This is an area for people to just dump writing they've been doing, or plan on doing, or whatever, and in theory you could also comment or offer criticism etc.
So I'll start with something that I'm just composing right as I write this post, off the cuff. (preemptive )
Muskegon, Michigan, is one of the few American cities not on the Pacific Coast where the sun dies in the water, and often it is a Viking's funeral. But not from the city proper can you see it. The enveloping arms of the Pere Marquette and Muskegon State parks shield the city and its main harbor from this phenomenon. The swollen suburban neighborhoods do get some of this light, but it is arguable if it ever really shines on them. So it is consigned to the generated wilderness north of the channel, and the massive beach south of it. Campers, vacationers, city people, all come down and look on the dying light. Rarely do they rage against it. In this day, Apep is safely chained in DVD format, and the Tzitzimitl are unpronounceable. Huitzilopochtli makes do with the bloodshed of the roadways, and Amun-Ra has graciously retired in favor of Aten. But for the woman, indeed the only woman on the ice-strewn beach tonight, the suns of the ancient world were still alive and well, and must be, for she had come here for their favor. Their blessing. Their photons to light her path.
Just three weeks prior, she had attended her father's funeral, and shortly after, the reading of the will. Nothing had been left to her, and indeed all of it was to be divided between his only legitimate son and the American Nazi Party. The son's share had been contingent on his remaining in the closet, but Michigan law didn't enforce such arcane, farcical strictures when it came to filial inheritance. Unfortunately, while the lawyer had conceded this almost immediately, he (having been handpicked by the dead man) required some proof that she was the child, bastard though she be, of Mr. Willem J. Haart, late of Grand Haven, Michigan. He had also ruled out an exhumation, and refused to give out her half-brother's contact information, his only presence at the funeral being a card that bore an acrostic poem spelling "GO FUCK YOURSELF" unsubtly. So a quest stood before her, possibly banal and made of court orders and lengthy traces through phone books and internet directories, but possibly otherwise. She had come north, to the stomping grounds of her summers, and hoped for a sign. The sun descended, and Mithras made it known by certain signs that he was very busy right around now with matters on the other side of the state, and Sol Invictus played dead, and Helios just ignored her. Finally, one last sun gave an sigh inaudible and flashed copper and bronze and silver, reflecting the world briefly, and knowledge came to her, Anne Green, from all around Michigan, to look into her purse, and she did, and her compact glittered briefly in the dying light, and the moon, rising behind her, snickered, divinely.
It was getting late, and so after thanking the sun with no little irony, she got into her Accord and drove downtown, looking for a decent restaurant, and then to the Holiday Inn, and then tomorrow, the quest would begin for real.
Chants and cheers resounded throughout the stadium as untold thousands beheld the super spectacle sight that was the annual DissecTrophy. In the arena before them, and in the monolithic screens around and above them, they could see the participants partake in the event’s final contest. Hauling whole cadavers on their backsides, necrotheologians, xenopathologists, family practice morticians and novelty abortionists clambered up the final steps of the great central ziggurat, kicking and shoving their competitors away, gnawing at stray ankles, grasping and reaching for purchase, stamping on the faces of those behind them while yanking at the hair and the facial features of those ahead of them. The smell of desperation and preservatives, sweat, adrenalin and necrosis, was palpable in the recycled air.
The menagerie of mostly human bodies they now hauled were either donated by the Justice Department’s Entertainment Division, or harvested from the assembly lines of prefabricated embryonic produces and designer organ manufacturers, factory runoffs, rejects or once-fashionable tissues from yesteryear reconfigured into whole beings. The leavings of post-humanity and planned obsolescence now brightened the lives of the populace of an entire world. Children stood on the shoulders of their parents and waved foam spleens and kidneys with the names of their favourite anatomists and thanatathletes.
In the preliminary games, they all had teamed together to saw open and section saurpods, cetaceans, pachyderms and other humongous anesthetized specimens, massive creatures slumbering with their internal organs still functioning even as they were anatomized, in a feat that showed solidarity and camaraderie and sportsmanship, which also ceremonially provided meats to sustain the contestants themselves. Afterwards, they artistically prepared and sculpted more remains, medium-sized samples of humans and non-humans alike, arranging them in delicate and intricate poses to display each individual participant’s dexterity and skill. Enormous skeletons decorated the stadium, with skinless fleshforms in maddening contortions imprisoned within their cavernous ribcages, waiting patiently for the usual moneyed connoisseurs to add them to their collections.
Now it was time for the main event. As in the very first DissecTrophies, it was the only thing that mattered. No more camaraderie, no more artistry. Only victory.
The crowds went wild as the first thanatotheologist reached the flattened top of the ziggurat, the place where contestants re-enacted the traditions of ancient human paleocivilizations in all their cultured barbarity. He deposited his cadaver and regarded the diverse sets of tools and surgical equipment arrayed around him, ranging from obsidian implements to a gleaming apparatus that appeared to have been designed to induce abortion in radioactive mutants. He eschewed them, preferring a wickedly curved blade engraved with prayer inscriptions, as was customary for the sky burials he practiced in the mountains. He began his work with frenzied alacrity. Serrated steel slid through flesh, graceful motions peeled fat and muscle from bone. The crowd cheered him on and on. Others were reaching the top level by then, an aged embalmer and a hissing reptilian headhunter proceeded to squabble over the instrument sets as referees tried to arbitrate their dispute. Someone kicked someone else’s cadaver down the ziggurat’s steps, causing a furore as participants began tackling one another, sending the living and the dead alike tumbling down the hard granite terraces.
An hour later, and after several concussed contestants had been mistaken for cadavers and autopsied, the judges in their lofty death panels rendered a point decision. The necrotheologist awaited his prize, the rightful reward for the enthusiasm and bravado with which he performed the exotic sky burial before the eyes of the thousands in attendance, an achievement that far surpassed the conventional autopsies and anatomizations and dissections that had long gone stale. Even after finishing ahead of the others in rending flesh from bone and thus winning, he continued the ritual of his people by grinding the bones into pulp while the audience listened with baited breath to the microphone-amplified cracks and crunches of pulverizing ribs and femurs. The swagger of scattering the disintegrated remnants at the faces of his outraged competitors was also a classy touch that won him even more points on style.
He received the much vaunted golden scalpel from Lady 3Raye Xielweiss, whose corporation sponsored the great event. She then raised his blood-soaked arm and declared triumphantly, “For your unmatched mastery of human and inhuman anatomies, the unparalleled speed, vigour and thoroughness in which you conducted your post-mortem anatomization, the unprecedented manner by which you disposed of the mortal remains arrayed before you... On behalf of all the citizens in attendance, and of CinCorp’s proud shareholders, I name you the winner of this year’s DissecTrophy!”
The crowd erupted in applause. Together, 3Raye and the blood-drenched winner released a black dove, and the audience members followed by releasing countless other birds from their hands, making for a visually stunning conclusion of the DissecTrophy and marking the beginning of the feathery carrion-eaters’ feast.
With all that said and done, 3Raye and her retinue departed the venue. A trio of luxury DeBarros repulsorcrafts formed their convoy, sleek dragonfly-like hulls of gleaming opal leaving the DissecTrophy arena and slicing past starscrapers, structures with mirror metal surfaces reflecting the colour of the sky, once bright and yellow, now dimming into a rusty hue, as the suns slowly fell below the horizon. The looming arcologies casted shadows that stretched across the cityscape, black silhouettes that blanketed the teeming millions beneath them.
3Raye looked out of the window, through three inches of transparent steel. Saw the crafts leading and trailing hers, their passengers all replicants, synthetic humans vat-grown and programmed for her safety, not to mention armed to the teeth. Naturally, she was in the most secure vehicle in the center of the formation. Insulated from harm and from the rest of the outside world by layers upon layers of protection, beginning with the armoured chassis of her ride and the small army of security personnel constantly accompanying her wherever she went, and extending to the vast and incalculable mechanisms of the organization she was quite literally an aspect of: CinCorp.
It was an entity whose fortunes ebbed and flowed with that of Corsico Cinco’s ever since the world’s terraformation. CinCorp owned everything from the atmospheric processors that made the very air breathable, to the fabricator lines that grew the enhanced and quite fashionable tissues and organs everyone had inside themselves, each cell of each piece of flesh bearing the corporate logo, bearing her mark. The latter was their most ubiquitous enterprise, and included the creation of whole artificial humans, such as those who guarded 3Raye, and those whose parts littered the stadium they just departed.
It was a de facto family dynasty, 3Raye’s progenitors were the largest stockholders of CinCorp, and she and her sisters were designed to inherit it. There were three of them, numerically designated and identical, made to fulfil multiple functions simultaneously. At any given time, one of them would be connected to the CinCorp mainframe, interfacing with the digital intelligences responsible for the company’s upkeep. The other would be out and about physically overseeing company affairs, such as publicity bloodsports in the arenas. The third could enjoy a quantum of solace, a measure of free time and relaxation in either the physical world or the digital one, guarded by soldiers and cyberspace ICE walls at all times, before the roles were rotated.
In a way, she was no different from those charged with safeguarding her. Made to fulfil a pre-determined function, as pre-fabricated as the embryonic wares CinCorp peddled. Doing her programmed duty, just like the replicants.
3Raye sighed.
“Is there something wrong, miss?” one of her guards asked. His face was bland, indistinguishable from the others. Cosmetic attributes like distinctive facial features were considered unnecessary for private security purposes.
