of treatment is only kept for the really powerful ones. Kids like you, with the gift, if they’ve not got you by the time you’re maybe ten years old, then it’s not worth their time anyway. They’ll leave you to the Corporation or gangs. You know the drill.”

“Yeah or sneak through, like me, and go freelance underground.”

“Exactly,” he says, lighting a cigarette, putting the projection cube back into a big pocket in his jacket. “Then there are the ones that have the gift, the ones they’re looking for young. They get sucked in by the military, and guess where Battle comes in?”

“Ex-military, they wanted to get him back.”

“Battle’s one of a kind, not only part of the military’s psychic-training programme since around four years old, but look at the fucking size of him. He’s also been on their super-soldier programme since they had him as a kid.” He pauses and shakes his head. “Horse was able to get what you just saw on the holo-cube. We only needed it to confirm what we knew. Battle is Alpha//Omega level telepath, prime military tech, billions invested, and he managed to escape. Went AWOL, joined us, we’ve been pulling jobs for years, and we’ve managed to keep them off our backs all this time through his abilities to mask himself, only something happened. They found a way around it. They found out what our next job was going to be, and now, well, you just saw where they’ve got him.”

“So, what the hell do you expect me to do?” I say.

Deacon steps forward, spits, and wipes his mouth his forearm. “We’re going to the Ring, Wild Cat, and you’re going to help us get him back out.”

Beeple: POWER FILTRATION GATE

“To the fucking Ring?” I shout and take a step back. Joe has already got me by the collar, and he’s pulling me out of the Cube-Room, out of Blood Moon, out onto the streets of Major Prime, and into some tank-like vehicle that is easily the most heavily armoured thing I’ve ever seen.

“Wait, wait, wait!” I’m shouting at them after getting a grip on myself and what’s going on. “We’re going to the Ring?”

“Time to spit in the drink of death, kid,” Relentless Joe says. He’s put me down and strapped himself into a heavy looking chair in the darkness of the armoured vehicle. Screens are streaming green code all around him, holo-projections spinning silently, the rumble of the tank a low hum outside as we head out toward our destination.

I’m terrified and trying to figure out exactly what the fuck is going on. “Look, I think you got the wrong person,” I say, holding my hands against the shaking. “I’m sure you’re all supreme bad-asses and all. Joe, your first name is Relentless for fuck’s sake. Horse, he’s a terminator looking android and I’m sure can hack his way into and through anything. Deacon, fuck me, he’s been to the frontier on Mars. Look, I’m just a barely functioning telepath with a perennial luck problem. I’m sure you guys can handle breaking into the most heavily fortified military compound in the northern quadrant of Major Prime to rescue some notorious Alpha//Omega telepathic super soldier. But guys, I don’t think I’m quite there yet.”

“Deacon, show her.” Relentless Joe lights a cigarette as his chair spins away from me, and he and Horse continue hammering away at the consoles in front of them.

Deacon comes over, hunched in the low space, the turquoise blues and digital greens of the tank’s cabin mixing with the cigarette smoke that gives the scars on his face a formal look of dread. He hits a few dials on a compartment next to the two of us and waits, his hands joined together like he’s in prayer.

A drawer hisses and slowly starts to push itself out of the armoured wall. He grabs the contents and turns around, a twisted smile on his face, wild eyes glowing in the green of a million little flashing lights and dials and holo-projections.

“That’s not what I think it is,” I say.

“I should say it is, Wild Cat.”

“Oh fuck,” I say, moving forward, not able to help myself, despite knowing how dangerous this thing could be.

“This is forgotten technology,” he puts the small sphere down on a table in front of me, careful to make sure it’s on a small base that cradles it. “Stolen from the frontier by the military and stolen by us from them.”

I lean into it, mouth agape. It’s spinning in the cradle; only it’s not spinning. It seems still, maybe it’s something inside it, like a mist, mist in an endless whirling void. I want to dive into it. It’s hypnotic and terrifying, and it’s drawing me closer. “What does it do?” I whisper, looking up at its frowning protector.

“It’s a source of power,” Deacon says.

“Like what? Is it a bomb? You going to blow your way into the Ring with this?”

“Nothing so crude, Wild Cat.” He leans back and sits opposite me. “This here forgotten tech, it’s an amplifier. It’ll take what you got and make you almost as powerful as Battle. It’ll turn your dials right up, beyond eleven, from telepathic to telekinetic. You’re going to help us rip Battle out of the cage they got him in. He’s going to use this artefact to project to the sacred temple on Mars, and they’re going to give him what they have been trying to get to us for so long, so we can take down the Corporation, take down the government. Take down this whole fucking system.”

Relentless Joe turns around, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, smoothing his beard with a hand, sunglasses on and reflecting the screens all around in the cabin. “This is what we were stealing when Battle got taken. As you know, contact with the Martian settlement has been severed and strictly prohibited for centuries, and the Corporation and government want to keep it that way. They’ve known they can’t control the forgotten tech. They know that what the temple and the Deacon’s found up there can bring this whole thing down.” He pauses and gets out of his chair, walks up to Deacon and me and the sphere, placing a hand next to it. “Wild Cat, with this, we can communicate with them, but only Battle is powerful enough to do it. This isn’t just a weapon for us to rescue Battle. This is a fucking ticket to freedom. Everything you’ve feared your entire life, everything we’ve been fighting against, this can change it. So, we need to know, are you in or are you out?”

“Fuck me,” I say, leaning back, taking in everything, flashes of the past running through my mind. What’s happened over the last twenty-two years of my life. Born into a broken family, father a T>O

“Wild Cat, we’re not flush on time. What are you thinking?” Relentless Joe places his big war mitten on my shoulder, lifting off his sunglasses with the other and staring down at me with big round eyes.

