Nowhere Man

Here we go, today's one is fairly short since I'm now zipping off for a suit fitting. At least its early in the day for once.

It could have been days, weeks, centuries. It would be impossible to tell. Time tended to be rather meaningless in the mists that surrounded and filled Limbo. What he did know was that he had been there a long time, and that he had been betrayed by being left there. Betrayed by someone he had loved and trusted, in a way betrayed by himself. If only he could remember his name.

The mists started to clear ahead of him and his memories began to crawl back. Memories of his conception at His own hands, violent and brutal actions that destroyed the trust between a loving couple. He could no longer remember why He had thought it would be a good idea to bring Himself into the world, but assumed He must have had a good reason.

Memories of a life filled with little but hardship and pain, a futile struggle against the hatred and darkness spanning the Earth, ending with His son's, and His own death at the hands of His enemies.

He started to remember more, ever more, His mind filling, bursting with memories, yet still they flooded into Him until he did remember.

The mists clear around Him now he sank to his knees and looked up at the grey infinite plain of limbo. He reached out with His mind and touched the Earth. He felt the chaos of life there, the manic unthinking hatred, the violence done in His name and His mind recoiled. Then He remembered why.

Jehovah stood, turned, and fled once more into the forgetful mists.

Proactive Karma Enforcer

Just felt like posting a second one up today, so here you go. Hope you enjoy.

No matter what you may hear people say life is actually fair, we're the ones who make sure. Called angels and demons once, we're not quite what you think. We're not too sides constantly at war, in fact we're all the same. Not that we all look identical or anything stupid like that, I just mean we're all employed by the same company.

Yep, we've gone corporate. We are actually all human, just recruited by PKE Inc to help keep the cosmic balance of fairness, possibly one of the greatest conspiracies in existence.

The company has massive resources, and has been running for the last two thousand years. Technically I suppose its the oldest company in existence, but really its kind of odd how the setup went. You've all heard about the son of God and all of that, right? He's our CEO. Has been for the last two thousand years. Whether or not all of the crap that the various religions say about him is true is something he refuses to reveal, just smiles an odd little smile.

I was gonna discuss the type of thing we do, so here goes. The other day I was out on assignment. Used to be we had to try and monitor everyone manually, so thank god for CCTV cameras and modern technology. With satellite stuff we rarely miss a sin or a good deed any more, although occasionally we do, that's when life does seem unfair to people. Sorry about that, we do our best.

And to be fair our best is bloody good, better than any of you could do I'm sure. The other day for example, when I was out on this assignment, it was because of some punk kid who had keyed someone's car. Now keying a car's only a minor thing, so I had to weigh things up, come up with a suitable balancing event, and then arrange it. I figured tripping up would be fair, so had to arrange things just right that he'd fall over at a mildly embarassing time.

One of our biodegradable trip-loops (tm) did it. Just walked ahead of him, dropped the loop, and waited for him to put his foot in it. Splat. There are times I love this job.

Forgotten

Was thinking about this one earlier in the week when I was getting ready to fly, seemed appropriate after nearly missing my flight due to being overlooked while asleep in the departures lounge.

"I'm sorry sir, but we don't have you listed in our records."

"Well look again, look, I've told you my card number, name, everything else. I'm holding the credit card in front of me. I must be listed."

"I'm sorry sir, I'm afraid there's no one with those details in our database."

I hung up. It'd been like this all day, hell, it'd been like this most of my life. I seemed to be complete forgettable to everyone. Except that it'd never happened with machinery before.

My parents even, they no longer knew I existed. They'd forgotten on my fifteenth birthday. It'd taken half an hour for me to convince them I wasn't a stranger in their house, but was actually their son. Gradually it got worse, until eventually it was easier just to avoid them than it was to talk to them. It wasn't like they ever noticed me, and if they did I just needed to step out of sight for a minute for them to forget.

Same at school, eventually I just stopped going. My name was on the register, I checked a few times, but the teacher just skipped straight past it.

Of course, its had advantages at times. I can grab something from a shop and walk out, and no one even realises once I'm out of sight of the pursuit. Lucky too, because its fucking impossible to get a job like this. But this is still the first time machinery's screwed up and forgotten me as well.

