Category: Short Stories

Short Story: Break Out

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Panther crouched at the edge of a rise overlooking a large military compound. The place was little more than a sea of tents and heavy vehicles with a lone modular building slapped together at its center. The tents encompassed it on all sides, as if some god-like shrine and they its prostrating disciples. It made her sick to look at; so many were force-fed corporate lies and thanked them for it.

Panther’s optical augments shifted the contrast of the images flowing through her eyes to highlight the compound’s details. Patrols of two trudged along the three, nearest perimeters that formed one half of an overall fence-line. Panther’s heads-up-display highlighted the patrolling guards in opaque red, analyzing each one with minute text-windows of everything from height and weight to their ever-changing trajectory.

Across the wet-gleam of the asphalt grounds, more patrols made perpendicular paths through the tents winding to form a shifting, full-coverage net across the compound. The HUD recorded the paths with faint, red lines overlaid on the terrain. Overhead, drones filled the gaps between patrols with optical sensors and a near-silent whir of electric props. Their dual 10mm cannons sat on standby, ready to spin up and litter soft targets with hell-fire.

The drones would be the easiest part. They were stupid, guided by subroutines and out of combat mode until operators or officers designated otherwise. People were more difficult. Apart from the patrols, Panther knew, a few hundred soldiers were hidden in the tents between her and the modular building. It didn’t change the fact that she had to make it to the building. Ion was waiting, probably under duress, and no doubt weak from torture. Getting out would be hardest, but if forced to stay, Ion would be dead before sun-up.

She and Nix had been caught in a fire-fight while trying to liberate some refugee supplies held hostage by the military. They wanted anyone not touting the corporate line turned in. For refugees coming from a corp war-zone, that was just about everyone; brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons. It wasn’t going to happen. The military knew that, decided to starve the refugees out. Panther and the others had more humane ideas, and sent Nix and Ion to retrieve the supplies while they created a distraction.

Needless to say, things didn’t go as planned– actually, they went completely fucking sideways. The end result was Nix dead and Ion in the hands of the military, receiving the same treatment refugee-dissenters would. Now Panther had no choice but to go in, get her sister, and hope they both got out alive. The alternative was certain torture and a public execution to make an example out of any “resistance.”

With all of the information gathered to her HUD, Panther slipped down the hill-side for the compound’s barriers. Invisible laser-fences had posts every twenty or so feet and were spaced evenly enough that getting to one would be easy. Panther reached one, pried open a few of the sensor-control panels, and began fiddling with the wires. Beside her, the invisible lasers were green on her HUD, crisscrossed and formed like chain-link, but unscalable without the right augs.

She didn’t have the augs required for jumping the fence– nor the more upscale ones that allowed one to walk-straight through without setting them off. She did have razor-sharp, carbon-fiber nails though, and an augged hand willing to use them to strip and splice wires. She shorted the connection on a power distributor, knowing no-one would notice the breach before she was long gone. The fence itself wouldn’t read the failed parts, and only a visual inspection with the right eyes or visor-settings would reveal the sabotage. She slipped past for the shadows of a tent’s rear-sheet. Sounds of a couple of soldiers fuck-grunting emitted from within.

“Great,” Panther thought. “More meat for the grinder– might as well fuck and get it over with now, take advantage of that corp health-plan before it’s gone.”

She followed inactive, red-lines on her HUD toward the front of the compound. Voices of laughter or low conversations marked the sides of each tent as she dodged and weaved to stay hidden. By the time she reached the last set of tents, her heart was racing. Neuro-transmitters were flooding her body with adrenaline, making it hard to think. A mental activation of endorphins and serotonin slowed her heart to a crawl, her mind and body now completely at-ease with the task at hand.

She glanced along the line of tents, then hurried for the door of the modular building. There’d no doubt be surveillance inside– security, drones, all manner of things to contend with. She was ready. It was now or never. Feline agility sped her body into the building. Micro-speakers implanted in her augged arm emitted inaudible, digital noise, jamming audio and visual equipment. Two guards were startled to their feet at her entrance.

