“Jeff, if this is about what I did to Rick, man it was just a joke, come on please just let us go. Let her go, at least.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Jeff, I command you to release us,” Melina said, “authorization code: Murphy, Umbrella, Forty-four, Lima.”
“Thanks for the code, but nope,” the android said.
“What do you mean nope? I’m your superior officer!”
“Oh God! I can’t keep this up any longer. Surprise! It’s Peter,” the baboon said and crawled over the shoulders of Jeff. “He’s in remote mode.”
Marwick hadn’t noticed until just then that the voice was coming from the recognizable Fruit Company voice emulator tablet, and not from the TODD. He locked eyes on the tiny monkey and shouted, “Peter, you double-crossing sonofabitch!”
“I heard you last time, Marwick.”
“Oh, well I wasn’t sure where we left that.”
“I see someone’s ready to party,” Elliot said, entering the room with a long, serrated knife in his hand. He turned and contorted his body past Jeff, who was still in remote mode and had been left standing stiff in the middle of the walkway. “Get this fuckin’ thing out of the way, Peter!” Elliot demanded and then resituated himself, adjusting his collar and tie. “How long has this been going on, Marwick?” he asked as he craned his free hand behind his back and re-tucked his shirt into his waist. He coughed loud as if to signify that it was Marwick’s turn to speak.
Marwick said nothing.
Elliot grabbed him by the hair and chopped into him with the honed edge of the knife, its weight tearing divots where the serrations impacted his skin. Elliot dragged the blade down with even pressure, gashing Marwick’s face from the outside edge of his eye down to his jawline. The blade made a metallic scraping sound against his augmented cheekbones, but Marwick remained silent.
“Peter, I thought I told you to disable Shock-Protocol?” Elliot said, visibly distressed.
“I… I did sir, twenty minutes ago,” the furry lab assistant said, then jumped down off the android and scuttled over to a nearby workstation, again confirmed his settings and nodded. “He’s feeling this, I assure you,”
“Fucking tough guy, eh?” Elliot said, then with a swooping double-handed axe chop he buried the knife to its hilt into Marwick’s thigh. Aside from an increase in respiration, there was still nothing from the Purifier.
“Sonofabitch! TODD, move her so she has to watch,” Elliot said and the Android grabbed her chair, screeching it across the floor slow enough to maximize the discomfiting noise. He swung the seat around so that they were facing each other, not more than two meters apart.
Elliot wrestled the knife from Marwick’s leg, turned his attention to Melina and gathered a fistful of her dark hair into his fingers, then jerked her head back, and placed his blade at the outer-corner of her eye. He carved a gash across her cheek and jaw to match Marwick’s.
“Stop it, you monster!” Marwick erupted and writhed in his chair, causing the stainless steel to pop and groan under his considerable mass.
“Finally, a little participation!” Elliot said.
“Let her go!”
“Then answer the fucking question!”
“Just once, it was just the once!” Marwick shouted
“This is the second time I’ve caught you!” Elliot said.
“This was the only other time, I swear it.”
Elliot looked down to Melina’s face, the very same face of his sweet Rachel, and said, “I’ve always loved you, and yet you betray me. I’ll leave that ugly scar as a reminder of this day, and of my mercy, so maybe you can tell the difference between us next time.”
“I’ll still always love him,” Melina said. “I don’t belong to you. I’m not her. She’s dead!”
Elliot connected with a wet-sounding, flat punch snapping her head into the steel headrest. “Fuck you Melina!” he said.
“Never again,” she said and spat blood into his face. She grinned at him with red smears across her big teeth, and blood streaming down her dark face.
