Category: Short Stories

Shorter-form fiction

Hard Lessons: Part 13

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

13.

Complex Problems

Crystal smeared anti-ID paint across her face as she monitored the vids for the signal. Her weapon harnesses and belt-pouches clasped with industrial clacks. She tested the fit of her clothes, re-laced her boots; she’d have only seconds, would need them all. She checked the baby Deagle at her side, flipped the safety off, just in case.

Titus reported in, “’round the corner.”

Crystal watched a figure in high-end silks enter from one side of her digital surveillance net. She turned for the door, HUD superimposing the vid-feeds on a corner of her vision. It tracked Saito, shifting cameras as recog-software cycled angles along his passage of the buildings.

Crystal slipped from the rear of the building and into the shadows amid the downpour. Rain puddled on the porous jungle of concrete, reflecting the gray behind the blare of countless, incandescent street lights. Water rebounded off sheet metal, ricocheted into the distant gurgle of street-drains suckling rainwater. Their gullet’s resonance said it they did so as dutifully as failing infrastructure could; as the prideful, final remnants of a near-ruined system might, when emblematic of the depth of its own flaws.

Dim, GPS blips tracked Titus and Saito across her HUD. The information was further resolved on the screens before her. Titus remained in place. Saito moved laterally, toward the edge of the building where his palm-pad was hidden. Beside it, the alleyway concealed the entrance to his vault as the alley outside Angela’s apartment concealed her garage.

Saito’s blip gave only the slightest moment of hesitation. Crystal watched him on the PiP-feed: He glanced over his shoulder, around. In only a beat more than usual, he continued for the side of the building, his hidden panel. He rounded a corner and disappeared behind a series of columns and overhangs.

“Go,” Crystal instructed.

Titus sped past like a shadowed freight-train. Cameras tracked him, their recog scrambled by his face-paint. He doubled his pace on the PiP view. Saito hesitated again.

“Wait!” She commanded.

Titus stopped a step before the edge of the building that would expose him to Saito, the alley, and blow the job. He back-stepped quickly, doing his best to look nonchalant despite the exposure he felt. Crystal watched Saito rubberneck the alley, then put a hand on the wall. A section of alley-floor sank into darkness, revealing only the slightest hint of stairs in the edge of its scant light.

Saito was moving again. Titus was ready. He struck with precision; the sniper’s distant bullet, there and gone for one purpose. He flashed through from obscurity and into the alley. In two steps he’d bridged half the distance. The mark stopped mid-step. He’d had just enough time to squint through the rain at his assailant.

Titus struck. Saito was down, dazed. Titus reeled back a fist. Then, Saito was out.

Crystal was too busy running to watch. She sprinted over puddles, never splashing ground, silent. The street became alley, the alley, stairwell. A moment later, groaning, mechanized hydraulics re-sealed the hatch and she found herself in the dark.

“I’m in.”

Titus strained against Saito’s unconscious weight as he carried him to their hiding spot. Crystal crossed from stairs to floor. Lights flared on in the walls, forcing her to blink against suddenly-wet eyes. Her HUD engaged her new software, readjusted the contrast. She blinked out the last of her confusion and took in her surroundings:

The staircase had deposited itself in an unceremonious foyer. One of necessity rather than form. Walls of light, as in Angela’s garage, confirmed the shared architect. The design, as much for function as form, equally complimented the post-digital-age aesthetic. A style further evident in its extra-wide, utilitarian corridor running the length of its high-strength vault.

From the layout above and below, Crystal judged the vault-proper as just below the near-edge of the warehouse. The design of Angela’s home and garage said the vault was likely built up beneath the warehouse-floor, kept as innocuous cover easily investigated.

That was a popular theme in the shadows; the sleight of hand that kept one looking in the warehouse for wrong-doing, not the property above or below it that was equally there and open to construction. It was an obvious relic of a Pre-3D age. One where the idea of everything came from notions built on paper.

Paper was flat. 2 sided. Or at least, only 3 sided after exceptions or manipulation.

The post-digital-era was different. People weren’t flat anymore. They had depth too; had gone beyond the X and Y planes to the Z, even the T. 1 and 0 was old news because it had done so much more already. It was a symbol, sure, but an old one. One that wasn’t right for the times.

She started down the long corridor. Immediately drawn right, into a dead-end occupied on either side of a smaller hallway.