“No, nothing,” she replied. The sky was darkening, a few stars were visible now. She wondered. Her progenitors named her and her clone-sisters after rayes, impossible things, free and wild, barely tangible beings that swam in starlight and sang tachyon pulses in the ether. She had taken a liking to nature documentaries, watching holograms unrelated to the business, to running the empire that pretty much ran the whole world of Corsico Cinco, the fifth pebble from the local suns. Maybe one day, she could finally leave the little speck of dirt and see her namesakes up close...
She involuntarily suppressed that thought. There was a shudder. An indistinct feeling of something un-right, un-good. She looked to the side, through the armoured glass once more. She saw a flock of Octodactyls gliding gently, wings spread to catch the thermals, porcelain hides immaculate. They ought to be returning to their roosts, 3Raye thought. Dactyls were not known to be nocturnal.
The flock suddenly swarmed the leading repulsorcraft. The DeBarros veered in a vain attempt to evade the creatures.
“Paleochrist!” the pilot’s voice crackled through the comm.-link.
The closest dactyls disappeared in flashes of sickly green light, quickly succeeded by others as the rest of the flock detonated around the three repulsorcrafts. The first vehicle broke apart into a storm of liquefying fuselage and high-speed shrapnel, which tore through 3Raye’s craft just as the shockwave rocked it violently and sent it into a tailspin towards terra firma. The pilot screamed obscenities intermixed with technical aeronautical jargon while she herself just screamed obscenities as earth and sky blurred into one, a kaleidoscope of freefall and certain fast-approaching death.
Shock absorbing foam secreted by the passenger cabin attenuated the inevitable impact, which by all means should have liquefied internal organs and pulverized bone, though the sudden onrush of seemingly suffocating fluids caused 3Raye to scream in panic. That she could continue on screaming made her later realize that the foam was semi-permeable, so that the passengers would not be asphyxiated by the very apparatus meant to save them from crash landings.
3Raye stopped screaming. There was a momentary silence followed by the whine of contragravitics. A repulsorcraft landed, she heard the sound of people disembarking, rushing towards the crumpled wreck that her DeBarros had become. Rescue, at last. Metal screamed as something pulled portions of the fuselage apart, then she saw an armoured fist punch through and peel the solidified foam around her.
“Miss, we’ve got to get you out of here,” came the steely professional voice of the fully tac-suited replicant. Others like him, armoured forms bearing CinCorp colors, had formed a defensive circle around the crash site, an array of lethal weapons drawn and pointed outwards.
“What happened?” 3Raye asked weakly. She rubbed her head and winced in pain. Despite a possible concussion, she tried to connect to the datasphere to figure out what was going on.
“The birds had bombs inside them. Liquefied the first craft, no survivors,” the replicant replied matter-of-factly. “They’re packing some serious hardware. They mean business.”
Before a shocked 3Raye could say anything, her rescuer gently but firmly held the back of her head down protectively, while shielding her with his body as they sprinted towards the last remaining repulsorcraft.
“We’ve got to move,” another replicant said, whether verbally or through comm.-link, 3Raye couldn’t tell. People were barking out orders, transmitting distress signals, relaying all sorts of information. A crowd was forming around them, people were talking amongst themselves, gesturing, streaming electronic gossip into the datasphere.
“Incoming!”
3Raye turned to the source of the scream just to see the person’s head turn into an explosion of scattering cranium and brain matter. The rest of them got down just as viridescent tracer rounds mauled the already ruined DeBarros behind 3Raye, melting holes in its broken hull. The others in her security detail immediately returned fire, their lassiters spitting crimson beams of congealed light. Whether they found their mark or not, 3Raye had no idea. She saw bystanders scream and run, watched as an unfortunate few caught right in the middle of the crossfire were mercilessly cut down.
Someone from the other side lobbed a projectile which burst into cloud of acrid black smoke. Electronic traffic was obscured, distress signals were blocked off, even short range comm.-links grew garbled and distorted. All she could hear were the screams of the dying and the epithets of those trying not to die.
“Cover fire!” the combat replicants marshalled and directed an intense phalanx of beams towards wherever their foe was while 3Raye and her protector ran towards the remaining repulsorcraft. Its contragravs roared as its pilot prepared to liftoff the second she got on board.
3Raye was on the verge of jumping into the wide open doors of the vehicle when her guardian suddenly tackled her down. She could not see the anti-tank missile, but she could feel its heat as it passed over her and connected intimately with their rescue vehicle.
Everything went black. Seconds, minutes, hours later, she finally got up. Blood leaked out of her ears, though she was otherwise intact. She looked around, all of their vehicles had been turned to burning wrecks. She turned to the replicant who had saved her, now lying on the floor with a jagged piece of metal jutting out from the back of his skull. The others were dying before her very eyes.
She finally caught a glimpse of her attackers. Emerging from the smoke and fire were human forms clad in robes and armour which blended in with the environment, some kind of active camouflage. With the last of her security detail dispatched, the assailants lowered their weapons.
In desperation, 3Raye retrieved a fallen replicant’s lassiter and aimed it at them. She was about to say something defiant when she saw one of them throw an object – a metallic hemispherical thing which flew towards her. She decided to curse at them anyway.
“FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-“
Before she could finish, the entirety of her head was encapsulated by the flying guillotine. Three superheated blades at its base intersected to liberate her skull from her shoulders. The apparatus sealed hermetically and subzero freonic gas filled its hollow interior.
The decapitation device returned to its wielder, who regarded the headless body as it twitched and flopped on the pavement. The assassin tossed a grenade and what was left of 3Raye was subsequently consumed by thermite plasma. The assailants exfiltrated the area.
TO BE CONTINUED...
IMMEDIATELY
An errant mind connected to the datasphere, the consensual hallucination that weaved across Corsico like an invisible spider web, interlinking countless minds in a biodigital expanse of simulated senses and ever-flowing, ever-shifting information... An enhanced reality which anyone with the requisite neurotech interfaces, like the endocortical wetwares of CinCorp, could partake in.
The grid was awash with news of the apparent murder of 3Raye Xielweiss. Scenes of the firefight were on constant replay, showing mysterious assailants gunning CinCorp security replicants down while the helpless heiress looked on in shock before black smoke engulfed everything. The footage cut to postmortem stills of Xielweiss’ immolated remains, consisting of a carbonized silhouette stencilled on the ferrocrete pavement. Digital discourses were rife, conspiracy theorists wondered if the body could just vaporize like that, speculating pundits pointed fingers and tentacles and pincers at rival companies with something to gain from the heiress’ untimely demise, four dimensional graphs showed lines representative of CinCorp stocks worth in the trillions of metacredits corkscrewing down through space and time, the computational intelligence that was the Xielweiss family avatar released a statement offering a considerable bounty for the heads of those responsible, and the press relations officers of for-profit law enforcement agencies immediately swore to bring the perpetrators to justice for a very generous fee, all while religious leaders blamed the tragedy on the immorality of turning human and inhuman tissues into consumer products and promised salvation to those who repented for a very generous fee, and even the commercial breaks had everything from defence contractors to pharmaceutical and organ manufacturers advertising wares that could protect fortunate buyers from unwanted incineration. All for very generous fees! Subliminal cognomemetics were beamed to coerce unprotected minds amendable to these not at all unsubtle suggestions.
Just like that, the great DissecTrophy was a thing of the past, irrelevant save for an entertaining blurb where the winner offered his thanatotheological services for the disposal of Xielweiss’ extra crispy remains. In a truly class act, he offered them for free, without a fee, generous or otherwise. The Lady would have appreciated that. Probably.
No, she wouldn’t, the errant mind thought whilst disconnecting from the embrace of the datasphere. She would have wanted something expensive to show to everyone left alive that even as a lump of smoking charcoal she still had more money than they ever will. Statues, they would definitely have statues to honor her. Instead of using ordinary matter, they would make the statue out of holograms, holos that could coagulate into solidified hardlight.
Errand grumbled to himself. The heightened state of alarm caused by the assassination would make his job that much harder. That job being the transportation of sensitive materials, up to and including illicit post-organics. Errand runs, possibly and usually highly dangerous once, hence his preferred alias.
He was already at the pre-planned rendezvous point, in a forgotten tunnel once used during the early years of Corsico when people still preferred to travel through the subterrain rather than venture through the harsh expanses of the then-partially terraformed surface. As the world grew steadily more habitable, people began moving out for greener and more breathable pastures, leaving an undercity that was still connected to the rest of civilization, through the subways that linked the rail- and roadways of both regions, though now relegated to the less fortunate of the population.
The subterranean segment Errand was in was uninhabited, the groundcars and gravbikes he had left in the dark were untouched, a week’s worth of dust accumulating on their surfaces as they waited silently together with him. The plan, as far as he knew with the need-to-know basis he was working on, was to meet up with a group that would give him the package. The group would then split up in the cars and bikes to decrease the possibilities of discovery. Errand and a couple of them would head to the edge of the city to the extraction point, where a ship would take them off-world to safety. At that point, he would then collect his due and finally escape Corsico.
Unfortunately, the assassination would make things a little bit more complicated than that.
“Perfect timing,” he muttered. The worse thing was that the price he and his mysterious client had agreed on for the run was already set, unchangeable. He couldn’t back out on his word now or change the deal to take the increased risks into account, just because some rich broad’s vaporization had every private security outfit in Corsico out looking for anything remotely suspicious to shoot full of holes. He had his reputation to consider. And he needed the money. It was still, by far, the most lucrative deal he had been offered in his whole life.
