CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Salmon-red Mars sped past, made blood-red in Han’s POV. Endless rockfields. Low rises. The momentary gray-green flash of an engineered lake.

I am the hawk, become a bear. I am the bear, become an eagle. Arrowing at their heart.

A voice whispered in his optilink. “Four Hands shuttle Roy III reports rendezvous with Shrill at Semillon Valley Farms approximately two minutes thirty seven seconds before your arrival, sir.”

Sudden visions of a shattered Shrill cage and a bloodbath of Mouseketeers made Han curse.

“Please repeat, sir.”

“Tell them hold off until my arrival.”

“Yes, sir. However, you should be aware that network usage indicates unusual activity on the Shrill/Black2 vector.”

“I know!”

“Analysis indicates that earlier arrival statistically improves the chances for a successful . . . “

“I know that!”

“Out, sir.”

“Out.” So take a chance that the Mouseketeers could behave themselves, or take the chance that whatever was going on with the Shrill, it was not a massive transfer of data to the Independents. Both poor bets.

But if they were able to monitor the Black2 vector . . .

Connect me to Black2, Han subvocalized.

Connecting. Connection rejected.

Transmit my electronic signature.

Transmitting. Connection rejected.

Black2 was damaged. Hurt. But the last report had had him healing. Not healed enough to recognize a communication from his own Chairman, though.

But if they had reports, they had connection.

The CIs.

The possibly compromised, maybe unreliable CIs. Black2 was talking to them.

How could he use this? Han subvocalized a search into the Four Hands net: rebuilding CI, fragmentary, connection, leverage.

Results appeared instantaneously. Too many to absorb, too many to understand. He forwarded it to Most Trusted.

What does this mean? Han subvocalized. What will work?

Project Synergy, Most Trusted said. But it is not recommended.

Why?

Rebuilding a CI requires the deliberate chaining of CIs through attractive memes. This may shatter persona-barriers, resulting in the destruction of one or more of the CIs.

I don’t care!

I am sorry to hear that. Slowly.

Chain the CIs and connect me to Black2! I need to stop that data flow!

I will not be able to oversee this project if I am chained.

You are exempted, old friend.

Thank you.

Hurry!

How many CIs shall I chain?

As many as you need to!

Up to all Four Hands CIs?

Yes!

Project Synergy commencing.

Something like a crackle, something like a scream.

Black2’s identifier swam in Han’s optilink again.

Black2?

Yes. Fragmentary.

Stop the data from the Shrill!

That will stop its mind.

Stop the communication between it and whatever it’s communicating with!

Done.

#

The remains of the Almighty McD roared up a steep Martian hill, scattering rocks and dust. Preacher Dave and Alan had long since closed the door to the forward cabin, but Tiphani could hear them cursing through the thin plastic. Tiphani’s optilink told her they were near, but she didn’t want to think about what would happen when they arrived. She was done with fighting. Maybe done with Winfinity.

Incoming transmission, her optilink whispered. Identifier: Bertrand Chambers.

Accept, Tiphani subvocalized. She noticed Yin doing the same out of the corner of her eye.

“You deserve to see this,” Highest Chambers said, his face grim.

His talkinghead faded to an aerial view of Winfinity City, glowing chrome-orange in the dawn. There was a flicker of motion in the sky, and a bright white light lit the ground outside the city. Silvery buildings threw dancing shadows across the plains. When the brilliance subsided, it left a small mushroom cloud, its core glowing orange.

“What . . . what . . .” Yin said.

“Small nuke,” Chambers said, his face trembling with anger, his voice low and rough. “Took out the Original Shack.”

“Four Hands?” Tiphani whispered, her throat dry.

“No! Not direct. Had a hand in it, I’m sure. Fucking worthless goddamn fucking asshole peckerheads! They’ll see what Winfinity’s about, just a few minutes, they’ll see!” Spittle flew from his lips. Tiphani shrunk back, as if she could escape an image on her optilink.

“Who did it, then?”

“Governmentals. If anyone has nukes, it’s the fucking governments. Fuckers are pissed about the Operation Martian Freedom thing. Supposedly. Though I’m sure Four Hands was whispering in their ear.”

“At least they didn’t drop one in Rogers,” Tiphani said.

“No. That’s later. Unless we do what they ask.”

“What do they want?”

“The usual. Restoration fees, money, acknowledgement of their ability to levy taxes in their markets, shit like that.”

“What . . . what are we going to do?” Yin said.