A subsonic pistol in Panther’s left-hand dropped one. A razor-sharp sword in her right, cut the other guard’s throat. Her body followed through. Alarms began to scream. Guards poured in from various corridors. The click of the subsonic pistol accented metallic slicing as she moved like a ballerina, painting abstracts of blood and brain matter across the room.

She pirouetted, grande jete, a bladed boot slicing flesh as her arm made plunging motions and the pistol kept time. She came to a stop at the far-side of the entryway, blade wet and pistol empty. Bodies fell this way and that, creating water-falls of blood through the grated floor.

She didn’t need to survey to carnage to know it was total. Her left hand worked to drop a mag, and slap in a new one. A moment later she speed-walked through a door, body stiff, determined. A few men and women turned, one-by-one. The click of the pistol laid each of them out.

The room was filled with invisible barrier-fences, like the perimeter’s, to contain the various prisoners. The room was empty, save a lone, huddled figure in a corner cell. The poor creature rocked back and forth on his haunches, completely unresponsive to Panther’s approach. She ignored it; Ion didn’t need to do anything more than continue breathing, she’d do the rest.

She punched her way into the barrier’s control panel, shredding faux-skin off her metallic hand, then gripped a handful of wire. Sparks rained from the panel with a whiff of smoke. Panther ignored it, hurried to lift her sister off the floor. Ion’s eyes were glazed over, her face bruised and bloody. She stared vacantly, too drugged and traumatized to comprehend the situation. She opened her mouth to speak, revealed a missing tooth and a few, chipped others.

“Don’t. I’m getting you out.”

She timed her exfil carefully; made it back out the building’s door before anyone knew what had happened inside. Her HUD warned of impending patrols, allowed her to duck back and narrowly avoid a pair of men crossing her path. Moments later, the two were at the downed fence-line. A pair of soldiers examined the pole there, evidently aware it’d been breached.

“Can you walk?” Panther whispered.

Ion gave a noncommittal shrug, found her feet. Two clicks splattered blood across helmet-visors and asphalt. The pair hurried through, Ion limp-sprinting on pure adrenaline. Neither of the sisters was sure how she made it up the hill. At its crest, she fell stumbled, fell, slid the rest of the way down.

A black van waited beside the hill’s terminus, its doors open on familiar faces that forced Ion to tear up. She fell into the arms of Nix’s brother, as Panther hopped in. The doors shut and the van’s electric engine gave a silent start, compelled it forward over the crunch of small twigs and gravel.

In the front seat, Panther’s ex-boyfriend and second in command, Delta, glanced over; “Everything alright?”

“Five-by-Five,” she said with a hint of scorn. “No-one’s going to take my sister from me.”

“Sibling love. Almost as powerful as sibling rivalry.” He glanced over again, “Just not as, you know, bloody.”

She thought of the bodies, “Depends on the siblings.”

Delta gave a laugh and drove on through the darkness.

Short Story: A New Age Begins

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

It would be the first in the next-generation of prosthetic That was how everyone at Cameron Mobility Incorporated saw it. They’d been designing prosthetic devices since the 1940s; from an old man’s scrap wood in a garage, to the custom fitted, laser-cut, hand-assembled metals and plastics of billion dollar industry. Needless to say, the precision-engineered chrome and carbon-fiber had come a long way from the whittled bits of wood Arnold Cameron had first created for his son.

The company hadn’t operated out of a garage in nearly a century, from any one location in decades. The global enterprise had been built on a foundation of one man’s dream and hope for his son. When Arnold died in the late 1980’s, that son stepped into the role of overseer, both poster-child and client from a childhood accident, he took the company public with an image bolstered by his company-replaced right arm and leg.

Public-trading brought investors, stocks, money as the prosthetics became more complex, more specialized, elegant, elaborate. Sturdy, proto-plastics, later replaced again by fully articulated poly-alloys and carbon-fiber “joint and bone” designs.
The heir to the fortune fell ill, forcing his daughter to replace him as head of the company. That was when everything changed– for better or worse was merely dependent on one’s view-point. The company’s stock plunged until measures were taken to secure its future. What those measures were, only one fluent in legalese and corporate intimacies might say. All the world knew was that Cameron Mobility was suddenly growing again, and to new heights.

