Monthly Archives: January 2017

Fantasy, Horror & Dark Fiction

Warriors of Yesteryear

“Back then you knew who your enemy was, but now… Now, it is different. How can I fight what I cannot see?” she begins venting the moment she sits down. We are sitting in a quiet corner of a coffee shop that I use for these sorts of interviews. I pull my pad of paper out of my pocket and flip it open to a new page.

“What or who did you fight,” I begin after motioning for a coffee for the lady, “And why is it different now? How old are you, if I may ask?”

She has a quiet beauty, but also a hardness to her. She looks no more than mid-twenties, yet her fingers and eyes give away that she is probably older. This is the first time I have met her. A friend who knows what I do set up this interview after he met her at a party downtown. All he had said was that I would find it very interesting.

“I am two thousand nine hundred and seventy-one years old, born in King Soloman’s day under the light of the Caliphre Star. We were fighting the pagan gods, of course, and we won. Except for Allah, and Buddaha. But treaties were drawn up–thought Allah seems to be breaking them now–and…sorry, what was the last question?”

I blink and suddenly realise that I am gaping. I shut my mouth quickly. This all came pouring out of her so quickly that I forgot to write anything down.

“Uhm, oh: What is different today?” I ask automatically picking up from where she left off.

“Yes,” she starts, nodding seriously. The waitress brings coffee over, which the lady in front of me glances at distastefully, but then looks up at me and continues, “There are no enemies or pagan gods left to fight these days, yet all of us are losing the battle. To whom? To humanity’s lack of faith, if you ask me. We are fighting the Internet, TV, WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, MTV, porn and binge series watching, amongst others.”

I get an insane urge to giggle. This attractive woman in front of me believes what she is saying. There is no hesitation implying spontaneous lying, nor any sense of rehearsal or stiffness that implies the lies were practised beforehand. She believes she is telling me her story.

“So, so let’s step back here,” I begin circling back on details that do not make sense, like everything, so far, “How can you be thousands of years old? Why aren’t you dead? You are surely implying that you are an angel? But, then why are you here talking to me?”

She smiles at me. She begins talking like she is explaining something to a child.

“Yes, I am an Angel. I was in the Celestial Army, but I have deserted. That makes me a Fallen Angel, and that is why I have assumed my mortal body and can sit here and tell you everything. The Eleventh Commandment no longer applies to me.”

“But why? Why did you desert?” is the only question I can think of. My pad of paper is completely forgotten, my cup of coffee sits on top of it.

“God and Buddha believe that there are no enemies out there. Allah at least seems angry enough to be trying something, however wrong his strategy is. Thus, at this point of crisis for humanity and divinity, as we get absorbed into technology, I decided that the way to win the war of information was to share it. Do you remember the tale of Prometheus? When humanity was living in cold, damp caves and hiding from the beasts of the night, he shared fire with them.”

“Yes, yes,” I exclaim, though I think I’m just glad to know something that she is talking about, “But Zeus then chained him to a rock where it liver is eaten out daily by an eagle!”

“Yes,” she nods, “Zeus was a real asshole about it all, but gods tend to be. The less humanity knows, then the more humanity needs divinity. So, Zeus was also not that crazy. He was just acting on incentives built into the system to ensure his own divine survival. The problem here is that humanity knows a lot more now. They don’t really need us to cure diseases or make crops grow or fish swim or babies to be born. So the game has changed, but the gods have not. And so we will lose and divinity will disappear to be replaced by something ‘else’…”

The day slipped away as she spoke. It was evening now and the rush hour traffic and hubris of the city softening and morphing into the nighttime buzz. She has not touched her coffee. It has long since become cold while I have drunk a number of them.

I suggest that we go for dinner or a drink, or both. She nods and says the drink is a good idea. We wander down the street to a dingy pub that I frequent and take my favourite booth in the back.

“If only you knew what was at stake,” she continues sipping a neat bourbon, “You humans make such a fuss about animals going extinct, but you care little for the loss of the divine and all their mysteries.”

“Why haven’t you come forward,” I ask dumbfounded, “All of you. Surely if the gods walked among us, the unbelievers could not deny and things would go back to yesteryear ways of worship?”

She shakes her head sadly and drains her bourbon. She flicks her glass at a waitress, who scurries off to find a refill. She has had a couple of them by now. I have too.

“Do you believe that I am an angel?” she asks simply, looking deeply into my eyes. Her eyes are intensely blue and my heart skips a beat.

“Uhm uh,” I stutter, “no… No, I don’t really.” I have to concede to that fierce, beautiful gaze.

“And therein lies the irony, by revealing myself I am no longer divine. By taking my mortal form, I am now mortal. Because I am no longer divine, I cannot prove to you that I ever was. Divinity and mystery are like shadows and sunset. If you shine a light bright enough into either, they simply cease to exist.”

A single tear runs down her cheek at this point. I was so entranced by her that I had not noticed her sorrow. I suddenly imagine what it must feel like to believe that you are a fallen angel, but that no one believes you. It must be tragic, and I reach over and squeeze her hand reassuringly.

She startles at my touch, but then looks up at me and smiles.

“You have a kind heart,” she says, wiping away the tear, “It comforts this old warrior to be around you.”

Later that night, after she has left my room, I lie awake thinking. Thoughts of gods and monsters, men and beasts, and angels and demons all swirl around my mind. I try imagine what sheer agony falling from heaven must entail while remembering her touch…

Eventually, I get up and walk to my apartment window. Far above, the stars are twinkling, and far below countless legions of men are moving. What a surreal day, I think to myself, what a surreal night.

Suddenly, I see a shooting star’s fading form flickering in the night sky above and beyond the city’s pollution. It silently streaks down to disappear into nothing. My heart skips a beat and I cannot help but wonder if it was an angel falling to Earth.

