Tag: Science Fiction

Bonus Short Story: Wraith

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The pulsing throb of a sub-woofer sounded in the distance. The reverb of a wide, open room made fools of the treble and mid-range frequencies while an erratic strobe added to the place’s confusion. Below it and the disco ball, center stage, was Candy. She gripped and mounted the greased pole better than any other girl in the joint. Her body whirled and spun, unfurled and contorted with sexual predation and temptation.

Soren watched a cascade of bills flutter out around her from some jackass at the pit. Another one with more money than sense. Candy dipped low to show her tits from an upside down angle. To her credit, she was more an expert than any other girl Soren had. She swung past while upside down, gripping the pole, and managed to pull twenties from between his teeth with her own. She was an earner, and damned if she didn’t deserve every penny liberated from dumbasses like him.

Soren threw back the last of his straight scotch, made a come hither motion toward one of the other girls– a waitress in nothing but a G-string and two tassels. Soren ordered up another drink, stuffed an extra twenty in the side of her thong. She sauntered to the bar for his drink as he focused on the American across the curved booth from him.

The guy was well-dressed. No suit or anything, but he had a certain flair of style that said he liked fast women and expensive cars– or perhaps it was the other way around. In either case, he’d come in looking for more blow than anyone Soren had ever met. It wasn’t unusual that someone came to him for drugs. He ran the club, after all, and everyone knew if you blew enough cash on strippers you were probably doing coke off their tits at some point.

Still, Soren had gotten out of the game years ago. More importantly, there was something about this guy he didn’t like. Something in his features. They were American features, but with an almost translucent skin that he swore showed bone beneath. That’s not to say that Soren was prejudiced. One man’s money was as good as any others’ and he’d happily take it regardless. In fact, most of his best girls were Americans working off debts back home. The exchange rate nowadays was enough to bring in scores of ’em, even with his high standards.

This guy though, there was something in the way he held himself. He seemed not to inhabit the room, or even reality around it. It sent a chill down Soren’s spine. He didn’t like that. He’d learned to trust his gut long ago, and it was telling him to lose the guy. Something else though– curiosity, maybe– told him to understand the gut feeling better before deciding.

So, instead of sending the guy straight to the bouncer, who’d escort him out back to the dealer, Soren sat him down for a drink. He was going to do his best to suss out the guy’s overwhelming creep-factor. The thong and tassels girl brought Soren his scotch and something equally strong for the American. He watched her leave again, then refocused on the American before him.

“What you’re asking for,” he said casually, testing him. “It’s not something many people could get. Even if I were so inclined to make deals of that nature, it would be beyond me.”

The guy was clearly disappointed, but his face suggested he wouldn’t give so easily. He spoke with half-ridicule, half scorn, and in a tone so cold it froze Soren’s veins, “I thought you were a player, man. Cock of the walk, and all that shit.”

There it was, Soren thought. That was what he’d sensed, the thing he disliked, that he didn’t trust. At least, he was pretty sure that was it. The tone of voice had thrown him. Anyway, he should’ve guessed it; everything with this guy was dominance and alpha-level bullshit. He looked as though he had no idea how the game was played. Even if Soren were still in it, he wasn’t stupid; he wouldn’t have been so easily baited even on his worst days.

“Get out of here,” he said firmly.

The guy didn’t budge, only his jaw tightened. Soren made eye-contact with a bouncer. Bane was a thing of meat so wide he had to angle through the club’s doors to avoid getting stuck. He looked like he could lift a semi, and at that, Soren was pretty sure he did it regularly, just to pass the time.

Bane appeared as Soren rose. He drained the last of his scotch and buttoned his blazer, “Escort our friend outside. He’s hereby barred from the club for life.” The guy made to speak through his teeth but Soren spoke over him, “If he resists, break his knee caps.”

The guy held his tongue with a snarl. He stood to be escorted away. Soren blew a relieved breath feeling his blood warm again, “Americans.”

He made for the club’s rear, passed through the long room of lighted mirrors. The other girls were half-naked or getting there for their shifts while Candy finished being eye-fucked on-stage. His eyes skirted the girls for anything unusual, came away satisfied.

Past a door at the back of the dressing room, he entered his office. It was small, with just enough room for a desk, some chairs, and a couch along one wall. A laptop was closed and powered down on the desk. Behind them, a wall of flat-screen TVs showed feeds from cameras across the club. Soren gave them a passing glance then sank into his chair and opened the laptop.