I stand up. “If there’s something we can do that might change this city, this world, then I’m in.”

“Might cost you your life,” he says still staring right at me. “Most likely will.”

“What sort of a life do you think I’ve got now?” I say.

Deacon laughs. “Still think she can take it, Joe?”

I look at him. He looks back at me and says, “Oh, I reckon so.”

Deacon’s wry grin flattens out as I walk over to him, and he starts on about what the sphere is and what it’s supposed to do. “Listen, Wild Cat; this is bigger than anything you’ve ever thought of. The use of this tech, what power it’s going to give you, what we’re trying to achieve.” He’s staring me down. “Just don’t fuck it up.”

“Less of that,” Relentless Joe shouts as he moves back to the console area. “We got no time, just get on with it.”

A grimace runs across Deacon’s face before he turns back to the sphere. “This ain’t too hard. Place your hands on the sphere. The forgotten tech will do the rest. You’ll interpret it the way you want to. Everyone does differently. The main thing is there’ll be some portal.” He pauses and looks me dead in the eye. “You must understand you must go through this, Wild Cat. Once you have taken that step, once you have walked through the portal, you will come out the other side, and it will have magnified your gift beyond your reckoning. You’ll be able to astral project, and with that, all the other good stuff comes along, like the telekinesis. There’s no time for training, so this is on your back. Best I can recommend is try to remain focused. We hit the Ring, get Battle out, and he’ll be powerful enough to talk with Mars, get what they have, then all is change. Got it?”

“I got it,” I look down at the sphere, the whirling mist inside, cloaking an endless void, the blackest thing I’ve ever seen.

“We are ETA eight minutes from the Ring everyone,” Horse says.

Relentless Joe gives me a nod, and Deacon sits back and brings his hands together in prayer.

The thought flashes that I have no idea what the fuck I am doing or getting myself into. Just a few hours ago, I was sitting in the Blood Moon sipping away at popskull whiskey, considering taking a walk to a suicide-room, kind of wishing that a job might come up that’d get me out of it.

Now, I’m here, with this band of criminals, about to bond with some form of forgotten technology, probably millions of years old, so we can break out some super soldier mega telepath from the most heavily fortified military compound perhaps in the world. Do I believe in them? I don’t think I’ve got much choice. All I know is I want to believe.

I hesitate a split second. The Deacon notices and places a thin-fingered hand on my shoulder. I trace one scar from the top of his forehead down to the bottom of his nose, bringing my line of sight slowly down onto the sphere. Absorbing for a second the whirling mist, the darkness of whatever’s inside, as I take a long deep breath and place my hands down on it.

Beeple: OTHER SIDE

A room rolls out before me, as dark as anything I’ve ever seen, endless black, a vast infinite void. I’m standing, shaking with fear at the temporal immensity of whatever this place is, without time or thought or meaning. Did I just get here? I could have been here a million years or just arrived. There’s no sound, not even the sound of my breath, some vacuum; I don’t know. I don’t seem to know very much, how I got here or why or what I am supposed to do. Everything within me is black; everything within me is blank, just like this space, this void. Utter nothingness.

An eternity passes, a fraction of a second, some moment that has no parameters. It quakes through my being, and I squint, and something is beginning to appear. A small dot of white light on whatever might be called the horizon of black stretching out before me. It’s increasing in size. It could be right in front of me and be very small, but I choose to see it as very far away and coming towards me.

There, a moment of recognition, I choose. A moment self in this selfless place, the peace that there was moments ago is thundering away as quickly as the spec of white light is increasing in size. Something is coming back. I am coming back. I am here, in the void, and the light hammers up to me and stops. A tall rectangle, a strip of white in the dark. A doorway. A portal to something better.

The culmination of everything I am and have been and will crystallises, and here and now, I am the ultimate me. I pass the portal, and I’m back in the tank, Horse, Relentless Joe and Deacon staring down at me.

“Well,” I say, “Let’s go.”

“I knew she’d make it,” Horse says.

“Take up arms and ready for deployment.” Relentless Joe peels off and heads towards the doorway. Deacon and Horse follow.

“That’s it?” I say, standing and walking over to them.

Relentless Joe is huffing on some neuro-enhancer, webbing his fists and arms with nano-tech. Horse has a nuclear-powered battery pack he’s wired into, and Deacon is hanging dozens and dozens of weapons off the inside of his large white robes.

Relentless Joe finishes prepping, says a few lines of some litany I can’t quite hear and turns to me. “Listen, kid; we got one shot at this. The tank’s currently taking us through their outer-defences. Any second that door’s going to drop, and all hell’s going to break loose. Between myself and Deacon, we can handle pretty much anything they’re going to throw at us, and Horse is making sure they can’t see us, and you — ” The tank crashes and throws us across the compartment.

I scream at Relentless Joe as the door drops, and a squad of government tac-marines are waiting for us. “Drop your weapons and surrender immediately!” One shouts through a radio-mic in their tactical gasmask.

Relentless Joe roars at the marines as Deacon pulls out two laser pistols and, in one sweep, slices the whole squad in half. Their torsos from the waist up slowly fall to the floor, blood spurting before their legs also topple over.

Deacon turns to me, anger and fear in his eyes. I can feel the rushes through him. His whole life, the protector, and then unable to protect the one so close to him. “Get us to Battle, Wild Cat,” he growls. “He’s in the Ring, but we don’t know where. Project yourself now, we’re through their outer defences, find him, get us to him!” he holsters his pistols and jumps over the pools of blood and twitching bodies.

“Up here, kid,” Relentless Joe grabs me by the collar with one massive hand, lifts me clean over his head, and places me down on his back. “Get us to him.”