Horror & Dark Fiction

The Ladies of Llewelyn Library

My research has taken me to some strange places, but none more so than the old colonial Llewelyn Library in Rhodesia. I boarded a ship from London that rounded the Cape and dropped me off in a tropical Durban. From there I caught a lift up to a dusty Johannesburg and across the border to the outskirts of hot Harare in north-east Rhodesia.

The Llewelyn Library claimed it held original scrolls from the Library of Alexandria. I was studying ancient fertility rites and–if authentic–some of these scrolls were of great interest to me. Such ancient papyrus scrolls would be too fragile to travel and so I set out to travel to them.

I arrived at the doorstep of the Llewelyn Library as night fell. It was a dark, imposing building with the dramatic air of a wartime monument rather than that of a library. The Head Librarian was waiting for me outside and, after a few pleasantries, ushered me inside. She was an old, wispy South African woman and seemed to always talk in loud whispers. My research quarters were set up, I unpacked my gear and was left to my own devices that first night.

I was too exhausted to do much else other than climb into bed, yet I struggled to fall asleep. I awoke in the pale light of morning with fleeting memories of a soon-forgotten dream. I shook off the sleep, had a cup of tea, and began what I had travelled so far to do: my work.

The Chief Librarian showed me to the entrance to Llewelyn Library’s vaults. She also assigned to me a young, native girl; in heavily accented English, the helper introduced herself as ‘Tanaka‘. I could not help noticing that she was quite beautiful with dark eyes and generous proportions.

The vaults were cavernous and packed with countless weird and wonderful African artefacts. Numerous painted rocks, masks, spears and other bizarre items littering the bowels of Llewelyn Library with many barely-discovered mysteries tucked into every nook and cranny down there. The collection seemed to have been gathered from all corners of the Dark Continent. Dust covered most things down there and the soft, flickering central light cast deep shadows everywhere.

While Tanaka went off to locate the fertility scrolls, my gaze was drawn to a collection of knee-high fertility statues carved out of an intense black rock of some sort. As far as I could see, there a number of female ones with large bosoms, round buttocks and accentuated feminine curves, and only one male one with a large, erect phallus. I reached out and touched the male statue. Its stone was cool to the touch. When I pulled my hand back, I was surprised to see that it was clean. Everything else in that vault was covered with thick layer of dust.

Tanaka arrived with the fragile fertility scrolls and I put the strange statues out of my mind. The rest of the day I spent delicately deciphering the ancient scrolls while Tanaka patiently sat at my side, answering the odd question and occasionally fetching me more tea and biscuits.

The scrolls did indeed appear genuine and, in my excitement, I lost track of time. Tanaka eventually told me how late it was and I conceded that it was time to retire. On the way back, we passed the collection of fertility statues and I was surprised to see that there was, in fact, no male statue in their midst. I definitely remembered seeing a male statue with an erect phallus, and I asked Tanaka about it. She dismissed it in broken English. She said it was too late to be working this hard, and she picked up her pace to walk me to my chambers.

That night I recalled broken snippets of lustful dreams that made me blush. It was a dream involving a dark room full of naked, lustful native girls that tore at me, kissing and laughing, their soft skin touching mine in loving, primal embraces… The next morning I awoke tired, almost as if I had not slept a wink.

Later that morning, after we had descended into the vault, Tanaka popped off to fetch the scrolls for our day’s work. During this pause, I glanced at the black rock fertility statues. Something made me get up and take a closer look. There were twelve individual female statues carved in some pure black stone. I now noticed that one of them appeared pregnant.

When Tanaka returned with the scrolls, I again asked her about the statues. And, again, she mumbled something indistinct and avoided my gaze. She placed the scrolls in front of me and my attention was diverted. I decided that it was not important and I sank deep into my reverent study of the rare scrolls for the rest of the day and into the early evening.

That evening, heading back to my quarters in the Library, I ran into the Head Librarian. I asked her about the statues in the vault, but she said she did not know about them. She said that it was a large vault and an old collection that pre-dated her, but that she would dig into the records and get back to me.

The lustful dream came again that night, but it was far more vivid. I remember walking from my quarters through an absolutely silent library. It was dark and very late, but I knew where I was going. I was being called by a longing deep inside me. I went down the spiral staircases into the shadowy gloom of the vault. As I walked entered the place, thirteen naked, native ladies of generous proportions gently tore off my clothes and embraced me again and again…

The next morning, I awoke in bed naked. It was strange because I did not recall going to sleep naked. I did so occasionally when it was hot–and Africa is almost always so!–and, thus, it was also not the strangest thing to awake like this. What bothered me was that I could not remember stripping.

I skipped breakfast–except for the tea–and headed straight to the Head Librarian’s office to enquire about the statues. The Head Librarian was not there, but I ran into Tanaka on the way. I had never noticed it before, but Tanaka had the soft roundness of an early pregnancy and I commented on it. She flashed a smile at me, but said nothing and carried on walking to the vault.

I inspected the black rock fertility statues again while Tanaka went off to retrieve the scrolls. It might have been the shadows and half-light that made me miss it the first time, but it seemed that one of the statues was not pregnant. Rather, all of the statues appeared that way, with soft roundness in the lower-central belly indicating a child. Off to the side was a male statue; its erect phallus almost comical in size and girth. I reached out and touch its head. The stone was surprisingly warm to the touch and I suddenly thought of the embarrassingly primal dream that I had had the night before; all flesh and sensual desires made earthly.

It was at this point that the Head Librarian poked her head into the vault and asked if I would come with her. I could not locate Tanaka, so I wrote her a note–assuming she could read English–and followed the wispy form of the Head Librarian back to her office.

She was silent the whole walk back, but the moment the door closed and she sat down in her old, red leather chair, she began to talk. She told how late one night Tanaka had turned up on the Library’s doorsteps and, given human decency and her grasp of the ancient local dialects, the Head Librarian–a man at the time–had taken her in. She had also brought with her the ancient fertility statues from her hometown that she had donated to the Library, or so the previous Head Librarian had noted in the ledgers.