But until the forth generation Cameron sat on the board of directors, nothing truly astonishing took place. Evelyn Cameron changed that. Like her mother, Evelyn was a trail-blazer, but also a certified genius with a hands-on approach to research and development. On top of her duties as jet-setting business woman, she worked long nights with engineers and technicians in the labs, designing what would come to be known as the most revolutionary prosthetics known to man.

And so, when the culmination of four generations of eager, forward-minded Cameron men and women– and the collaborative toiling of Evelyn and her R&D team– finally came to fruition, they stood at-the-ready for mass production. Their factories in Taiwan and China had already received the plans, and if all went as Evelyn hoped, in a matter of hours the first line in bionic, augmentation prosthetics would be manufactured.

There were already whispers of elective surgeries– voluntary amputations for augmented replacements that would be stronger, tougher, sleeker than human parts. A new black market was ready to form, both around the sale and installation of the new “augs.” No matter the repercussions, there was no doubt this was a new-age. Augs were not just prosthetics, replacements for those poor souls who’d lost part of themselves. Now, they were true to life upgrades, the next step in man’s apex-predatory nature that would see the food-chain and natural evolution forever left behind.

Evelyn and her team had one philosophy; why just return function when it could also be augmented? A decade of research centered on thought-controlled interfaces, superalloys, and miniaturized hydraulics, came next. Then, another five years of prototype construction and programming trial and error that resulted in a line of limb prosthetics that, when installed and routed to the brain via wireless, neural-controllers, exceeded anything an evolved creature could hope to sport.

Everyone had heard the talking heads on Info-Corp’s pseudo-news entertainment channel debating augment-ethics. Most learned people saw them as spouting uneducated nonsense. Evelyn agreed. She’d nearly plunged her company into the red, but somehow retained investor confidence. The rumors spreading of her receiving a Nobel prize didn’t hurt, and were she in any other position, she might have argued them. Instead, she remained silent, watched them bolster investor confidence and keep the money flowing.

She stood now before her first, real test subject. The factories in Taiwan and China were poised for a sprinting run on the first, mass-production line of augs. The man before Evelyn wasn’t someone who’d lost their limbs in an accident, or been born with a corrupted genome and no limb. He was an elective, someone willing to replace limbs with Cameron Mobility’s newest augments.

Evelyn chewed at the tip of her thumb behind a pair of windows. The small observation corridor looked out on the muscled, naked body of the subject. Chrome and carbon fiber rippled from his torso where his limbs should be, as if someone had taken his flesh-less arms and legs, dipped them in steel and carbon-fiber, then replaced the muscles and tendons with criss-crossed mini-hydraulics, actuators, servos, and good, old-fashioned tongue-and-groove gears.

Around him, were masked and suited doctors who’d entered through a clean room. A nurse appeared, wheeling a cart of metal panels and Allen-wrenches. The doctors took places around the body to fit the panels over the augments to hide and protect their innards. For what seemed like hours, but was only moments, they worked the wrenches along bolts. When they stepped away again, the carbon-fiber panels had given the man an intimidating patchwork and a futuristic gleam.

All but one doctor left, the nurse with them. The last prodded the naked man’s neck with a needle, set it aside on the cart. Evelyn waited, breath held. She’d was dimly aware of her team beside and behind her, lined up along the windows in silence. She sensed their own refusal to breathe through the unnatural stillness of the corridor.

The man’s eyes flickered open. The group leaned forward in expectation. He blinked hard, as if waking from a pained sleep, and sat up on an elbow to rub his eyes. The corridor echoed with a half-dozen gasps as the doctor’s mouth moved in silence from the sound-proof room. Evelyn knew from protocol he was being questioned for residual pain.

The man sat up, back to the group, as the doctor carried out a physical exam. After a minute or so, the doctor stepped to the side with a thumbs up. The corridor exploded in cheers, congratulations. The team shook hands, hugged. Someone patted Evelyn’s shoulder and she deflated into her exhaustion.