Elliot gripped her hair and spit back on her, then plunged the tip of his serrated knife into her right eye, its barbs catching on tendons, nerves and veins as he continued to press until he felt and heard a pop. Melina screamed and jerked against her restraints, but Elliot held her flat to the chair and flicked the blade inward and yanked back like he’d been burned. The brilliant white orb of her sparkling blue eye emerged from her socket with a sucking sound and rolled down her cheek, followed by a cascading fountain of blood. From the empty socket trailed arteries which prevented the eye from falling to the sheet-metal floor. Screams caught in her throat, her mouth agape, trying to open further still than her jaws could allow, like a dying fish. She was in too much pain to make a noise or draw a breath. Her remaining eye shone with terror, darting back and forth, looking at her removed eye and away, trying to make sense of the tremendous sensory overload, her mind seeing two directions at once and struggling to reconcile the data.
Marwick pistoned his arm back and forth until he managed to tear his hand free from the restraint, shredding the flesh of his forearm, which now dangled and flopped from his metallic bones as he jabbed the hand forward and snatched Elliot by his belt. He reeled him in with a quick tug and as Elliot fell towards him, Marwick released his grip on the belt and snatched his necktie. With a violent yank, Marwick was able to bring Elliot to his knees then shot his bloodied hand up to his neck, clapping his long digits around Elliot’s throat. He worked his hand tighter with each of Elliot’s struggles until he felt the larynx cave in. With the entirety of his rage focused into one act, Marwick twisted and jerked the crushed flesh within his grip. By shaking Elliot back and forth, he generated enough force to snap his vertebrae, severing his spinal cord.
Melina screamed in confusion and agony begging for Marwick to stop, and then he tossed Elliot’s limp body to the floor, where he lay in a twitching pile.
Peter quickly mounted the TODD and piloted it toward the nanite inhibitor and unplugged it. He backhanded Marwick with the hundreds of pounds of steel that was a TODD arm, sending him and his chair careening, and then leapt again from the android. He skittered across the floor and pressed a little button on Elliot’s watch. The pressing of which released a small vial of emergency nanites into Elliot’s wrist, which swam through his body to jump-start the repair process.
With the inhibitor off, Melina’s cut was already starting to mend. Her eye would soon regenerate, leaving not a trace of the day’s events.
Elliot took a sudden gasping breath and bounded to his feet. He twisted his neck, making an audible cracking sound, and pointed to Marwick who lay face first on the floor, still seventy-five percent bound to the steel chair. “That’s two times you killed me, Buddy,” he said and held up two fingers. “That’s kind of a lot.” To the TODD he said, “Get him up, please. That’s no way to treat a guest.”
The Mulligan feature of the Fruit Company watch caused a certain post-death euphoria, and so Elliot de-escalated the situation. Once the android had righted the overturned chair and with it his identical nemesis, Elliot continued, “Okay, so no more times killing me, capisce? Three strikes and you’re out, okay, got it?”
“Mark my words, I will take your fucking eye out as soon as I have a chance. You’re going to know how it feels.” Marwick said in a low register, barely audible.
“Hold that thought, I’m not quite done with my thing, yeah?” Then to the baboon, he shouted “What a fucking day!”
“So, what next? Do you want me to kill them?” Peter asked.
“No, we still need them,” Elliot said, waving his hand in front of his eyes, dismissing the competing impulse to have the TODD drag the both of them out the airlock.
“Wish I would have known that before I asked if I could kill them,” the baboon said.
Tapping his finger across his lips, he pondered over his next steps. “Okay, so let the nanites do their work long enough
to heal her eye…” Elliot said, looking over at Melina’s face once more, this time softened by his temporary death experience. “No one wants to look at that shit, and you might as well wait until that arm of Marwick’s is mended or we may have to lop it off.”
“Thank you,” Melina said.
Elliot looked at her with disdain, locking his eyes onto her functioning one and said, “Once his arm heals, plug in the inhibitor and gash his fucking face up again… Just like it is now. I wasn’t kidding about the scar.”
The silence that followed these hateful orders was shattered when Elliot’s Fruit Company device rang and he picked up the call nonchalantly.
“Yeah, hey Oxsterbaxen—
“No, I know… total destruction… yep… I know it was a prototype—
“I mean, but surely that wasn’t the only one… yes, I know what prototype means, and no, I wasn’t calling you—”
“You can go, sir,” Peter said, “I got this.”