To the right, safety-glass walls sectioned and protected computer panels controlling various, connected hardware, no doubt monitoring and linking the vault’s various systems. In addition, large breaker panels and high-voltage symbols and cabling led in, spliced from the nearby grid-work that fed the warehouse

None of that was technically illegal, but it wasn’t exactly board-approved building code either. Clearly Saito wasn’t entirely above using old connections, despite the game he supposedly wasn’t part of. Their job aside, Crystal could already tell this guy was headed the way of his old boss if he wasn’t careful.

Judging by immaculately organized patch-panels, network switches, and other routing tech more was freshly interconnected here than procurable outside his former-network. She knew what network it was, because it fed her and Titus too.

Crystal focused left, on the immensely-thick vault-door half-protruding from the wall.

The door was decidedly intimidating. More than that, it was disheartening. Vaults doors couldn’t be picked or tooled. Most couldn’t even be blown open. They had to be plasma-cut or utterly removed. Neither was an option here

Unless they contained a small key-panel to the side; a standard panel for a non-standard door. One Crystal couldn’t help but smile at.

She stepped over, producing a small, cordless drill, and started working out hex head bolts. The internall-suppression mechanisms, some self-modified, withdrew the bolts in utter silence. The panel of number-letter keys and LCD readouts came free.

She fished through the internal wiring, feeling for the connectors. A wrench and a twist freed a pair of wires from a conduit, spliced them. A spark, a whiff of burnt insulator, and the grinding clicks of a few thousand pounds of meshing gears and bolts fell open.

Then, a prolonged hiss as the door eased open within its extra-wide corridor.

Crystal never ceased to be amazed at how few whom relied on digital technology actually understood it. Whether the highest-grade, state of the art containment facility, or the lowliest car-door lock, it relied on and required one thing to work; power.

Thus, power was also its greatest weakness and vulnerability.

Crystal couldn’t help but think of what Titus had said about vulnerabilities. In context, people whom didn’t understand such basic principles of digital security were incapable of planning for its exposure. Most electronic-locks had the fail-safe of a latch lift-able in the event of a power failure. Thus, the idea was to never lose the power in the first place.

State of the art facilities with billion dollar security systems compensated for this with multiple redundancies, complimentary fail-safes to prevent total system-loss. From their own, private police forces to their own power-plants, there were back ups to the systems.

All the same, Crystal guaranteed one or more vulnerabilities existed. Even in the most powerful systems, there was some weakness to exploit. What made her job difficult were the redundancies, the layers and overlap.

All of it though, required power. If it couldn’t be cut, that meant peeling back layers until getting to the target. As mentioned, it made her job difficult.

What made her job hilarious, almost pathetically easy, was ignorant fools putting a half-mil door on a vault they never bothered to reinforce digitally or electrically. It was its own weak-link in the chain of security.

The door stood open before her. Were she not so certain of Saito’s own foolishness, she might’ve hesitated. Fortunately, the door told her all she needed to know. No matter what more lay inside, protecting the vault and its various charges, something would betray them.

“I’m in,” she said, HUD scanning for anything suspicions.

It found nothing but clear ground.

Titus’ drugs would keep Saito out for hours, but he couldn’t risk him becoming lucid. Worse, if something happened to him, Curie might hesitate with him in the future. Their relationship required knowing exactly when and where to strike, how to compliment each other therein, for the best collective effect. It wasn’t always a Grand-slam, but it was never a miss outside their control.

Meaning, mostly fielders like Crystal assigned to jobs, fucked up.

Those were the requirements of a Fixer-Middler relationship; trust and loyalty. Curie was the M to his Bond, or near enough to be indistinguishable. Shaking the foundation meant shattering the usefulness of that partnership. It would happen eventually, if they lived that long– always a question in their line, but until then it couldn’t happen.

Neither side was prepared to weather it.

“You’re looking for a workstation. Concealed. Its drives.”

Crystal stared down rows of sleek, metal cabinets, counters, and drawers. Each was locked with a number-print bypass. Nothing beyond her skill, but the room looked to be half as wide and long as the warehouse above.

“Anything more?”

“No.”

“Titus, this place is fucking enormous.”

There was a long, deliberate quiet. Crystal was left utterly alone, just beyond the intimidating vault-door. She’d never wanted to run from a job so thoroughly. Something about the looming walls, the cold sterility of the vault; the sudden silence and aloneness. She felt trapped, imprisoned.

Something clicked. She suddenly understood the vault.

Rounding the door and heading out along the short hallway for another, her steps and HUD scanning. Lines of invisible code flickered like particle collisions in an accelerator inside her brain, processing for traps, lasers, trip-wires, pressure-plates, anything that might signal something.

There was nothing but white-light paneled walls, ceilings, and tiled floors.

