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Science Fiction, Technomology

Out of Time

“Any last words, Captain Winkle?” his former-First Lieutenant barked as they strapped him into the cryogenic escape-pod, “Sorry, mean just Winkle. I’m the Captain of Catwalk now.”

“I-I-you-this will–” he spluttered, fury overriding his fear momentarily until his former-First Lieutenant punched him. A sharp pain shot down his spine and he heard his nose crack. Warm blood began pouring down his face.

“Shut up, Winkle,” his former-First Lieutenant growled, tightening the final strap before closing the escape-pod, “We don’t want your imperial bullshit anymore. These men have families back on Earth and we are going to go home. Your Government can send other people on their suicide missions. Enjoy space.”

The cover of the escape-pod was flipped over him. Impotently straining against the straps, the last image the former-Captain Winkle saw before they turned on the cryogenic stasis in the pod and ejected it into deep space was his former-First Lieutenant grinning ruthlessly at him.

***

An intense light was blinding him and it felt like a crushing, contactless pressure was bearing down on him. Winkle wanted to cry out but his throat did not respond the way he expected. A funny gurgle came from somewhere inside him. He tried to reach up to block his eyes from the painful light but whatever was pinning him down held his arms in place and he could barely budge them from where they lay.

“Take it easy, buddy,” a calm voice said from somewhere inside the light, “Hey Doc, he’s awake! Wow, ok, take it easy, buddy, it’s been centuries since your body functioned normally. You barely have any muscle mass left. You probably don’t remember gravity either. Those first-gen cryogenic pods were never meant to be used for that long. Your muscles are basically completely atrophied and your nervous system is still struggling to reboot. We have jacked into our machines for now but you must feel quite disorient…lucky…found you when…never meant…gosh…”

The voice droned on but his mind felt fluid and shifted in and out of consciousness. He only heard snatches of what was being said.

The intense light that was blinding him slowly dimmed down to a glow with patchy, dark shapes within it. And then these shapes formed into more recognizable forms around him: people and objects.

He was lying somewhere. Maybe a hospital or a lab? While figuring this out, he slowly began to feel his own heartbeat, the dry, scratching breathe in his lungs, his limbs and then his whole body. He ached down to his very bones and it felt like something deep inside him was broken.

“W-where…I?” he eventually managed to cough out after what felt like ages had passed. His throat felt raw and his tongue uncertain with these supposed-familiar words, “Where I? Where?”

The shadowy shape of what he now thought was the doctor loomed over him, a light pierced his eye and then a second, elder voice replied from just above him.

“Not where, Captain Winkle. You should rather be asking when? We are still trying to piece together the details and we are sure that you can fill us in on plenty. If your face is anything to go by, after being forcefully ejected into space in your ship’s cryogenic escape-pod, you floated around for almost ten solar-centuries. Uh, you probably don’t know that measure. It is based on Earth-years back when we lived there. We are off-planet now. Intergalactic, in fact. As a civilization, we owe everything to you first-wave colonizers, so…”

The doctor paused, probably noticing his expression. He cleared his throat and returned to his point.

“Anyway, when is exactly that, Captain Winkle. The ‘when’  of your story is about a thousand years after your last memory. Welcome back to civilization, Captain, you have a lot of catching up to do.”

***

The now-called “Galatic Government” had successfully populated space. There were lots of casualties along the way, including his old starship and its mutinous crew. But enough first-wave colonizers reached enough habitable planets that humanity began to populate the cosmos as Earth began to fail.

Next, entire colonies shifted off-world and technology advanced to a point where this was less and less of a problem and more just the way things were.

The last recorded contact with Starship 130D Catwalk indicated that it was low on resources and down to a single atmospheric generator. Half the crew remained able. No working cryogenic pods remained. Staff morale low and the ship–against express instruction–was homebound from Andromeda-adjacent System. No further contact made. Starship classified A.W.O.L. and crew noted as deceased.

That was the last record of his mutinous crew’s attempt to return to Earth after dumping him in space. They did not make it home. That was a little over nine hundred years ago.

Everything that Captain Winkle knew was either dead or different now. In some regards, that is the same thing.

People no longer remembered the civil war nor questioned who had been fighting for what? The winner had written the public records. People popped from planet to planet but never went back to the polluted, toxic Earth.

And no one missed that planet either. Some parts of the Web even questioned if it existed at all? Apparently, its name had been recycled and there were at least three other planets scattered around the cosmos now called “Earth”, only differentiated by their galactic codes.

All his friends and family were long dead, as were their relatives and their relatives’ relatives. His wife back on old Earth had remarried and his children had lived full lives a thousand years ago. So diluted and broken was the hereditary chain that there was little point in reconnecting. The current relatives that were alive were complete strangers to him, and him to them.

The Galatic Government had a fund that supported the first-wave colonizers and their families. The only beneficiaries left in it were a couple great, great grandchildren and some monuments, hospitals and schools, but the Fund added him to the list and began to pay monthly stipends in his name.

The local government of the fringe planet that had picked him up also provided a small, freehold property for him to live on and set him up to live out his retirement in relative comfort.

And so Captain Winkle found himself a public hero, comfortably looked-after, retired and with only time and a growing existential crisis to fill his days.

***

“Thanks, appreciate that,” Winkle said on the call, “Just to clarify, the Fund will keep paying its monthly and you will ensure all bills are settled from that. The excess can be saved. Great, thanks. Bye.”

He stood up from where he was sitting, downed the remaining bourbon in his glass and stumbled to his cellar. It was lined with lead and titanium, and had an in-built self-sustaining life-support system. The whole thing was run by an off-grid AI and sitting in the middle of the floor was a state-of-the-art cryogenic pod.

He closed the cellar doors behind him. They hermetically sealed and the chamber’s life-support booted up, softly humming in the background.

He walked over to the cryogenic pod and put his hand on the glass, a strange smile on his face. He punched a series of instructions into the pod and the glass top opened, hissing, and ready for him to climb in.

“Let’s see in a thousand years, shall we,” he muttered to himself as he climbed in, “Maybe there’ll be some point then.”

The pod closed, sealing him in as the cryogenic process began. On the top of the pod he had scrawled a message for anyone that found him before the pre-set time, or, maybe, the message was for himself: RIP WINKLE.

 

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.