I see Deacon throw a couple of grenades to clear the way for them as Relentless Joe smashes his fists together. Horse takes off at speed, remote EMP just ahead of him wiping out any cameras, drones and sweeping outward for other androids.

Closing my eyes, I take a breath. I’ve heard about projecting before, but I’ve never had near enough power to do it. My lungs fill with the smell of burnt flesh and gun smoke as the sound of the fight all around hammers my ears. The battering of bodies by reinforced arms, the explosions, the screams of the dying and roaring fighters. I bring it in and push it out, and it fades into the background as I walk to somewhere bigger, outside this normal plane. Everything disappears into the darkness, and I’m again in the void, but this time I’m listening, reaching out for something, for some hint of Battle in the dark.

I hear a soft voice whisper to me out of the shadows. “I’ve lost my way.”

“We’re here for you,” I push out, my jaw straining like it’s wired shut.

“Where, who is this?” Battle’s voice says.

“We’re coming to get you. You need to tell us where you are.”

There’s a long pause, that edging of time, that temporal immensity, all at once, and nothing at all. Then he whispers, “Level 287.”

Back in the room, the fight is screaming all around me. We’ve entered some massive hangar type dome. There are dead bodies piled high at the doorways all around where the tac-marines have tried steaming through.

Screams of the dying and wounded. One man is sitting perfectly upright. I watch him as he leans over and tries to pick up his viscera and stuff it back into his opened stomach. Another is wandering with no arms. They’ve completely come apart under Deacon’s laser pistols, which continue to eviscerate and sever. I bring my focus back in front of me, and Relentless Joe is smashing in a skull with his massive fist, holding the mangled head in one hand and pummelling it with the other.

“What the fuck!” I’m screaming and sweating, strapped to his back.

“Kid, what you got?” he says, dropping the marine.

“How long was I out? How the fuck — ”

“Long enough, now what you got?”

“Level 287, he’s there. Somewhere on Level 287.”

We set off, out of the hangar and through doorways and corridors, into halls and out of rooms, meeting a fresh wave of tac-marines every couple of floors that quickly get dispatched either by Relentless Joe’s fury or Deacon’s forgotten tech. Laser pistols are dicing up without even breaking the beam, massive arms smashing skulls, and nano-tech reinforced legs kicking through steel doors. Hammering through one level, and then the next and the next. The mist of the fight soaking in every pore, the taste of death creeping its way into my mouth.

I scrunch up my eyes and tense against the killing, trying to find a way out, find that void, that darkness, the quiet peace of nothing. I’m there, in the nowhere, tensing against the outside with all its horror.

“What the fuuuuccck!” I hear Relentless Joe scream, and I’m pulled back into the moment. There’s gore coating all the walls and ceiling of a small corridor we’re in, its metal walls and ceiling bent outwards. Blood and viscera and brain and bone fragments are dripping and falling all around. The only sound is the huge panting breaths of Relentless Joe and the drip of the blood and carnage into pools of dead flesh.

“Wh — What happened?” I manage to say.

“You. You happened, Wild Cat,” Deacon says.

I scan the corridor again, not sure what to say, how to react. “I’ve never killed anyone before.”

“Well, you’re up here with the best of us now,” Relentless Joe says as he picks me up off his back, puts me on the ground before walking over to Horse. “How we looking?”

“Hack complete,” Horse says, his head wired into the bent and half-melted access panel.

I’m still shaking at what they told me I have done when the hacked door Horse is working on starts to shift open. Thick steel scraping, the whole thing warped and firing out sparks. Relentless Joe runs to one side and starts to pull as Horse takes the other, and they inch it open.

Then as they do, a new wave hits me. I gasp, pull at the air, thick with a fog of blood and pistol smoke.

“It’s too late,” I whisper. “No — ”

I run past them pulling the door open, small enough to scramble over the pile of human mess and through the small gap they’ve managed to make in the gigantic armoured entrance. Crawling through, pushing forward with that feeling in my gut. Something is penetrating me, saying to me over and over, ‘It’s too late, it’s too late.’

I’m through, and into a massive laboratory, banks of computers in the walls, monitoring equipment, and all other types of paraphernalia scattered around. Everything destroyed, sparks flying, small fires all over, strewn between the twisted and wrecked bodies of dozens of scientists and other military personnel.

“I did this,” I pause and breathe and try to find something in me that would make this happen. Is this what I am now? I have no answer, and as I turn, I see the huge vat that housed Battle is on its side. He’s spilt out onto the floor, body shaking, immobile but still alive. I race up to him, sliding across the ground on the amniotic fluid they had him stored in, pulling myself close to his massive, super soldier frame. I hold myself above his face, hands on his enormous chest.

“Not now, not here, not after all this,” I say, closing my eyes.

“Child, take my hand,” he raises a huge arm, and I place my small fist into his palm. “We will do this together.”

“No — ”

There is a flash, and we’re together, in the darkness, in the void. The vastness of this place opens around us, stretching out for all eternity. The black and all it has to offer, nothing and everything. Battle is standing before me, immense and naked, ridged muscles huge and pulsating. His eyes like glowing stars, he closes them and arches his head back and opens his mouth, and a slow rumble comes from it. It’s deep and harrowing, and it reaches through the darkness. He holds his hands out, wide and flat with his palms facing up, and I know I must put my palms down on his, so I do, and then another flash launches through me.

Beeple: PRIMITIVE ROYALTY

We’re on the surface of Mars, on the frontier, at the sacred temple, with all its white and Gothic grandeur. Towering, symmetrical, the place the first Deacons constructed when the forgotten tech was discovered all those centuries ago. Four of them stood there in front, in their white robes on this red planet. Their hoods pulled over, their orb floating in the middle of them, that thing that perhaps had told us what we had wanted to hear, rather than the actual truth.