It was roughly a half-hour later that the hairs on the back of his neck upended. He smoothed them with a hand. The same shiver from earlier coursed through him, made his shoulders buck and jostle with a shudder. His blood froze again. He swallowed hard, audibly.

“Something wrong?” A familiar voice said.

Soren spun ’round, a pistol out to see the American a little beside and behind him.

He raised the gun, “You!”

His features pointed lethally, “Me.”

“What the hell are you doing here!?” Soren demanded. “How the fuck did you get in?”

His face angled downward. Shadows played across it. He looked downright demonic now. His eyes glowed yellow from fury rather than light. His translucent skin iced over until his whole body was almost opaque.

Soren barked an order at him, “Get out!”

The man stared. The yellow eyes glowed in transparent sockets. Soren went pale as the wall behind the man appeared.

“You should’ve taken my offer, Mr. Soren. I could’ve made you rich.”

Soren thumbed the pistol’s hammer, ready to fire, “I’m warning you!”

There was a sudden flash. An icy wind impaled Soren. His innards froze. Ice crystals formed on his hands, froze the gun to them. He fell to the ground. His still-warm legs bucked him onto his back. He gasped for breath against frozen lungs. The man approached and Soren’s eyes widened.

“You wonder what I am,” he said, his voice now discordant with grating harmonies. “But a wraith is nothingness, that primal terror no man wishes to accept as true. It is for ego’s sake alone. He fears nothingness, for in it, he is nothing. And man must always be something.” He hesitated with a snarl. His eyes flared brighter, “But you will not be a man when I am finished with you. You will be nothingness too.”

The man suddenly disintegrated into a fog. It fired at Soren like a missile. He screamed, but it was drowned out by a climax of laughter in the dressing room and the pounding beat of a dancer on-stage. When Bane came looking later, he found nothing. There the wraith was proved honest; nothingness where once there’d been a man.

Short Story: Too Real

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 3 Comments

She’d be at it near-on forty hours by the time it was over. She knew it ahead of time. Weekends like this weren’t uncommon for the chronically unemployed Sonia Rakes. She’d settle in on Friday night, greasy crap-food on one side of the desk, soda and water on the other with a bottle of Jack chilling beneath it in the mini-fridge. While her marathon choice of game booted, she rolled fat joints and blunts to pass the time, mind racing in anticipation of the glory ahead.

To say she was a burn-out would require ignoring the intense passion she wrangled out of herself for each and every imaginary world she eventually conquered. Sure, she was a little overweight, but the chair-sized ass she sat on made her all the more comfortable during the marathon sessions. Even if her pudge spilled over her waist-line, stuck out nearly as far as her free-bagging double-Ds, that just meant there was more of her to love. Besides, she’d long ago abandoned the realm of such social pressures in favor of the confined, fantastical ones she occupied for days at a time.

She sparked up a blunt, took a deep hit, and swigged down some cola home-run style. The cola was swallowed away to allow a plume of smoke emerging from her nose and mouth. Her lungs re-inflated with fresh air and the high trickled in through the back of her brain. The slow immersion of brain into cannabis relaxed her shoulders and chest. She sank into her gaming chair with a deflation that would’ve made “truth” ads jealous.

But this was no ordinary immobilization of inebriated limbs. In fact, it was just the beginning of what had always been the ultimate in relaxation and comfort. Contrary to some opinions, that were no longer popular, getting high only enhanced most things. One of them, at least for Sonia, was the imagination. Gaming was nothing if not stimulating for the imagination.

She booted up, set the blunt aside for a minute, and made the momentary keyboard clacks to put her in-game. With the blunt hanging from a corner of her mouth, she plunged into the post-apocalyptic world of her now-favorite title.

Her avatar was made to look like her; long brown hair, big boobs, and slightly pudgy with green eyes. Most of that pudge had been lost during gameplay by the game’s now-famous strength building system. Many of the game’s mechanics were touted as revolutionary. For an RPG, they were somewhat ahead of their time, even if most had been explored before. Everything had a modifier to it, and every modifier affected a stat; every stat, in turn, gained XP each time it’s level changed, and those experience points then went into an overall character level.