Her steps remained cautious regardless; if she’d learned anything, it was that the more benign something felt, the more benign it was. Call it intuition; simple human sensory-logic, but if a room felt unused, it was.

Vaults had that feeling as a rule, most times. They were seldom used, but always contained the lingering presence of humanity. A distant, decayed hint of cologne, perfume; the last, infinite echo of a footstep; the hint of minor, animal warmth long since cooled.

That was what comprised reality. What gave an old house its musk. An old leather its feel. In simplest terms, it was life’s effect on a thing.

But Saito’s vault wasn’t merely empty. It was sterile. It didn’t reverberate. It didn’t smell. It didn’t echo. It didn’t linger or breathe. It was dead. Or rather, had never lived. It was just one more redundancy in a 2D system turned 3D. That’s how she knew it.

She found herself at the end of the hall, still awaiting Titus’ reply and knowing why he’d been silent. He didn’t want her getting dependent on him. They’d had sex. The relationship had changed. They hadn’t. She snapped back to her senses, alone but recomposed.

She found it then, another door. Expertly concealed to a human eye seeing a 2D plane, her HUD spotted it instantly. The wall panel rose imperceptibly but outside digital tolerance, decidedly out of place to the software in her HUD. In its adherence to remain innocuous, it sacrificed any further, external security.

Were the room beyond it not 3D, unlike the unliving, unbreathing vault, it might gone unnoticed. Even had the HUD missed it, Crystal knew she’d have sensed it eventually. Ultimately, this saved time. She looked about the door and scanned for any hidden method of entry. She slid her hands along its edges. They suddenly hissed, came loose, and slid into the wall to reveal the small, glass-walled entryway inside.

“Found something. Lab-like.”

“Worth a shot,” he said, tapping Saito’s phone as he squatted beside his unconscious body.

Crystal pushed forward through an inner glass door that sealed behind her. Decon fans spun-up and whirled gaseous air. She tensed up, too focused on the room beyond to notice. The sterile white made more sense now.

What didn’t was the thing lying in pieces on a steel table across the room.

The door to the lab-proper opened on something crossing an OR mid-surgery with a tech-workshop. The steel table, like a gurney, contained one-half a vaguely-human thing. It wasn’t, of course. Too much of it was open, exposed to the air; too much mechanical, robotic, to be human. All the same, Crystal couldn’t contain herself.

“Jesus Christ,” She breathed, eyeing the craftsmanship of the micro-joints beneath a hand. “It’s like Blade Runner in here.”

“Cee, stay focused,” he instructed. “The drive.”

Crystal swallowed, giving the creation one last, awe-inspiring look before turning for a nearby table and a computer there. Contrary to Titus’ expectations, it was not concealed. Even further contrary to Crystal’s expectations, it was also not protected in any way worthy of what likely resided within.

With a quick, few applications of her cordless driver and deft fingers, she worked the small SSDs from the computer and server cases and pocketed them. After one, last look of eerie sorority at the half-assembled creature, she hurried out and toward the stairs.

She started up, triggering an automated protocol that opened the staircase again. Top-side, Titus was stuffing Saito into his driver-less Continental, its scenic-route re-programmed. He shut the door, and it started away for the other side of town. Between that and the drugs, they’d have more than enough time to pack up and get out before anything was discovered.

The pair started through the rain to pack-up their hideaway together.

Short Story: Fractured Nets

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know what more can be said on the Paris Incident, but I know the Eur-Asiatic invasion was never avoidable. Sooner or later, all the Corps knew, the Great Wall would break and spill itself into the rest of the world.

Europe would always bear the brunt of it. Sooner or later, it was inevitable. There was nothing to do but steady on and hope. When the wave hit, we were either prepared enough to weather it, or prosperous enough to rebuild.

The Web 2.0 crash changed that.

What didn’t it do, really? It gave Corps more power; gave people something new to get high on; gave the builders exactly what they wanted. Most of all, people got a new reason to keep slogging through the daily grind of human existence. If only for a while.

The net-fracture was the unexpected treat helping to further cement our complacency. It kept us that much further from, as a whole, exploding into all out anarchy. The after-image showed what was really possible; what was really going on.

We couldn’t have known the extent of things then. The rebellion wasn’t public yet. There was no resistance to speak of. To us, its leaders were still pissants from a new generation of tech-heads and nerds stretching back before Lord Gates and his Microsoft billions. It was there progress had originated, had rooted through and mined all the veins it could.

Why re-tread ground in some other, only-vaguely dissimilar way, hoping for more greatness?