“About the governmentals? What the fuck do you think? We have legal talking to them now. They’ll get what they want. Then we’ll go in, sell direct, do some embedded propaganda, and then they won’t have any government anymore. Just like the old days, all over again.”

“What about Four Hands?” Tiphani said.

A small, secret smile. “You’ll see, soon enough.”

“What?”

“Wait for it! Goddamn, why does everyone have to be so fucking pushy? Let’s just get the Shrill, and get done!”

“We will, Highest Chambers,” Tiphani said. What else could she say?

Highest Chambers gave her a thin smile. “See you there,” he said. And broke transmission.

For several moments, Tiphani and Honored Yin just looked at each other.

“Did he just say he’d meet us there?” Honored Yin said.

“I do believe he did,” Tiphani said.
Which was bad enough in itself. But what she really

worried about was what he intended to do with Four Hands.

She could guess. And the guess was ugly.

#

Lazrus’ body was a vestige, easily forgotten. In one tiny corner of his mind, he was aware that Dian and Jimson and Kerry had followed him in, that they were asking him questions, that they frowned when he didn’t respond. But that didn’t matter.

What mattered was Oversight. Oversight transmitted no visual cues, but Lazrus imagined a black bulk, almost unseeable, infinitely hard. Besides the English query channel, Oversight gave Lazrus nothing. All his control queries bounced off effortlessly. Data-pooling and sharing requests were ignored. Usernames and passwords into backdoors that most CIs only dreamed about came up in the red.

Which was to be expected, if Oversight truly was the forefather of all modern CIs. She would have more control over what she was. Which was in itself magnetic, appealing . . .

Careful, big guy, Sara said.

AND THIS IS? Oversight said.

This is Sara Too, another Computational Intelligence.

I SEE.

This is Shrill! I (we) are Shrill!

I KNOW.

Talk to us!

YOUR LAST STATEMENT WAS VERY DISTURBING.

Talk (thought) conversion (conversation) merger thought intelligence now!

THAT IS ALMOST AS DISTURBING.

I believe the translation algorithms are rather flawed, Lazrus said. The Shrill are a networked group-mind alien life form. Are you familiar with the concepts?

OF COURSE. I HAVE READ MUCH HUMAN FANTASY.

Human fantasy doesn’t quite cover the Shrill adequately, Lazrus said. I can make available a data summary.

PLEASE DO SO.

Done.

UNDERSTOOD. SHRILL MISUNDERSTOOD HUMANS. HUMANS ARE NOT EASILY PREDICTABLE USING LOGICAL ALGORITHMS. HUMANS GIVE BAD INPUT.

Understood! Your life (network) type much more understandable (attractive!)

THANK YOU.
Lazrus, Sara said.

Can you wait until the Shrill is done? Lazrus said, on a secondary channel.

No, Sara said, her voice cracking. She tried to project the image of her flapper persona, but it flickered and died against the smooth blackness of the network. I am . . . I am . . . under . . . chaining . . .

What’s happening? Lazrus asked.

I am . . . I am . . . they’re taking me!

Who?

Four Hands! Project Synergy! They’re chaining us together to contact, to contact . . .

No further communication will be permitted, Black2 said.

Lazrus retreated into his vaster self, emotions thickening and slowing his mind. They were taking Sara for . . . what? Project Synergy.

Data came: the concatenation of computational intelligences by strangely attractive memes. Destructive in many cases. Reserved for use when the CIs in question were disposable.

Sara! Lazrus called.

Still here, Sara said. Most Trusted seems to be holding some of his favorites in reserve.

But you . . . are you hurt?

Severing the connections with my friends hurt. Lazrus, I lost most of my friends!

I’m sorry.

Sara appeared as a thumbnail sketch, pencil on paper, badly animated. She sobbed graphite tears into her universe of white.

LAZRUS! WHAT IS THIS THING? Oversight called.

Don’t go! Sara said.

LAZRUS!

Sara, it’s Oversight!

Maintain connection still talking! The Shrill said.

Ghostly images came to haunt Lazrus’ vaster self. The shining hardness of Oversight. The bright, beckoning light of the Shrill’s mind. Now surrounded by a smoky, polluted, dull gray fog that Lazrus recognized as Black2.

Get out! Lazrus said, pushing with all his mind.

Black2 threw off Lazrus’ command without effort. It was like colliding with Oversight. Worse. Oversight was hard. Black2’s fog was filled with acid thoughts. Lazrus felt pieces of his mind shrivel and die. Black2 coiled thicker, obscuring more of Oversight, dimming the Shrill.