So the job was still on.
He heard the rumbling echo of something that sounded like a distant explosion, and felt a slight quake. Which naturally unnerved him, being underground in a tunnel. The job just kept on looking better and better. He was about to check the time when he heard more echoing noises, which sounded more like footfalls.
Errand looked up and saw a squad of heavily armed gunmen approach. They were clad in robes that blended in with the background like some kind of adaptive camouflage, and underneath that they had armour on. The men resembled 3Raye Xielweiss’ assassins, Errand realized.
“This is great,” he said to himself as he smiled at his new partners in crime. “I’m gonna die.”
Most of the mercs had dispersed in the other vehicles, bound for their own extraction points. Errand and three of the remaining mercs took their own beige-coloured groundcar and drove towards the surface. Two of them were seated at the front, while he sat at the back with a merc who politely identified himself as Arash. He was holding a large steel container that he suspected contained the package, the undoubtedly priceless item they had stolen from 3Raye, who they incinerated in the process. They conversed and he told Errand that the explosion he had heard earlier was from a mine that they had left behind, which meant that someone was tailing the mercenary squad. Which was a bad sign, for obvious reason. He hoped the detonation, and the untrustworthy topography of the underground tunnels, were enough to throw their pursuers off their tail.
Back at the rendezvous site, the mercs had shed their conspicuous gear to take up more nondescript attire and wield more concealable weaponry, losing the considerable firepower they had used to great effect against the CinCorp replicants. It was a trade-off, if they had to engage in a firefight at this stage of the plan, then things were pretty much unsalvageable, so they had to focus on evading the citywide surveillance in order to survive. They had piled up all their heavy artillery, all the evidence, back at the rendezvous point. Arranged all of the guns and armour above another nasty surprise waiting for anyone after them.
The mercenaries were meticulous and devious in their craft, they were real professionals, Errand had observed. From what he gathered from Arash, they were Sardicans, duneworlders and battle hardened ex-guerrillas selling their services to the highest bidder. After every job, they underwent selective cognomemetic wipes to ensure client confidentiality and protect the identities of everyone involved. They were top of the line, high end operators, though their conditioning and martial training made them poor conversationists. Whoever was bankrolling this part-hit part-snatch and grab was certainly not sparing any expense, nor paying them to chitchat.
So the conversation died and, after a few minutes, the tunnel intersected with the rest of the convoluted undercity, the inhabited parts with shanties populated by pale sunlight-deprived people illuminated by the firelight of burning trash cans and then, later on, clusters of ancient buildings surrounded by fences and walls rimmed with razor wire and broken glass to keep the albinos out. These were the semi-dilapidated domiciles of those who could not afford to live topside but were still able to live in half-decent dwellings thanks to cheap subsurface real estate. Rainfall came from rusted overhanging sewage pipes, beginning as a light shower and then graduating into near monsoon proportions before a septic tube suddenly exploded, sending putrid messes slopping down like man-sized wads of phlegm. Pigmentless children ran towards the globs of waste, squealing in delight and poking them with sticks, searching for any salvageable objects within the filth.
Soon enough, other vehicles materialized in the tunnels, a few decrepit sedans and busses here and there, though most were trucks bound to or from the industrial section of the undercity, parts of old Corsico that remained functional, like waste treatment plants, food factories, recyclers and so on, all deigned too unsightly to be carried over to the surface world, though still vital for everyday living.
They merged with the traffic and eventually drove into the surface, plying into the congested streets of Corsico’s capital where the subterranean sights gave way to a far more bustling scene. The night was lit by neon lights and dancing holograms; streetside food stalls offered local favourites, exotic cuisines, alien dishes and off-world recipes; within the marketplaces tinkerers printed and moulded unique trinkets and wares unlike anything from the corporate assembly lines, traders showed off goods acquired from lightyears away, and shady types sold pirated organs, generic embryonica with cut-rate prices and dubious reliability; aerostats hovered lazily in the thick air, holoscreens on their hulls advertising off-world opportunities and psychoactive beverages; below them brothels promised sensations and stimulations beyond what any simulation could offer in nearly as many varieties; and, strangely, an out of place pet store displayed adorable creatures frozen in cryo-stasis.
The traffic paused momentarily to accommodate crossing pedestrians, a moving mass of garishly clad humans and inhumans of varying makes, models, shapes, forms and sizes, the naturals indiscernible from the synthetics and those in-between. The mob passed and the flow resumed. Their nondescript beige groundcar manoeuvred around a tractor rig hauling a tank full of metallic hydrogen. Deranged youths on gravbikes zipped past them, too close for comfort. They heard the contragravs of some repulsorcraft hovering nearby, and had no idea whether it was a pleasure barge or a transport full of CinCorp replicants preparing to drop down on their heads. Noticing this, their driver gently turned their vehicle towards a path beneath an overpass, which would hide them from airborne observers. There was no escaping the omnipresent surveillance though, all they could hope for was to avoid attracting its scrutiny.
Errand tried not to look too nervous. He scanned the datasphere, tuning into the frequencies used by the law enforcement companies, listening for any unusual or heightened activity that would prelude their actions. Any half-competent outfit would communicate outside of the normal channels when conducting major operations, but Errand tried to listen for signs nonetheless.
“We have someone on the outside tampering with the grid,” Arash said offhandedly, as though reading his mind. “Altering the signals, diverting attentions, making us harder to find.”
“I hope he’s good,” Errand replied. He cleared his throat and eyed the metal hemisphere in his seatmate’s hands. “So. Anyway. I’m supposed to carry something, right?”
“Right,” Arash gave him the metal container. It was slightly larger than a human head, Errand noted as he received it. “The package is organic, you’ll have to internally carry it. This casing is too conspicuous, and the terms specify...”
“I’m familiar with the terms,” Errand replied. He had no intention of showing any anxiety. He still had a job to do, a reputation to consider, and a paycheck to collect. “And I’m prepared for internal carry.”
He boosted himself with the knowledge that if he did this job right, then their mysterious and rather resourceful benefactor would probably take his performance into consideration. He ran his hand over the container’s smooth surface, felt the coolness of miniaturized cryonics preserving what was inside it. Errand found what he was looking for. He pressed several buttons and the metallic casing opened with the hiss of escaped coolant. The gasses cleared and Errand was finally able to glance at the parcel he was supposed to deliver.
The decapitated head of Lady 3Raye Xielweiss.
EPILOGUE
The illicit and concealed transportation of post-organs, or even baseline organs, necessitated several mission-specific protocols. Using cryonics was a no go due to the size and visibility of conventional containment devices and their noticeable thermal signatures. What proper transporters liked to do instead was called internal carry, using the courier’s own anatomy to sustain the living payload through the use of umbilical interfaces. By treating the parcel like any other part of the courier’s body, which in effect it was, it could easy avoid most methods of detection. No aberrant thermal signatures and no inorganic hardware necessary.
Errand pried his abdomen open to the slick squicking sound of parting skin and subcutaneous tissues, revealing a mostly hollow cavity where the normal digestive organs would have been. In its place was a highly compact and compressible synthetic pseudo-intestine adhering to the abdominal walls to maximize internal carriage space.
Arash was holding a mirror so Errand could see inside himself. Normally he did the necessary connections by himself, but this was a rather special case.
Several umbilical arteries autonomously slid up the base of 3Raye’s neck, snaking like tendrilous tentacles. The connections were standardized, making the interface process rather simple. The vessels injected themselves and self-sealed, blood began flowing from the organelle that served as Errand’s placenta – a safety device to ensure no cross-contamination between the carrier and what was carried.
It made sense that the heiress of the planet’s premier post-organ producer was, herself, a post-human mostly made out of post-organs, post-head included. Her face slowly regained its colour, the healthy tan preferred by the topsiders to distinguish themselves from the albinos of the undercity. Its expression, with eyes wide open, nose flared and mouth gaping, were still frozen mid-curse.
Errand thought that it mirrored his own feelings exactly. He was a little bit lightheaded, whether from the displacement of blood to his passenger or from the fact that he was carrying what was presently the most important, and thus the most dangerous, object on Corsico, he could not tell. It was probably a combination of both, he realized.
“Nobody mentioned this,” Errand said. His head throbbed slightly. His cranial wetware told him that the organic connection process was still loading. Sustaining a head, with a fully intact brain, required much more... everything than sustaining other forms of contraband tissues.
“Just do your job,” Arash replied tersely.
“Nobody said that this was part of the job,” he went on, pointing at the head hanging out of his open abdomen for added emphasis. There was no point in concealing the fact that he was in way over his head. And that the head under him belonged to the woman in charge of the planetary monopoly, which meant that her head was undoubtedly full of secret, sensitive corporate information. If the company knew that they had it, if they figured out that it wasn’t as vaporized as the rest of her, that their most prized data storage device was in the hands of a bunch of goons bound off-world, ready to hand it over to... whom?
“Just who are we bringing this to anyway?” More blood coursed into the disembodied head, which meant a little bit less blood went into Errand’s. He considered the potential beneficiaries of their operation, running through a mental list of rival entities that could profit from whatever was in 3Raye’s brain, parties that would also be best served by cleaning up any loose ends. He could not help but ask, “And what’s going to happen to us after we make the delivery?
For a moment, his Sardican seatmate was silent. And then, he replied.