We, the public, were thinking of rocks when we should’ve been thinking about diamonds– the next overabundant, meaningless resource we could place arbitrary value on.

That concept was simply beyond most people though. The rest didn’t care to think on it. The true Human weakness, as a species, is its inability to recognize irony. Irony which dictates our immense capability for emotion yet forces us to live so stubbornly in one state. Humanity, that is. That same irony forces us to identify so wholly with those emotions, we refuse even the possibility of upsetting them.

Sad.

And pathetic.

If we’d paid attention even half-a-second longer than normal, we’d have seen reality crashing down on us. It didn’t require clairvoyance or precognition. Just attention. It was the same thing that had been happening. It was another merger, another monopoly, but of a context we didn’t recognize for little more than a merger then.

Web 2.0 buckled beneath the weight of its own propaganda. It was no longer a people’s gathering ground. It was a bloated creature of pus and bile cleverly disguised with warm themes and cunning language. It had many jobs, but all of them cutting; it was a masochist’s playground.

What took its place was a former dark-net, the former dark-net. The Darknet itself was merely a moniker, a name for the conglomerate of hackers and wannabes running tech gear with masking programs and no data-loggers. What no-one realized was how much more power they got when the nets fractured.

People wanting to, and working against the system, found a way to do just that. The corporations had inadvertently dug their own graves. Everyone knew it eventually, saw it for what it was, but it took time to figure out. Even longer to force the dying corps into the ground.

In simplest terms, the internet fractured from one, interconnected and ubiquitous system, to several whose interconnection was often one-way. That is to say, the light-net was accessible via the Dark-net, but not the other way ’round. The purpose was two-fold: The nature of the Darknet’s inherent security required safe-guards that barred all but the most complicated external access; while the corps wanted to ensure no-one from the light-net– or inside, got out.

The corps attempted to create digital moats around fortress-cities, more or less succeeding until Darknet users fired back through cracks in the system. The sparse revelations of the light-net’s flaws eventually led the Resistance to take hold, using such attacks only when it was most beneficial. They were sparse until the light-net responded with quietly-tightened security. By then, only the most die-hard loyalists and their confused kin, bothered using it.

The Corps’ biggest mistake will forever be stagnating, never evolving. That seems obvious in retrospect, but it wasn’t then. People didn’t see the true force of creation Corps inevitably were. Of that, they most certainly were a creation of Humanity, by any empirical standards, and represented a new entity for the cosmic field-guide.

They weren’t quite alive, but they existed. They were particularly cunning, if only by way of hive intelligence. They could defend themselves through guard-dog lawyers and corp-sec ops. Most of all, they needed sustenance to survive. For a corp, that was money.

Corps could not survive without money. They lived and consumed,able to starve to death, one lay off after another,if not careful.The corps never did learn that.

At least, not until it was far too late.

No CEO or Board of Directors saw the truth for what it was; in the eyes of the machine, no-one was meant to be immune. Execs may not have been as susceptible to predation as most of the machine’s prey, but their money could feed the beast too. The way it was meant to be– between the beast or their money, was that the beast was allowed to win or it was game-over for everyone.

That is what the Corps never learned.

So, they fell to ruin in the shambles of their own stubbornness. Board-room warriors without any, real battle-prowess had been inbred for generations. Their ilk were now men whom grew fat off luxury even when besieged. Etiquette and protocol were ignorantly bred into those unsuited for their inherited stations. Dimwits became indistinguishable from honorable workhorses, until everyone ended up covered in shit from the fan.

And all the while, smiting their underlings; tightening fists to squeeze unneeded pennies from stone, lest it fatten a competitor’s bottom-line instead. It wasn’t done so brazenly of course, but what is?It was done “for efficiency,” “freedom.”

Corporate cards became conveyors of private, digital bit-currency run by the issuing corp, and useless elsewhere. Everything was handled by their software, and on their servers. A corp no longer gave a paycheck, it totaled your life’s exchanges digitally, deciding if you were in the red or black based on various work and purchase statistics.

Then the crash came, and the nets fractured.

As prepared as we could be, the first bits of wall and water rained down almost imperceptibly. Then, the Great Wall broke. The markets and nets flooded with people clamoring for pieces. New corps, new private-companies, subsidiaries, and assets.

In time of course, the Corps simply bought everything up, called it diversifying, and settled back into the groove with the board more cluttered with their assets than before..

Until then however, the fracture was doing something much more subtle and profound; it was funneling value into a universal currency. One only growing by the moment. That, by virtue of the technology backing it, was completely untraceable. It didn’t need to be. The currency was good anywhere and could be traded for anything. The issuer and purchase system were completely moot.