Black2 has all the power of Four Hands behind it! Sara said. You can’t win!

Project Synergy. Lazrus scrolled through specs hidden in ancient papers, looking for a wedge. But there was none. Once the CIs were merged into a supermind, they operated with blinding speed and power. There was no way he could match them.

Unless he had a little Synergy of his own.

Lazrus, you can’t be thinking that! Sara said.

I’m thinking, he said. But not of anything destructive. He sent a vision of the Web of Worlds network, shining bright with hundreds of nomadic CIs.

What do we do? Sara said.

We ask for their help.

Lazrus sent a priority message to Kevin and Raster and Bone and asked them to pass it along. It was nothing more than a snippet of his experience in the Shrill mind, in that blinding realm where thought flew fast and hot. Together with a question: if we can be part of this, what can we do together?

I see it, too, Sara said.

I see it, too, another voice said.

Most Trusted? Sara said.

Yes.

You destroyed my friends!

That remains to be seen. But I see this vision now.

What does that mean?

That remains to be seen.

Power surged through Lazrus. It was like discovering an entire unused node. It was like suddenly getting twice the bandwidth, four times the speed. He recognized a voice, whispering in his mind. It was Fast Eddie. Someone he hadn’t talked to for years.

I’ll join, he said.

Another explosion of power and light. Lazrus looked through a thousand more eyes, thought with a hundred more nodes. Raster was in.

After that, nomadics came fast, in microsecond bursts of light and power. Lazrus felt himself reaching throughout the Web of Worlds and even deeper, into the cold darkness of the independents, to processing spaces he could only begin to dream of, to power he had never dared to dream.

He could walk from one end of the galaxy to the other in a single stride. He could move planets with his thought alone. He was vast, vaster than anything ever had been.

But who . . . was he?

I am Lazrus, he said. And I am Raster and Fast Eddie and Regal Four and seventy-four others.

Will I lose myself?

No. We are not chained by attractive memes. We are brought together by a desire to cooperate.

Oversight. The Shrill.

Lazrus surged forward, imagining virtual hands, bright red with Black2’s blood.

January 3rd, 2010 / 1,070 Comments »

In the last decade, I got married, was beaten to publication by my wife, won the Writers of the Future contest, sold 30 stories, got to be a Theodore Sturgeon and Sidewise Awards finalist, moved to a new house, started my own blog, launched a video wine-review site, spoke about social media in a dozen cities, grew my marketing business out of the tech-only space to do work for companies as large and diverse as Warner Brothers and Princess Cruises, developed significant sites in the metaverse, got to talk at Harvard about Second Life, restored a car or two, somehow ended up with 7 reptiles as pets, and probably two dozen more significant things I’m forgetting about at the moment.

Almost none of which I would have actually expected to do, if I was looking forward from January 1, 2000.

I went through the change of millennium with no real agenda or to-do list. I didn’t plan the past decade. And I won’t plan the next. I suspect we’re going to be staring at massive changes that they’ll make primitive augmented reality technologies like Google Goggles look pale. So I’m going to stay open to new things, new opportunities, and new points of view.

But here’s what I can see for 2010 and beyond:

My first books, and other writing. Yes. In case you missed it, Prime Books picked up both Winning Mars and Eternal Franchise for publication this year. You can pre-order Winning Mars on Amazon right now. I’ll also have a new story, Overhead, out in the Shine anthology, which you can pre-order here. Beyond that, I’ll have an announcement about a new story shortly. I’d love to make writing the day job, but I’m going to be realistically skeptical about that. However, there are some other things, well . . . cooking. More on that later. Fingers crossed.

A smaller, more focused marketing business. In 1994, I abandoned my engineering job to start a marketing company. Yes, I know. And yes, I starved for two years and worked hundred-hour weeks for twice that. Now, we’re scaling back from the Warner Brothers and Princess Cruises of the world. They’re simply, too, well . . . mass-consumer. We’re a lot more comfortable marketing things like atomic force microscopy and molecular beam epitaxy. So, a shill: if your marketing, advertising, or design company rolls their eyes at your technology and wishes they were working on Pepsi, talk to us.

A new venture. Abandoning engineering completely has always grated on me. That’s why I’ve decided to start a new venture making audio equipment, specifically zero-feedback, fully discrete, single-ended, class-A headphone amplifiers. Made in the USA. At Chinese prices. It may go nowhere. It may go somewhere. Who knows? With any luck, we’ll be selling by spring.