“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” Arash gestured to his exposed guts, and Errand looked down to see 3Raye looking straight at him, her visage no longer that of a petrified swearing grimace. Instead, she looked rather bewildered. Frightened. Her mouth opened, she tried to speak, but the lack of trachea and lungs and such hampered that somewhat.
Despite his considerable experience in handling body parts, Errand was horrified. Before he could make a remark, or maybe restrict the bloodflow to 3Raye and put her back to sleep, Arash produced something from his pocket and attached it to 3Raye’s throat. It made noises that matched the movement of the woman’s mouth. The synthetic sounds became a tiny voice.
“Where am I...” she uttered weakly. “What’s going on...”
“It’s okay, you’re safe.” Arash answered. He reached down to the side of her head to remove an earring composed of colourless crystalline Cs curving and converging three dimensionally to form the double helix CinCorp emblem.
He held it before her eyes and broke it in half.
The shattering heirloom released a flicker of light and an afterimage of shifting geometrics, a cognomemetic sigil encoded within the jewel latticework.
3Raye’s pupils dilated as the subliminal signals coursed through the biosynaptic contours of her endocortical wetware to override a series of self-inflicted infraconscious locks.
The corner of her mouth raised, forming a mischievous smirk.
“It worked...” 3Raye said, her voice stronger. “I am free.”
Thanks guise. It's rather unfinished and there's still at least ten more pages worth of MSWord pages to write for it. It's meant to be a gift to a couple of friends. I posted since I needed a quick assessment of how it was going. And I haven't written anything for over a year so...
They tell me contemporary "standard" novels on the market are between 80k and 120K words long. This piece is already 5k words long, and there remains approximatively 5k words to be written if what Shroom says is correct.
I have difficulties believing novels can be so short.
Though I've been accustomed for a while now to reading fanfiction pieces whose chapters are almost novella-length in themselves, and with wordcounts over the 500k-1M mark...
The only thing is that maybe you could drop all the 'private' from the 'private security' lines
with the implication that private security is all there is (so actually calling them that rather than just 'security' or something is redundent)
but I'm nitpicking here
Oxymoron wrote:Though I've been accustomed for a while now to reading fanfiction pieces whose chapters are almost novella-length in themselves, and with wordcounts over the 500k-1M mark...
In my experience it's easy for stories to get sprawling if you're kind of making it up as you go along (I remember the last story I wrote that way, I meant for it to be relatively short but it ended up being the better part of the length of a full length novel), which I suspect is how a lot of fanfiction writers operate.
I used to be one of those people, then I had some first hand experience with the downsides of that approach.
Oxymoron wrote:Though I've been accustomed for a while now to reading fanfiction pieces whose chapters are almost novella-length in themselves, and with wordcounts over the 500k-1M mark...
In my experience it's easy for stories to get sprawling if you're kind of making it up as you go along (I remember the last story I wrote that way, I meant for it to be relatively short but it ended up being the better part of the length of a full length novel), which I suspect is how a lot of fanfiction writers operate.
I used to be one of those people, then I had some first hand experience with the downsides of that approach.
there's something to be said for structuring stories with a concrete beginning-middle-end structure and a sense of... restraint? containment? how do you say that thing? not going too gratuitous. i know that's odd coming from me. there's something to be said for direction and focus. the difference between timeless old movies made with limited resources and a modern day CGI-laden explosionfest of epic proportions.
“...and I used memory blocks so they wouldn’t pick anything up in the brain scans,” 3Raye was explaining to them how she orchestrated her complicated scheme of anonymously hiring the mercenaries. Her smirk returned. “Cunning plan, am I right?”
None of it made sense to Errand, so he asked the smartest question he could think of.
“But why?”
3Raye regarded him curiously. He had no idea why, of all the potential organ smugglers on Corsico, she had to choose him to risk life and limb for her sake.
She shrugged, which was quite a feat since she lacked a torso.
“Why not? I want to see the universe, and as far as I’m concerned, I can do anything I want. CinCorp disagrees, so fuck them. If they think I’m destroyed property, then they won’t even try to take me back. It all works out.”
There was a hint of sadness or defiance or melancholy or something in her voice. Errand realized that despite the elaborateness of her machinations, the plan wasn’t particularly well thought out. It was some bizarre, deranged version of a privileged little topsider girl’s mentally screwed up attempt at escaping their perfectly planned post-human lives, though the irrational desire to ditch Corscio was completely understandable. He also realized that this was probably the first time he had a dialogue with a package.
“You do know that they will try to kill the rest of us, just out of principle, and spite. And since they think you’re killed, they won’t be particularly careful when they try to kill the rest of us, and you might also get killed along the way?”
“I don’t care,” she responded petulantly. Errand imagined that she was crossing her arms defensively. “Besides, I hired you all to do a job – namely getting me off this planet in one piece.”
“About that...”
“I heard you ask,” she interrupted him. “I have an account at the Orion Bank. It actually belonged to someone embezzling from the company, using the funds to build himself a nice little villa on some garden moon, but I had him cut off... literally. Nobody knows about it except me. I made sure.” 3Raye elaborated. “We get off Corsico, so no one can take me back, I get you your payments and I get a new body while we’re at it. Simple as that. The only challenge is leaving this planet. After that, we’re practically home free.”
“Alright,” Errand conceded. There was no point arguing.
There was a moment of awkward silence. The route they were on was still covered by the overpasses, but it eventually terminated in a fork that would take them out to the open. Their taciturn driver spoke.
“We’ll have to take the bridge if we want to go out of the city,” he said matter of factly. “That means we’ll be exposed.”
Errand understood what that meant. He looked at his package. “Lady...”
“Just Raye, please.”
“Okay, Raye. We’re going to be exposed when we get on that bridge. Someone might be scanning us. So I have to...” Errand hesitated, thinking on how to describe putting her head inside his abdominal cavity and thinking of how ridiculous and outrageous it must undoubtedly look and sound to any normal post-human being. “...I have to hide you now. Is that okay?”
She looked into his cavity, which resembled some kind of lipless vertically-opening mouthpart vomiting arteries that stuck to her neck. She hesitated for a moment and then sighed lunglessly.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Errand nodded. He lifted her head as gently as he could. Before he would place it in his cavity and reseal it, he ran his hands through her hair to make sure he wasn’t introducing anything that would give the linings of his innards allergies. “Just checking for foreign objects.”
“Right,” she responded. He didn’t bother to look at her expression. He felt some debris, probably from the previous firefight. Meanwhile, their car took the last turn and left the overpass’ shadow. Ahead of them loomed a stretch of suspended steel and ferrocrete, glowing with night lights and abstract holographic advertisements like two oversized neon harpsichords mating with each other. The lights reflected off the lake of sewage beneath the bridge, the body of water delineating the megapolitan capital from the surrounding slums and projects.
“What’s this?” like a paleoprimate picking out a parasite, Errand extracted a tiny speck from 3Raye’s hair and held it up for further inspection. Arash turned to look at the object in between Errand’s fingers. A horrified look of recognition dawned on his face.
“We’ve got incoming,” the Sardican on the front passenger’s seat pulled out a submachine gun. He casually checked its magazine and deactivated its safety. “Personnel carrier at our six.”
The object in Errand’s fingers was a microtransmitter, a tracking device. He immediately placed it in his mouth and crushed it with his teeth like a hi-tech peanut. He spat out the masticated circuitry, brought 3Raye up to eye level and eyed her suspiciously. “What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know!” the fear and confusion on her face seemed genuine.
“Never mind that. Put her in and get ready,” Arash ordered and turned to look out the back window.
Errand did as he was told, shoving the panicking 3Raye into his cavity and sealing it as fast as he possibly could. It occurred to him that maybe it would have been more prudent to somehow relax or sedate his self-aware cargo, but he wasn’t about to argue with the Sardican with the flying guillotine.
He joined Arash and took a look see at their pursuers.
A massive armoured fighting vehicle rolled towards them, lights flashing and sirens blaring as it smashed groundcars aside like a rampaging pachyderm. Its hyperalloy hull was coated in the CinCorp colours and undented by the repeat collisions with civilian traffic, and the myriad weapons systems mounted on its hull were trained towards their direction.
“A fucking Doomvee,” Errand gasped. Their vehicle accelerated up the bridge and weaved past trucks and cars. He lost sight of their pursuer, but it couldn’t be that far behind.
“CEASE AND DESIST!” Doomvee-mounted macrophones roared. “STOP YOUR VEHICLE! STEP OUTSIDE AND LOWER YOUR WEAPONS! YOU HAVE THIRTY SECONDS TO COMPLY!”
To stress its point, it fired a warning shot into the air. The armour-piercing shell exploded harmlessly over the confused and panicking stream of vehicles, peppering roofs and windows with not-so-lethal fragments. The point of detonation was uncomfortably close to their getaway car though.
The other motorists spared no time in complying with the general announcement. They stopped their cars and trucks.
“Punch. That. Shit.” Errand shouted, though their driver didn’t need any encouraging. Beside him, Arash produced a golden sphere from his satchel bag. “Whuzzat?”
“Snitches,” the Sardican lowered a window and pulled off a ring sticking out from the object in his hand. Its golden covering unfolded into a pair of insectile wings, which began to beat rapidly. It hovered off his hand and darted out the window.
“CEASE AND DESIST!” the order came again.
The snitch zipped towards the approaching Doomvee. Turreted auto-guns and killcannons swerved and swivelled to face the incoming object. Fruit-sized globe and armoured fighting vehicle regarded each other for a second. And then the snitch zoomed away.