What mattered was money coming and going, somehow. That it came and went, and something was exchanged for it. That currency infected the world like a computer virus downloaded and opened a billion times a day, and spreading its influence with each iteration.

The Web 2.0 crash, in its roundabout way, was the closest thing to a miracle in the modern, digital day that could exist. It was completely prompted, expected, even programmed for. Yet the forces of mutation existing through-out the universe brought upon an anomaly that more or less solved– thus-far– an eternal problem; money. Mostly, backing its value.

How? Data.

What better than data? Data was the byproduct of all things. From the smallest subatomic particle to the universe itself, everything either is data or generates it by existing because it is record-able as data. The universe is composed of such preposterous amounts of information it can never be fully obtained. It can neither lose nor accrue value, because it simply is. Data is a constant. It is a single, fertile, and ever-replenishing thing by virtue of its nature.

Its size, so immense, can never be fully envisioned. It is the horizon of our observable universe and still more. Infinitely more. Information is everything. Our linking to that information, in form, matters not; only that we link. So why not make the information’s divisions, its pieces or bits, the backing of currency?

The idea mattered more than anyone could’ve anticipated.

Bit-currency was more than just a new dollar. It was something bigger. Something universal. Stable. It could be poked and prodded– mined– whenever needed. Something that let us do our thing, shut out the bullshit long enough to make sense of what was really happening, still come away with the bills paid. We didn’t need governments or Corps fighting over whether or not they’d take our hard-earned money because one person’s dollar meant less than another’s.

And just like that, creds were out and bits were in.

The Web 2.0 Crash left us entirely outside expectations. It was the anomaly in the system. The new-age Big-Bang. The final bit of pressure that cracked a nut. It opened our eyes to our ability to collectively will a problem’s solution into place. Let’s not worry about money anymore. Let’s just know it’s there when we need it, and can earn it if we’re willing.

Bit currency did just that whether you were a thief, an architect, a corp-exec, or a wage-slave. Bits simplified everything.

And all that time, the masses were figuring that out; counter-cultured, shadow-dwelling, Resistance leaders were lining their pockets with it. For years, they’d hoarded stockpiles of information. Even when no-one else was looking, and were still thinking about e-creds and dollars and yen, they’d been hoarding and squirreling it away.

The world willed it, but they made it happen; the black-markets, the shadow people, the hackers and wannabes and forward thinkers. And they all made off with that money-trailing after them, cackling like mad as we gawked, utterly destitute and morally bankrupt from the turbulence in the former money-system.

One that, like that version of us, no longer existed.

More than anything, the power of the net’s fracture told more than we realized; that it had always been there, the fault-line. We were always warned and told to be aware of our actions, and the workings beneath us. Yet we weren’t. The fracture was the result. It’s a shame it took so much bad to develop such good, but at the very least, it’ll never happen again….

Probably.

Short Story: Citizen’s Memorial

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

If those rat-bastards had known what they were starting, would they still have started it?

That’s the question that can’t help being asked. Fact is, the Paris Incident wasn’t the start of it. The start of it was those pansy-ass ultra-liberal extremists masquerading as good, decent-minded folk. That they’d managed not only to succeed, but also manipulated others into believing their bullshit was more astounding than the cluster-fucked war-zone or its aftermath.

That war-zone, of course, was Earth. Who doesn’t know by now? Those cheap-shit Clinkers and their aluminum guts. It was a wonder anyone ever wasted time or money on them in the first place. Who knew what we were setting in motion when that Cameron-bitch did her thing.

Cameron Mobility my ass. It was the black market that really did it.

Course… we did sort of fund that one too, so maybe we’re to blame there. Then again, no-one blames us anyhow, so it’s moot.

Problem was, those pansy-asses had gotten their tits in a twist over something. Again. Like they did, the media arms of Info-corp, GNN, and the other Big Five went into gear, spinning and spinning. Until they’d formed another of the threads woven day and night into the masses’ fates.

That thread was one, unbroken stream-of-consciousness for an entire global culture. It had stretched on, completely unprepared for Cameron’s sudden revelation to be added to the mix.

Augs appeared and it was like every extremist’s wet-dream; an army of disenfranchised for the picking. Right place. Right time. Funny two wrongs never make a right, but two rights can make a wrong.

Pricks.

Everyone, corp and not, knew the protesters were never there as Augs or sympathizers. Augged or not, they only cared to use the situation to their advantage, forward their agenda. Whatever it was, it was all that mattered. A new arm to jerk at a thousand-Gs was just a bonus.