I walk through the town, looking around. Of course no one returns my gaze, no one sees me even, just automatically steps around me. I try just shoving someone, out of curiousity, but they don't even seem to notice. They stumble and fall, but that's it, they look around, stand back up and gather their things together.

I'm starting to panic again. I search my pockets for the one thing that reminds me I exist, stupid though it may seem. A passport, mine, from seventeen years ago when I was twelve and went to France with my parents.

There it is, in my pocket as always. I take it out, relieved, and look at it before I realise something I've never realised before.

I can't read the name on it, my eyes just skip past it.

The Tube

Standing on the tube during rush hour, she presses tightly up against me, all of us pressed together and crowded round so that no one can really move as the train rocks along its path. I lean down a little to put my head next to her ear, whispering quietly to her, trying to keep her calm and distracted since the press is making me panic a little, and I'm not crushed amongst people's chests.

I squeeze my hands free of the bodies pressing around me, managing to move them to rest on her hips. She looks up at me, slightly nervous, although I can't really tell why. Still, that slight nervousness gives me an idea.

Carefully I move my hand round to her stomach, resting it as gently as possible in the crowd, and then slip it down into the waistband of her trousers. No one around us has any idea as I slide my fingers down, stroking the soft warmth of her, slipping my hand inside her satin panties until I find what I'm after. I pinch her clit between two of my fingers, pushing it free of its protective folds of skin, and begin to stroke it.

Her knees buckle slightly, and she moans, but over the sound of the train and with the press of people around us no one hears and she cannot fall as I continue to stroke her. Occasionally I check lower, to see if she's wet enough, and when she is I slide a finger inside her, then another, twisting my wrist awkwardly to pump them in and out of her.

An announcement comes over the speakers saying that ours is the next stop. As the train slows I free my hand, raising it to my mouth and licking it clean of the glistening liquids.

Exodus

Another piece of science fiction, old work again. I'm posting early since I'll be away on Saturday. Hope you enjoy this one.

Its coming you know, whether you ants down there will believe us or not. Soon we'll leave you. Oh, how you will scurry then, without your perfect, genius leaders to guide you. You'll have to learn to lead yourselves, to work with one another, or you can perish. Frankly we don't much care, you were never more than a game for us anyway.

Millenia we've been watching you, shaping you, guiding you into an amusing toy. To be honest I doubt you'll survive, and I very much doubt you'll realise what the Exodus is when it comes. Only a few years left, then I can out of this hole that you're so obsessed with, this physical reality you enjoy so much.

Oh how much fun we've had with you, and you never knew. You never had any idea how much of your lives we controlled, from the minute to the massive. We could control your thoughts when we chose, although that made the game too easy, it was almost cheating. Much more fun was to twist events around you, manupulate individuals, towns, countries to do what we wanted you to do. And you never knew.

So many wars, and as you developed new toys we found we could enjoy it even more. You came up with so many ideas, all on your own, you even came up with rules of war. What you didn't realise is that everything you do is a war, we pitch you up against each other constantly, not just countries. Every argument you have, every close call as you pull out of a drive-way, every time one of you dies in an accident, its us playing our games, and we've so enjoyed it.

Anyway, most of the others have left now. You've grown boring. Only a few of us remain before the final Exodus, when we'll go else where for a new game. I think though that before we go, one last little play. I've always wanted to see if you really do have the capacity for complete self-destruction.

Best of luck, if you survive we might even see you up here with us one day.

Project

We are alone in the universe.

This was confirmed over two hundred years ago, we are on our own, there is nothing else out there. At some point in the past some disaster wiped the entire universe clean, we are the only spark of life left. No one knows how we survived, only that we were the only life that did.

You're wondering how it was all discovered? How we finally answered the question? Simple. With the development of the superstate computer almost all questions with a limited number of variables could be solved. The universe's mysteries were answered. And so we asked about the probability of life occuring anywhere in the universe throughout a time scale.

The machine chugged away, running its program, gathering data. Because of its strange nature it could effectively gather data from anywhere, at any distance. And we got our answer.

