Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Page 6

  Gia leaned into him. Even her breath smelled like blood. Her eyes were gleaming black in the shadows. “Show you belong to something. Show me you’re a Seeker.”

  She stepped back, her arm stretched out, half-beckon, half-command.

  Gun in hand, Luc stood over Mahir. The old man might as well have been at the bottom of a well.

  Mahir said with a grim smile, “The Fates will forgive you, my friend.”

  It happened fast, then slow, in the space between heartbeats. Luc swung the pulse gun up in a simple arc. Jadoh’s expression, burned as it was, contorted with hideous surprise. His eyes widened. Then a white-orange flare and half his face was gone.

  Gia screamed. It was full of rage and pain and cheated triumph. She tackled Luc mid-waist before he could turn. The pulse gun cartwheeled away into the night.

  The ground rushed up to meet their bodies. Dust invaded his mouth, his eyes. She moved with incredible speed, pinning him down. He shifted, tried to buck her off. Her response was a frenzy of strikes at his face, his throat before he could block. Her fingernails gouged into his neck, his chest. He gasped at the burning, slicing pain as her teeth sank into his skin.

  She’ll kill me like this. With her hands and teeth.

  At last, he rocked free and climbed to his knees. On all fours, she snarled at him. If there were ever reason in her, he could not see it now.

  Behind her, Mahir staggered to his feet.

  Run! Luc tried to yell. All that came out was a winded grunt. Gia’s strike to his throat had stolen his voice.

  She charged him again, her small body like a missile. The air rushed from his wounded lungs as he landed under her again. He gulped in one greedy breath, and her forearm pinned his neck. His lungs burned with need. She’d learned from the first time and was impossible to throw off now.

  His vision telescoped, dimming at the edges. Over her shoulder Balish appeared, seeming a thousand feet tall. The boy’s face was a pale smudge in the waning light.

  Something flashed once. Gia’s mouth formed a surprised O. Her eyes blazed at Luc, filled with betrayal and fury. With a wet sigh, she flopped to the dust.

  Balish looked from Gia’s body to Luc. For a moment, his expression appeared a perfect mimic of Gia’s surprised expression. But he brought the pulse gun up. The hand that trained it on Luc trembled. Luc pushed up on one elbow. The air wheezed in and out of his assaulted throat.

  “You’re Regime,” Balish said. It was condemnation. There was no room for anything else in it.

  “Was,” he gasped through a throat on fire. “I was.”

  “And now?”

  Luc took his time. He climbed to his knees and sat back on his heels. His voice was a hoarse croak. “Now I’m just Luc.”

  It hung in the blood-soaked air.

  Balish lowered the pulse gun, allowed it to slip from his grip. It plopped to the ground with a soft thud. Luc was aware the night had lost its firmness. The long shadows of the courtyard had turned purple. Dawn was not long off. Then the glaring, white-hot suns would rise to show the evidence of the night’s bloody acts.

  Mahir shuffled up, leaning at a gravity-defying angle. Even in his injured state, the old man attempted to help Luc to his feet. Balish, after a long hesitation, joined him.

  The three huddled together in the purpling light of the courtyard, discarded props from some wretched play.

  “Will they send more?” Balish asked, staring down at Gia’s still body.

  “I don’t know.” Luc turned away. For a long moment, he considered the vast desert at the fringe of the city below and the dim gray mountains beyond that. There were dozens of nameless canyons and half-remembered trails.

  It would be easy to hide two shallow graves somewhere out there, a simple thing.

  ~FIN~

  A Simple Thing takes place in the Allies and Enemies Universe. The first book in the series, Fallen, is a 2016 Dragon Award Finalist for Best Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Novel.

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  NOTE TO SELF

  A SHORT STORY

  By Joseph Lallo

  ABOUT NOTE TO SELF

  Justin prides himself on his planning. Little does he know, a mysterious woman named Ruby has been making plans of her own. Now he has to ask himself just how long-term his plans should be.

  NOTE TO SELF

  There never seems to be enough time. Justin prided himself in his planning. Since childhood, he was the one doing his homework on Friday to have the weekend free. All through college, he was the one taking travel time into account when putting together his schedule. It got him some sideways glances from his friends when he pulled up the campus map while selecting courses, but come the middle of the semester, they were the ones showing up out of breath and five minutes late. Yet somehow, despite tracing out his route and triple-checking traffic, he was still running late for the third of five job interviews he’d lined up for spring break.

  “Let me see,” he muttered, checking his watch for the seventh time in as many minutes. “Appointment’s at three-thirty. Figure five minutes to find the right office. Bus runs every twenty minutes. If it’s on time, that gives me… maybe three minutes to get to the stop.”

  He glanced up at the gray clouds overhead. Despite the sunny forecast, the skies were threatening to open up at any moment.

  “Great. This is just great. I’m going to get there ten minutes late and soaking wet.” He fished for his phone. “Maybe the subway will be faster at this time of day.”