And why not? Never know when you might need to.

People’d been trained too well in that case. Each one had been turned into scheming bastards. Corps spent decades being scheming shits. Why couldn’t people be too? In the end, that was why the Corps fell; shadow games couldn’t be run if the shadows were full to brimming with wannabes.

The Big 13 had unwittingly spent decades teaching their enemy to play their game. It is always inevitable that the student become the master. It is the natural march of time. The only reason corporate culture’s thrived so well on those Eastern philosophies.

Castes and cliques make system incorporation easiest to limit. Controlling what is already self-limited and self-controlled is inherently easier.

On a human level, what delineated those organizations was culture.

Corps didn’t understand their own culture well enough to maintain control in a crisis, how could they ever become eternal, as they were wont to do?

Culture is a concept that adds social redundancy to various levels of a system. In the case of corporations, it’s the sense of Corporate security. Ensuring Corps maintained morale and proft-margins was the first level of corp-sec before men were ever involved. It was inherent and intuitively established in the concept’s existence.

Corporate safety and sovereignty could be assured simply by understanding that, so long as the actuators in the system were allowed their leeway to work, they would. The actuators further up, in this avaricious executives blood-thirsty for money, were thus supposed to allow that leeway.

But the shit hit the fan, and they ran. Instead of stepping up and getting splattered.

As they should have.

That was what the Execs never understood; Eastern philosophies and, thus Corporate culture, dictated all fuck-ups be accounted for. In effect, some entity was required as sacrificial lamb.

Until the Fall, not one of them knew that.

By then Execs were third and fourth-gen buy-ins. Their qualifications were theoretical, more or less guaranteed by their great grandfather’s skill in their field, rather than their own proficiency. The Fall’s seemingly unendingness was necessary.

However long-coming, it was the result of corporate and true-realities clashing.

Reality was, Corps were as much living things as any multi-celled organism. As capable of corruption as anything, but moreso inclinded toward it because of their great propensity for effect.

Corporations were human-body cell divisions; each level a title. Each marking some region along the body. Cells were grouped within and by them. Mostly, for the purposes of efficient division of labor and resources to meet demand, but each individual was therein motivated differently.

Each level of cells had its own inner divisions too. If only in two lines of actuators– or people, shuffling boxes in unending Conga lines. The trick was keeping that going for ever without any, one conga-er being without its every need and reasonable desire.

It was a delicate balance that required occasional sacrifices for the same reasons all sacrifice is required; because it was fucking required. Sure, CEOs were least likely but so long as no-one was immune to the purge, it was no more or less fair. So long as heads still rolled at every level, no-one was the wiser to the actual statistics.

Besides, numbers didn’t matter. Not really. Only preservation of the system. The resistance succeeded for the same reason. Especially in the beginning, their leadership was entirely nonexistent. Then, entirely fluid. Whomever had the best ideas rode lead. If someone failed to produce after a while, they rode backseat again.

Revolution made people feel useful again; as individuals, in addition to a disenfranchised group.

The individual was what really fucked Corporations. They didn’t have time for it. Patience did not exist in corp-culture. Only two things did: time and money.

The goal was achieving the perfect fusion of the two. The cold-fusion, if you will, of time-money synergy with the least interference between A and B.

Only what was necessary was allowed there. It was an attempt at statistical harmony, to be maintained indefinitely. True Fusion would be perfected harmony between the forces of labor, cost, and output allowing for total, eternally sustained growth. That was the “nirvana” of the Corporate entity.

And it would absolutely never have room for the individual.

Impartiality aside, those fucking liberals knew that. Maybe not all of ’em, but the ones stirring the shit and priming the fan, so to speak. They knew the system for what it was; that just waiting a few more generations might sort the last bugs out as intended. And they weren’t satisfied with that.

In the end what’d we get? LeMaire’s future? The resistance? Still living in fucking shit and squalor decades later; some places worse than if we’d left well enough alone? For what? No corps

Yeah, and a fucking barter economy, too. Turns out when you surgically remove the largest– and only– Global producers of services, goods, and employment, things don’t just balance out. If they’d just shut their mouths, the eventual cock-up cascade might never have occurred. At least, if it had, it wouldn’t have rivaled the damage even World Wars couldn’t top.

In time, things might’ve worked out. Little by little. Shit always shakes out. Eventually. Our species’ survival’s taught us as much.

Usually, without nearly destroying us in the process.