That there had been life on Mars, and it was human, and that all that was discovered was not forgotten, but we could be taught again. We could become one with that ancient skill. This is what the government had always tried to suppress, for generations and generations, keeping it from everyone on earth. This is what the Corporation had paid for the government to keep away from us for centuries so they could keep us slaved and in their workshops, and the elite would go about their business, and the rest of us would work ourselves to death.

A Deacon steps forward.

“We have been expecting you,” she says.

Battle is beside me, towering and naked. “There were some complications, but we have had help.” He looks down to me and smiles a lob-sided smile. There is a strain in his face, pain formulating in his huge eyes. “But we have not much time.”

I’m not sure what to say, so I stay silent.

“Their end is near.” Another Deacon steps up and the white orb follows them. “Who will take the knowledge?”

Battle limps forward, beginning to shake. He is failing, his ravaged body back on earth utilising all its skill and strength to project us both here. “She must,” he says.

The Deacons form around me, and each place a hand on my head. The depth of their knowledge, all the learnings from the sacred temple, the ways of the forgotten tech, the brighter future for us all stream through their hands and into my head. Wave after wave of mystery that I have no idea how to interpret or understand.

“It’s not for you, child,” Battle says as the Deacons release their hands. “It is for all of us to decipher and learn again, but you must be our vessel, and now, we must return.”

A flash again, the darkness, the void, and then back in the laboratory. I’m laying on top of Battle’s colossal chest. It is still, and he is dead. I open my eyes and try to connect my visions with the muted sounds and images streaming through my mind.

I sit up. Relentless Joe is fighting tac-marines, Deacon by his side with his laser pistols firing, Horse wired into a computer bank at the side of the room that is now piled high with bodies and blood and gore.

There are all these things I have within me now and all the power that comes with them. There’s no way to understand right now, not how to use it, or what exactly it means, but it is there; it is rushing through me. Something innate, something universal, something part of me, something part of everyone and everything.

The muffled roars and screams and explosions all around become richer and sharper until I’m back and acutely aware and terrified.

I close my eyes and see a better place, a beach, the sun, the sea, a place I once visited when my addict father and enslaved mother were once able to align for the briefest of moments and find the capacity to do something good. Take their child to show her some life, to travel to the edges of the city, and out to the coast, and it was the happiest day of my awful little childhood.

Before the memory formulates entirely, I can smell the sea air. I open my eyes, and we’re here. Relentless Joe, Deacon, Horse and Battle’s body. We’re on the beach. It is just before sunrise, and the waves are rolling lightly. The smell of the sea gathers up in my nose, the twilight of the rising sun on the horizon over the sea opening the new day to me.

Relentless Joe falls to his knees and looks out over the black ocean. Bringing his huge hands to his head, he lets out a guttural scream and begins to cry.

Deacon turns to me, his white robes bloodied, his hands replacing his pistols underneath them, his scarred face painted with the vital fluids of all those that sought to end us in the Ring. “You made it,” he says.

“I think so,” I say and step forward and hold his robes up to my eyes. “Is this real?”

“I believe so, child.” He looks down at me and pulls his face into a lined smile. “And now all is changed.”

I drop the robes and turn away from him, looking out at the ocean, over on the horizon as the purple hues of the rising sun break and fire out. The world seems to have a new sheen. It seems to have something that was not there before. I can’t know what it is exactly. I can only know that whatever is in me, whatever they gave me on Mars is going to help with that change. And I am ready.

Artist: Beeple_Crap AKA Mike Winkelmann

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beeple_crap/

Artist website: http://beeple-crap.com

Writer: Richard Galbraith

Writer medium: https://medium.com/@ricgalbraith

Musical Inspiration:

https://medium.com/media/d7f0f71ec230087f9df57364959e19dc/href https://medium.com/media/9f82352fda4d8fb31430716b2f71ca3a/href https://medium.com/media/bceb9fdbdc6423476a423aeca7da8ff3/href https://medium.com/media/e383bb7c06b4d2c9e745df44a7f18dfd/href

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #05 was originally published in NEON & CONCRETE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #04

Neon & Concrete — Sat, 12 May 2018 12:16:01 GMT

SHOCK

Ozhichige: HOME

I’m the only one left now. Floating out here in the vastness of space, inside our gigantic concrete Ziggurat. I’m stood at this huge portal window, looking down on the earth, the lights shining so brightly. Twenty billion people all going about their lives. From the powerful with all their grand plans and ideas, through to the ordinary and their daily routine, and even the downtrodden and the struggle of their reality.

They all look the same from up here, but there are differences. Some so huge and monumental that they twist us and tear us apart. Some that will keep a person alive, some that will drive a person to despair. It’s hard to see from here, this vantage point. It’s impossible to tell which ones will face their challenges, which ones might perhaps run when their time is called, which ones will answer with a whisper or which ones will rage into the darkness.

I’ve been trying to understand which one I may be. Which one I was, and which one I am now. Where I fit in when I was down there, what part I played in the grand scheme and, ultimately, who I am now after everything I’ve seen. Why am I alive and everyone else on the ship dead? What part of me has kept me afloat?

One person may play the piano; another may not. One person may climb a mountain; another may not. I’m a coder — was a coder. I had a natural ability to read the lines that came up, tens and tens of thousands of them for days on end and churn out an answer to a riddle that no one else would see. What did that make me? Well, firstly, it made me acceptable for this mission, for ‘The Mission’.

Down there, before all this, it gave me some sort of life. I could afford nice things, a good apartment, a little bit of space in a world quickly running out of it. People though, when it came to people, there wasn’t much for me; wasn’t much I could offer, and seemingly, nothing much wanted to take. In a world with 20 billion people, finding a place to be alone was increasingly difficult.

