Monday, December 5, 2005

Untitled
Hey there,

I have finaly edited one of my stories enough to post it on here, I still need to warn all under 15 year olds, there is "strong language and scenes of sexual nature and violence" , if any of that would offend you do NOT read on. And the ones that do read on let me know what you think. Enjoy

PS to Bloodmire, you are a sweetheart and yes you are special and of course I love you my friend! You are also a sarcastic and cheeky chappy but hey I wouldnt have it any other way. I am counting on your honest opinion on this!


_ _ _

Untitled

I could feel the whiskey stinging and burning at my neck and back, the idea of how much glass was actually lodged there made me dizzy. I felt my stomach turn and the bile reaching the back of my throat. Fortunately the huge metal ashtray that came flying at me was distraction enough to stop me from throwing up. And it is a wonderful distraction technique if it was being hurled at a pure mind, but I wasn’t a pure mind, something my opponent seemed to either forget or take for granted.
A pure mind was something cherished on Earth, and unheard of along the colonies. They were tribes of people that had run into the forests and jungles when the change took place. However now was not the time of place to be thinking about such things.
I didn’t even have to look around the bar I could feel his presence, the brainwaves were erratic and the thought process illogical and scattered, moving back and forth between patterns of attack and the desire to get laid for one last time. I could have taken him down with a single thought, and yet something in me was fighting the instinct to kill. To kill a pure mind would be such a waist, they were always the ones that come up with the most radical inventions that changed the world in one way or another, the idea of the amount of neural damage the murderous thought would do send a shiver down my spine. The arm raised itself and I heard the crackle of air being turned into vapour, the groan that followed was nothing compared to the brain waves that hit me. Pain, anger, fear, all send in small packages, over and over and over again. And there it was next to me, a body, well a part of a body, the shot had evaporated most of its original form.
Being infected had more advantages than most pure minds believed, being infected on Earth was like a roller coaster, only you don’t know when the twist and turns were coming, the gravity creating a handicap that few of us new how to get accustomed to. When I was send to do this the impact of what it was going to cause me never hit home until I allowed for all thought process to flow freely, when I was asleep, when was the last time you remembered a full dream and made sense of it?

***

Her face flashed in front of me smiling, the violet eyes as bright as starts in the sky. How did I know what the starts looked like? The irrational pain and earning that I felt when I saw her overwhelmed me, I wanted to touch her, to hold her, why couldn’t I?
Being infected had more disadvantages that I remembered, or was it that I was told there were none, again the wrong time for thinking. A moment like this where your mind slips into some old memory lets all your guards down, anything can be dragged out of your head, or put back in it.
The room was decorated with all sorts of memorabilia of the past ages; there was a great painting on the wall portraying a round table and a great king, despair written all over his face. I recognised it as an interpretation of king Arthur right after he found out he has lost Guenevere’s love. The next thing that caught my mind was a poster of a man in an old space suit on the moon, with the words “Step” and “Human” still barely visible at the bottom of it, ages having rubbed the rest of the words and their meaning away. Big candles burned in huge recesses in the wall. In the corned there was a man, or I thought there was a man, I couldn’t focus, the image of Saline still fresh in my memory.
“Do you understand now why we need you there, what we need you to do?”
“Absolutely…” the voice felt distant, yet it was coming out of my lips, the calm didn’t make sense, “ … We cannot have pure minds taking over the colonies, the Aurora terminal was most certainly not an unfortunate accidents, we don’t make accidents, we prevent them.” The words were cold, surgically delivered, by a cruel and unforgiving female. I was back in my old skin, doing what I did best.