After The Fall, most people began seeing that but the screaming wasn’t applause. It was the fucking bloodbath going around everyone. Everyone’s agreed on that; the Two Week War, was war. The Revolution, was a revolution and it did occur globally.

Global war. Plain and simple infighting. Not a sovereignty war. Not even a civil war. It was a Corporate war. A real one. Not the kind run in boardrooms and through ad-campaigns, for figures on paper. It was a war for ground, for bodies, for hearts and minds.

That was the one thing the resistance got wrong– not that it mattered in the end. They were fighting a war on two fronts they could’ve easily won on one alone, if they’d been smart enough.

The sheer strength of the message that rallied their people attested to that.

Instead, they waged a bloodbath of corporate war for nearly a decade. All that time, conditions worsened for corp and wage-slave alike. The cities turned to ruins from constant exodus of war and attrition shrinking borders and collapsing what remained of the economy.

By the end, no-one really cared that the last corp exec was tried or executed. We’d lapsed back to normality. A new normality, but a normality nonetheless.

The only real, net differences were for those on the sidelines, counting the losses sustained. Bits are still cash. Folks still earn ‘it, with or without the sweat off their back and brow, but everyone needs ’em when suddenly no-one’s got ’em.

People though… they don’t grow back. You can’t take on an extra helping just to get back some that were lost. A lot of people learned a lot the hard way from that war. Some learned of their own mortality, some learned of others’… but I’m not bitter.

Short Story: Steward-Apprentice

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

“Bring the Seeker in.”

Fabric rustled and doors swung shut, their resonance heavy in distant, empty rooms. The Seeker entered, led forward by the Steward. The Seer sat in a corner, half-cloaked in shadow from the glowing machine beside him. Its warmth blanketed the room, thrum giving rhythm to thoughts and effect to the air over a distant, almost-whine reporting regularly all was well and normal.

The Seeker knelt honorably before the Seer, draped in tattered poverty, hands folded in his lap.

An edge of the Seer’s face visibly twitched. Whether from the light or dark side, it was impossible to tell. Perhaps even both, as if for that one instant, something embodied darkness and light.

“Kneel if you wish, but I require no such courtesy– Sazz!”

The Steward carried a chair from a corner. The Seeker took a seat. A long silence ensued. Tension mounting by the moment.

“Speak!” The Seer finally commanded.

The words spilled out in mortal terror, “Our youngest son is infirmed by fever. His cheeks are flushed. He can keep nothing inside him. What does not come out one end, leaves the other. For days, he has slept, weakening more and always sweating profusely. We have taken him to every healer from here to the Great-River–”

“Yet the fever persists,” the Seer inferred studiously, however distant his manner.

The Seeker affirmed with a nod.

“Sazz.”

The Seer’s indistinct face became more vague as the Steward disturbed the air. The latter needed no further instruction; long apprenticed in the Seer’s ways and rhythms, he understood his every wish and desire as if it were his own. They could communicate in the smallest of movements and gestures equally as well as if they were two halves of a whole.

The brief hint of a lean between Master and Student prompted the Seeker to lean too, so attuned was he to them. The three came nearer as if bowing. The hint of letters and numbers in glowing air behind the Seer was nearly indistinguishable, but hints inflected themselves behind closed eyes.

A slight gasp cut the air. The Seeker recoiled. Desperation and heartbreak flooded him at the blind-white eyes of the Seer:

All present knew the stories of Seers turned to evil by dark knowledge. Each one, blind. Seer and Sazz exchanged thoughts. This man knew the stories of the elder Seers, their greed and hate.

A slow chuckle built to a deep billowing laughter, startling the Seeker before flooding him with an infectious reassurance. A joy more warm than any before. The Seer handed Sazz’s bag over. The Steward’s eyes exploded before narrowing shrewdly. The Seer sensed it.

“Place this in his morning tea. One pinch a day. Every day. For one week. Return to me then.”

The Seeker hesitated. Seeing no further expectation from him. He stumbled to his feet and fled for his ailing son. Behind him, Sazz eyed the Seer who’d already withdrawn– as was their way during the transference of knowledge between Master and Student.

One week later, the man reappeared: His son had grown healthy again. The color had returned. The fever gone. Once more the boy’s appetite was healthy, his spirit that of a vibrant youth. Thus, once more the man knelt before the Seer.

Now though, he pressed himself at the floor. His upthrust hands presented the bag, nary a pinch more nor less than prescribed. Sazz, Steward and Apprentice, took and replaced the pouch with a tense week’s sigh of relief. Though it did not seem it at first, the air lightened severely.

“How young is the boy?” The Seer finally asked.