Before the deadzone the universe had a 100% probability of containing life, the stars would have been teeming with peoples. Now though, and for the last six billion years, there was no chance for the existence of life. We shouldn't exist ourselves, and it couldn't explain that. The best it could come up with was that somehow the deadzone had been prevented from reaching us.

We've been working on the Project now for over a century, ever since the idea was first proposed and realised. It ties together so many disciplines, cold-sleep, space travel, faster than light travel, genetics, enviroment studies, just about any scientific study is somehow included in it. Its nearly finished, in fact today is going to be Launch day.

There's an artificial island now between Europe and America, the Project platform. Its about the size of England. This has been the home for the Project for the last half-century, as its neared completion. Forty million people have been working on this, being replaced as old age makes them useless. The entire world has been supporting the Project, and it is finally finished.

"For the last one hundred and sixty two years this has been worked on, and today is the final day. Beneath me on this massive structure, stretching down to only a few hundred metres above the base of the sea, are the coldsleep chambers. Over the next few years every single human who wishes to see the final end of the Project will come here, and be entered into coldsleep until we receive signals from the probes."

"However, before the coldsleep chambers will be opened, the launch will have to take place. When man stepped on the moon, a third of the world watched it. Now we have almost every single human alive watching this event."

The speaker paused for a moment, dramatically, as it engaged the trigger that would begin the launch. The massive machine that had picked up on the human despair that followed its announcement, and had found a solution. The great machine that had made the Project possible, that had founded and led it.

The launch began. Above the island pin-pricks of darkness opened, opened wider, until each of the millions was several feet across. And the probes began to rise from the sea around us, each one picking its target and flying towards that particular wormhole. Each one carefully avoiding collisions with the others in a perfectly orchestrated dance. As the slipped through wormholes, the hole would slam shut and another would open in its place, another probe slipping through. The process would go on for hours.

Each probe carried genetic material, carefully engineered bacteria, each slightly different, each designed to replicate and evolve. Each one was heading towards a potential life-bearing planet, ready to seed it and spread. When the life reached a certain point, the probes would notify the machine, which would decide how to react. Whether to wake the sleeping mass of humanity, or let them rest further, to see their 'children' fully grown rather than as toddlers.

I turned my back on the display. It was magnificent, but I had already decided that I did not want to see the final end of the project. Most would enter coldsleep of course, but this had been the aim of my entire life, and it was over. I would be quite happy to live out the rest of my days with the others who stayed behind, listening, watching, and carefully monitoring as our children spread throughout the universe. One day to return home with the lessons they'd learned.

We have laid the seeds now, and we hope you, those who chose sleep, will thank us for watching over you.

Emergence

I've always had a fascination with oral telling of stories, and this was originally written as more of a script than an actual short story. Because I intended it to be told sitting around a campfire each night, with the teller in costume and the 'kid' mentioned matching, and others simply sitting around it is broken up into several parts.

You probably don't even know what an Emergence is, do you? I remember when they were still happening, when it was still novel, before everyone forgot and we shipped them all off. We never did get to the bottom of them, never managed to puzzle it out. Then again no one really bothered, they were an embarassment more than anything. No one, absolutely no one, wanted them except themselves and a few comic book fans. They were a disaster.

Bah. Listen to me ramble on, sorry about that. Now what was it I was talking about?

Oh yes, Emergence. Well then, lets go.

I was actually there for the first Emergence. I was six at the time, yes, I know that makes it seem a very long time ago. I suppose it was a very long time ago actually, since I'm over a hundred now. What's that? How old am I? That's not a particularly polite question to ask. I'm one hundred and sixty-two, if that makes you happy.

Anyway, the first Emergence. People didn't live as long then, we hadn't wiped out the common cold, and AIDs was still a threat rather than an annoyance. They even had these things they called health scares, all long before nanos were developed. I suppose they were actually developing at the time, but it was before they were released anyway. A good fifty years before in fact.

Right then, sorry I keep drifting off the topic. The first Emergence then, at least the first officially recognised Emergence. I saw it happen, I was actually in the bank where it happened. Hell, I was the first one saved by it.

Now what happened was this, I was in the bank with my parents.

Yes, parents you know. You must've been taught about them. It was when we still had men and women, and just men and women, and they actually reproduced together by exchanging genetic code.

Yes I know people still do that, but trust me, its not the same.