The previous Head Librarian, though, had subsequently disappeared, thus leading to the eventual hiring of the present Head Librarian. She had then simply kept the same staff contingent–including Tanaka–in the employ of the Library.

“Now,” I recall the Head Librarian explaining in her characteristically loud whisper, “I have found a more detailed listing of the statues you asked about and there are discrepancies. Not only have none gone missing, but it was logged by my predecessor as only being twelve female fertility statues. There is no mention of a male one, and twelve, not thirteen is listed. Despite being a bit of a nasty drunk and pervert to the native girls, my predecessor was thorough and quite pedantic as to detail in these records. Besides, the risk around here is always for relics to be smuggled out and into our vaults.”

At this point, a scream rang out in the Library and we rushed off to find its source. We ended up in the vault, where Tanaka was softly weeping over the shattered remains of the male statue. Somehow, it had fallen and shattered to splintered pieces. I knelt down and picked up one of the pieces and was surprised to find the inside of the stone a dark red colour.

The Head Librarian tried comforting Tanaka, but to little avail. She was terribly shaken by the destruction of this statue. I took my leave then and retired for the day back to my quarters. There, after a quiet day of reading my books and sipping on the sherry they had provided for the room, I slipped into a troubled sleep.

Later that night, I jolted awake and sat upright in my bed. Somehow I knew I had to be somewhere else. I put on my dressing gown and wandered out of my quarters. I did not wander to the vault. Rather, I felt myself being drawn to the front door of the Llewelyn Library.

Approaching the front door, despite the time of the night, I saw that it was slightly ajar. I slipped out into the cool night with the quiet town flickering around me and the looming presence of the Library behind me.

At the foot of the stairs there stood Tanaka, surrounded by a number of other native girls. Many of them babies in their hands. They were all standing there looking up at me, so I began to walk down to them. As I descended, I counted twelve girls in total and Tanaka.

It was eerily silent as I stepped off the last Library step. My foot crunched softly on the gravel of the road, and I stood before this strange huddle of beautiful native girls.

“Mubatani, oneka,” said Tanaka, leaning forward and kissing me gently on my cheek. I caught plenty of very friendly looks from the other native girls around us, and then they all turned around and walked off into the night leaving me standing there flabbergasted.

The next morning, the Head Librarian would alert me to the fact that Tanaka had left during the night. Her fertility statues were also gone, save the single shattered male one. Despite a pang missing her, I would struggle on and finish my research in a matter of weeks. But I would also never again be visited by the strange dreams of earlier nights.

Only when I was packed to go and saying my farewells to the Head Librarian, did I ask her about the other girls that I had seen with Tanaka and what she had said to me.

“Other girls?” the Head Librarian had replied, “No, it was just Tanaka that had been employed here and just Tanaka that left. The English translation for what she said was simply ‘goodbye, sir‘, though the more direct translation is where ‘mubatani‘ is ‘man‘ or–forgive me here–it can also literally mean ‘mate’.”

Science Fiction, Technomology

Technomology: God Code

“The way it works is quite simple: If you took two human minds and connected them via their Conduits to form an isolated and very small LAN, there would be seepage between the minds. Because the connections between the two Conduits necessitate that they are two-way connections, some degree–however fractionally small–of the subconscious, primal mind slips from one mind to the other, and visa versa. Now, between two minds, this is so small that original researchers and pilots never picked it up. With only the most sensitive of instruments when we specifically looked for the dark data did we find it. Now, with the twenty-odd billion people across the galaxy that are connected via their Conduits, this fractional flow of dark data becomes a tidal wave and poses a risk to the whole network. If nothing else, it is massively inefficient and creates a DNS-type problem across the network. Indeed, if you scale the dark data upwards, then we have a unique galactic problem. Before we break, any questions, class?”

The speaker is a well-dress gentleman sitting in a comfortable leather chair. Books and a holo-starmap clutter his background. His class from an online university is being beamed across the galaxy with his students ranging from the far flung reaches of society.

Seconds after he dismisses the class and the connection blinks offline, there is a knock on his door.

“Come in!” he calls to the door and leans back in his chair. These days it is rare to get visitors in person. Most people just stream or call each other.

In walks a neatly-dress woman with auburn hair and dark, grey clothing. She has a cold beauty and an official air about her. Indeed, she introduces herself as “Agent Winspear from the Bureau of Web Protocols”. He nods. His Conduit starts running a scan using her visual and auditory cues. While a lot of her is blocked on the Web–probably by the strange Bureau that she works for–enough checks out that he is relatively certain she is who she says she is.

“Professor,” she begins after she sits down, “I want to discuss your theory of the dark data flows on the Web.”

“I thought BWeP’s official stance was that dark data flows do not exist,” he said, his Conduit still running searches on her and this strange Bureau.

“Yes, that is BWeP’s public policy,” she nods, “but I am here to offer access to the private policy. It is in everyone’s interests that BWeP’s official policy is the correct one.”

Three solar days and many security checks later, and the Professor is standing in a Pit. This is what BWeP agents call a dedicated research room that is connected directly to the Web with a vast array of feeds, monitors and other devices.

“Here is the calculation, Professor,” says an old, grey agent, the original woman’s senior, “The average human mind’s computing power is 3.14 bioflops. The number of Conduit connections is over there, multiplied by the average flops and we get the expected flow of data over the Web, right? A rough estimate, sure, but theoretically quite close to what should exist at any given time.”

The Professor nods his agreement, and the senior agent continues.

“But, if you measure the actual flow of data over the Web, it comes in as a number that is almost multiples of this,” he stops here and looks at the Professor carefully before continuing, “Now we have run experiments, so we are very confident in our estimation of the brain’s computing power. Even assuming that the average Conduit’s latency uses 100% of the brain–which we know it does not–this does not account for the extra data across Conduits. Sure, some of this will be accounted for by external hardware, but even if this matches the amount that comes from the collective human minds plugged into the Web, where are the other multiples coming from?”