  His thumb traced its way through a practiced set of sub-menus and popped up the navigation app. He danced through the various options, seeking that mythic combination of mass transit and walking that would shave an extra three minutes off his journey. A lifetime of smart phone usage had trained him to navigate with his peripheral vision, and it paid off when he narrowly avoided crashing into someone who stepped directly into his path.

  “Whoa, sorry, didn’t see you there,” he said, stopping short.

  The person he’d nearly run into was a woman of early middle age. It was difficult to nail down her heritage at a glance. Her complexion was swarthy, possibly of Indian origin, but there was something off about her. It may have been her outfit, which had the bizarre combination of bearing a half-dozen still-dangling price tags while nevertheless being secondhand at best. The ensemble also had an alarming bit of style clash, in that her top was a semi-formal blouse that she’d chosen to pair with faded blue leggings. The greatest clash of all, though, was her face, which was an impenetrable mask of perfect confidence. She looked him square in the eyes with her penetrating gaze and smiled.

  “Ah. Just the man I’ve been looking for,” she said in a posh British accent. “I was afraid I’d missed you.”

  “I think you’ve got me confused with someone else, ma’am,” Justin said.

  The oddball appearance and narrowly avoided impact had only been able to displace his punctuality-based concerns for a moment. Already his brain was eagerly replacing his brief pondering of her fashion sense in favor of the cost–benefit analysis of giving up and giving a ride-sharing app a try. He tried to sidle around her, but she stepped into his path again.

  “Oh, no. You are most certainly that man I’ve been after,” she said. “I wonder if I could have just a moment of your time. We’ve got something that needs to be discussed.”

  “Ma’am, honestly, any other day, but I’m really running out of time.”

  “I assure you, Justin, you’ll be interested in what I have to say.”

  “I’m really… Wait…” Hearing his name spoken by a stranger was enough to sideline his travel anxiety again. “Do I know you?”

  “Not yet.”

  She glanced at her wrist, where a watch would be if she were wearing one. He began to ask another question, but she silenced him with a raised finger.

  “
I’m sorry,” she said, “but the timing is crucial.”

  “Timing for what?”

  “Two short honks, one long, and a skid.”

  “Yeah, I have to go…”

  He stepped out into the street to get around her, then hastily stepped back as a car he’d not noticed nearly clipped him. It beeped three times, in precisely the cadence she’d described, then swerved with a light squeal of its tires.

  “That was… weird,” he said.

  “No, it happens 98% of the time.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “There’s a very nice cafe right around the corner, Justin. Private seating, disinterested staff. Let’s have a nice cup of coffee and discuss it.”

  He tried to make sense of what was happening, but his brain was juggling the looming travel deadline, the unexplained prescience, and the unlikely but distinct possibility that she was flirting with him—it didn’t leave much room for critical thinking. Eventually his default anxiety won out.

  “Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go.”

  “I understand. Watch out for the woman in the red hat. Though tea stains don’t show much.”

  He turned to her to somewhat more forcefully bid her adieu, but in doing so he ended up bumping into someone and feeling a hot splash of liquid down the arm of his suit jacket.

  “Aw, come on! Perfect! Thanks a lot…” He looked to the woman he’d bumped into. “Lady…”

  Sure enough, it was a woman with a bright red baseball cap.

  “Hey, you’re the one who isn’t watching where he’s going!” she snapped, brushing away the collateral damage of the spill that had otherwise ended up exclusively on his sleeve.

  In another situation, he probably would have had a much more heated exchange with the person who had, at this point, doomed him to not only being late for his job interview but looking like a slob. As it was, he had other things on his mind. He turned to the mysterious woman, who was leaning contentedly on a wall, a knowing smile on her face.

  “Care for that cup of coffee now?” she said.

  “Look, I don’t know what kind of stupid prank show this is, but whoever’s producing it had better have a good lawyer, because I’m a busy man with a bright future and your hijinks are seriously screwing up my day.”

  “You are so very right, sir. A very busy man, with a very bright future. That sharp, analytical view of the world, so wonderfully skeptical and cynical, is just what’s called for. To be frank, it was a long shot imagining you’d say yes without a bit more convincing.”

  “Convincing of what? Don’t you need me to sign a release or something to use this footage? Where’s the camera?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is a camera, Justin.” She pointed over his shoulder to a prominent white security camera. “I have reviewed the footage over two thousand times. I know this little corner of this little street better than I know my own son.”

  “Reviewed footage of what?”

  “Of you, doing all of this.”

  “I’ve never been here before.”

  “Nope, and nor will you be here again, which is why it was crucial I meet you right now.”

  He gritted his teeth. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, and I still don’t believe a word of it.”

  “Of course not. Eighty-eight percent of the time it takes the bird to finally change your mind,” she said, subtly glancing at her wrist again.

  “What bird?”

  She kept her eyes on her wrist, but raised a finger to the second-story window across the street.

  “Three, two, one.”

  Justin watched as a pigeon, that had been gliding overhead mistook the clear glass for an open window and thumped headlong into the pane. It fluttered to the ground, shook itself off, and fluttered away. He looked to the mysterious woman, who had crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows expectantly.

  “Fine,” he said. “Let’s get that coffee.”