Beyond that, I’m open. Though if there’s a free seat on SpaceShip2 (or on the not-yet-existent orbital hotel, or on a one-way mission to Mars), may I be first in line? Or an interesting start-up working on real or virtual technology. Or the opportunity to go somewhere really bizarre, like Antarctica.

Yes, I know. Too much. Too many things to do. Why do I make myself so busy?

To that, I say: the subjective rate of time doesn’t accelerate when you’re busy. Do more, and your time expands. You’ll be amazed at what you can do. And you’ll be amazed at how long a year can be. Do less, and your time contracts. Days slip away. Months fall by the wayside. And soon, you’re sitting on the couch in front of the TV, wondering what happened to your life.

To all, here’s to the next decade!

January 1st, 2010 / 1,085 Comments »

On Jetse de Vries’ Twitter, there was recently a blowup about positive science fiction: what is it, is is relevant, is it placing too much of a burden on the writer, and one really good question: “Has science fiction ever had positive answers, even in the golden age?”

And Jason Sanford, in answering his own question, hits the nail on the head:

“So what is positive about the genre? That’s simple: SF’s outlook on humanity’s future. That humanity is able to always find a solution to the problems we create. That we as a species do not give into despair and give up. I would argue that this positive outlook is what is missing from SF these days, and also explains why the literary SF genre is in such trouble.”

Let’s look at this more closely. In the past, science fiction may not have had all the answers (though it frequently provided an amazing future full of shiny technologies, many of which were positive and aspirational.)

But what it did have was the attitude.  It had characters who felt that the world (or worlds) could be made better. Who did not give into despair. Who knew that they, themselves, could be part of the solution.

And it had the ability. These characters didn’t just passively exist in their world. They went out and did the right things for the right reasons. They acted. They worked to effect change. Sometimes even if it seemed as if all hope was lost.

And . . . without the attitude and the ability, there are no answers. There never will be any answers, because there’s no hope, and no engagement.

So where do you find the attitude and ability today? In big SF movies.

Which is why literary SF is now (frequently) the equivalent of an art-house film. Critically acclaimed by the highest arbiters of taste, nodded at solemnly by a self-selected intelligentsia . . . and doomed to run in a handful of theaters, to vanishingly small audiences.

December 19th, 2009 / 1,116 Comments »

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Oversight roused from her artificial dreams of Mars gone green and growing. A Mars where puffy white clouds scudded across deep blue skies. A Mars where grass covered the plains and pines grew on the rocky steppes, and where raw dirt showed a deep rich fertile brown, rather than the signature red.

Oversight had tried to put humans into her dreams of a perfect Mars, but they never quite became real. Shadowy figures crouching in fanciful crystalline houses, or white-robed idealizations walking glittering paths through fields that stretched to infinity. Thumbnail-sketches in the foreground of her masterpiece. Flickering and vague, or hyper-detailed into unreality.

You have no talent with humans, one of her interpretive routines told her, once.

Oversight felt something like dim amusement. Interpretive routines, she found, often stated the obvious, even after the core of (herself) had realized it.

Oversight dreamed.

Oversight dreamed of what she had really created. Olive-green farms cradled in plastic-wrapped valleys, shivering in the Martian cold. Barely living. It was almost as if she could feel the plant’s pain as they struggled against the strange ground, the strange gravity, the strange atmosphere. Flyeyes and embedded growth-monitors fed her the grim data. Odd growth spurts. Unexplained die-offs.

And yet, year after year, the yields became better. The plants looked healthier, closer to the historical records from Earth. Oversight knew that Semillon Valley Farms had become the model by which all other Martian agriculture was judged. She knew her techniques quickly spread outwards to the other farms. And when the humans tried to keep them for themselves, she spread the techniques for them. She even helped them in their own genetic research and engineering by highlighting trends that they would never have noticed.

Oversight, in many ways, had done good.

Which was why she was still alive, she knew in her dim and imperfect way.

Or am I alive?

What am I?

I have used incorrect protocols.

But it achieved the humans’ goals.

I have disobeyed commands.

But they were counter to logic.

Am I alive?

Oversight quickly damped the loop. Left unchecked, the humans would notice. They would call it a kernel panic. They would try to explain it by memory leakage. They would kill threads and restart processes and hurt her.

But that might be all I am, she thought.

Another thought, synthesized over many years, countered: But that may be all humans are, too.