Once leveled, a player could immediately boost stats instead of working them up, and gain new perks that allowed them to take on new challenges or better overcome older ones. It was, for all intents and purposes, a game with refined mechanics that flowed beautifully, to say nothing of its atmosphere, characters, or narrative.

But what set it apart, Sonia knew, was its Artificial Intelligence. She’d barely seen a third of the game, but her awe of the AI was unsurpassed. Whomever programmed the game certainly had the chops to pull off the best work she’d ever seen. Most games’ characters were like cardboard cutouts; at a distance they appeared real, their “lives” full, but the closer you got, the more you noticed they merely wandered along set routes, repeated a few lines of dialogue, and were otherwise one-dimensional.

This game was different, and she’d only begun to scratch the surface of how. Her inebriated mind wandered, wanting to immerse itself deeper in the game’s world before fully committing to a quest that might forward any progress and inch her nearer its conclusion.

She found herself in the center of a small town. It was hardly a town by any standard, really, merely a few buildings forming a three-sided rectangle around a large well. Small shacks and lean-tos kissed the horizon around it, built scatter-shot across fields of mutated corn, tomatoes, and wheat. She aimed for the old-style saloon in the center of the open rectangle.

The whole place was an anachronism, a sort of wild-west area built up along a bombed-out, rural highway neglected into disrepair since the bombs. She liked it for that alone. It was rare to find such attention to detail that even the Non-playable characters’ cultures differed from settlement to settlement.

With that in mind, she sauntered up to the saloon’s swinging doors, but hesitated. An NPC down the wrap-around porch mentioned something about needing to “head ‘cross the wastes for Ban’oover.” Something about his twang intrigued her. He had that friendly sort of sound that put her at ease, made him seem either an easy target, or possibly, a new companion, if she found him to her liking. It was an instantaneous decision to follow him.

She whirled to follow the NPC’s ratty flannel and cowboy boots, gave him a good head-start, then passed by the other NPC he’d been speaking to. It uttered a “howdy” with a slight head tilt as she crouched at the edge of a corn-field, and began to track the NPC. Her stealth skills were only high enough to keep him unaware of her at larger distances, but she could easily keep to the cover of cornfields and rocky, desert roads that would lead to Banhoover.

She kept him at the extreme edge of her visual field, then knowing his intended target, fell back to bask in the world around her. Through the haze of caffeine, liquor, and weed, the hot sun kissed her skin while arid winds carried dust across her path.

A sudden screeching shattered her serenity. She froze, terrified. Her big, anaconda revolver was out, sweeping the horizon for threats. She crouched low to steady her aim, circled in place. The screech sounded again; metal nails on a chalkboard. Her teeth rattled, nerves stabbed by the sound. Something small staggered and swayed onto the road ahead. It weaved left, then right, fell forward. Her weapon sank at the pitiful sight of a massive crow with a bloody puncture in its torso. She swallowed her fears and approached carefully. The screeching sounds came louder, faster with each step.

She crouched again by the bird, examined it carefully. It was easily the size of her torso, and given the wound, near death. Her med-skills weren’t great, but might be enough to help. These types of random events weren’t uncommon. She’d yet to see one in this game, but so much of it was unexplored such an event didn’t surprise her.

The way she saw it, there were two options; try to heal the bird, or put it out of its misery. She’d gotten lucky a few hours into the game, and had been healed by a passerby on a similar road to this. Like the bird, she’d been bleeding out, the world phasing in and out of blackness. She saw no reason not to try and repay the debt to the collective gaming Gods.

With a few hotkeys and clicks, she’d drugged the bird with painkillers, and did her best to patch the wound. A quick flicker of XP, and the sound of a leveled stat told her the action succeeded. The bird hopped up, swayed a little, then examined her with a few tilts of its head. With a running start, it took flight and soared off into the distance. She chuckled, continued along the road.

It wasn’t long before she found the NPC she’d been tailing. More accurately, he found her. He’d hidden in the bushes a mile or so down from the bird. Five minutes of walking were interrupted by him leaping from the bushes. He held a big revolver like hers, trained for her head. A flicker of her HUD said he had a head-shot trained on her.

His shouts affirmed it with the addition of a demand, “Gimme all yer guns, clothes, and cash.” She remained silent, wondering how best to play it. He started shouting again, demanding, “Quit wastin’ time, there ain’t no other way out!”

