Tag: Resistance

Bonus Short Story: Make It Worth It

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

“It began with an election,” she said, sparking a cigarette in a way that would’ve made James Dean jealous.

The old rebel could’ve never hoped to imitate it though; She had a booted-foot kicked up backward against a sheet-metal warehouse. Her leather pants were tucked into her calf-high boots, tight enough to say her legs were slender, beautiful, and chromed polyalloys– forced augments after an accident had claimed the real ones. The slightest hint of electric blue encircled her hazel irises, said she’d only elected to get her HUD installed afterward.

Her eyes morphed between brown and green with tilts of her head as she took a long drag. She flicked ash at the gusts with one natural hand, the other stuffed in her pocket and unmoving. Another bionic, claimed with her legs by the same awfulness. Like them, there was an angular rigidity to her otherwise soft, supple face, that screamed alloy bone-weaves. Maybe it was the cheeks, or forehead, their skin stretched a little too unnaturally to be organic.

She took another drag, and plumed smoke, “It began with an election, like most shit-storms in history. World War two did– pretty much anyhow. Hitler’s election sealed the world’s fate. Truman’s election sealed Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s fates. Even Vietnam’s fate was sealed by Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Hell, the only reason Nixon pulled out was ’cause he was too damned corrupt to keep track of everything.”

She scoffed angrily, then flicked more ash.

“Whatever. Point is, everything begins with an election, or the lack thereof, or the assassination of some smart-mouthed politician. We humans and our trust… we really gotta’ learn we’re all out for ourselves. Even I’m only telling you this for the sake of it not being forgotten, ’cause I don’t want it to be.”

Her lone audience member was inert, his HUD recording her every move and word.

She sighed, “Anyway, the great American hive-mind voted in some businessman who’d gotten a wild hair up his ass to be president. He wanted to run the country like a business ’cause we had money problems. Big fuckin’ deal, who doesn’t? Problem was, just about every business he’d run, he’d actually run into the ground. Sorta telling looking back, huh?”

She was quiet for a moment, staring out across the horizon. Between the two sides of the harbor there were enough rundown, ramshackle, sheet-metal warehouses to prove her point. Behind them, their horizons rose in waves of countless skyscrapers. Corporate logos and digital billboards were splattered across them in sickening, electric colors from LEDs and Neon signs, offensive to the otherwise unrelenting gray that formed the sky.

It wasn’t hard for anyone to see the corporate-takeover she was referring to. It managed to enslave a good portion of the country to their government’s debts and screw everyone in the process.

“So this guy,” she said animatedly with her smoking hand. “Gets elected with all these promises to dick around certain, specific groups of people. The country fuckin’ eats it up, like he’s some god damned spunk-shooting john and they’re all his whores swallowing for their payday.”

She snorted a burst of air like a desperate laugh. Her lone audience member gave a silent chuckle to himself.

She continued astutely, “So they lap it all up, like good little servants, and the bastard gets his pay day. He gets on Capitol Hill, and lo and behold, suddenly he’s writing all these laws, submitting ’em to Congress.”

She flicked her cigarette to the ground, pulled another from her pocket with the other hand. The augment’s hand was a chrome skeleton, like an old terminator’s, but with forty-years and billions more in research behind it.

“All these laws getting submitted– and eventually passed– were fed through a Congress bought and paid for by companies lobbying for certain agendas to be passed.” She covered her mouth a moment to spark a lighter with her augment, then shoved both back into her pockets until it was time to flick ash again. “The country knew even then it was happening,” she admitted angrily. “But we couldn’t do anything. Congress had the power, and the corporations had Congress. Even the fuckin’ President helping them didn’t have more than the power of suggestion. But see, that was the thing, they gave him the suggestions. Then when the time came, he shoved those bills into the legal system and their cronies passed ’em without ever realizing they were being so wholly manipulated. Or if they did, they didn’t care. After all, billions were being paid out to collectively keep them complicit!”

She’d gotten herself into such a fury she was forced to pause to calm down. She did it over the span of a couple of drags. Then, with her augged hand, she produced a flask and threw down a gulp. She offered it to her listener, and he swigged with a “thank you” and a wince.

When she started up again, she was calmer, more morose, “So the corporations passed all these laws without any oversight or consideration of the “common” man. With a few, specific laws, they nullified almost all privacy, Citizen’s rights, and any hopes for peacefully assembling against them.”

She took another drink from the flask, then twisted the cap on with the hand, her cigarette between two, real fingers. She slipped it back into her pocket with a casual move and her augged hand disappeared again.