The truth was, she’d never known if it would really work. Not when it came time to test it. Now, Taiwan and China could begin manufacturing, and in a matter of days, the first augs would ship to awaiting patients and electives. Only then could they know of blow-back from the masses, if any. As the others celebrated around her, she thought rationally; more testing was needed, as was careful monitoring. The man needed to be watched for signs of rejection or other, unpredictable complications.

Time would come to remember those feelings as only footnotes, but even then there was no doubt; a new age had begun.

Short Story: L. Mactans

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Her pursed lips wrapped around the end of a straw to suckle a long island from its glass. Her dark eyes met his down the bar. Through the scattered, dim light, they glistened with an animal wanting and a hint of desperation that signaled to he alone to hunt, chase, conquer. She presented the bar stool beside her with a flit of her eyes, to silently suggest he join. He took the offer like a lion sauntering to a kill that’s already accepted death.

She was a nobody, comparatively speaking, but he was somebody. Rumor had it he was a cleaner for a local crew running guns and drugs out of the red light district. There was no evidence of the rumors, of course, but that didn’t stop them from forming. It didn’t hurt that he made a point to keep the mystery about him, never saying much about himself, or anything for that matter. For anyone who’d spent enough time in the little watering hole off the beaten path, at least some whiff of Anton had manifested to them.

“Allison,” she said, head tilted to drink from the side of her straw.

“Anton,” he said, mounting the stool beside her. “What brings a girl like you to a place like this?”

She smiled, chuckled. He’d left out the “beautiful” part, but it was word for word what most guys said. He didn’t know that of course, but it revealed his obvious desires. Where other men would’ve fallen flat though, Anton walked sure-footed as Christ on water. He had the clout and cash to back up any challenge to his status, to say nothing of his manhood. They were two, beautiful people in a drab, ugly place, that stood out like sore thumbs. Both of them knew it.

The next hours passed in a retrospective haze. Allison was younger than most, good looking with hips, breasts, and waist all in perfect proportion to her hourglass shape. Her dark eyes and hair accented the bits of pink flesh peering out along her clavicle, back, and navel from the neo-modern dress that framed her diamond belly-piercing in glowing light.

Before either of them knew it, Allison was leading Anton by the hand to the bar door. They slipped out into the street toward his high-end sports car. The flashy style perfectly suited his reputation, and more pointedly, his date. If there was anything Allison loved, it was fast cars for even faster men. He was certainly one. They spent the whole ride home in various states of sex, receiving mouth or hand, Anton the one, Allison the other.

Coursing with fresh ecstasy and lust, they spilled from the car, clothes half off. He carried her in to his palatial home, took her once just inside, then again anywhere else they could reach. Their stamina finally gave out in the bedroom, Allison on her hands and knees, wet and sweating from more sex than she could ever recall having at once. They gave virile new meaning in one another’s minds as they collapsed on the bed together.

Her body was slicked with sweat, glistening like her eyes had in the low-light from a lamp by the beside. He sparked a cigarette and smoked in silence while she let pleasure course upward from her loins and out to her shaking limbs. They lie in the still aftermath, drinking up the last of the erotic night as the liquor-high furled up its tendrils to slink away until its next return.

Contrary to Anton’s expectations, Allison climbed atop him again, kissed her way along his body before taking him in her mouth one last time. With a final, pulsing throb, he flooded her throat and she swallowed, began to kiss her way back up. She settled her groin atop his, the wetness there pleading for more attention as she bit at his neck.

He groaned something mixing pleasure with pain, dug his nails into her back. The pleasure drained from him. All was pain. Sudden, piercing, as if being stabbed. He struggled, managed to throw her off. She fell sideways off the bed, rebounded onto her hands and knees. He swore repeatedly, vision darkening. He fell off the far-side of the bed as she rose to full height to watch.

He writhed on the floor, retching, ready to vomit. His limbs tingled. Needles sank deep along punctures flooded with molten steel. The pain was too much. He vomited beside the end table. Dry heaves forced the painful needles deeper. His pulse raced, veins inflating like balloons to cause ever-present blood flow to hurt more and more.

Anton fell around on the floor, like a wounded insect tackled by its predator and grappled around in its limbs. Allison merely watched, eyes locked on him. Her face was empty, blank, nude hourglass shining with a fine coat of sweat. Anton made one last attempt to stand.