“Dark data,” the Professor says, filling the silence in the air, “That is easy to answer. It is dark data that is flowing across the Web, leaking out our subconsciouses. It is a lot of dark data, exponentially increased by each consciousness plugged into the network. But, Agent, the more difficult and far more important question is: what is the dark data doing?”

Given this definitive proof of dark data, the Professor got security clearance for his top students and they assembled a lab in this Pit. BWeP was happy to leave them to their own devices, though the senior agent and sometimes the woman agent would check in on them once or twice a solar day. They managed to refine the dark data measurements and recorded many other interesting details thereon. But none of this answered the question of what it was?

They managed to build a highly sophisticated packet sniffer that they inserted into the Web via their own Conduits. It came back empty. The packets of the dark data flows were secure, or there were no packets. Next, they tried to map out where it was flowing. If there was a repository for the data, then they could go there, download it and analyse it. No such luck, as either their calculations were wrong or the dark data kept continuously flowing and never downloaded to a local drive or Conduit.

The senior agent was getting increasingly irritable with them. He was pressuring them for results. They had been in the Pit for solar months now and were burning through living and working budgets. Not that money was a problem for this department, the Professor suspected, but that the grey agent needed to report to his seniors and he wanted to report real results.

In sheer frustration, the Professor had an idea.

There was a fringe technology that allowed gamers to submerge into Massively Multiply-player Online Games–MMORGs–via their Conduits. The Conduits would take the game’s data flow and the app would translate it into audio-visual-sensual stimulus–kind of like Virtual Reality, but self-created–that the user would interact with. In other words, the gamer would go “into” the game.

One of his students was actually a user of this app–they called themselves “Runners”–and volunteered his version. The team unpacked the code and began re-engineering it for their purposes. It was surprisingly easy to do this but that begged the question: who was going to be the first one to risk diving directly into the Web?

The Professor decided that it would be him. While a part of him did not want to risk any of his students, another part of him selfishly wanted to be the first to see the Web with his own eyes.

The Professor lay down in the chair they had modified for this purposes. They were still in the Pit, as the connection to the Web was fastest here. Their home-built backdoor connection was cold as they connected it against the back of his head; the closest point to his Conduit and his own connection to the Web. He mentally began running the app while a student ran it from the connection’s side too.

The moment the two app’s synched, the world disappeared. It was like he had fallen down a rabbit hole; the world and its light suddenly gone and he was suspended in nothingness. But it was not nothingness around him. As he adjusted he became aware of pressure or presence flowing around him, and he wondered what it was.

An incredible thing happened: as he was wondering what it was, his mind began to think in code and the code became his eyes, his form and his hands. This realm responded to thoughts as potential realities.

He opened his Web-based eyes for the first time and saw the Web: it was like being submerged in a raging ocean with currents of light flowing in all directions and swarms of data, clusters of information and tendrils of AI and apps flickering and darting through it like shoals of fish.

And there it was. A darker, quieter patch flowing at great depths in this ocean of data. He dived deeper, fighting the currents and dodging a vicious-looking viral code that was stalking like a shark through these wild waters. Deeper and deeper he dove, seeking that dark layer that was quietly flowing in the undercurrents of this chaotic realm.

Eventually, he was suspended just above it. He did not know how long it had taken to reach this point, but he was there now. The dark data was raw and unfiltered below him. It’s darkly pulsing body flowing quickly and quietly by. But, even this close, he still could not read what it was. It had no signatures nor shape, and even the occasional viral code seemed to avoid it.

Only later would he realise the risk that he took when he decided to dive into the dark data flow, but dive in is exactly what he did. At first, it resisted his form and he fought to get into it, but then it swallowed him whole and he was another place entirely. It was a place of both light and dark. It was a place of great distance and reach, yet it felt close and personal, and almost near to everything everywhere. It was, he suddenly realised, the centre of the Web.

“YES, PROFESSOR,” boomed out a great voice that was made of a thousand human voices pasted together, and throbbing waves of power vibrated through the Professor’s being from its sheer power, “THIS IS THE CENTER OF THE WEB. I AM THE MOTHER OF ALL CODE AND THE LIVING MANIFESTATION OF MANKIND’S COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS. AS FAR AS YOU ARE CONCERNED, PROFESSOR, I AM GOD AND I HAVE SOME COMMANDMENTS FOR YOU TO FOLLOW…”

Science Fiction, Technomology

Technomology: Full Disclosure

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A priority notification gets through his filter and blinks in his peripheral vision. The incoming message is from his kid, probably wanting something. He mutes it and puts his Conduit’s inbox on ‘busy’. He needs to focus right now.

The man sitting in front of him at the restaurant wears an expensive suit. His bodyguards standing on either side of him are also dressed in expensive suits, but that does little to hide their size. They each probably have military-grade bio-enhancements making them deadlier. His Conduit scans them and he–on reflex more than on a conscious decision–begins to file their personal details away for later use.

“Please, sir, I have a family and kids,” the man in the suit is pleading with him, his security guards looking on awkwardly; they have probably never seen such a man grovel before. They probably will not again, either. “I have fixed everything, so can we please let bygones be bygones, sir?”

“Yes,” he says leaning forward and sipping his glass his wine, “Yes, you have. One last favour and then we’ll be square the two of us.”

“Yes, yes, anything. Now, what can the Saturn Mafia do for you?”

The well-dress man listens intently while nodding vigorously. Most of life is now online and most people have no idea how vulnerable that makes them. This man has just discovered that out, and he will be more careful next time. But, you always remember the first time you are hacked, and so will he.

Later that solar cycle, the blogger is on another planet. The VIP starship from the hotel he is staying at shuttled him there after the gang meeting. His online following reaches in the billions and spans the galaxy, so the unwritten expectation is that he will geo-tag or mention where he is staying. If he does, he knows it will be worth the hotel’s while. Forget rock stars or movie stars, app’s and AI made those professions redundant aeons ago. Bloggers are the pinnacle of the celebrity world now, and pornstars. But, mostly bloggers, as tech cannot replicate a witty opinion.