“A lotta’ people then thought people like me– the ones that saw where we were heading– were nut-job conspiracy theorists. You’d think after we’d been proven right about governmental agencies spying on us they’d have at least given us the benefit of the doubt. But nope. Instead we got the same old rigmarole. We were paranoid, lying, or just plain crazy.”

She stared off for a moment, her thoughts elsewhere. Her listener wondered if he should say something to keep her going, but she sighed, shook her head, and looked at the ground.“If we’d been smarter, maybe we’d have rebelled then and there.” Her eyes rose at him again, “But we didn’t. Instead, we took it, hoping one day things would turn out better. Now we’re all screwed. Over the course of a decade, the corporations and that lame-brain puppet we called a President completely overwrote the Bill of Rights and Constitution. Their friends on Wall Street and in their corporate towers were the only ones that benefitted. Meanwhile, we became slaves to corps, so weighed down by debt and fear of the monsters looming over us we’re petrified against action.”

She drifted off on this thought. Her distant look of depression told her listener that his only recourse was to speak. He wasn’t sure what to say though. Instead, he reiterated his initial question– the one that had led to the history lecture.

“So… that’s why you’re taking off? The corps? What about your friends? What about me?”

She sighed, “One day you’re gonna’ learn that the only reason we’re all poor and living on the street’s ’cause we weren’t ready to let go of things and fight back. When that day comes, maybe you’ll let go and take off too. Maybe then you’ll find me again. I hope so, anyhow. I like you, but you’re too young and I’m too old. The gap between’s still too much.”

He shook his head, “I think you’re just running off ’cause you’re afraid.”

She put her one, real hand on his shoulder, “We’re all afraid, Ra. What separates us is how we react to that fear, what it turns us into. Me? It’s turned me into a fighter. If it just made me afraid, why would I run off to follow rumors of the resistance?”

He couldn’t argue with her logic. Then again, she was a decade older than him, and in her late twenties. He’d only just turned eighteen. He doubted he’d ever be able to outsmart her, or even win an argument. Still, he loved her, and she seemed to care about him.

For this last point he made a case, “If you didn’t care you wouldn’t be lecturing me.”

She shrugged, “Maybe that’s the other reason I’m going. There’s no place for love in this world. No place for caring or kindness. It’s all cold calculus and living and dying by the dime. Maybe you oughta’ think about that. Maybe I do love you, and maybe that’s too hard to deal with until I do something to change things.”

He wasn’t sure if she was speaking in earnest or whether she was just trying to shake off his questions. He liked to think the former, if only to keep himself hopeful.

She flicked away her last butt, and lifted her pack to a shoulder, “One day, if the world’s meant to have love in it, we’ll find each other. Until then, stay safe, and know there’s at least one person out there fighting for you. So make it worth it.”

She turned away, her face steeled against undeniable emotions. Ra watched her leave, wondering if he’d ever see her again. At the very least, he knew for certain he’d follow her soon enough. One day, he’d find the courage to say enough was enough, and seek out the resistance. Until then, he’d remain forced to scour the ghettos for food and shelter, his only thoughts otherwise always of her. He’d make it worth it, no matter what. It was the least he could do for her.

Short Story: Eternal Optimists

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Paris Incident by now. Who hasn’t? It was the sole trigger to the single greatest atrocity in modern history– and I speak as a German whom hasn’t forgotten her history. The Corps may have purged the bombings from the light ‘net and the media archives, but where I’m from, we still live with it. Everyday.

I wake up to a half-leveled horizon outside my window. There’s always frost there when the sun comes up. It doesn’t help that we have no heat in the building. Unless you count barrels of fire as heating. I don’t. After I eat whatever I’ve scrounged up or gathered from the air-drops by neighboring rebels or surviving humanitarian organizations, I head downstairs to the book store I live above.

Funny how some things never quite go out of style. For decades there were people who said that print media was dead. E-readers and web-books were supposed to make the written word obsolete. I can only laugh at the thought– one of few that elicits such emotion nowadays. Those people never realized you couldn’t use e-readers without electricity, or god forbid, the internet.

I miss the light ‘net. All we get around here’s the dark-net, and that’s used for encrypted communications between rebel cells. We simply can’t risk linking the light-net to any of the people here. The few that even have access are lucky. Most of them rigged scavenged-solar cells to old, power-hungry laptops provided by various cells around the continent. Most are grateful, but it makes me feel like we’re a charity case.