His legs were too weak, felt of rubber beneath a marble slab that was his torso. He collapsed onto the bed, sweating profusely and gasping for air. His heart skipped beats with erratic arrhythmia–he stretched an arm out at Allison, felt it seize entirely. With a last set of gasps, his eyes rolled back, and his body went limp.

Allison stood in place, more satisfied than usual. The cleaner had been dealt with, and soon everyone would know. They wouldn’t know who’d done it, of course, only speculated how. Indeed, when Allison read the digital newspaper only two days later, Anton’s cause of death was exactly as she’d predicted.

She sat on a cafe patio, soaking in the sun of a warm, Floridian morning. The tablet in her hand read out an article that could have been overlooked by even the most intrepid investigators. The most important part however, was a line that read, “… died as a result of a Latrodectism, a toxic effect of the bite from a Latrodectus Mactans, more commonly known as the Black Widow spider.”

Allison sipped her cappuccino and smiled. No one would ever know. That was why she’d been paid so much to “clean” the cleaner. Even her clients didn’t know the truth, only the calling card. That alone made her chuckle. She sipped her drink again, and let the sun warm her hourglass shape.

Bonus Short Story: The Plague

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

That horizon ahead? It used to be alive. It was more real than the stars and a million times brighter, like someone had cut holes through reality to the multicolored fabric beneath. The glow could be seen for miles, and it would’ve rushed toward you as soon as it would’ve appear from nowhere. That was before everything; before the misery, before the plague, before the end of the world.

It didn’t happen like we thought it would. There was no nuclear exchange. No zombie outbreak. No horsemen. There was just sickness, death, the stink of poverty and grief. Even the war didn’t really hit us in the States, not until the retaliation strikes wiped us out. It was our own fault.

I remember hearing the air-raid sirens; It was one of those typical Tuesdays, or as typical as they’d become with the state of things. The media were screaming nonsensical ravings about imminent destruction. They’d always done that though, the narrative had just changed, the rhetoric shifting from general to pointed. Instead of offhandedly implying certain things would cause a certain end, news-anchors and pundits began to say this would cause that end. It was all very intentional, charismatic fear-mongering, but no-one thought they’d be right.

It wasn’t like we’d have been able to do anything about it anyhow. The US economy had collapsed, just like most others’, and the rest of the world was following more by the day. Most of us had leveraged our national assets to the Chinese in exchange for debt relief. After all, they had the largest workforce in the world, and with their communist-state becoming more democratic by the day, they were on the rise. Debt relief came in the form of trillions of dollars, but with the obvious caveat that those whom defaulted forfeited those leveraged assets. What a fucking mistake. It was the worst bargain ever, and no-one I know– or knew– thought otherwise.

But the politicians and governments thought it was the greatest thing since sliced-bread. The propaganda, media-machine kicked into overdrive, and we started hearing more about how good it all was and would be. All the while, people were getting more and more angry, protesting and threatening to riot, feeling more and more as if they’d been sold into slavery. Eventually, they were proven to have a point, but at the time, everyone was too angry to speculate.

We should have though. All of us. Maybe then someone would’ve hit upon the kernel of truth in what was to come. Maybe, just maybe, we’d have seen the shit-storm on the horizon and been better prepared to batten the hatches when it arrived. We weren’t and that’s ultimately how that horizon died.

Every country has its own story, but as far as the US goes, it was the steel industry that went first. American steel had built the world for almost two hundred years, but coal had become scarce, oil more expensive, and exportation more difficult. Tariffs and embargoes, imposed by the UN countries, eventually forced us to close up shop, but not before our number one industry was bled dry by money-hungry vultures.

Hundreds of thousands were suddenly, and immediately, out of work. Their Unions threw them to the wolves, then fought for the scraps before ending up euthanized by political mistakes and missteps. When the unemployment rates came in, they’d tripled. The next election cycle proved to only be a catalyst to the chaos, with both sides proclaiming to have the answer. They were easy answers to extremely complex problems though, and everyone with sense worth a damn saw it. Funny, it still didn’t save us…

The problems spread; without cheap, easy access to steel, the auto-industry went belly up. It didn’t hurt that our Chinese “saviors” were the new, number-one steel producers, and were hiking their prices up higher than a whore at a garter-convention. It was probably the first time in history the Chinese had managed to piss off both Americans and Russians in such equal measure.