Towards a tractor rig. Towards the tank of metallic hydrogen behind it.
The semi-bright microgrenade fluttered around the oversized cylinder like some kind of curious bird. After it found a structural weak point, it underwent a spectacular transformation into a stream of superheated metal, which punched through the tank’s steel casing, going on to damage the underlying systems designed to keep the hydrogen in. The magnetic bottle failed, allowing the expansion of an ultracompressed substance harvested from - and more accustomed to - the interior of gas giants.
Within a microsecond, the tank ruptured as the liquid metallic hydrogen destabilized and evaporated, igniting the very air around it. The resulting fireball engulfed the Doomvee and turned the fighting vehicle and its entire crew into ash. Those nearby were spared from that fate and remained as puddles of liquefied chassis and people.
Errand half-cursed and half-cheered at the sight, too elated at the disappearance of their pursuers to notice the significant collateral damage. He turned away and looked forward, they were already more than halfway through the bridge, past its zenith.
Errand patted their driver’s shoulder. “Good job.”
There was aloud crack as the windshield shattered. Blood, bone and cushioning burst out of the back of the driver’s seat. Their groundcar veered to the side and smashed into the railings of the bridge. Blinding spotlights illuminated them as a repulsor gunship hovered into view. Its chin-mounted cannon spewed out more rounds, several punched through the hood of their car, causing the fuel cells to catch fire.
“It’s not over yet!” Arash threw another grenade out of the broken windshield, past their erstwhile comrade. Errand ducked his head down, anticipating an inevitable explosion. Instead, the projectile began spewing out a thick cloud of acrid black smoke. It hid them, but it blocked their vision as well. “Get out!”
Errand scrambled out of their crippled vehicle just as another volley of cannon fire gutted the passenger compartment. Arash and the other Sardican also made it out.
The gunship came down low, cannons finishing what little was left of their beige groundcar. Its contragravs blew their lifesaving smokescreen away.
“Shit!”
The three of them ran for cover behind the disabled and partially immolated vehicles littering the bridge, which had the makings of a fully qualified battlefield by then.
“What’s going on?!” came a sudden interruption to their life and death struggle. Errand forgot 3Raye’s presence, and her lack of audiovisual sensory input. He had no time to patch her through. “Are we on foot? Are you running?”
Errand cursed. “Not right now, 3Raye.”
“I’m contacting the others for backup,” Arash pulled him behind a mostly intact van. They both looked through the windows, saw the steamed remains of the passengers inside, and beyond that, the landing gunship. Power armoured forms exited the aircraft. “We’ll buy you time.”
Errand looked at him incomprehensibly.
“Here,” Arash handed him a handgun. He took it. “You have to make it off-world. That’s the contract.”
A trio of CinCorp troops advanced cautiously towards them, weapons ready. They didn’t have much distance to cover.
Arash pulled out another snitch. He kissed it for luck and let it fly.
The foremost soldier trained his weapon on the semi-sentient warhead with synthetic human speed but before he could fire, Arash hurled his flying guillotine to distract the replicant. The hemispherical decapitation device was a larger target and was torn apart by weapons fire, leaving the snitch’s path wide open. It flew past the foremost soldiers and connected with the one at the rear, and both man and microgrenade disappeared in a violent flash of light. The resulting shockwave and shrapnel knocked the remaining troops down.
Arash dragged Errand away while the other Sardican emerged from behind an immolated ambulance and lunged at the nearest soldier. He slid a bayonet down an unarmoured collar, eliciting a wet gurgling noise from his faceless victim just as the last remaining replicant recovered from the blast and drew his weapon. The Sardican was the first to fire, but his submachine gun’s rounds were ineffectual against the replicant’s exocarapace. A lassiter burst burned multiple holes through and through the mercenary’s torso before he could jump back behind cover.
Errand leaned against the bridge’s railings while Arash aimed his submachine gun towards where the replicant was most likely to emerge. The bridge had turned into a highway of death, and their pursuer would have to navigate through a small maze of dead vehicles before getting to them. They didn’t have much time. He thought of saying something ironic, but nothing came to mind. He touched the datasphere and noticed Arash receiving an encrypted transmission, for all the good that would do.
The Sardican turned to him and said, “Jump.”
“Wha-”
“Jump now!” Arash repeated. “Jum-”
Before he could finish, a crimson beam sliced his arm off its shoulder. Arash’s smoking form collapsed.
The armoured replicant stood atop the wreckage of a station wagon with wooden panelling that had caught fire. It trained its lassiter towards Errand.
The organ transporter turned and, without hesitation, jumped over the railing.
He screamed as he fell, eyes widening and lungs burning as the lake of sewage and filth beneath him grew larger and larger. Time slowed down as natural and synthetic adrenalin coursed through his veins. His neural wetware overclocked in response. The bridge’s holographics, now blazing with emergency patterns, reflected off the surface of the waves of septic liquid in a strangely hypnotic display.
The sea of light and excrement was going to swallow him. He could smell the ammonia. He wondered if he would drown, or if the polluted water would simply dissolve him like the gastric juices of a giant stomach. He decided that he would find out either way.
Something snagged his arm and abruptly stopped his descent, nearly dislocating his shoulder in the process. He was swung in one smooth motion onto the seat of a gravbike. Repulsors whined to compensate for his weight and his rescuer stomped on the accelerator, sending them streaking away from the bridge, leaving a wake of spraying sewage behind them as they headed towards the shore, towards safety.
After the shock wore off, Errand tried to ask a question, but the combined noises of wind and contragravitics drowned out his voice. He tapped the biker’s shoulder, and the person turned around and simply nodded. He was one of the Sardicans from the tunnel rendezvous. The backup Arash had called for in his final moments.
A scream of much larger and much louder contragravitics came from behind. The gunship was coming after them, cutting through the air, its razor wings spread out and showing off the half-dozen missiles mounted on underlying hardpoints. Its chin cannon swivelled towards them and fired.
Errand cursed. The biker manoeuvred their nimble craft, making it dance out of the line of fire. The orange tracer rounds missed and struck the water, causing ineffectual sprays of sewage.
The gunship accelerated and tried to find a better angle of attack. Their gravbike decelerated in response, and their pursuer overshot them. They changed directions in an attempt to evade the pursuing craft, hoping to lose it even as it tried to regain its position behind them. They were nearly out of the lake, the shoreline was visible, the lights of the habitations like a constellation of stars, making their chase resemble some kind of dogfight in space. They were almost there. If they were over a population centre, the gunship could hardly make strafing runs over the heads of thousands of bystanders.
But it could attack with impunity over the lake. The gunship repositioned itself and Errand could feel a curious tingle in his cortical wetware, a synesthetic sensation that was neither a dataspheric transmission, nor some after effect from the synthadrenalin or neural overclocking.
“Radar lock!” the biker’s scream could be heard even through the redlined contragravs. It was quickly overwhelmed by the shriek of an igniting motor. Its approach was instantaneous. They felt its searing heat wash over them and were nearly blinded by the rocket’s red glare as it nearly set them on fire.
The gunship was still too close. Before the missile could properly manoeuvre, it had already overshot its target. It detonated harmlessly and caused a shower of stagnant shitwater.
As putrid fluids rained upon them, Errand profusely thanked a proverbial pantheon of deities for his continued existence. Perhaps the gunship pilot was not well versed in shooting down aircraft as aerospace warfare was not a regular occurrence on Corsico Cinco, and CinCorp itself was not in the business of air to air combat. This, what was happening to them right now, was a relatively rare occurrence. On the other hand, it would not take long for the pursuing pilot to correct his mistakes.
The biker handed him a satchel bag. Errand unzipped it and found a number of golden spheres. He knew what to do.
Behind them, the gunship decelerated and allowed some more distance to pass between it and the gravbike. The tingling caress of the radar returned. It intensified and spiked. A lock on.
Errand activated all of the snitches and threw them over his shoulder.
A second missile streaked out from underneath the gunship’s wing, screaming towards the gravbike like a carnodactyl out of hell. The greater distance allowed it to accelerate to supersonic velocities. Its seeker head processed the targeting information, directing its fins and thrust vectoring nozzles to send it on the most optimal attack vector.
At the same time, the snitches’ insectile wings drove them at a relative snail’s pace compared to the incoming missile. The microgrenades’ semi-intelligent systems exchanged data packets and coordinated with each other to converge and swarm their target, but they were too slow. Even as they detonated, the missile had already shot past them, sustaining not a scratch.
The biker sent their contragravitic steed on a desperate corkscrew. The sudden twist threw Errand off his seat and towards the pull of gravity. A split second later, the missile connected with the vehicle and transformed it into an expanding blossom of fire and steel.
The gunship pilot exclaimed and reported the exploderization of the target. The craft slowed down to survey the scene.
And then a stray snitch, the last one Errand released, one that had been too late for the failed interception, acquired a new target. It flew towards the gunship, which was much larger and much slower than the missile.
The pilot did not notice the winged orb of gold as it connected with the gunship’s glass canopy.
There was a less spectacular blossom and the aircraft simply dropped out of the sky and hit the water. The impact crumpled its fuselage like a beverage can, and after five minutes of precarious floating, it finally sank beneath the waves of waste and human excrement.