Imagine that, all of Berlin, once a powerful seat of progress in a technologically-minded country like Germany, groveling for scraps and hand-outs. There are probably only a few thousand of us left now. The corp-bombings saw to that. When Lemaire fell, and Paris burst into flames, London and Berlin were next in line. There were other places too, but most were small– too small to notice when they were wiped out completely.

But as a haven of technology and free-thought, instilled since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we had the greatest concentration of Augs– that is to say Cybernetic or bionically augmented humans. Whoever wasn’t directly an Aug, was an “Aug-sympathizer.” Everyone knew that, including the corps. So when the proverbial sheisse hit the fan, everyone was splattered with it. When I say that, what I mean is; after two weeks of battling on the streets in major cities around the globe, the offended players banded together to bomb the rest of us back to the stone age. Literally.

Berlin got the worst of it. If there’s any solace to be take from our fate, it’s that we managed to wound the corps’ bottom lines enough to push them out of Germany altogether. We’d taken over most of their buildings, destroyed the rest, cut down those whom sided against us in the fighting. Most were slayed by the waves of bodies that filed through the burning streets.

We Germans have a way of being ruthless to a point of barbarism at times– not from a lack of humanity, quite the opposite in fact. We care so deeply and passionately about things that our natural ambitiousness makes us too strong-headed and hardhearted at the worst of times. Maybe if we weren’t so consumed by our ambitions then, we’d have stopped to look around at what was happening, or sensed what was about to.

Maybe if we weren’t so enamored with listening to our hearts we’d have heard the Raptor-cries. Maybe even, if we hadn’t been so loving of our augged brothers and sisters– whether literal or figurative– we’d have been righteously hardhearted enough to save ourselves.

But we weren’t. We were eternally the optimists. The same people whom, even generations later, were socially guilt-ridden for Hitler’s actions and determined to make up for it. Each of us felt the shame of World War II, promised not to repeat the mistakes that led to it. Somehow, we still let the corps take charge, and until they began their Nazi-esque campaign of extermination against the Augs, we supported them.

That was the issue though. It always has been for us. We let the evil into our hearts with open arms, ever-believing in the good of Humanity. Instead, we’re soon shown to have been manipulated, our love used against us and those that would otherwise truly deserve it.

The first bombs that fell over Europe targeted three, initial cities; Paris, where it all began; London, where the revolution looked to spread most violently, and Berlin, where the Augs that wouldn’t or couldn’t fight were likely to find sanctuary.

Raptors screamed over Europe with their hard-angled noses spitting chain-gun fire and their rounded bellies splitting to unleash hell. In minutes, any hope for a life in Berlin– for Aug or otherwise– was exterminated, burned to dust in the fires of evil. Before the sun rose the next morning, tens of thousands were dead or dying. Those not killed or critically wounded– and even then some– were distraught, chaotically confused. They tried to save what few they could. Everywhere you went it was like standing in a crowded metro whose noise and movements made you want to cower and weep. Many did. A few couldn’t take it, led themselves out.

I was eighteen when the bombs fell, just into university. I was just old enough to drink, and just young enough to feel the last of my innocence dissected from my heart. It was like I’d been given bypass surgery without anesthetic. The sharpness of grief in my chest was omnipresent in those days, punctuated by the stabbing sounds of rubble as we combed for survivors and dead alike. Most found were the latter.

I remember the worst of it, not because of the grisly scene, but because it was the first time I felt hatred. Hatred is something humans speak of out of anger most times. It is often despair masked by the ego to keep one’s image intact. This was different. This was real, pure hatred; a feeling that filled my mouth with a wetness as though I were goring the throat of a foe with my teeth. From there, it infected my being with a sharpened determination, a strength I have not lost since. It has kept my muscles taught when they should have faltered in fear, steadied my hands when they would have trembled with terror.

I saw a young girl curled in her bed. We’d dug a path to her grave from beneath the collapsed upper-floor of her apartment building. Everything around us was charred black. We were forced to don respirators from the dust and stink of days old, immolated flesh. Then I saw her; curled in her bed as if sleeping peacefully, but where her skin should be was the marred, blackened flesh of a war-crime. She was like one of those Pompeiian victims, forever frozen in her death-pose.

I am a healer, a medic, a surgeon and I feel no shame in admitting I have a strong stomach. I have seen things that could bring the strongest men and women to tears and pained retching. Most of the time, I’m forced to power through them for the sake of the victims– my patients– and I do so. This was so awful I stumbled away in tears and vomited all the grief that I’d held back since the attacks.