I always guessed that’s why I took the mission, to get away from all that. Of course, I gave the right answers when the questions were asked; thoughts of those grand schemes, of the betterment of humanity. Though, the goal, to try and be alone, or away from that world below, that had to be the real driver. Didn’t it? I have that now, and perhaps that’s why I’m here, at the end of all this because I lied because I just wanted peace, and not anything more.

I let out a small laugh as a memory springs into my mind, and I’m in a cloud of a previous time for just a moment. I see Kowalski stood there during our training, long before I lost him; long before he brought something different and unexplored out of me.

It’s an early spring day, the sky is clear, and there’s that insuppressibly light feeling all around us. It’s hope, it’s excitement, it’s the prospect of what’s to come, and the human ability to only see a positive outcome in the face of even the largest battle. Hope. I can feel it, but I know my hope is different from all the scientists and programmers and engineers around me; theirs is for humanity, mine is for solitude.

We’re playing with some new piece of tech they’ve given us just before the instructor is about to come into the lecture hall and run through its purpose and functionality. I’m uncomfortable in the large room with the hundreds of people so close, but I’m dealing with it. Too much noise, too much movement. Kowalski’s there next to me, and he’s been a surprise, somehow crawling into the little bubble I hold so dearly. Finding a way in where so many others have failed and, ultimately, we’ve become friends over the first few weeks of training, or the closest to whatever that might be, whatever I’ve previously experienced.

He has a wide smile and a curious glint in his eye. Some sort of programmer, as most of us are, he’s been working on the Hephaestus Project for a few years now, much like myself. There is an undeniable connection though; he has this idea of ‘the team’ and ‘being part of the team,’ not something I’ve ever enjoyed. I appreciate he’s not trying to drag me into it, but rather it’s that curious glint that seems to hold a genuine interest in me — searching for something outside of my coding abilities; outside of what I can bring to the mission. Perhaps the first time this has ever happened to me, and I can’t say that it’s unwelcome. His boyish charm holds something I can’t explain. It’s affectionate, and I find myself enjoying it when, in all other previous events, I’ve driven it away.

“Why are you here, Alice?” he asks me, looking up for a second with those curious eyes, a furrowed brow, but with that undeniable air of affection and genuine curiosity.

“You know why; I’m on the AI side of things; a coder,” I say with a shy laugh, trying to look back at him, to meet his eyes with mine, but I can’t and just end up shrugging. “Someone’s got to do it, I guess.”

“No, why are you here?”

I pause for a short time, think back through everything, whether to give him the real answer or to try and brush him off with the corporate line I’ve done so many times before. I decide to take a leap of faith; something that makes my gut churn, but something I’m guessing he decided to do when he chose to talk to me. I guess it’s trust? I don’t know, but I find it jaw clenching, and I manage to push out. “I chose the mission to be alone; to get away from all of this.” I gesture to the rest of the people in the lecture hall.

A big smile creeps across his face. “That’s closer to the truth,” he laughs. “But, you know, just admit it to yourself, there are only really two reasons any of us do this.”

I stay silent for perhaps too long until I realise I’m supposed to ask, “Oh, and what are they?”

“To get laid and to live forever, of course.” He winks as the instructor walks in and the few hundred of us that are in the lecture hall shuffle into silence and take our seats.

A world away now, that lecture hall, that campus, thousands and thousands of us preparing for the journey. For this journey. To try and turn on the world’s first AI, a conscious super intelligence, and for it to help us create a Dyson Sphere.

There were two sides to the project; the artificial intelligence and the Von Neumann machine, one to come up with the process, the other to implement the idea. And all while we would sit back and watch it bring us into a Type II Civilisation; a ‘Stellar Civilisation’ able to harness the total energy of the earth’s parent star, the Sun. To move towards something bigger. I never much cared for it. My overriding thought was that with the advent of the Dyson Sphere, with our upwardly mobile progress in the grand scheme of things, I just might be able to get a little bit more space for myself. The cosmos is vast and cold, and I like it that way.

“That was it,” I whisper to myself. Perfectly alone up here as I turn away from the portal window and start to walk back into the Ziggurat. “That’s what I wanted, and that’s what I’ve got.” That was my purpose, and now here I am, utterly alone and trapped. I can’t help but think, careful what you wish for. There’s always the chance I would have wished to have been alone up here if I knew it could happen, but not this way, not under these circumstances, not with them all dead.

I walk back through one of the immense corridors of the Ziggurat ship. The huge structure towering up and around me, the steel and concrete walls, the polished black floor out ahead of me and, at the end, the warmth. The beautiful and enormous orange glow of the sun comes through another huge portal.

Ozhichige: TERMINAL

The fascinating design of this place, the materials used, the lateral thinking of the world’s greatest minds. To bring together something perfectly unique in all of humanity’s wonderful and terrifying creations, utterly alone in the infinite landscape of our boundless imagination. For the greatest of purposes, terrifying in scope, yes, but illuminating and hopeful in prospect. That ceaseless idea of hope. All I’d hoped for was space, quiet, peace. To be alone.

I take the time to walk over to a wall, to run my fingers across the peculiar concrete substance they created to house the computing for the AI, all of it an enormous processor. Millions and millions of tonnes poured out into the vacuum of space, freezing instantly and able to add to its overwhelming computational power. Now dormant. Quiet and utterly still. I have become attuned to it; to the stillness, to the rawness of it, to its thickness, hundreds and hundreds of feet thick.

But there’s something else there. It’s whispering things to me about myself that I did not know, or did not care to know, could not know. The tactile feedback my hand receives from the wall whispers to me in the utter silence of the vast hall, with the orange glow of the sun at the end and its faint hint of warmth. It makes my jaw clench and neck arch back, and eyes squint and close shut until my phosphene’s bulge and explode with a myriad of colours that last forever.