I. You. Make preparations. We are invited. The invitation is of gold. The paper must have been very expensive indeed. My good suit is at the laundry and I can't find yours either. Perhaps we shall go in drag, or make of it a masquerade, or pretend that we are, and go in rags. Or maybe we won't go, maybe we won't honor the invitation, and maybe we will simply find something else with which to occupy our time, and after all, I don't see any RSVP here. I saw that there was a movie playing at the old three-screen, a documentary about a celebrated triangle player, tonight. The showings are, according to the paper, tonight at seven, and at ten. We can make it if we go quickly. I love to hear you. Please say something. My darling. Please. Please.
Chuck Norris awoke with a gasp. He sat there for a long moment, shuddering from the phantom sensations of his journey to the spirit world. Sweat beaded down his hairy, muscular body, cold and clammy to the touch in stark contrast to the hot steam of the sweat lodge around him. Finally he brought himself under control and rose from his cross-legged position. Mighty legs flexed, tendons and sinews taut with the tension of ready violence. His long member stood fully erect, iron hard and circumcised so as to prevent masturbation and be more pleasing to his Lord and Savior Christ Jesus. His mammoth chest was covered with wet hair, so thick that it remained firm even when drenched. His beard, harder than granite, was even more unmoving, defying the water vapor laden air to alter its legendary tensile strength.
i are sorry but this is like the first thing i've written for myself in more than a year and i'm kind of really giddy with it so i can't resist dumping it here all the tiem
INTERLUDE
Rays of multispectral light move in the void, curving around the spatiotemporal contours surrounding stars and novae, serpentine rainbows of barely perceivable, hardly conceivable colours lazily drifting in the solar wind permeating nebulae and constellations, curiously peering into quasars and dead suns in search of mystery; drawn to the accretion disks of event horizons, when caught in the immense gravities therein, they dive into infraspace and make for superluminal escapes; then, hidden within the sub- and hyper- layered wavelengths of transphysical existence, they spake in tachyons and mesons, frequency resonations and cosmic vibrations like the pitches and tones of songs echoing in the aether; the auroric wisps twist and turn with and into each other in playful entanglements, games of wild things free and careless in infinity.
rayes of starlight singing in space
basking in sunshine swimming in the warp
antennas listen from voyeuristic worlds
a girl sighs in her tower and dreams of flight
an errand boy runs and cowers and fights
Strings and chains of protoplasmic spheres weave into each other, merging and diverging in maddening configurations, as the organomolecular compounds permeating within their cytomembranes undergo transmutation, ethyl methyl sulfonate infusions inducing recombination, alkylation, producing gene sequence alterations regulated by antiviral proteins; more patterns form, helices and spiral galaxies of complex sugars and acids, geometric snowflakes with symmetries calibrated to transcend nature while etched on their cellular matrices were the formulae for planned obsolescence; morphology, longevity, incept dates; cells coalesce into tissues mostly designated to form organs for the lines, ready for use and wear, whilst some maybe perhaps mitosing into zygotes destined to germinate and slumber within exouterine spheres of amniotic fluid.
corpsebearers scaling jagged angles
bloodslick hands slipping
crowds cheer whilst running men fall
tumbling down their screams echo
through a puzzle’s empty spaces
rayexiel rayexiel rayexiel
FOOTNOTES
The Sardican stood at the prow of the ramshackle boat, which was little better than an oversized canoe that the captain, an amputee clad in tattered attire, steered from his wheeled chair, while his wife stood at his side, fanning him with a large plastic leaf. Other forlorn forms were also there, burdening the tiny dinghy with their oppressed masses as its asthmatic engine pushed it against the current. The breeze intermixed septic river water fumes with that of petrofuel emissions.
Errand reeked of shit. He was still trying to wipe the slime off his body, he could still feel it sticking to his skin even as he rubbed it raw, and even with the mandatory rebreather he wore, the odour still lingered in his airway, which added to the taste that refused to leave the back of his throat. Each swallow of saliva was like gulping down burning poison, the emissions of some diseased member. He burped and, with his makeshift gasmask on, had no choice but to inhale the contaminants he had just belched from his esophagus. He fixed his watery eyes on the distance, as to not succumb to nausea.
Around them were other boats, watercraft of similar shoddy construction, most originating from the tunnel communities of the capital, sailing forth from where the gigantic sewage pipes connected to the river, forming a makeshift harbour for the underdwellers, an estuary where the semi-solid waste of the city – or, at least, of those in the city unable or unwilling to pay for waste treatment and instead opted for their leavings to be disposed of in a cheaper and more cost-efficient manner – was shunted through sphincter-like tubes that excreted their contents out of sight and thus out of mind. The polluted body of water served as a moat separating the capital from the undesirables beyond, for such was the extent of the topsiders’ disdain and apathy. The biohazardous miasma was simply countered by saturating the megapolitan boundaries with clouds of filter-feeding, air-purifying nano-organisms, while anyone on the wrong side of town could simply suffocate or resort to improvised life support systems.
Behind the impoverished flotilla, CinCorp hovercrafts searched for the remains of the crashed gunship and the exploderized gravbike. Fortunately for the fugitives, there was an army of bodies underneath the river, ranging from everyday murder victims, to the waste products of the DissecTrophy, to the discarded shells of people who either bought themselves better bodies, decided to upload themselves into the datasphere, or simply availed of their friendly neighbourhood suicide booths.
The captain’s wife walked over to the Sardican and told him that they would be landing now. She turned back and went to Errand and smiled sweetly.
“How many months?” she asked him and tried to touch his slightly protruding belly.
“It’s a miscarriage,” came his deadpan response. Errand hated it whenever it happened, strangers thinking that they could violate his personal space just because he looked like a pregnant man, going over and touching his delicate transportation equipment. “I’m going to a chop shop to have the fetus bartered for something useful.”
“Fuck you,” 3Raye hissed from within the cavity.
The absurdity of the situation made him explode into hysterics. He must have looked like a lunatic to the homely wife as she spared no time in leaving him alone, but he didn’t care if she thought he had gone mad. Everyone on Corsico had gone mad a long time ago.
So he laughed. He fucking laughed.
“Oh what the hell,” 3Raye surrendered and joined in the laughter, adding a second voice to Errand’s laughter, echoes emanating from malfunctioning vocal gear, or a side effect of demonic possession.
Their dinghy reached the makeshift port, a sad cluster of jerry-rigged pontoons, made out of plastic drums and corrugated metal sheets, extending from the riverbank. The captain’s wife helped them out and received the passengers’ fares, which she gratefully informed them would go to purchasing second hand legs for her husband.
With the narrowness of the pontoons, the passengers had to disembark in single file. Errand was behind the Sardican, and noticed that the mercenary had a satchel, presumably full of the handy microgrenades so effectively employed earlier.
“By the way, thanks for the save,” Errand clapped the merc on the shoulder.
“No problem.”
“So... what do I call you?”
“You can call me Arash,” the mercenary replied. “Before the mission, Sardicans are removed of everything unrelated and unneeded for the task. Thoughts, memories, even names. We have individual designations, but no more. This makes us more efficient, and in case of capture, interrogation, and processing, we have nothing to give away. It protects those dear to us from any reprisals. We get them all back when we finish our duty, that’s our real reward. So, for this mission and until we return home, we are all Arash.”
“I see.” Errand nodded. He would never know the real name of his saviours.
They left the unsteady pontoons and reached land, undry and rather mucky land composed of equal parts soil and equal parts coagulated filth from the river. The proportion between real earth and solidified sewage got better the further they went inland. Errand spotted a vacant stall that beckoned to his needs.
“Excuse me for a bit,” he said to the new Arash and made for the toilet.
It was actually a broken down and repurposed suicide booth. Amidst all of the implements for stabbing, slicing, electrocuting, asphyxiating and the like was a receptacle for people to relieve themselves in, connected to a hose connected to the river. Errand marvelled at its brilliance and promptly locked himself in.
“We have to talk,” he said as he unzipped his jacket, pulled his shirt up, and pried his abdomen open. He pulled 3Raye out and brought her up so they could look at each other face to face.
“Yes?” she replied, her voice nonchalant and her eyebrow raised. Slowly, the beginnings of a smirk appeared on her voice.
“I could cut my losses right here, right now,” Errand was speaking to her and to himself, beginning a suicide booth soliloquy before an audience of rusted automated euthanasia equipment. “Disconnect you and leave you here for your company to find.”
“I would die.” 3Raye was incredulous.
“I can keep you connected with the pseudoplacenta. I can detach it along with you. If you go on sleep, it can keep you alive for an hour or two. That’s enough time, and I can leave, disappear in the nethers or in the underground or wherever, away from the city...” Errand continued. “And that’s it. No more chases, no more gunshots, no more swimming in the fucking sewage.”
“Hmmm...” 3Raye thought it over.
“Hmmm what?” Errand propped her head on a Zyklon X nerve gas ventilation apparatus and proceeded to cross his arms over each other.
“Just hmmm,” she smiled innocently.
“Fucking... ugh!” Errand spat. “Come on, out with it!”
“Well... you don’t even have to leave your pseudoplacenta with me. I’d imagine that little item cost you quite a bit, and if you do decide to cut your losses, you won’t be getting paid, so you’d need to save every little penny you’ve got...” she said speculatively.
“Yeah, if I do that, you’d die but I won’t have to buy new gear. Either way, I can get the fuck out of here,” Errand mulled it over. “So why mention it? Is this some kind of unconventional bargaining tactic for the Ladies at CinCorp?”
“No,” 3Raye did that disembodied shrug of hers, a combination of delicate facial expressions giving away a complete carelessness to the world around her. “I was just thinking.”