Every morning I wake up she occupies my thoughts. Even as I go down through the bookstore, and out into street I think of how she was stolen from this world. She could have been my daughter had I not been more careful. At that, she could have been me if the bombs had been dropped only a few years further beyond than that.

So I walk along the street, largely clear of its debris, and watch the city around me with her in mind. It still has the look of the blitzkrieg turning in on itself. Full, corporate towers are replaced by mounds of rubble, steel and concrete land-fills. Nature has done its best to reclaim the rest while we keep it enough at bay to carry on in our missions.

To that end, my part is simple; keep people alive. I do it for her. Most that come to my clinic down the street are badly injured, either from work-accidents, refugee status, or as acting rebels for the cause. Germany is not without its remaining corporate outposts, but even they steer clear of Berlin. I guess it’s to pick their battles. They already took our government away, any representation or sympathy therein gone with it. Maybe they let us live just to remind the world that, while there may be a place for Augs to hide, it is still due to their good graces.

All the same, every morning I rise for her. The hatred of her image never falters or fails to arouse my determination. So I leave, patch up those whom may one day lead us from darkness and into light. While Lemaire’s death may have caused everything, an unwitting catalyst to a global revolution, it was us that let it happen– the survivors. Whether from our own convictions, or a greater cause, we can not allow ourselves to fall again. At least for us Germans, we’re eternally optimists, believing in a better world with heads even stronger than our unshakable hearts, and finally working toward it.

The Collective: Part 1

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

1.

Declaration of War

Her crème white skin gleamed in the dimmed light of overhead LEDs, tinted with a plethora of colors from the 3-D holo-vid in the room’s center. Her body mirrored that of the projected woman before her; legs and back straight, eyes forward, and arms at her sides. In her hands, two, razor sharp Katanas gleamed with hints of light and caricatured reflections. She began to move with the projection; her feet parted, braced her exposed torso as her arms drew the blades up to rest on her shoulders. The cold steel triggered waves that coursed through her body, tickled thin, light hairs along her arms and neck, and refined the shape of her nipples.

With a fluid motion, the blades lifted. A foot kept her balance in a pivot while the other leg swept sideways to come about. The blades’ hilts touched, began to whirl as one entity with graceful movements. She urged them apart and into a vertical tumble. Balanced extensions of arms and legs moved her lower, forward. The blades made long, controlled swipes as she pirouetted to bring their blunt edges in toward one another, form make-shift bars of death before her face. Her dark eyes closed in a meditative trance, and the movements flowed into one another again, faster this time.

The nudity wasn’t required for her practice, but she couldn’t escape the freedom it brought. To be one with the sword required she be willing to dance as naked as it was. The two were beautiful beasts, as graceful and ready to love, embrace passion as to murder, spill bloods.

The movements became faster with small leaps. The room’s layout was clear in her mind as her muscles worked. Despite the darkness, she saw the room with light– an unnecessary luxury given her routine. She was as much dead to the world now as anyone who might cross her blades would become. At that, it wouldn’t be long before the polished steel ran crimson.

They were already watching from the cameras embedded in the apartment. She knew who they were, had seen them before. In that odd way that memories sometimes manifest from the aether, they appeared in portents of violence. The visions were stills of things yet to happen, as though made of old, analog film left on the cutting room floor of time. For her part, she would see the film joined by blood.

Her style of practice was something of Tai-Chi mixed with Ballet, both forms of bodily training lost to the world in the rise of self-medicating technology. Before the Sleep, it had surrounded people, become so much a part of their lives most hadn’t noticed it any longer. Now, it was their lives; virtual worlds had become as real as the Earth itself– moreso even, given the untold possibilities V-R allowed for. Everyone was now a buff-stud or supermodel in a world of their choosing, lived out through the use of special chairs, visors, and neural adapters. Nowadays peoples’ avatars were more them than their chair-bound vessels ever could be.

The world had gorged itself on greed and gluttony when all but a few jobs became automated, relegated to synthetic workers, robots, or intelligent software. The World Economy had begun to collapse then. Ninety-eight percent of the world’s work force was laid off. Before it could decimate the planet entirely, steps were taken, precautions put in place. The populous was given living stipends, needs and luxuries made available at fractions of the cost to ensure complacency.