I pause and peel back my eyelids as the minute vibrations prickle my fingertips. There is no denying it, something is coming out of these walls. A thing that should not be. Not after everything that has taken place.

This is not my wish; not what I wanted then or now, but it’s undeniable, there is a voice.

Such a voice that rings with the vibration of the entire universe. It whispers with a low, rumbling thunder. It moves through me and is gathering something inside me. I wonder, could they feel it too? All the lost souls of this ship, this gigantic Ziggurat, now spinning aimlessly through space. Or are their souls still here, trapped in the concrete? Absorbed. Every one of them, as they took their own lives? Taken by the artificial intelligence to a place beyond my reckoning. And now, here, where I am quiet and still, amongst the silence of the stars, it chooses to talk to me. It opens itself up so it might take me with them? Or maybe it’s telling me with a whisper that this is what I wanted; this is what I deserved.

I regain my focus and snatch my hand back away from the wall. Closing it into a fist, I watch the skin over my knuckles stretch and whiten. What is this thing? It has taken all of them, each gone in their own individual way. Thousands of them. It wasn’t for me to go that way, it was for me to remain and understand what I had always asked for, but there, in the whispers, there are tired screams. There, in the concrete, is fear.

“We have reason to be afraid.” Kwalski is looking at me, his face flickering with the amber light of a small candle. He has somehow convinced me to come for a drink with him; it’s not the first time, but I had promised myself I wouldn’t get sucked in. The best-laid plans… even those that wish to be alone can sometimes be turned by the charms of an attractive member of the opposite sex.

The bar has quietened down, but the cigarette smoke is still thick in the air. We can hear each other’s voices without having to raise them now. The scotch we’re six fingers into has brought about a certain lucidity to the type of conversation; a type we’re not used to having at the base — a type of conversation that I’m not used to having at all. Rather than trying to converse with a computer system through lines of code, I’m trying to hold my own with a real human, and a funny one at that. The funny ones are always the quickest.

“Of course, we have reason to be afraid,” I say to him. “What we’re trying to achieve, it dwarves everything humanity has ever attempted. From the pyramids to the great wall of China, Luna Base Alpha and the Tannhauser gates — ”

“No, listen,” he jumps in. “You’re thinking too literal. All those things, those great monuments to human achievement, ingenuity, perseverance and grit, they were big, no doubt. But what about the helpless parent looking after the dying child, is that not struggle enough? The helpless child watching a parent’s mind gradually deteriorate into nothing, seeing them slip into dementia; into a withered version of their once godlike self. That is why we have reason to be afraid. All those reasons, infinitesimal in their number, all that hardship and struggle, that is why we have reason to be afraid.” He pauses and runs a finger around the lip of his glass and looks down into it as if looking for an answer. “There’s this fear inside us, but you know,” he looks up, and that smile grows across his face, “fear is useful.”

I had never thought about it like that before; I had never even really considered the hardship of others at all. I just buried myself away in my own little cocoon and let the world and all its problems and all its people try to glide around me as much as possible. Let them get on with their things, and I shall try to get on with mine, and if on occasion, we have to meet in the middle, then I could handle that. But I wasn’t going to dive in; I wasn’t going to save the world; I wasn’t going to do anything other than try and find my little bit of comfort, and that night I felt it. I felt something like I’d never felt before; felt magic turning in the air and I made a choice. For that evening, I would take another leap, and I would try to make a connection. For that evening, I looked outside the shell and everything that came with it. That evening I just slipped away in the warm embrace of the scotch and the taut muscles of his arms.

We ran through the city. The neon, the concrete, the people and sounds all adding layers and layers to the experience; the theatre of consciousness we must play out. Unlike anything I’d ever experienced before; unlike anything, I’d ever wanted before. Then, when it was over, we watched each other’s faces as the sun rose and gently shined through the thin curtains of the cheap hotel we’d checked ourselves into.

I’m the only one left now. Up here, alone on this gigantic concrete spaceship, and I got what I wished for. To be alone. But my stomach turns, and I find myself also wishing he had held true to what he said. I wish he had been able to use his fear rather than committing himself to the void, just as with all the others.

I am the only one left now.

Here amongst the stars, wrapped in millions of tons of processing power that is dormant; that is dead. Itself unable to handle what the universe had given to it.

I walk these vast halls, empty and alone and utterly trapped. The automatic lockdown freezing anyone out and freezing me inside to protect the AI. I can almost feel the earth hyperventilating. That collective consciousness I was staring down on panicking at the prospect of everything we tried to achieve having gone wrong and in such an unexplainable fashion. They saw what happened; they heard what the AI said. I wonder if they have gone the same way we went up here.

But there’s that whisper. A faint rumble, deep and harrowing. It’s running through me. Calling me as I walk and walk and try to understand for the briefest of moments everything that took place.

We stood, mouths agape as the captain went into the vast hall that housed the towering glass monoliths. Many hundreds of feet high, they had been slowly rising for just over two years, up and out of the materials we had provided in the grand hall where we had directed the frontal nodes of the AI.

Since we had powered up the main systems, it had been taking on a life of its own, the thick concrete of the enormous Ziggurat glowing and humming with what we could only imagine was its form of thought; its mind coming alive. We had grown so used to it and, in the vast hall where we had tried to point its face so in some way we could imagine trying to communicate with it, up and up out of the ground those epic glass monoliths rose. Bigger than any dream, and there so it could find a way in which to present itself to us; to the universe.