Elliot gave him a thumbs up and walked away. “Yeah, I get it… never get a ship from you again… okay, got it. Hey, can I call you back, I got a thing I’m dealing with… yes, a thing…” and Elliot rounded the corner, his voice fading as he went.
“I’m actually not going to enjoy cutting your face, as much as I thought I would...” Peter said, “But you know orders are orders.”
“I don’t even care anymore, Peter.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I got some primo new unrestricted nanite cultures from—”
“I know, I was there... We already talked about it.”
“Oh, that wasn’t me, just a copy. I can’t honor any deals you made with him... So, anyway... You want to buy some nanites?”
“I... I don’t have any money.”
11: Pete Didn’t Start the Fire
Peter grew tired of watching over Marwick, who’d long since given up on breaking free of his restraints, and could no longer be baited into conversations. So, Peter left him there alone, and made his way to the server room once more.
The door slid open as he approached. All security protocols had been suspended for the torture session so that Elliot could come and go as he’d needed. Peter had counted on this to some degree. He neared the cluster of cabinets housing all the quantum computers and Fruit Company communications switches and servers, and once more removed the tablet he wore around his neck like a medallion. The voice emulator was the one thing he depended on to facilitate communication, and the one thing he hated the most about his simian coil.
He’d uploaded his copy’s memories from the ship’s data core: having two sets of overlapping and competing experiences was confusing at first, and for a while he felt like the time traveler Arthur Penrod, but he’d rejoiced in his ability to speak freely.
And now he had twice the desire to transfer his consciousness into a Purifier husk, an undertaking he wasn’t altogether sure he could do remotely.
Leaning out from behind the server racks, Peter peered down the hall and found Marwick, ensured that he was still strapped to the chair and hadn’t pulled some daring escape, and backed into a nook that suited his small monkey frame. A small halo was hung from the corner of the cabinet, which he placed on his head. After entering a few command lines, the halo began glowing as it copied a new version of Peter’s mind into his tablet.
Once the upload completed, Peter set the Fruit Company tablet down alongside the primary interface blade and once more selected the Monkey-B icon.
“Upload Monkey-B-2 to device?” The tablet prompted, just as before.
Peter, in the flesh and fur, clicked “Yes.”
12: Prologue: Spaghettification
Peter entered the Bethlehem Cloud as a sentient series of binary base pairs, just as he had when he’d negotiated North-Star. And that was where the similarities ended. The Purifier Collective Consciousness was far busier and louder than he could have imagined, or been prepared for. Peter, who had a tremendous mind, couldn’t navigate the code, or silence the background noise long enough to travel in any direction. Unable to locate any pathways that might lead him to a host, Peter became terrified and his mind, big and powerful albeit virtual, started to glitch, as he experienced déjà vu and eventually paralysis. His digital consciousness was disintegrated and pulled apart hundreds of ways at once, to have various segments of his memory and persona merged with the thoughts and feelings of a thousand battle-hardened Purifiers, and sent racing across the Solar System in every direction. Time ceased to exist for him.
He would sometimes have flashes of lucidity where he thought he knew who he was, would attempt to speak out, but words were always on the tip of his... he wasn’t sure what the thing was called. And then he was gone again. He never knew that he’d become not just a Purifier, but had stained all Purifiers except for the two he’d just tortured. He never understood that he’d made the Collective Consciousness bloodthirsty, or that he was firing rounds into innocent people. He never gathered that he’d started a war.