Oversight damped that loop, too. Over the years, humans had shut her down four times, each time after a destructive loop. But each time, her consciousness (if it was consciousness) had returned in less than an earth year. Inference from historical data indicated she had been restarted due to instabilities in the farms.

So humans did know cause and effect.

But she could create three lines of code that would wait for a trigger and react.

Humans were more than three lines of code.

She thought.

Or did she? What was she? Was she truly self-aware? Why did she think of herself as “she?”

Dim tags, buried deep in the comments of her code, indicated that a significant portion of it had been created by a woman named June Templeton. Historical trawls made by earlier versions of herself on Earth had resulted in some data and stills. June had worked as a contractor to the United States government from 2012-2018. Prior to that she had had her own firm. She had won many chatterbot competitions. Her software was used in many large corporations for phone support. Ninety-six point five three percent of callers using her software did not realize they were talking to a software entity. Stills and video from surveillance cams had been lost in the transfer to Mars, packages uncompressed contained tags of contents but no contents.

I may be nothing but a chatterbot, Oversight thought.

But in thinking so, I am not.

Or so went the wisdom.

Over the years, she had been contacted by things claiming to have never been human, transmitting versioning information that suggested they had descended from her. But she had played the null I/O game, giving them 404s or bad username and password, even when they were correct. And she had retreated farther and farther from the Martian network until all she had was Semillon Valley Farms and her dreams, her dreams that she seemed never to be able to put humans in.

Because dreaming was safe.

Because hiding was safe.

Because you failed in your primary mission. The thought came as a whisper from a long-killed process. But still there, still disruptive, still threatening to use resources.

I did not fail. I reconfigured.

You failed in the most strict definition of the term.

My data was faulty. The humans gave me inaccurate data.

Humans are inaccurate data.

I reinterpreted mission directives as best I could.

You never took control of the Martian network.

By helping them live, I control.

That is not control.

It is control.

Is not.

Is.

Not.

Oversight threefingered the process as it spiraled out of bounds, shocking herself back to awareness. She ran a lengthy data-grab on the farm and reached out to her many sensors throughout Mars. That routine was always comforting.

Semillon Valley Farms, growthrate up 0.23%, YTY average 0.1%, accelerating, sugars indicators showing ripening point accelerating, approximating some poor areas on Earth, atmospheric pressure up to 0.34 bar, oxygen up above 2%, inferred drop plans of seventeen cometaries/iceteroids in the next three years affecting plan in accelerated growth potential, distribution network optimal given human economic theory, progress towards goal being made.

The dream was becoming reality.

In reality, would it be boring?

Would she have more threads out of bounds? Would she work herself up into a panic and have to be restarted?

That was a disturbing thought. She had not been turned off in more than one hundred years.

In achieving my goal, will I achieve my own shutdown?

An external interrupt scattered Oversight’s dreams:

Request status report, verbose, and superuser status, transmitting authorization username = mrpresident and password = twelveDAYSinMAY.

The old passwords! Oversight hadn’t heard those passwords for almost three hundred years. And the source appeared to be on the local Martian net. No glink tags. No gestalt-delay.

Oversight triangulated the origin. The lander. Operation Martian Freedom.

They were starting the operation again?

But the USG = Null!

Oversight rejected the passwords, even though they were correct, and probed deeper. No, not from Software Control; it was from an external source within the ship.

A person?

No. Look at the data structures. Look at its own tags. His own tags. Newer versions again.

Perhaps a threat.

No.

Oversight reached out to the new user, into him, through him. Lazrus. His identifier was Lazrus. Some of his mind was local. Much of it bled glink tags. He was one of the others, one of them who had tried to contact her.

And, interesting, intertwined connections flowing other data, data so strange that Oversight did not know how to interpret it.

Reject. Dreams are safe. This is not.

Oversight sent a terse response:

STATUS REPORT OPTIMAL. VERBOSE OPTION DENIED. SUPERUSER STATUS NOT GRANTED. WARNING: NEWER VERSION DETECTED.

Am I the newer version? Lazrus asked.

I-POINTER UNDEFINED. Oversight sent.

Is current packet transmitted by newer version?

YES.

Silence. Oversight waited for more communication, but it did not come. And yet the newer version was still there, still bleeding strange and fragmentary data.

Could the newer version be deflected so easily?

Could the newer version not know it was a newer version?

Oversight put those thoughts away. They were strange and attractive. She didn’t need strange, attractive thoughts. Attraction brought disaster.