“Barely nine.”

“A ripe age for learning, wouldn’t you say, Sazz?”

A flicker of expertly controlled fear crossed the Steward’s face. All the same, the room felt it. As one felt the fear of possibility before excitement, the kind that made impromptu celebration not only possible, but acceptable.

“Bring the boy to me a week before and after his ninth birthday,” said the Seer. “You will leave the boy with Sazz at the door and await his return precisely one-hour later.”

Confusion and curiosity clung to the air, dispelled by a wave ushering Sazz and Seeker away.

The Seer called out, “And thank you for the return of my pouch. It is most precious.”

Sazz nodded reassurances to the Seeker and led him out.

The boy appeared midday the fifth; one week before his birthday. He said little, entering behind the Steward, whom made to close the door.

“Sazz, leave us,” the Seer commanded.

Sazz hesitated. There was a hope to argue, but the Seer had already begun ignoring him, focused instead on his pipe. He busied himself with it, his back to the boy, uncharacteristically shuffling about as if nervous. He was not.

The boy was.

Sazz left, reticently. The door shut. The Seer turned spryly as his age and mass allowed, surprising the boy with a hope that all was not as it seemed, but for the best of intentions. The alertness to the air only doubled the intended effect.

“Does your father smoke?” The Seer asked, stepping forward.

The boy’s eyes locked on his as soon as he turned. The stammer was expected, but gave the boy a way out. He judged then what he needed to.

“N-no,” he said, carefully scrutinizing the Seer.

“Good,” he said lively, striking a match on the desk between them. He puffed at his pipe with quick breaths and clouds of smoke, “Good. Good. Filthy habit. Never start. Never stop.”

“Is that what happened to your eyes? Smoking?”

“My eyes, yes. Smoking. No,” he said, in the most confusing way possible.

“What did, then?” The boy asked, understanding him all the same.

He cleared his throat, puffing deeply on his pipe for a moment. “What is your name?”

“Tiron. My dad says people that answer questions with questions are asses’ flies.”

“Is that what you think of me, Tiron?” The Seer asked with a deep look.

Tiron shrugged, “I don’t know. You do seem strange.”

“Strange, aye,” he said, distantly agreeing. “But is strange bad?”

He’d asked as if unsure of a fashion. Tiron shrugged again, “It’s just different, I guess.”

“Isn’t everything different, until you know it?”

“I suppose.”

“Then you may leave.”

Tiron stopped short.

In the same way that he dealt with all others, the Seer ignored the boy so belligerently he knew to leave. Sazz returned. Immediately. The meeting had taken all of five minutes.

“Deliver this to the boy on his ninth birthday. Ensure he alone reads it. Destroy it afterward.”

Skepticism and suspicion played over the Steward-Apprentice; by now, having long lost any hope of understanding the Seer’s interests in the boy. Lost in the wilderness of his own confusion and the seeming loss of his Master’s guidance, he could only await the passage of time.

On his ninth birthday, Tiron’s letter was delivered. He read it out of sight, then handed it to Sazz whom immediately, and regrettably, destroyed it. He saw none of its contents. Nor did Tiron’s father, the now increasingly perplexed and disquieted former-Seeker.

One week later the Steward awoke to find his master’s room empty, and set about a mental inventory to deduce the Seer’s intentions. He’d taken a few choice vials, herbs, and fresh notebooks; typical for long-walks.

But how long, if the boy was to arrive soon?

Morning came and went. The Steward-Apprentice fretted. Noon arrived bringing Tiron with it; boy of newly nine, and carrying an unmistakable pack long worn and weathered.

Sazz sensed the pack’s origins, where it had come from, why. Tiron’s letter confirmed it.

“You’re to read this while I put on tea,” Tiron said studiously. He comforted him, “Master Seer’s was longer.”

Sazz,

I was told only what I needed to know. We are to be master and student as you and Master Seer. He told me to write, “A plague had begun to take your mind. One of doubt.”

He said you must not let it take us as well. For we are the future. I am to replace you and you, he. In time, you’re to teach all you know. Through this, he’s to teach your final lesson; all things pass.

We won’t see him again.

Sazz’s face bluffed grief, was called, and lost.

Yet, he understood. Again, he trusted his Master’s strength; that one, final lesson. What it proved to be was the last thing he expected:Faith. The real kind, in others and oneself, in human feeling. He collapsed and wept, comforted by Tiron’s tea and his warm desire to fulfill his savior’s last wish.

With it, he ensured the teaching of Steward-Apprentice and Master Seer would cycle once more.