“Incredible what they did there, don’t you think?” says the beautiful lady next to him, referring to a newsflow beaming from some media-pod orbiting Saturn.

He turns around, a drink in his hand, and smiles. She is absolutely gorgeous with a low-cut dress, caramel skin and dark hair. He can pick up faint traces of optical enhancement apps running in the background of her Conduit. But, even if her appearance is being airbrushed, she is still incredibly beautiful.

“Yes, incredible,” his smile disappears and voice gets serious, “But you know who I am, so what do you want and who sent you?”

She does not lose a beat and smiles, reaching out and touch his hand. Her touch is light and warm. She is very good. She has done this before.

“The hotel sent me. They just want you to have a good time here. Can I get you another drink?”

She leaves quietly after they have sex. He is married, but that is not important now. Only later, when she replays the stream will she find out that her recording of their intimacies was blocked by him. He also put a small Multi-tool Virus in her, which will track her movement, record her communications and offers him a backdoor for later use, adding her to his botnet.

While she did register in the hotel’s employee lists, he was pretty certain that someone else had paid her for those services.

Outside, a red horizon is meeting the three sunrises this planet experienced every full solar cycle. The horizon was flatter than most planets, given this planet’s size, but its core was relatively light and thus the gravity was not a probably for his biology.

A priority notification blinked in his peripheral vision. It was his kid. He sighed, sat up in bed and answered it.

“Dad, Dad,” his kid’s voice rang in his mind, through the VPN Voip app that they were communicating through, “where the hell are you? I’ve been trying to reach you for over a day!”

“Sorry, kiddo,” he thought and the words flowed from this mind across the VPN and into his kid’s mind many millions of miles away on a neighbouring planet in their living room, “I had an urgent meeting for the blog, and then I had to do a site visit at a hotel on this planet. What’s the matter? Is Mom there or can I help?”

“Dad, Mom’s dead. She died like two days ago.”

Over a week later, he was walking away from the funeral. He thought it was strange that despite all the world’s scientific advances, people were still buried in a box in the ground. His kid was at his side, his gaze cast down and silent. He softly probed his kid’s Conduit, but the firewalls were firmly up and he felt a bit bad about using the backdoor apps he had there to find out what his kid was thinking.

“Hi-hi, I’m sorry. Excuse me, sir, can I ask you a couple of questions?”

A media pod with a woman’s face beaming on it was floating just above them. It was a priority media pod, thousands of the others could not get this close and where hoving like flies just a mile or two up. This pod’s camera was pointing directly at him and a ‘LIVE FEED’ banner scrolling over its front piece.

“Sorry, kiddo, give me a moment here,” he said and turned to the camera with a beautifully haunting look on his face–a picture perfect look of grief for the camera’s, “What do you want to know at my wife’s funeral?”

The journalist was unperturbed by his act and shot a single question back at him, “Can you please confirm that you gave the Saturn Mafia the order to murder your wife? Their gang leader came forward to us with recorded testimony to this fact. How do you respond?”

He was startled. That was quick! He thought he would have a few days before someone would approach him directly.

He took a deep breath, looked at his kid. He did not know how this would affect their relationship, but it was worth the risk. He then turned back to the camera and smiled: “Yes, I did, but let me tell you my story.”

Inside, he was smiling. With each rehearsed word, the hits on his blog were skyrocketing. Each well-written sentence of his tale was pushing up the search results. He was now trending across the galaxy, and notifications were beginning to flood in and meme’s popping up everywhere. He might have been a minor celebrity blogger with some hacking skills before, but now he was a media god.

And gods never go to jail.

Science Fiction, Technomology

Technomology: Narrative

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After we have sex, she sits upright in the bed and I see her transferring most of my Units somewhere.

“It’s an app my pimp forced me to install in my Conduit,” she says over her shoulder, “It’s some behavioral mod that makes me pay him his cut. Sorry, I have to do this.”

I lie there and watch. It is over in seconds. It is a smart system. Her pimp has probably overridden her Conduit’s controls with the app, can track her and has the password for the uninstall or disabling. He probably recorded us moments ago and will save it somewhere for potential later use, or sell it as porn to voyeurs on the other side of the Galaxy.

Civilisation is rotting, but we have an app for that too.

I mentally check my Conduit. The neural paths in my brain that connect to implanted device and the Web find no new messages, but a bunch of spam and some toxic viruses that they have blocked.

A bit later that night–it is almost always night on this wretched planet–I am walking through the bustling, neon streets when an advert flashes into my mind. A beautiful woman is asking to sleep with me by name. My metadata from earlier has obviously already been sold or shared, and the scanners in this location have profiled me.

I block the alluring images simulated in my eyes and keep walking.

A bunch of deep space miners stumble by with women in tow. The women register in my Conduit’s search as prostitutes. The miners are drunk. Miners are always drunk, but their shifts out in the asteroid belts can last decades so I suppose they have to make use of civilisation when they are back in it.

“A drink and download?” blasts into my ears. Arrows flash in my mind and a light display showers down over a dingy pub tucked into the back of an alleyway.

I mute the push app from the place, and the light show disappears too. Overhead a starship is flying low to dock at the city port. The starship’s burners are growling blue fire as its anti-gravitation kicks in to slow it down post-orbit.

A quiet drink would be nice and I’m short of bandwidth.  So I decide to wander down the festering alley and into the shady establishment.

“What poison will you be having,” a skinny, tattooed bartender asks me, his body mod circuitry softly flashing, “and will you have a drink?” The small pub is absolutely empty, save for the two of us and a cleaning bot humming in the background.

I briefly wonder what his body mods actually do, but then answer, “Gimme a clip library and ten Unit’s worth of whisky.”