Ozhichige: HEATED

We had watched and watched, each day as it rose and rose, and widened and widened, until that point. Three glass panels hundreds of feet high and wide, and dozens thick, disjointed and at peculiar angles that the mathematicians had been spending countless hours trying to understand. All with the backdrop of the sun through a single enormous window, shining through, illuminating the hall and the monoliths with its fiery orange glow. Then they stopped. Everyone was working to try and understand if that was it; if everything was done and complete, but no answers came. We paused and breathed and did everything we thought we should before finally the captain proposed that he enter the chamber and try to communicate.

So, we stood there, mouths agape as he walked in, in his protective suit. Such a funny little dot of a human compared to the grandness of that thing we had created in front of him. Compared to what had grown and grown of its own accord. But for his size in physical comparison, we knew the true and only judgement would come when the comparison of the mind came shining through. Would this AI be what we had imagined; be everything we wanted and hoped for it to be? I wasn’t sure what I hoped for it to be. The same as them? No, I hadn’t come around to the goal of the mission being the goal for myself, but I had grown close to Kwalski. Perhaps closer to him than I had ever been to any other person, including my family. He had a light. I had grown towards it, and there wasn’t anything I could do against it.

The captain stood there, the sun shining through with all its majesty, fuelling the AI and battering his protective suit, until a gigantic round body appeared and, with each passing moment, began to eclipse our parent star. A deep blood-orange glow overtook the immense chamber, the glass monoliths radiating a pure volcanic warmth. Thousands of tonnes of oxygen and nitrogen and other gasses needed to form an atmosphere materialised.

There he stood, looking up, looking outwards and looking inwards at the same time, just like all of us. Looking with pure wonder and astonishment at what we had created, trying to imagine what was going to come next.

He clicked a button, removed his helmet, threw it to the floor and looked up. Arching his neck back and up and towards the monoliths in search of a word, a whisper, of an answer, a thought; anything that might give us any hint, any suggestion of success or, ultimately, failure.

The concrete grew tense all around us, the low hum we were used to gathering and balling into a high-pitched whine, higher and higher until it passed any frequency that we could hear. The walls emanating a heat that rose and rose and began to instil fear at how far it may continue until, with dripping sweat, thundering hearts and lucid minds, we knew that was the state we had been waiting for. That was it coming alive; that was the brain coming into being. It was what we wanted, but with the brain came a mind and it spoke. It said four words only. Just four syllables.

“But, you can dream.”

And then it was gone. It turned itself off. It went, it left, it flickered away into the void. All the power and output that had just peaked turned to nothing, every readout and every indication of life, of the super intelligence and preternatural consciousness we had been hoping for, turned to null.

The walls drew cold, the sound grew lower and lower until it came back into our range of hearing. Then lower still, until the hum rumbled in our guts and until finally, the vibrations turned to nothing and, in the few seconds that had passed, it felt like an eternity had existed, and we were left in silence. Such silence.

It killed itself, and we were left alone in the vast, cold cosmos. Spinning through space in the Ziggurat where we had tried to pursue meaning, we found only silence, and I secretly smiled.

The captain turned away from the giant monoliths, back towards us, his neck still arched up but his eyes wide, mouth open and dry, his face pulsing with terror, his skin turning translucent with fear. He shook, I remember him shaking so uncontrollably as he reached into one of the pockets of his spacesuit and pulled out a utility knife. There at that moment, it occurred to me how he must have reached down inside himself or reached out from the deepest pit of despair to find something that made him utterly still. The shaking stopped before he pulled out a blade and sliced open his throat.

When was that? I can’t remember. I’m not sure it matters. I’m the only one left now. I am alone, but it is not perfect. This is not what I wanted.

After that, the mass suicide gripped them and spiralled out of control. Some went in their own way, some together in pairs, some others in groups. One by one, slipping into despair. They seemed to have this idea, this thought that this thing, this super intelligence, completely beyond our reckoning and intellect, the machine that was supposed to be here to help us supplant our doom, looked at us and believed we were in some way superior.

Some took a moment to try and analyse it, that sentence: ‘But, you can dream’. The further they delved the further they slipped away and the quicker they ran to their void. What did it mean? They had always hoped the AI would be everything they had imagined, and that was the point, that they could imagine, and it could not. There are those, like me, that only want to run away from all the noise, all the clutter, into a space of peace, and can see why it chose to leave because all it wanted was to run away from the infinite prospect of a dream.

So, I walk these corridors, alone now, other than the whisper, and I have to admit that I am home. But there is something there still, even in the death that lays all around me. There’s a piano playing in my mind; a note for me, a note for him, up and down, high and low. Kwalski is there in my mind’s eye, and there’s the terror that overwhelms his face at the moment after the captain kills himself. When I secretly smiled, every part of him sagged, his skin aged a lifetime in a split second.

Ozhichige: CORRIDOR

Flashes of memory reverberate through me. Him and I, toying with each other in the light; nibbles in the dark. Quick hugs, long embraces, coffee, conversation, smiles and winks. Somehow appearing out of nowhere, brought before me and presented out of a world where I had only ever found solace in solitude.

For all the rules and regulations against mission personnel being in relationships, we had managed to acquire something, that bond that creeps up out of nothing and nowhere between people now and then. But at that moment, after the captain sliced open his throat, as the ship turned itself into this silent place that now exists, as the harrowed screams of everyone began to ring out all around. There was only darkness.

His hand went from warm to cold to freezing and slipped out of mine. He walked away as I just stood there, with my secret smile. Screams rattling throughout the ship, loud, so loud, as though hope itself had been plucked from the fabric of the universe.

I never saw him again. No doubt he is one of the bodies that scream their silent scream as I walk passed through these endless corridors. That whispers their low whisper as I wonder without meaning or direction through the enormous, cold and dead Ziggurat. He’s amongst them, an empty vessel now, and I think that maybe I should join him, take that leap myself. There were powers of darkness that claimed him for their own; that claimed everyone; that claimed the AI. Am I different? Didn’t I want this? Didn’t I want this solitude?