***
Blood, what felt like gallons and gallons of blood. It was everywhere, on the walls, on the furniture, on the floor. It wasn’t supposed to be there, this wasn’t supposed to have happened, not to Saline, it was meant for me. She lay there, looking at me, as if begging for forgiveness. I couldn’t find it in my heart. How could she leave me, did the 4 months we spend together mean nothing?!
“I am sorry madam but the best that we can do in this situation is to send someone to collect the body and clean up” I could have killed the voice on the other side, I didn’t need a cleaning service, I needed a detective to come and investigate my lovers death.
“Madam, I can download the scene from your flat’s memory , I have run it through all our possible scenarios and it is most certainly not a murder. Your kind do not kill your kind, you only kill yourselves. It is a well known fact.”
These things got erased by hackers on an hourly basis, each with their own personality and unique thought patterns, and I have to say a unique way of pissing you off. They were A.I s designed to speed up phone queues and abolish the hours spend on hold trying to get to any of the government organisations. The Emergency services had the Empathy class, and as the imaginative name suggests they were meant to be able to empathies with you and your problem, were it the death of your lover or the occasional disappearance of your car or engineered pet. Not meaning to be a difficult customer, but somehow I didn’t feel the empathy at all, in fact it felt more like the f*$ker was making fun of me. I send it a “present” that I carry in my head for just this kind of thing, although it was against policy in the general scheme of things, and against the law too. It proved a point however, and I had the police on my doorstep within 12 minutes, serving me with a fine for destroying public property.
“Madam…”
“If another one of you f*$kwitts calls me madam one more time I will erase you off the face of the planet!”
“Do beg your pardon, we aren’t on a planet but I will ensure that my colleagues and I do not make the mistake of offending you in your fragile state!” As he was falling backwards hands automatically reaching for his stomach his eyes registering the pain of being kicked in the gut a tall thin woman walked next to be.
“Poor bastard has been begging for an ass kicking for some time now. I’m glad it wasn’t me who gave it to him; the repairs would have come out of my pocket. Detective Kaneshiro, pleased to meet you”
“Trinity” she smelled of dust, sweet dust, not something I was used to associating with the long arm of the law.
“Well it reads suicide, smells like it too…” the detectives voice trailed of as she fixed her gaze on the wall above the sofa, her lips parted slightly.
“I see you have a trained eye detective, most people ignore them thinking they are fakes.” Why was I so calm, why was I not hysterically screaming at her that this was not the time for antiques watching.
“I enjoy sharp objects, call it a hobby, it was the ivory that gave it away” her eyes were still fixed on the three katanas that were hanging off the wall. They were given to me by my grandfather, having skipped my mom entirely, something she never forgave him for. I received offers from rich self-indulgent bankers on an hourly basis, the numbers in those offers ran for pages.
I snapped back to reality, the images of my grandfather fading away and my left hand itching.
“If I take this case, will I get the chance to have a go with one of them for an hour or two?”
“How about a weekend, you can cut all sorts of interesting objects in two, maybe the smell of folded steal will get your brain in a good enough state to find who did this and why.”
“So you can use the remaining two and cut the bastard into cubes?”
“Sushi, it is more stylish. Would you like to get some?”

***

He was dead.

***

I had all the hardware I would need, accessing any software was going to be a doodle, the firewalls needed to brave the pure mind world were up and running and the feeling in my toes and fingers that I was doing the wrong thing had not gone away. After my conversation with the man in the memorabilia hall I was more than happy to get a new commission. I was saving to buy a bigger place so Saline and I could get a tiger, engineered animal, people say they used to be real, I doubt it, what freak of nature would create an orange cat with stripes? I pulled my attention together and locked out any thought strain that wasn’t connected to the task ahead. I also locked out the pain that I got from the thought of Saline. Why did it hurt so much thinking about her, I missed her yes, but it wasn’t like I was never going to see her again. I got up and walked to the other side of the cabin, inspected myself in the full-length mirror. The curve of my buttocks was smooth and perky, tight with running; my breasts matched the curve although they were a bit bigger. In my minds eye I saw Saline cupping them and laughing, she never believed me when I told her they were real. Something must have been wrong with the routine I had selected, I tried to block her out of my thought process, but I could still feel the violet eyes on the back of my neck, begging for forgiveness, what was there to forgive? I put on a pair f leather shorts, hip hugging, and a bra that made most men reach out without realising, put my coat on, the inside of which was like an armoury and stepped out of the private transport pod. Sun, bright and warm, I always enjoyed the first time I stepped into the sun after a long period on the orbitals.
“Where have you been?” Detective Kaneshiro was walking towards me, with two cups of steaming coffee. She handed me one of them and leaned in, sweet dust, the smell tried to awaken e memory I had just put to sleep with my routines. I tipped my coffee all over the front of her silk shirt and saw the pain that the hot liquid caused. Another sleeping thought tried to break though as I walked past her ignoring her quizzical look. She made to follow me but seemed to think the better of it. I could feel her picking up the round long canister that previously been strapped to her back off the ground and her eyes were burning holes into the back of my head, I kept walking.

***

“Sake, spare me the tiny glass” NeoJapan, was a part of town were paper lanterns, dragons and white make up seemed to be trendy. Vendors had set up shop on the pedestrian walkways making it difficult to ignore the smells and bright colours of whatever they were selling.
“A hardcore drinker I see, most people would end up in hospital after two sips of the stuff.”
“Its not the sake that makes them ill, it’s the filtering machines in their bellies, they think it’s a form of virus.”
“You become more and more interesting by the minute” detective Kaneshiro had suggested the little Sushi restaurant as a place to talk about what had happened in my flat just over tree hours ago. We had ordered huge sashimi cut into all sorts of shapes and sizes and of course my bottle of sake, minus the tiny glass. I had just loudly ordered my second bottle of sake, and was starting to feel the warm feeling of numbness, this was the one time I wasn’t going to flush it out of my system, numbness is just what I needed.
“So, you have avoided the subject of my girlfriends death and how you are going to deal with it. Is that your strategy, keep me in the dark just in case I am the murderer?”
Kaneshiro took out a small box, and opened it, the sweet dust smell came rushing out of it, yet no one turned around, and no sirens went off. She took a pinch and put it on her tongue, and then took a deep sip of my sake.


Comments (3)