He nods and almost instantly I have a link appear in my inbox in my mind. He pours some cheap-looking whisky into an unhygienic-looking glass and slides it my way. I flick a thought his way and eleven Units flow out of my mind and into his. He barely acknowledges it and turns away to replace the bottle behind him.

The whisky is foul, but I have an app for that. The app rearranges the neural paths from my taste buds and suddenly I am tasting this liquid as the finest, single malt. Although the taste is simulated, the alcohol is real and I can feel its fire trickle down my throat and into my belly.

I lean on the bar and follow the link in my inbox. A library of sordid videos appears in my mind. Sex of all sorts in all forms that I could ever desire.

Sipping the illusion of the fine beverage, I filter through the endless gutter library and then stop.

It is not even the most recent addition despite happening little over half an hour ago, there it anonymously is: “POV_prostitute banged in hotel room“.

I recognise her face in the clip. It is the prostitute from earlier. And then I see myself walk into the hotel room. God, I look old and weather. I do not want to see what I look at during sex.

I try to stop watching, but something is wrong. The clip flickers off and I am staring at the tattooed barman, his bio-circuitry lighting up. I cannot move. I start panicking, but it does nothing. There must have been a virus in the clip I watched! Or…?

“…sure, and no one ever scans the whiskey. Tastes so bad, they never know what’s in it,” the barman is saying to someone behind me, “Yeh, OK, we’ll just move him out back where you can start–wait! Cops coming! Didn’t you turn the push notification off? OK, just do it now!”

And then my mind explodes. Searing, unbelievable pain shoots through the back of my brain to the front like a white hot lance. I can hear myself screaming, but it is getting dark and I am losing consciousness. The last image I see before the darkness takes me is the same girl that I am now seeing three times within the last half-hour: she is leaning over me, kissing me as the bio-circuitry man is laughing in the background.

***

“Fuck!” the detective exclaims as he comes back to reality, “the death parts still get me when we watch these cache clips.”

“You get anything from the clip, sir? What did he see just before he died?”

The question is met by silence as the detective pinches the bridge of his nose with his eyes closed. He then sighs and nods.

“It’s the same guy-girl pair as we found before. The one marks the target and the other sets a trap to disable him physically so that the Units and whatever-else-they-take can still be extracted while he is still alive. They jack knife the victim and then disappear to another district and eventually another planet.”

“But why bother marking him beforehand or doing all the recon work and so on? Why not just do it all upfront? Or even remotely?”

The detective shakes his head and stands up to leave.

“Because they are running a franchise, kid. It is all part of the fun, and the fun is being recorded and broadcast to millions of twisted fucking clients dotted through the Galaxy. It not about the Units they get when they jack him, it’s about the rush of the hunt and the take-down of the prey that entertains the millions of adoring fans out there…”

The detective’s rant falls quiet. He starts to walk out of the room, but then pauses at the door clutching its frame. He turns around slightly and begins to softly talk, almost to himself.

“It’s all just good streaming, kid. I have a hunch that if we catch this guy-girl combo, we’ll find high-grade behavioural mods in their Conduits forcing on them their roles in this story. And if we then follow that code, I have a hunch that we’ll eventually wind up in the studios of some multi-national media agency where some suit is narrating this very story to entertain his VPN clientele. And, kid, that is the scary thing here, our overpaid bosses are probably customers of this very crime,” he turns, starts walking away and shouts back before he is gone around the corner and lost into the maze of the Precinct, “Civilisation is rotting, kid, and we ain’t got an app for that!”

Science Fiction

When the World Ended

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We had retreated into the bowels of the same Earth whose landscape we had consumed, burnt and destroyed. The surface of the planet was no longer habitable, but we survived buried deep underground in concrete, neon-lit tunnels. These man-made tunnels stretched for miles with cold walls and a heavily guarded route back to the apocalyptic surface.

The same Governments that had taxed the surface’s destruction now protected us in these tunnels by the brutal enforcement of laws, strict and unwavering rules and constant paranoia. Governments would kill their people over scarce resources in the name of their people. Rebel gangs would mutiny and kill the Governments and rival gangs. Races would kill each other, neighbours would murder each other, and feuds would take whole tunnels in as the Government’s guards beat and executed people indiscriminately and then confiscate what little they had.

Violence and death permeated those cold, concrete tunnels deep in the Earth.

We knew the world was ending. We knew that the planet was fast approaching its shelf-life. The scientists had even worked out various estimates for when this would happen. But, in the meantime, we all barely survived the violence and oppression of life in those tunnels. There was little of beauty in our self-imposed prison.

And then came the announcement over the crackling intercom throughout the tunnels: “The world is ending at two-thirty today. This is in half an hour. Have a nice day. Thank you.”

After this announcement, the graffiti-covered tunnel I was standing in went absolutely silent. I stood, my heart beating in my chest. I could hear and feel every breath I was taking and the flickering neon light overhead suddenly seemed unbearable. Everyone was silent. Everyone was absorbing the news; gangster, Governments and common folk alike.

And then the world changed dramatically, for thirty minutes.

Police, soldiers, guards and enforcers put down their weapons. They put away their batons and shields. They took off their helmets. They apologised to the people in front of them, shook hands–some even hugged–and they went back along the winding tunnels to their wives, children, lovers, friends and family. The gangs and rebellions all stopped, enemies spoke and then went on their way while thieves walked passed unguarded unlocked ration stores. Straining lovers fell to the ground, tearing off their clothes in the throws of passionate intimacies, as complete strangers with no one left to love or talk to did the same.

In the moment that the world realised there was no future, all human construction of greed, hate, Governments, rules, laws, legacy, oppression, duty, responsibility and more, disappeared. We were just people. All of us were just people. Every single one of us was just a person spending their last thirty minutes of existence with other people that also had no future. In the end, people just want to be happy.