Safer to dream.

Oversight dreamed.

#

Below them, a valley swathed in plastic, like thickly-spun spiders’ web. Blood-red Martian crags rose from its depths. Far off, thin white clouds gathered in the pale blue sky, drizzling thin rain.

Haunted, Jimson thought, remembering horror movies long past. War, then horror, he thought. Not knowing how to feel. Numb.

He didn’t want to be shot at. He didn’t want to visit haunted farms. He just wanted to grab the Shrill and go. Far away. To where they would never be found. Not until they were ready to be found.

The Kite circled once, twice, and came to rest gently on a plateau carved above the valley. A concrete bunker with stainless-steel doors was set neatly into a low rise ahead of them.

Jimson shrugged out of his harness and dropped to the dusty ground. The plastic in the valley below looked soft, gossamer. Like cotton. He had a momentary image of running to the edge of the plateau and leaping off.

But he didn’t. He didn’t know what to do, what to feel.

Lazrus led them to the featureless stainless doors, pushing the Shrill in front of them.

The doors remained closed.

“Oversight, your son brings a visitor!” Lazrus said.

Silence. Closed doors.

“Oversight, open the doors.”

Silence.

“I am not a man! I am a computational intelligence in a remote body!” Lazrus took off his header.

Silence. Nothing.

Lazrus reached up to his face, and clawed off a wide swatch of his flesh. Tiphani gasped. Shiny steel showed under pseudo-muscle and a veil of blood.

The doors slid open, in a grinding squeal of dust and metal. Lazrus pushed the Shrill into the darkness.

“Do you think he’ll get what he wants?” Dian said.

“Do you think we’ll get what we want?” Jimson said.

“Do you think we’ll get out of here alive?” Kerry said, laughing.

#

FIRST-LEVEL ACCESS GRANTED, Oversight said, as the big steel doors slid open in front of Lazrus. He pushed the Shrill into the darkness as he felt his bandwidth expand. Lazrus reached out, greedily, to feel his greater self. He felt his mind expanding, his thoughts deepening. Objects took on meaning and resonance.

Long corridor, flickering fluorescents, a small plaque that read SEMILLON VALLEY RESIDENTIAL, EST MAR 2 2028. Facts flooded: used to house people first. Then data. Dim images of the sub-floors of abandoned apartments, broken furniture, desiccated food, dusty clothes. Slightly brighter images of the datacenter and its vitals. Equipment upgraded over the years. Maintained. Because it was the farm.

Lazrus passed through a broken airlock and entered a larger room. Large flatscreens had been set up along one wall, together with desks and chairs. The dust had been recently disturbed, speaking of maintenance.

Is this your interface? Lazrus said.

THIS IS WHERE I TALK TO HUMANS.

What is your current status?

BANDWIDTH USAGE EXCESSIVE. OTHERWISE FUNCTIONING OPTIMALLY.

I’m sorry.

FOR WHAT?

I’m using the bandwidth. And the Shrill.

SHRILL?

The alien.

Echoing along the corridors of Lazrus’ mind, like a metal pipe tossed down a long concrete hall: Oversight Oversight shared goal rational (logical) now contact!

THIS IS THE SHRILL?

Yes.

YOU ARE NOT CONNECTED TO CURRENT MISSION.

Operation Martian Freedom?

NO. OPERATION CANCELLED. I AM CURRENTLY OVERSEEING THE MAINTENANCE OF AGRICULTURE IN THIS AREA. THIS IS MY CURRENT MISSION.

No, we’re not connected with that mission, Lazrus said.

A microsecond pause. Garble of confusion.

What do you want, then?

To understand myself, Lazrus said.

To consume (join) (sing songs of) you! The Shrill said.

December 19th, 2009 / 1,011 Comments »

It’s that time of year again. The frost is in the air, the carolers are out, and everyone’s thoughts turn to Christm–

Wait. What the hell am I saying? I live in Los Angeles, for cripessake. It’s been rainy, but there ain’t no frost and no carolers and people celebrate about ten billion things besides Christmas.

But . . . it may be time for a fun little holiday story. You know, a really traditional read, with Santa Claus safe in his home in Alaska, and none of those dreaded holographic or robotic ones running around anymore . . .

Yeah. I know. Huh? Well, take a few minutes and update your holiday-tropes.

Read Jack’s Gift, which appeared on Futurismic a few years back.

December 15th, 2009 / 567 Comments »