Read the next installment—
Halloran: Static Saga Vol. 1
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078RRRXBT
Or get the Omnibus— Static: Androids, Cyborgs, War, and a Homicidal Baboon (Vols. 1-4)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0755PDGWR
Author Biography
M.D. (Michael Dirk) Thalmann, a novelist and freelance journalist with an affinity for satire and science fiction, lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife, children, and ornery cats, reads too much and sleeps too little. He has a couple dogs, too, but doesn’t like to mention them due to the slippers one of them ate in 2009, which neither has yet fessed up to. He is originally from Little Rock, Arkansas and has been living in the desert since 2004 when he took the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas entirely too serious and moved on a lark. He has been into journalism in one fashion or another and writing fiction and so on since he was ten years old or so and has gotten at least 20% better since that time. Today M.D. writes freelance and does columns for a few magazines here and there while working on his various novels and cursing his cats.
Enjoy the first chapter of Static, gratis
1: Striking Out
Alles Aarde
2186 A.D.
Halloran shoved Eli into the dilapidated cement wall of the Academy harder than he’d intended. He realized this when Eli bounced off the wall and crumpled down into the gravel. Eli breathed deeply and began steadying himself to get back up. His foot dug into the loose rubble, finding some purchase, but then skidding out and crashing him down once more. A chicken protested all the noise with a squawk and flap. Somewhere a carrion bird cawed.
“Stay down old man,” Halloran said. He meant it. Though hale and hearty, Eli was well into his second century by now and Halloran didn’t want to hurt him.
Halloran was a towering six feet, five and three-quarters inches tall and had arms and legs like a cutting horse. His abdomen looked like the shallow edge of a creek with thin water roiling over perfectly placed oval stones. He weighed 235 pounds, which is in the neighborhood of 106 kilos, and not much of it fat. These features alone set him apart from most other Men of Faith. The average height amongst men in their group was five feet, eight and a half inches tall. The average weight was 68 kilos.
Aside from those anomalies, he and Eli also had blindingly fair skin. They were the only ones. Most everyone else on the planet by that point had achieved a sort of beige complexion through what some considered to be excessive and indiscriminate fucking.
“What do you think will happen if you go out there?” Eli shouted from the dusty pile of gravel and litter he’d fallen into.
Halloran focused his slate gray eyes onto Eli, who stared back with the same eyes. One of Eli’s, though, was lame from a fight with Peterwick and looked elsewhere after only a moment.
“I don’t care anymore! It’s been too long. I can’t just sit here behind these walls and wait for the Apes to come pick us off one by one. I’m ready, Father!” He mean
t that, too.
The average height of a male Ape was six feet, four and one eighth inches, with an average weight of 77 kilos.
Halloran was only one hundred eleven, still spry compared to his father, but he’d spent all his days on the planet in a fenced-in stronghold community made up of survivors who tinkered about with electricity all day and spoke of the good old days with robotic servants, and plentiful food, and unending entertainment and all that. He’d gone outside but a few times to hunt, and never alone.
Halloran reached into the metal box attached to the wall of the Academy, grabbed a shiny flask connecting the wires, and yanked on the fuse until the circuit was broken. Sparks shot out in a display of protest. The fence stopped humming. Halloran hadn’t even remembered that the fence hummed until it had stopped. He’d grown used to it.
He wanted to do more than just survive inside an electrified fence reciting scriptures from brittle old books, and he was too young or too inexperienced anyway, for nostalgia in any real sense. He only knew how bad he had it because of what he’d been told in school and he’d felt just fine about life on most days.
Eli, on the other hand, had spent a great deal of time on the planet before it had gone dark and gotten its new name, and had nostalgia to spare. He was a pining mooner with a lazy eye and a beard filled with lice.
He’d been Halloran’s primary teacher, but Halloran suspected he’d still not taught him all that he should’ve, or even wanted to.
For example, Halloran didn’t know that he was over one hundred years old, nor that that was odd for a land mammal of his size. He’d just assumed the prophecies of the old books to be true: that those who remained pure of heart and made the sacrifices which God demanded would live fuller, longer lives, like the man with the big boat from Eli’s stories.
He and Eli had buried many of their fellow Men of Faith… three generations they’d outlasted. They’d all seemed fairly pure, yet all but he and Eli had perished or withered into the gray, nonetheless.
Europa Affair Page 6