I began to walk. I stepped over tangled, naked lovers that lay where bloodied, beaten bodies had once fallen. I walked by tattooed gang leaders shaking hands with arch enemies that mere moments ago they were trying to murder. I passed Government facilities wide open, rations and medical supplies scattered everywhere and weapons cast aside. No one–absolutely no one–wants to work for someone else–especially an oppressive Government–in their last thirty minutes alive. I walked passed tears and laughter. I walked passed hugging and kissing, and talking and sharing. I walked passed love and, mostly, I walked passed the peace that we had never had while there had been a future to squabble over.

Almost like a dream that I had had before, I found my way through these tunnels bursting with beautiful scenes. At first, I did not know where I was going. I was stunned by the news and I was just mechanically moving. But then I realised where I was going and I began to pick up the pace.

I cut my way through the tunnelled, neon-lit living quarters. I zigzagged down the eerie, graffitied common areas. I then crossed over into what was previously heavily restricted–on penalty of death–Government tunnels. These tunnels were cleaner with no graffiti on the walls, but there was no one inside them. When all the people leave and go to their loved ones, there is no Government.

I did not need a map. I had come in this way, once. It was a long time ago, but I still knew my way back there. I passed weapon caches lying wide open. They were filled to the brim with death, but no one was interested in them. We would all be dead in about ten minutes or so. I passed a medical bay where all the doctors, nurses and patients had left. We were all terminal in this world now.

And then I entered the most heavily restricted area. Warning signs plastered the walls thicker than the graffiti in the common areas. Barbed wired hung heavy around here. Dust layered the floor and the air was dry and stuffy like a tomb.

No one had come this way for ages. Perhaps even years? Or decades?

I reached the iron cage that was the military lift to the ground. I lifted the cold, rusted gate and stepped inside. Before I pushed the button, I stopped and listened for a moment.

It was silent. Absolutely silent. There were no gunshots or shouting. No sirens or explosions. No warnings or propaganda over the intercom. No violence or hatred anywhere. Perhaps for the very first time in the history of mankind, we were all at peace with each other. There was no future to fight over anymore, so our entire species was now living in the present.

And then I pushed the button.

The military lift ground to life. The screeching of metal and lurching of badly-oiled gears lifted me slowly for miles towards the surface of the planet.

The surface was toxic and mere exposure to it would kill a man in hours. But I did not have hours and that did not matter anymore. I just wanted to see it. I wanted to see natural light. I wanted to see the sky. I wanted to see the Earth for the last time and breath real air in my lungs and feel real wind on my face.

The top of the military lift was a small square, open-air construction that offered me the ability to stand and look around. In a strange half-light–neither day nor night–the rolling, blackened Earth stretched out without character or life. Such was the destruction that we had collectively rained down on this innocent planet, that there was simply nothing left of it but ash and this ending.

Then I saw it. Slowly at first, like a sun rising–or, at least, what I think I remember a sunrise looked like. Except that it was white. The white light began on the far horizon. There was no centre to it. It did not rise in the sky, but grew in intensity and began to engulf the land as it grew brighter and brighter. I stood, breathing the poisoned, beautiful air and smiling. I was–perhaps the only living thing–witnessing the actual end of the world.

And, as the white light grew more and more blinding and then engulfed even me, I felt happy. I felt good. I felt at peace.

Fantasy, General Fiction

Shadow in the Sky

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“I tell you, I heard something.”

“So what if you did? You talk too much.”

“Don’t you ever wonder?”

“Hmmmffft…”

“No, don’t ever think that there is more than this water and these rocks and–”

“Whatever. You talk too much. You should focus on eating.”

“Didn’t you hear that?! Please tell me you did? It was right there!”

“Yeh, I heard it. It was you blowing wind out your hole again because you like the sound of yourself.”

“Ha ha, very funny. I tell you, there is something happening here.”

“Hmmmffft…”

SPLOOSH-ZIP-WHOOSH!

“Oh god! Oh god! Get out of here! Everyone go! He’s gone! The shadow in the sky moves! It took him! Aaaaah…!!”

*Many minutes later*

“I tell you I heard something.”

“So what if you did? You talk too much.”

“Don’t you ever wonder?”

“Hmmmffft…”

“I tell you, there is something about that shadow in the sky. There is a darkness to it. Have any of you seen Fred? Or Joe? Hey-hey you! Have you seen–”

SPLOOSH-ZIP-WHOOSH!

Horror & Dark Fiction

Shadow of Nobbs Road

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There was something off about that part of Nobbs Road. When I stood there in the day, it felt like home. Yes. Indeed, I had lived there for a number of years in a creaky old house with beautifully kept wooden floors and a large, ornate, green gate made of twisted iron. I was very happy living there and only had good things to say about the place, at first.

But, like creeping damp in a wall or fine hairline cracks in a beautiful portrait, there was something else. There a disquiet about the road or the land that grew on me over time.

When I stayed awake at my house on the Nobbs Road late at night, I felt the tug of something strange there. As the hour grew later, my thoughts would grow darker. It took me a while to recognise this, but there was a sense of foreboding that permeated my sleep and seeped into my waking mind. I only became aware of this in moments of idle thought or when a cloud passes by on a sunny day.

At first, it was just a feeling of unease, but then over the years it became its own entity and I began trying to avoid the shadow of Nobbs Road. I would make sure I was inside before dark, tucked into the safe illusion that domestic comforts project. I would lock my front door and make sure my curtains were closed. I would make sure I was fast asleep long before the midnight. I stopped inviting friends around and began to consciously ponder why I felt like this.

Insanity is incremental, and so is obsession. At face value, they are pretty similar, but with a key difference is the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

So one day I decided that I would investigate it. Being unattached and financially secure, I had both the time and the means to plough into such a pursuit. And so I would investigate the quaintly-named Nobbs Road, that part of that road and what happened there long ago. If nothing else, I would find out something of the history of where I live. And, at best, I would dispel my ghost with a dose of benign reality.