“About how I can totally just ditch you and-”
“And return to normal?” she chuckled. “I’m sorry, but there’s no going back to normal for you. The only way you can make it out of this little situation alive is by going off-world. You can do it without me, of course. Run, fly, disappear, but instead of the nethers or the underground you could just hitch a ride with some space gypsies... to Solaris? No, you won’t go corewards... you’d go outwards to Celeste or Pharagon, maybe even out to Wild Space?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Errand nodded. “Thanks for making my travel arrangements for me. I’ll send you a postcard.”
“...but what will you do out there in the wide unknown, without a clue, with no idea what the rest of the ‘verse is like, so far away from home...” 3Raye wondered. “Of course, you could just say ‘I’ll figure it out,’ so gruff and street smart... but it’s a cruel universe out there, and without the moolah, the dineros, the quatloos, you’ll be just another microbe, another speck, another object in space. Lost like you are now, how many years until you find your way again, if ever? You’ll just drift to another gutter, same as here, the only place you’re familiar with.”
“Disconnecting you doesn’t sound like such a bad idea after all,” Errand grumbled.
“Face it. Your only way out of here alive is with me. Off-world. With the money.” 3Raye snapped. “That’s why you took this job in the first place. Without it, look at you. This isn’t living. This is sickness.”
“Fuck you,” Errand shook his head. “Fuck this.”
“You do know that they will try to hunt down and kill the rest of us, just out of principle, and spite...” she repeated his words earlier, mimicking his speech pattern, his tone. She returned to her own voice, “...and since they think you’re killed...” and then resumed in his, “...they won’t be particularly careful when they try to kill the rest of us, and you might also get killed along the way?”
“No...”
“Errand, I’m your only way out... and you’re my only way out. Once we get off this planet, everything will be over, all this...” she said gently, gazing into his eyes. “We’ll be free.”
Errand looked away and closed his eyes. He took a deep breath.
“Not to mention,” he began as he righted himself. “Arash... the Sardicans probably won’t give me a choice. They’re really... intent on completing the mission.”
“So we’re going together,” 3Raye’s smile was as sweet as sin.
“Yeah. Come on, let’s go.” Errand picked her up and placed her back inside his abdominal cavity. “I’m giving you an audiovisual link so you won’t get bored. There’s something I want you to see.”
They left the suicide booth, regrouped with Arash, and delved into their new environment.
The inhabitants of the Nethers were excluded from the megapolitan ecology to a degree beyond even that of the subterranean albinos. They were pariahs, refugees and dispossessed born to live and die away from the city, deemed unable to survive its brilliance, unfit and unable to exist in the predetermined order of things, thus unwanted and shunned like lepers, neglected to rot in the shadows of tomorrow.
Amongst their number were exodites, victims of Wild Space wars and interstellar calamities who escaped to Corsico in search of better, safer futures even when the world had none to offer. Aliens and humans alike lived in squalor, in a conglomeration of disintegrating mud huts, derelict spacecraft and misshapen hive clusters made from dried arachnid secretions, structures mating with each other in architectural abortions born from intermingling cultures and species striving to subsist in a delirious world.
With the immigrants were native Corscoptics victimized by the vicissitudes of fate and the unpredictable ebb and flow of the market, most recent were those whose fortunes fell with that of CinCorp’s stocks, brokers suddenly unable to afford their possessions and branded tissues, which were promptly repossessed by the very company they gambled their futures on. Deported by the truckload to the riverbanks to wander, newly homeless and eyeless and futureless, the Unmade sought aid and refuge, and were embraced by brethren bearing prosthetics, generic and pirated body parts, some stolen, others legitimately pre-owned and donated, all offered for mere pittances.
The most unfortunate of the lot were those who shuffled around them, Slow Thinkers unable to update their wetwares, their unguarded minds became bogged down by stray subliminals, mal-memes, mnemonic brainworms, and other mentallic hazards that turned them into shambling incognates, lost in never ending mazes, errant thoughts looping over and over again, gradually overloading their faculties to the point of cortical liquefaction.
Street lights cast an eerie orange glow on the dispossessed as they formed a procession, the refugees and amputees together with a ragtag menagerie of other castigated Corsicoptics, forlorn figures gathering by the thousands, marching towards the spaceport at the end of the Nether, their bare feet, stumps, and gnarled hooves displacing the accumulated dust on the cobblestones, causing a suffocating cloud to form in their wake.
“So this is what it must be like to live in fear...” 3Raye uttered as she watched from within Errand’s cavity.
Errand grabbed a random person and asked, “What’s happening? Where are you going to?”
He was a splicer, a genetic chimera of pirated chromosomes, gazing at Errand with startled compound eyes.
“Hope...” he trailed off as the masses ululated and pointed towards the heavens. He joined them, raising his flippers in excitement.
There was a rumbling in the sky, the subsonic thrum of contragravitics as a starship parted the clouds above them. Its sail-wings were spread wide, and its smooth opal hull gleamed like the scales of a massive reef fish gliding carelessly in the tides.
The procession followed the vessel’s lazy descent and came closer to the spaceport, but the facility was walled and its gates were guarded by private security troops, reminiscent of CinCorp’s save for the differing corporate logos marking their armours. Riot shields were raised, Doomvees trained their cannons at the desperate ragtags, ready to begin an unscheduled pogrom.
Suddenly trumpets blared and the spaceport’s guards made way as the gates opened.
Long-necked sauropods emerged from the portal. Building-sized reptiles with feathery hides adorned with beads, bearing platforms on their backs, structures festooned with prayer wheels and banners that displayed alien calligraphies as they fluttered in the wind.
Masked figures preceded the creatures, carrying baroque musical instruments made of wood and bones and shells. The one at the forefront opened a seal and showed it for all to see, and together, the retinue read it and declared:
“Behold your saviour has come!”
And then they ripped off their masks and revealed themselves to be lizards.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Errand could not believe what he beheld before his very eyes.
Right then and there, to the jubilant cheers of the oppressed masses, the scaled and feathered missionaries of the Zigonian Catholic Church conducted an impromptu mass. The lizards, in their cosmic pilgrimage to bring comfort and joy to all beings, were led by the venerable Reptilicus Pontifex of the regional astrodiocese who now stood atop the largest of sauropods, decked out in ceremonial robes and plumed headgear of his office. From the pagoda balcony he showered benedictions upon the gathered people, the flock of wretches he had come to Corsico to redeem.
Machines on top of the long-necks pumped psychedelic incense into the atmosphere, which the masses gratefully inhaled by the lungful. Eyes dilated and neurocorticals went haywire as instruments made music, sounds in audible and inaudible wavelengths turning into colours and smells and tastes.
The revelations of divine ecstasy woke the Corsicoptics up from the stupor of poverty and deprivation, sacramental substances overrode dataspheric synth-stimuli, the communion cocktails formulated to transcend the barriers between the myriad species of thinking beings, overcharging their empathic capacities, their pheromone receptors, their most fundamental faculties, not only sending them into astral heights, but also enabling them to simultaneously convey, perceive and absorb sensations from those around them – thoughts and emotions unsaid, even unknown to those who bore them - a resonance cascade of primal thoughts and feelings no digital medium could transmit, tuned and unified by the rhapsody of reptiles, the hymns of forked tongues. The lizards sang the most beautiful song in the world.
It was the custom of the Zigonians in their meta-cultural syncretism. Upon encountering humanity in the ages of obscurity, the bohemian reptiloids absorbed the symbols of what was then their latest curiosity, incorporating the most interesting aspects into their carefree ways and retaining these after so many centuries, so that the last church of the forgotten and man-forsaken paleochrist belonged to the apostles of Zigon.
The Corsicoptics danced to the lizard prayer-hymns, bodies swaying and writhing in strange synchrony. The Sauropod Altar of the Pontifex lowered its neck, allowing a conga line of supplicants to walk up and receive the nectar-drink and moth wing-wafers offered by his holiness. The lucky chosen would be taken off-world to have new and better lives as disciples of the reptilian carnival, their only mandates being to free their minds however they could.
“We have to go to the communion,” 3Raye said. “Then we plead sanctuary, have them take us with them to the stars!”
“But I’m not much of a religious person.” Errand protested.
“Stop fucking around,” 3Raye snapped back. “The mass counts as sovereign Zigonian territory, it’s our only hope!”
So Errand made his way, pushing and elbowing past the revelers and approaching the sauropod at a slow pace. He rerouted his bloodstream through his placental filters to protect himself from the incense. Arash also seemed immune to it too, as he watched their rear astutely.
“We have hostiles zeroing in,” the Sardican’s voice was somehow audible over the singing and chanting. “At your six.”
Errand looked back and saw a group of nondescript and all too normal-seeming people closing in on them deliberately, plainclothes agents unaffected by the psychadelics.
“Fuck!” he cursed. These were even worse than power armoured combat replicants, infiltrator models designed to operate undercover and bereft of external armour ad weaponry, with everything they needed discreetly grafted inside their bodies. The weaponized equivalents to Errand’s gimmick.
“You better hurry.” Arash reached into his satchel.
Realizing that they had been detected, the infiltrators gave up the charade and revealed their true forms. They shivered as biomechanical cannons burst out of their torsos, while razor blades slid out from fingers and toes, and the musculoskeletal arrangements of their limbs distorted themselves in defiance of human anatomy, assuming more efficient configurations. Their chest-guns fired, launching serrated spines towards their targets.
Errand threw himself to the ground while Arash grabbed a bystander and used him as a very short-lived human shield. Innocent prayer-partiers were caught in the crossfire and ripped to shreds.