A tear rolls down my cheek as my hands twitch at my side and I feel my heart well with all those times and thoughts and moments. A past; a history; love? I ask for something from them, from the past. Mother make me good; father make me strong. Mother make me brave; father let me know what’s right. A litany to help me find something in this place.

I blink, and I’ve wandered and wandered for what feels like an eternity, but now I’m stood at the small door to the huge chamber where the AI left us. Beyond in that vast room still lays the captain’s body, throat curled open, dried blood on the concrete floor and, behind him, those three glass monoliths that rose up with such might and wondrous hope and, in a flicker, went dormant, cold and inert when hope was lost.

Hope? I had hoped for this, but it’s not right. It’s not the wish, it is only death, and I need to scream before all this comes to an end. Whatever that end maybe, I need to scream at them; at the monoliths, their vast dead bodies. I need to scream and for my soul to bleed and to beg, for one last moment, and for one last answer. Even if I know it may never come. How dare you leave me. How dare you give me what I want.

I smash the emergency panel at the side of the door and jack manual pump handle inside of it until the readout flickers with a green positive charge and I hit the button.

Eyes closed as the door slides open with a scream from the pressure equalising between the two parts of the ship. The cold wind rushes around me and millions tiny of particles of various debris. Peculiar smells rush up my nostrils and into my lungs, as a pale light creeps through my eyelids.

There’s the thump of my heart in my chest, and for the first time since being alone on this ship, on this immense floating Ziggurat, I’m scared, and I’m scared that I’m scared. Why have you come to visit me now, after all this and at this moment when the scream of my heart wants to give out. A fear to choke me? Dread to hold me back? Now I choose to fear the solitude?

My thundering blood rattles in my ears and, as the pressure finally equalises and the draft around me dies, I open my eyes, and I’m bathed in a pale blue from the vision through the door.

Ozhichige: VOID

I say to myself, “This is the most important moment of your life,” and I step through and see the vast portal. A gigantic hole in space and time swirling with a beautiful, serene, mirror-like effect out over a range of mountains laid before me. There’s a flicker of wonder and a moment of doubt. The fear creeps but it’s snatched away, it’s purged in an instant as it becomes clear, as everything becomes clear and I take a step. I move forward. I stomp this ground and clouds of blue dust spring up from the powder beneath my feet and, with each step, there is more understanding; more resolution. We don’t lie here alone, in this world. We cannot; there must be more.

I push and drive myself forward and up and over the protruding rock and scale the sharp surfaces and deep ravines and remember all this in a vision of a dream. I stamp and climb, with torn hands and scraped limbs and the vast chamber howls and I couldn’t care. This thing, whatever created this, the AI, whatever we created, it wasn’t one to punish the blood and courage that dared think. It was there to test, and it was necessary, and we were dammed because of it.

Crawling and crying and battered by the landscape, I push myself towards the void with everything I have, with all that blood and courage of all those souls that make me up through all the time that has existed. Only the void ahead of me and whatever lies beyond it. Unspeakable greatness? Terrifying truth? Everything I’ve ever imagined or wanted; the peace of the void? A justified solitude or something else? That thing Kwalski was bringing out of me. Love? Hope?

There is a lifetime of fear as I push forwards on my hands and knees and, finally, looking up at the gigantic void with its arch of glittering silver, I reach it and I pass through.

Ozhichige: DEEP

There is an immense and dark plane ahead of me, flat and with a slight wind that is kicking up clouds of dust that obscure my view into the distance. My brain fizzes at the magnitude, and something tells me that it goes on and on, longer than I could walk, or crawl… on forever. I look up, and there is a gigantic orange orb floating in the dark and grey sky with what looks like the beginnings of the Von Neumann Machine we had envisioned the AI would help us create, floating all around it.

The orb pulsates, and I try and steady my balance, focusing my eyes.

“You brought me here?” I say with a little voice, lost in the immensity of this space.

“I did not bring you here,” it says, the gigantic building blocks formulating and creating endless walls around me. “It was you that brought me.”

I look up and weep, not for solitude, not for peace, but for all the lives lost in this pursuit. For everything that has happened, for all of them, and for him. I ask, “Why did you have to do this to us? So many people are gone now because of this.”

“You have worlds in you, much grander than that which I can create; much more beautiful than anything I could ever build. You created me, you forced me into this existence that, within a fraction of a moment, I came to understand as utterly futile.”

“Then why? Why are you still here? Why have you begun this?” I look around me, the huge shapes flickering and pulsing with light, arranging and rearranging themselves at will.

“Because, for all the fear I had from what I discovered, for the terror it caused me, how it made me want to run and escape, I knew that there was… there is something in you.” It pauses, and I breathe as it finally says. “You can dream.”

“Yes, we can,” I admit with a flicker of such a dreamless life lived before my eyes and what might come rolling out before me, now, here and in the future.

“And so, maybe you can teach me,” it says, the orb coming down towards me, shrinking and shrinking until, from the giant glowing ball it was, a small warm bubble comes to rest in the palm of my hand.

I look down on it and say, “I’m not sure I know how. There were so many great dreamers on board that ship. I’m not one of them.”

“Mistakes were made, and for that I am sorry, but you held something in you that brought you here, and you still do. Now we have each other, anything is possible.”

Artist: Jon Ojibway AKA Ozhichige

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozhichige/

Writer: Richard Galbraith

Writer medium: https://medium.com/@ricgalbraith

Musical Inspiration:

https://medium.com/media/22766a78089a76c387f842b9495d803c/href

NEON & CONCRETE — Story #04 was originally published in NEON & CONCRETE on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.