  The woman hadn’t been joking about the disinterested staff at the cafe. After finding a booth tucked away in the back of the establishment, the wait staff wandered off and entirely neglected them in favor of a phone call, a college basketball game on the TV, and some manner of color-matching game respectively.

  “Where shall we begin?” she said.

  “How about a name?”

  “I can’t give you a real name, you understand, so we’ll go with Ruby Tuesday.”

  “Like the song?”

  “And the restaurant, if my research is correct.”

  “Why that name?”

  “There is a glorious cover of it that became rather popular in my time.”

  “Okay, fine. Out with it, Ruby. What’s this about?” Justin demanded.

  “Very direct. I appreciate that. I shall be equally candid. I have a small task I need you to perform, but one that will have profound and wondrous consequences.”

  “Yeah? And you thought the best way to convince me to perform this task was to simultaneously ruin my day, cripple my employment opportunities, and stain my jacket?”

  “You’d be surprised how little flexibility I had. If it’s any consolation, if I’d not said anything you would have stumbled over the curb and gotten an oil stain on your jacket regardless.”

  “Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and pretend you actually know this stuff. How do you know this stuff?”

  “Let me answer that question with a question—”

  “No. Don’t. Answer it with an answer.”

  “Very well. Though this would go a good deal more smoothly if you’d let me ease into it. To put as fine a point on it as possible, I’m from the future.”

  “Okay, well, nice talking to you.” He started to slide from the booth.

  “Oh, come now, Justin. You’ve already missed your interview. Your day is shot. What have you got to lose from hearing me out?”

  “I’d really rather not find out what else I’ve got to lose, ma’am, but sitting in a booth with a crazy person is a great way to make a bad life choice.”

  She smiled warmly and adopted a calm, soothing tone. “Justin, please. Take a seat. Listen to what I have to say. What damage there is to be done has already been done. If you walk out the door now, you’ve got a day of feeling frustrated ahead of you and not much else. If you hear me out, you’ll at least have a fun story about this loony lady who swore she was from the future and insisted you were oh-so-important to the future of the human race.”

  He sighed and slid back.

  “You’ve got until they actually deliver my coffee.”

  “Ah, lovely. Loads of time then.”

  She turned her wrist upward and twiddled her fingers over it in a subtle but clearly practiced manner.

  “By now you’ll have seen enough time travel movies that I can’t share an overabundance of information with you, but there are a handful of things that we’ve determined are suitably harmless. The broad strokes of the immediate future are roughly as the technologists of your time predicted. Some amount of time, let’s say X years from now, the singularity occurs… Refresh my memory, has ‘singularity’ entered the common vernacular, in its computational context?”

  “Uh…”

  “Bah, no matter. The singularity is the point at which computers match the complexity of the human brain, and from thereafter exponentially surpass it. The good news is, all the oogie-boogie stories about artificial intelligences wiping out humanity were taken to heart, and oodles of safeguards are put into place. Barring a few notable exceptions, computers behave themselves.”

  “What kind of exceptions?”

  “Mostly it’s semantic, if you ask me. Computerized match-making has been accused of guiding human evolution to make us more computer-dependent. There were a few… let’s call them ‘insurrections’ that had to be put down. Nothing you or your children will need to worry about.”

  “What about my grandchildren?”

  “Try not to pry too much, Justin. I’m on
a rather short leash. All things considered, rest assured that humanity has it handled with regard to maintaining its place in the technological hierarchy. That’s not why I’m here. The primary side effect of effectively limitless processing potential is the reason for my visit. Humanity has divided itself into so many ages, each defined by its tools. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. Right now, you fancy yourselves to be living in the ‘information age.’ We’ve got our own name for it, but that’s neither here nor there. The era I call home is being referred to as the Simulation Age.”

  “Simulation.”

  “Yes, Justin.”

  “We have simulation now.”

  “Of course you do. Simulation has existed since the development of higher order invertebrates, and the ascendancy of humanity is owed almost entirely to our grasp of pattern recognition and our mastery of cause and effect. Anyone who has led anything exceeding the most regrettable of lives has done so thanks entirely to the very effective practice of thinking things through. A properly functioning human brain can simulate their reality at least as far as the immediate consequences of their actions. That’s not overly impressive, but it’s enough to keep us from plunging our hands into boiling water or wandering out into the path of a speeding mag-trans.”

  “Mag-trans?”

  She twiddled her fingers and glanced down. “…Bus. So our built-in simulation is jolly well enough for our needs. In my era, the average school child has access to computers capable of simulating systems on a global scale down to the molecular level. Research institutions can simulate global systems down to the sub-atomic level, or whole star systems at the molecular level.”

  “So, what? In theory, you could create something like the Matrix?”

  “The Matrix…” she said, eyes darting aside for a moment. Her fingers twiddled a bit more. “Half a tick… Early twenty-first century. Pop culture… The Matrix… Film, synopsis… Ah! Yes, a simulated realty in which the residents are unaware of its artificial nature. Ha! In theory could we make that? Forget theory, we’ve got that in practice. I think… are To-ma-go-chis an era-appropriate reference?”