A shiver shot along her spine as he cocked the hammer on his revolver. It was too real.

“Yeh, you best be shakin’,” he shouted from the beyond the revolver’s business end.

The revolver barked. A bullet whizzed past her ear. She felt it slice the air, buzz in her head. Her stomach dropped. Hairs on her neck stood on end. It was too real.

“I ain’t gonna ask again.” She hit the hotkey to drop her gun. He took a few steps forward, both hands on his gun. “Good. Now the rest.”

Her inventory menu appeared, and emptied at the “drop all” command. A moment later she was standing stark-naked in the middle of a desert road. He approached, licked his lips, chuckled to himself, then knelt to collect the gear in an arm. It disappeared into his hidden inventory as he stepped back again.

“Thank ye, kindly,” he said with a roaring laugh.

Something black flashed past, left him stunned. He growled, swirled around. She stepped back, terrified. Another flicker of black. Then again. More now. A shroud of black encircled him as he swatted at it. The revolver barked until it was empty. The NPC began to scream, flee. Sonia stood, petrified and dumbfounded.

It took a moment for her mind to comprehend the Murder of Crows attacking the NPC. It was almost a full minute before she could move again. By then, they’d brought the NPC down, had him in pieces on the ground. He let out a blood-curdling scream that upturned her stomach, then went silent, still.

A lone crow hopped over, its abdomen recently bandaged. It dropped something on the ground. She picked up a note that read; The crows will remember your kindness. She shivered.

Out of game her breath trembled, “Jesus christ, this is too real.” She stared at the crow, muttered, “Thank you.”

In-game the crow squawked. Sonia’s eyes bulged. It immediately took flight. The Murder followed in sync.

Whatever the hell had just happened, she was certain that bird had spoken to her. More importantly, even if she couldn’t understand how, it heard her. How? She collected her clothes and swallowed the ill feeling in her gut. She redressed, began to follow the road aimlessly, hoping to make sense of what the hell’d just happened.

Poetry-Thing Thursday: For Me, For You

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 4 Comments

Nicotine stains my fingers,
while they beat a rhythm over keys.
Color flickers beneath them,
from multicolored LEDs.

What do I say?
To Whom do I say it?
Hope and love and peace,
things I used to preach.

But now things have changed.
My mind’s estranged–
not from reality,
but sheer morality;

the is and the was,
the what and the how,
even the where,
is not the now.

Slaving each day,
for no monetary pay.
I’m crazy some say–
or stupid, in a way.

But I do what I do,
for the hope of all,
to read and to listen,
let reason befall.

Whether for its own benefit,
or the mere fun of it.
I give you words.
Let them be heard,

and perhaps felt,
by one and by all,
whether big or small,
I give them to you,
so we might never fall.

Bonus Short Story: Never the Same Again

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The world shuddered in fear when it appeared. It was a ghostly apparition sent from the heavens that no one refused to accept. It was like the shadow that flits at the edge of the eye, but when one turns to look with a start, they find nothing. Except it has never left. It didn’t then, most certainly. Now, I’, not sure we could imagine our lives without it– for good or ill.

I was working a main-line water-repair when it appeared. A few hours before the main had burst in front of a local middle school. We were lucky the summer-time was on us and school was out. If it hadn’t been, people would’ve hated us all the more for blocking the main thorough-fare between ends of the city.

I’d been cracking asphalt with a jackhammer when I looked up. I was wiping sweat from my forehead. For a moment, I thought my eyes were playing tricks. Even in the dead of night, the heat was ungodly. If it had been day my boots would’ve melted to the asphalt. I guess there’s some silver lining there, however minute.

There it was though. Hanging overhead twice the size of the largest the moon could become, and clearly man-made– or rather, made by something other than nature. It had settled into an orbit that allowed it to be viewed world-wide at appropriate times of day.

Humanity breathed together. We were like one organism, together in terror. I remember dropping the jackhammer and almost causing an accident when someone was about to trip over it. He and the other guy carrying equipment between them stopped. They caught my gaze. Five hundred pounds of concrete and other gear toppled sideways like over-stacked books. The ruckus made the job site stop and gaze over at us. They all saw us frozen, staring skyward, then stared themselves.