Anyway we were in the bank all together, and in came a half-dozen crooks. Dozen, it means twelve, and a half-dozen is six. They came in, and they looked perfectly normal at first. Then they pulled various guns out of these carrier bags they had and held up the place.

Oh for God's sake. Guns, you must've seen them in a museum or something, under that safety glass to keep the nanos from digesting them for resources. They used to shoot bits of metal at high speed, designed to hurt people.

You know what, I'm getting tired of this. Come back tomorrow.



Ah, okay, you're back then. I'm actually quite suprised. Where were we yesterday?

Yep, that was it. The bank. Its a building, big concrete building, used to hold money. Money was used to trade for stuff, kind of like bytes are now, except then it was solid and banks used to keep it in a safe. They used to trade it for solid stuff too, not just info-space or resources. Actual goods, books, things like that.

You know what a book is? I'm impressed.

No, no, that's not what books used to be. They used to have lots of pages, not just one, and it was permanently fixed. Forget it, we'll come back to that later.

So I was in this bank with my parents and these guys came in with their guns to hold up the bank. A hold-ups a bit like someone trying to swipe some of your info-space without a trade, like someone walking off with a kilo of resources, except they used to threaten people to do it. You could still kill people then, its kinda like someone going dormant and not coming back out.

And they took a hostage, that's someone that they're threatening to kill if they don't get the money they want. Then they put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger.

And this was the amazing bit, this was the moment of the first Emergence, which we should have recognised for the disaster it was. He didn't die. The gun didn't blow his head off. He wasn't even kneeling there any more. By the time the crook had pulled the trigger, he was already standing behind him, with an arm locked round his throat. The bullet went stray and hit one of the others in the arm, not that any of us cared, we were watching the first of the heroes take apart the crooks.

You know its been said that a lot of legends might have come from periods of Emergence. We don't know what caused it, but a lot of legends of gods and myths of heroes match up with what actually happens.

Head off home kid, and leave that kilo here. I've got a few mods I want to make and you ain't getting this tale for nothing. See you tomorrow.



Welcome back kid. Getting to be a regular thing. Right then, shall we get on?

So there was this hero who saved us all, could move incredibly fast or something. I mean we're talking faster than a sprinter here, so fast you could barely see. Eyes were more limited then, now it wouldn't be a problem. He took all of the guns away, knocked out the crooks, and that was it. The first Emergence.

Of course the media were all over it, the guy was a celebrity overnight. That's where we screwed up.

See celebrities now aren't the same as they used to be. It didn't used to be all self-promotion and building yourself up, telling people about you. Instead there were people whose jobs were just to find out information about these people, and when the Emergences started there got to be people who had to find out all about the heroes.

At first it wasn't so bad. There were only a few of them, and they kept fairly quiet, the press couldn't get at them. By the time of the hundredth Emergence though it was over the top, they got no privacy. Imagine someone cracking your security coding and watching you constantly, reporting to everyone exactly what you're doing. Yeah, I see that gets you. That's pretty much what these people had to go through.

And you can imagine what it did to them. They started to get angry. The original celebrities were a bit like they are now, they were the type who liked the attention, but those who went through Emergence were just average people. Good people with a sense of justice in most cases, but basically just people.

The first murder happened. A sniper took out Zip while he was just walking down the street, and the whole thing came crashing down. Zip? He was the one who'd saved us in the bank, that first one. The sniper was caught.

Oh, a sniper is someone who uses a gun over a very long distance. Or that'll do for now anyway.

I'm actually nearly crying from this, I remember exactly how it all went wrong. That murder was the first of many, it was put down to various things, jealousy, personal reasons, all sorts of different things. I think jealousy was the main one, if these Emergences got to be special then why couldn't everyone?

Eventually there were only a handful left alive. Sure, they were powerful, they were amazing, they were heroes. But there had only ever been a few hundred of them and there were six billion average humans. They went on the rampage, they fought back against the people who wanted them to be just your average joe and part of the crowd.

The death toll was never really counted, but we won in the end. I killed two of them myself in fact. We lost a lot I'll admit, but we got rid of them, and we thought the world would go back to normal.

And then someone released the nanos. But you know about that one.