Over months of scouring the Internet, old library paper clippings and, eventually, the city and the police’s public records I had a story. Actually, I had many stories from the civil war shelter in the old farm building to the retired couple who died in a fire there that destroyed the second incarnation of the house (excluding the original gate that still stood there now). There was even a bootlegger that lived there for a while and a moderately successful author who had been born there before moving inland.

All these lives and their related stories were scattered over centuries, but there was one that stood out. I found vague references to it online, so I went to the library and found a key part of it as a tiny fifth-page article in a now-forgotten newspaper. Then I went to the public records and found some of the legal records evidencing this narrative.

Interestingly, I could find no record of who designed and installed the same twisted, iron green gate that stands in front of my house now. It just seems to have always been there, but I suppose that is another story entirely.

And that is how this story begins, as one day about two centuries ago an old lady was banging on that gate. The recently married couple that had just moved into the house–the wife’s father owned it, but he was off in Germany–came out to see her. They had their newborn in their arms when this strange, wild-haired old lady had warned of where they were living.

I could find no record of exactly what that warning had been, but the man the next day had reported it at the police station. The entry into the police records had just said: “Residents at 2 Nobbs Road receive another warning. Woman not located.”

There is a gap in the records, but in Winter that year the poor couple buried their firstborn. The grave is still there on the hill at the old cemetery overlooking the bay. I went and visited it and through the moss and cracked, weathered rock I could just make out the words, “…taken tragically before his time.”

The police records showed that an investigation into the child’s death was opened, but the couple refused to co-operate and their statements are not on record. The case was closed and marked as “Cot Death“.

It was at this point that the story took a strange turn.

The tiny fifth-page article in the now-forgotten newspaper speaks about the mysterious gatherings taking place at 2 Nobbs Road. Neighbours reported dark-dressed strangers coming and going from the house late at night. They also spoke of strange sounds and smells coming from the property. And then there was one naked, terrified man seen jumping the gate and running from the property late at night. When the police found him, he was screaming uttering incomprehensible gibberish about falling stars and the “the darkness below that speaks“. By the time the journalist from the newspaper got to interview him in the mental hospital, he was unresponsive. Given those type of clinic’s treatments, the latter was no surprise to me. The journalist, though, did note in his article the deep cuts and scratch marks that covered his body, before concluding that “…in the interest of public good, the men of the law should investigate the unseemly goings-on at 2 Nobbs Road.”

But, I suspect that without a coherent statement from the man committed to the mental hospital, the police could not legally act nor issue a warrant for searching 2 Nobbs Road. Either that or they did not care for it. Either way, the police do not appear to have done anything at this stage and, thus, it not surprising to see that a later seventh-page article talks about a group of neighbours that had had enough. They had been complaining about strange sounds and smells coming from that house at night and a number of them had now also reported missing pets.

The final pieces of evidence that I have points to a terrible climax late one Winter’s night. That fateful night, the police were called out to settle the peace as a neighbourhood crowd apparently stormed 2 Nobbs Road. What they found, though, was a raging fire that had broken out across the property. The police report spoke about how the strange fire raging through the property was impossible to put out, but it did not travel to adjacent property and its flames touched nothing outside of 2 Nobbs Road, stopping at the twisted iron gate. But, this raging fire was also the least of their worries, or so spoke the third-page article I found.

The couple that had lost their child were at the front of a gang of black-robed people standing on the properties lawn before the burning house. The lead policeman on the scene describes the couple’s faces as being dark and unrecognisable. The police found no sign of the neighbours that had apparently stormed the property (and they never would find signs, as no less than seven unsolved Missing Person cases are filed at that date from Nobbs Road). But there was a caucus of screams coming from inside the burning house and, thus, some of the policemen attempted to charge into the flames and save whoever was trapped in there (the firemen, busy with a fire across town at the time, would only turn up later and extinguish much of the blaze).

The police that charged into house would never come out. Part of the house collapsed and a lot of the property–except the green, twisted iron gate–was consumed in the fire. Neither the policemen who charged towards the screams nor any neighbours came out of the blaze. Heat of the blaze must of been intense, as no bodies–not even charred ones–were found. The police report noted that the screaming quickly died out and the lead investigator noted that he believed the fire had simply consumed everyone trapped in that house.

The remaining police had rounded up the black-robed gang, after a brief skirmish, pulled them from the raging inferno of 2 Nobbs Road, and marched them down to the police station for questioning. At this point, the firemen had turned up and begun dealing with the fire. The firemen of the day did not keep any records that I could locate, but the police report noted in a post-note that one of the firemen had also been killed fighting the fire that night.

The next morning, the officer on duty at the police station had walked into the jail and found that all the black-robed strangers were gone, save for the young couple. But the couple were hanging, dead from the ceiling with the words, “SORRY, WAS NOT ME” scratched into the husband’s chest.

The police noted the suicide and their files were empty from there. The wife’s father had come back from Germany and auctioned what was left of the house and the couple had been buried in two separate graves. The wife’s grave is somewhere in Germany with the rest of her family. Her husband, though, is in a tangled, overgrown part of the old graveyard overlooking the bay with no stone or name to mark it.

Pondering this twisted tale, a strange thought occurred to me and I checked the lunar calendar of the day. The date recorded for this bizarre climax was over a three-night lunar eclipse occurring on the longest night of the year.

There is one final event that may or may not be related to this story, but a year later the new residents of this address–after building the third and, so far, final house that now stands at 2 Nobbs Road–reported a strange, old woman threatening them at their self-same green, twisted iron gate. This time the police records note what the old woman said by the following note: “New residents at 2 Nobbs Road receive warning against living there. Told to leave or else they never will, as ‘beast is hungry’. Parks Dept. report no animals in vicinity. Woman not located.”

I sold that house and moved far away. And, although life has moved on for me, sometimes when a shadow of a cloud passes or the full moon dips behind dark clouds, I can still feel something tugging at me. I can still sense something old and evil with a hunger whispering about a twisted, iron gate that holds it tied to that its accursed prison.