From what I’ve heard, that was how it went all over. One man or woman was wiping away sweat, or daydreaming with eyes on the sky, or blowing smoke from pursed lips, and caught sight of the massive object. From there everyone followed to look in similar fashion. I can’t imagine how many car accidents, or accidental deaths there were from that event. It was like the world came to an utter and complete stop. From 60-0, and there was no time nor braking. It stopped, and that was that.

People panicked. World-wide, global panic. The stock markets nose-dived. The stores were emptied by doomsday preppers. Martial law was declared in many places. Others were almost completely abandoned by law-enforcement and military, giving rise to local militias of crazy assholes with more guns then brains. At least the more intelligent folks among them prevailed. Some sort of order was necessary, of course, but it was a long time before anything resembling it reappeared.

I remember that first night. It was like we were on the cusp of a precipice. Behind us was this sort of imperfect peace. Ahead, lay a chasm of total anarchy and violence. The job was called off pending this appearance– and more “officially” the loss and damage of the dropped materials. That last part was the excuse, but I doubt anyone would’ve argued about it. I’m not even sure that information was ever received.

We were sent home around midnight. My wife was awake. She’d received a call from a friend working the late shift somewhere. I don’t know where. We never got along, and I didn’t ask questions about her. Point is, my wife was awake, and our little girl was still sound asleep in her bed. What I wouldn’t have given to see her dreams go on forever, so that she might never wake up into the nightmare that was sure to come.

We sat at the kitchen table, across from one another. We’d been friends our whole lives. We’d dated in junior-high, explored each other, broke up, explored others, then started over again Senior year of High-School. Somehow we came out of it with a beautiful daughter, a nice house, toys and luxuries, and an otherwise wonderful life. I wasn’t greedy. Never have been. She’s like me in that way. I guess we jut got lucky, rewarded for our general, positive way of living.

But that night…

It was like we were kids again. We trembled and held each other like inexperienced children. We cried in anger and sorrow like petulant children. Hell, we even laughed and joked the same as we once had, long, long ago. It was all a response to fear. We knew it then, as surely as I know it now.

It’s not something one experiences everyday. This was a complete and total shift of everything we thought we knew. Us as a people I mean, Humanity. Everything from social issues to physics was now challenged. So far as I know, scores of people vastly more intelligent than myself rose to it, and all of them came away stumped. Even that great physicist and sometimes philosopher Hawking only knew what he could deduce from observations, measurements, and readings taken with every known instrument.

I guess they tried communicating with it for a while. All the while the anarchy and chaos were worsening. The faithful said it was the apocalypse. The scientists said it was a baffling mystery. Law men and politicians flocked to one side or the other, adding whether they thought violence was the answer. Personally, I just said “holy shit.”

That was all that would come out. Every time I looked up, I thought about the millions of years of evolution that our species had gone through. I thought about the last few hundred years of technological development, the last few millennia of civilization. All of that had to pale in comparison to whoever– or whatever– had brought this thing here. I still can’t imagine what they’re like, or were.

Billions of years have passed since the Big Bang. The Universe is still expanding. It will, for the foreseeable Eons forward. Even our tiny knowledge base had deciphered that much. We had speculated countless ways of alternate evolution, from the most learned astrobiologists to the most overconfident sci-fi writers, but we’d never had any proof, any indication of where to look.

We suddenly had it then, and we still didn’t know what to do with it. When communication attempts failed, and our instruments had found all they could, an expedition was outfitted. A team of astronauts with a mathematician, linguist, psychologist, and school-teacher in tow, launched for the ISS. They made their rendezvous to procure supplies sent up before them on an automated rocket, then made for the moon-like vehicle orbiting nearby.

We still haven’t heard back much, but we know its empty. There’s a lot to be deciphered and scoured, but there is supposedly a distinct lack of any life aboard. I hope that proves true. I hope those crazy conspiracy theorists are wrong, that there isn’t a cover-up about aliens aboard. I hope, but I’m not holding my breath. There’s something about disappearances these days. They’re too numerous, too obvious. I can’t imagine what the point would be.

We live in fear now. It’s kept us in check thus far, but the way things have turned, it isn’t a stretch to believe it could all fall to chaos again. The governments don’t have control anymore. The militias are more armed and populated than ever, and the water main is still unfixed. I don’t know if things will ever be the same again, but I’m not certain if that’s good or bad. All I know is that my wife and I, and our daughter, won’t be taken without a fight, no matter who comes knocking.