The chanting stopped. The screaming started.
The Sardican threw a snitch, which darted to the formation of abominations and detonated into a cloud of aerosol magnesium. The AMAG instantaneously ignited upon exposure to air, and the things caught in the ensuing blaze made inhuman screams of pain as their flesh began to boil. However, they refused to die, as the subdermal armour weaved over their musculoskeletal systems and vital organs proved resilient to the fire. The burning men continued to advance.
“Run!” Arash shouted as he opened fire with his submachine gun. “Get to the brontosaurus!”
Errand did as he was told. The crowds were now panicking and running and screaming and some of them were also dying. The sauropods were turning back to the gates of the spaceport.
“No!” 3Raye cried. Errand ran.
Others had the same idea, desperate Corsicoptics still wishing to be spared from the ensuing carnage and taken off-world by the benevolent lizards. Errand kicked and shoved them off his path, weaved past them, used their devout bodies for meatshields from the biomechanical gunfire.
A sick and wet gurgling sound came from behind him as a half-melted infiltrator bisected a bystander who got in its way. Errand drew his pistol but before he could fire, and before the abomination could act, a jagged blade dug into its throat and separated its head from its body.
A Zigonian monk pulled back his halberd-rifle and pronounced something in its alien tongue, which Errand’s wetware quickly translated and subtitled:
<You must flee to safety, human!>
Then the lizard ran off to keep the peace even as more gunfire erupted in the distance.
Errand continued his run. The brontosaurus was already close by. There was still a chance –
A serrated spike buried itself in his left shoulder blade while two more sliced through both his legs. He buckled and fell. Synthendocrinal glands pumped painkillers, coagulants and clotting factors while the blood vessels around his wounds automatically constricted to staunch the bleeding. He rolled on his back and fired his pistol.
Subdermal armour absorbed the first two rounds while the third pulverized an eye and sent bone fragments spraying into the air. The abomination sneered with its ruined face and spat corrosive venom at Errand.
He raised his arm to shield himself and the spray caught his hand. His sidearm fell, and he watched with morbid fascination as his digits dissolved, flesh sloughing off and exposing the underlying phalanges, carpals, and metacarpals, which were subsequently reduced to viscous slime.
The narcotics in Errand’s bloodstream made the process as painless as posthumanly possible.
His soon to be killer wagged a finger at him, and with its other hand it picked him up by the throat. A narrow blade slid out of the taunting finger and the bio-assassin slid it across his belly in an act of casual evisceration. 3Raye’s head protruded from the gash, and it picked her up by her hair.
It dropped Errand to the ground, and its weaponized chest cavity opened, revealing the pulsating organs within while the parting ribs extended outwards like skeletal fingers, spider legs reaching for 3Raye’s head.
The bladed finger moved towards the umbilicals connecting her to Errand, preparing to sever their bond.
There was nothing he could do.
“Lady Xielweiss,” it hissed to 3Raye. “It’s time for you to go home.”
She met its cycloptic gaze and whispered:
“No.”
<Errand close your eyes.>
A brilliant light came from her eyes with all the intensity of a screaming sun, blinding, searing streams of photons arranged in brain-scrambling geometries, the weaponized cognomemetics of her neuromantic defence systems made manifest, flowing from her mind and engulfing everything she saw in its hellish radiance. Those caught in the periphery were reduced to convulsing, mouth-frothing messes twitching on the ground, while the biomechanical killform before her gaze withered and collapsed to its knees as its mind was overwhelmed by the brunt of the holo-mentallic assault.
Sensing complete systems compromise, its autonomic functions released mortuary enzymes – a failsafe feature that induced rapid necrosis throughout its physiology. Its eye oozed out of its sockets, while flesh melted like candle wax and organs shrivelled into dust, leaving behind an armoured skeleton in a steaming puddle.
Errand opened his eyes and crawled towards 3Raye. He cradled her head with his remaining hand, their bond was still intact, the umbilical lines still whole, albeit spilled out all over the earth and pulsating in the rhythm of Errand’s rapid heartbeat.
GLOSSARY
The papal starship exited Corsico Cinco’s atmosphere like a flying fish darting from the sea, sail-wings spread wide and radiating contragravtic waves to escape the planet’s pull. It soared into the endless aether, gracefully pirouetting as its engines left behind a contrail of charged particles in its wake.
The pilgrimage ark of Zigonia was waiting for it. One of many such vessels, built to remind the travellers of their ancient home and their heritage while carrying them across the stars on a mission to spread the message of their people and learn from the ways of others. The central hull was a monolithic column of ancient bark engraved with calligraphies writ by artisan monks over the generations, a trunk that branched out into a dozen limbs which themselves forked and parted like arteries and capillaries, spanning miles and terminating in crystalline leaves that siphoned cosmic energies to sustain the ark in its travels.
A glass portal opened for the smaller starship, which retracted its wings and disappeared inside the cavernous interiors of the much greater ark. After landing, its prow opened and a ramp slid out of it like a metallic tongue. Sauropods marched out from the vessel along with disembarking passengers, composed of missionaries and the few converts they managed to accept. The Reptilicus Pontifex came down from his brontosaurus-borne pagoda and was about to mingle with the newest members of his congregation when his faithful steed moaned in distress.
Twenty tons of upset sauropod was nothing to dismiss, and the prelate and his retinue were quick to calm the creature. A grumbling sound came from its enormous abdomen, which the Zigonians followed. It intensified as it made its way to the reptile’s rear.
They promptly dilated as the sauropod’s sphincter dilated and deposited several wet lumps. The pontiff made a holy sign on his snout and chest, which the others promptly followed, as they beheld the leavings, each roughly the size of a person.
Because each lump was a person.
“Uuuullluuueeeerrrrrggghhhhh!!!!” Errand heaved and hurled while the ever impassive Arash helped him to his feet. Covered with residue as they were, the Sardican could not keep his grip and the smuggler stumbled forward towards the gobsmacked onlookers.
3Raye fell out of Errand’s abdominal gash and he struggled to catch her. He fell on his knees but managed to prevent her from smashing to the floor. He raised her to face the Zigonian padres.
“Bless me father for I have sinned!” 3Raye cried.
“We plead sanctuary!” Errand added.
The Reptilicus Pontifex was at a loss of words. An aide came to him bearing a censer and he huffed the psychedelic fumes gratefully. He turned to the humans, his slit-eyes dilating, and the very cosmos themselves told him what to do.
He spread his arms wide and embraced the humans before him.
“<Welcome my children!>” he declared. “<O yea of little faith, the divine has guided you to the safety and tranquillity of our humble ark. Come, we must treat your wounds and then show you the hospitality of our people.>”
Errand breathed a sigh of relief. Incense flowed inside his lungs, into his bronchioles and alveoli, and then into his bloodstream. In his weakened state, he could not filter the substances, and it affected 3Raye just as well.
The retinue gathered and helped the injured fugitives up to their feet. As they were guided deeper into the bowels of the ark, they passed by a stained glass window displaying the orb that was Corsico in its frame. It was a little thing in a backdrop of infinite stars.
“I can’t believe it worked,” he said as he paused to admire the sight. "That crazy, stupid plan of yours."
“We made it,” 3Raye laughed. “It’s over.”
They had left the stifling conformity and numbness of their world behind them, and before them were the limitless possibilities of an entire universe just waiting to be explored.
“<No, my children,>” the Reptilicus Pontifex tutted and then spoke in their own language, “It has only just begun.”
The next few control checkpoints received similar treatment. Soon Wehrmacht troops on motorbikes and jeeps were in hot pursuit and men shouted orders into radios, no doubt calling for roadblocks to prevent the madmen from escaping. As if the duo had any plans for escape. Above, Litchenfeld stood tall, the Shroud of Turin flapping behind him in the wind. He started to display his hindquarters at their pursuers in an insulting manner, then stopped, turned and reached for his belt as he realized he had something far more Jewish on the other side. A moment later his circumcised penis was revealed in all its fully erect Hebrew glory. Litchenfeld crossed his arms and roared with laughter as the car began a tight turn.
“SHABBATH SHALOM, MOTHERFUCKERS!” he cried as he vanished from their sight.
Soon a massive building loomed ahead. Lenin smiled at the familiar sight as he remembered reading about how the Nazis had accused the communists of setting the Reichstag ablaze. Time to make their lies a reality. He waved a fist out the window.
“I’M BACK!” Lenin shouted.
As the car rushed headlong towards the National Congress Litchenfeld cocked his fist as he summoned his internal energies. Just before they collided he leapt down onto the hood of the car and slammed his fist into the outer wall of the building. The entire edifice leapt off its foundations and went flying dozens of feet back to land in a shattered heap. The car exploded and Litchenfeld backflipped up and over the fireball to face the gawking Nazi soldiers gathered behind. He glared at them, the mark of Abraham’s pact still clearly visible. Behind them a red sun flared from amid the wreckage and Lenin came walked out of the flames, completely unharmed. A golden Star of David appeared superimposed upon the red sun, and the titanic image of a majestic man with long hair blazed into existence around Litchenfeld.
“THE BLOOD OF MY PEOPLE RESTS HEAVY UPON MY SOUL!” Litchenfeld boomed. “MY FISTS CRY OUT FOR JUSTICE TO BE TOLD!” he continued as he pulled his pants back up and struck a combat ready pose.
The Nazis, for their part, looked somewhat intimidated.
)