Of course without the auto-industry, public sectors began to break down. Everything from public transit to car-dealers felt the blow. The big three were dead, and like big-steel, had taken a large portion of the country with it– to say nothing of the culture around them. Then, because of the lack of vehicles, big-oil took the hit too. They rode out the end of the world in style, of course, still able to export most of their stock, but to an utterly discarded reputation state-side.

Only a few of the newer, electric-car manufacturers seemed to hold to any scrap of hope, but the tech still wasn’t there, and the cars cost twice the average salary. In a country with a 30% unemployment rate, it wasn’t hard to see how fast they were going to fail if they didn’t compensate. Eventually, their compensation killed them off anyway. With them went any hope of renewable energy alternatives– and a few-hundred-thousand more jobs.

With all of that upper-middle class money gone, simple things like supermarkets and department stores started closing down. Unemployment shot up to 50%, the rich got richer, and the poor were so destitute most were dying. Even the government couldn’t help anymore. Most of their biggest money-making assets had been snatched up by Chinese companies to pay back the debt. It wasn’t long before it was merely simpler to close-up shop a world away and bring the businesses home.

It was total, economic collapse. The only thing we had left was the military, and it was the only time their bloated, runaway budget had ever seemed like a good thing. It had given them fiscal padding, enough to keep soldiers, sailors, and fighter-jocks in chow and shelter. Eventually though, the bombs fell, and none of that mattered anymore.

I couldn’t tell you who shot first. Maybe it was us. Maybe it was them. Both sides had good reasons. We were biting the hand that fed us, bitching and whining alongside the rest of the world, while the Chinese were trying to slap us down for it. I guess I don’t disagree with their stances; we made the deal and failed to uphold it. They merely enforced the terms and we turned on them for it. Whoever shot first seems less important now that everything’s gone. Or rather, now that everyone is gone.

We thought they were nuclear ICBMs when we saw them on the news. A couple of sat-images and alarms came blaring in over the televisions on emergency broadcasts. The Air-force scrambled squadrons to intercept, but the Chinese had been expecting it. They weren’t nukes. They were chemical bombs filled with something called Substance-42. It was like a combination of chlorine gas and Ebola. The first people dead were the pilots, but it didn’t matter, we’d done exactly what they’d wanted.

We blasted apart those ICBMs mid-air and the resulting debris contaminated the entire country. In less than a month, it was the continent. Four-hundred million people died in the first two months. Most of the rest went in the next few; twisted, mangled corpses of either retching poison-victims, or blood-drained casualties. It was like someone had opened a vein on the world, replaced the oceans with blood.

Those of us immune were considered lucky. Sure, lucky…. Lucky is dying in your sleep after a long, full life, or hitting the lottery and retiring early. Nothing about this was lucky. The ones that died were lucky. They didn’t have to watch the world go to an even deeper hell than it had been in.

But I did, because I survived.

Without industry, and with most of our country dead or dying, the war ended. Before the TV-stations went off-air, they’d said that the infection had just hit mainland Asia and was sweeping Europe. Even some dumb bastards who’d fled their countries had managed to infect Australia and most of the world’s islands.

I don’t know how many are left, but I know we’ll never survive. The virus they used mutated, killed off most of the animal life. If you can even find it to hunt, you eat it raw or over pioneer fires. Nothing else in this world works anymore. All the fuel is gone, all the public utilities, all the power, water, and heat.

I don’t know how long I’ll survive, but I’ve only seen a few people since the war ended. Terrifying, considering how dense and overpopulated Chicago used to be. I know there aren’t many of us left now. There isn’t much of anything left, really. Maybe the Chinese didn’t unleash a plague, maybe they’d just harnessed it– or maybe, just maybe, they’d eradicated that last true plague on the planet; humanity.

We were a blight on the universe, it seems. I guess now that we’re all dead the scales are balanced again…