Most of the world saw the change as a positive, but not Lex. She saw if for what it was, and in some instances, what it would become. There were no more wars, sure, but there was also no more freedom, no property but what was allotted. There were no avenues to pursue hopes or dreams, and given time, there would be no hopes or dreams anyhow. The world’s peoples had become victims of their own hubris, compromised fertility for longer life, vitality for luxury, and mental health for quick fix pleasures that would only lead to stagnation. All the while the rich got richer off it, did whatever they wanted. The global population had compromised fertility for longer life, vitality for luxury, and mental well-being for the quick-fix of pleasures that would only lead to stagnation.

Lex knew that, and so eschewed all but the most necessary luxuries, stipends, or pacifying technology that would allow her to achieve her goals. Those things couldn’t stop her from pursuing the future she sought, nor eliminating anyone in her way of it. Her only dream or hope was to change things– by force or reason, whichever was fastest, easiest.

That was how they had found her; through a few, overlooked surveillance devices embedded in common goods. Then, once surveillance had begun, they’d come in when she’d been away and planted more equipment to build their case. All she’d needed was the sense to investigate at the scents of foreign sweat, leather. When she did, she realized her mistake. Regardless, it only served to hasten her plans.

The world was the oyster of a very select few whom had carved it out for themselves over the course of decades. They had private armies– whole governments even– on their side, had otherwise pacified any other resistance against them. They’d drugged, imprisoned, or neutralized anyone that might stand against them, refused to sleep. They would kill anyone, no matter their station, to ensure the status-quo.

And now they were here.

The door to her apartment burst open. A flash-bang went exploded. Lex remained poised, blades touching before her face. Her ears rang, but she felt the vibrations of a half dozen feet charge inside. It was one of the few squads of police left in Tokyo– the whole world at that. The bulk of their numbers had long been reduced to drone patrols with high-powered tazers or small chain-guns mounted to their bellies, but these were foot soldiers.

They filed in. The latest, high-tech battle-rifles in their hands rose on her. Shouts of Japanese and English commanded the American-born woman to drop her weapons. They flowed in, fanned out in a half-circle around her. The commands never ceased.

Her arms lowered deliberately, swords in a downward-point toward the floor, her readied poise. The squad flinched. Shouts grew louder, repetitive. Rifle’s shook from adrenaline and fear. A few sparks of arousal in men and women left them half-dazed at Lex’s beauty and nudity.

In a blink, she leapt forward. A foot landed on the ball. Her hands flashed. The blades sliced up, in, down, flourished with a backward flip. Lex landed back in place as if she’d never moved at all. The only evidence was the slow river that flow form the blades’ tips, dripped crimson onto the metal floor. The squad blinked in disbelief as the lead man disassembled, arms severed from his torso and head from neck. His corpse fell to a heap.

Someone fidgeted, fingered a trigger. Lex leapt, spun. Blades sliced air, marred flesh, sundered bone and spinal nerves. Two of the left-most squad were decapitated in a flick of wrists. The others reacted, moved to take aim. Rifles were kicked from hands, bodies winded and propelled back with tremendous force. The dual blades mutilated wrists, incised throats. Screams turned to gurgles and bubbled whispers.

The room went silent again from the dead and wounded.

Two soldiers remained. One reached for her side arm, the other on her back on the floor, dazed. She gasped for air. Lex landed beside her, jabbed the left blade down into her chest, pierced her glossy body armor. The blade wrenched with cracking kevlar and bone. Blood spurted from an opened heart. Lex’s movement became a raised-leg spin that struck the side-arm. It flew across the room as the blades went for the woman’s throat, poised on either side to cut. She backed her up to the wall, forced her to her knees.

Lex stared down, blood spattered along her silken body, “You speak English.” The woman nodded. It wasn’t a question. “Tell your bosses I’m coming.” The woman nodded again. She raised her back up to her feet. “Tell them what you’ve seen here today, and that you know I could have done the same to you.”

“Wh-why?” The armored woman asked.

Lex chose her words carefully, “Mercy is a gift not often given. The world is about to change. You may choose to change with it, or die by my sword.” She locked eyes with the woman, “The choice is yours.” The woman sensed her conviction, swallowed hard. Lex sneered, “Leave. Do not return.”

The blades fell back to Lex’s sides in their readied poise. The woman bolted, stumbled over bodies for the door, fell through it only to scramble up and flee.

No matter what happened now, the Collective would know she was coming. They’d forced her hand, but she could use it, show them the stakes so they might watch, see the carnage about to befall them. Only then could they begin to feel fear– fear that would force them to make rash decisions, position their empire to be crumbled as they were taken out, one-by-one.

One way or another, an end would soon come.