Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 77

by Erzebet YellowBoy

  For twenty minutes, Shepard nosed the tug around the perimeter of the derelict in search of a flat plane. Between an intake valve deep enough to park the tug and a cluster of blocky protrusions, he bumped against the hull and engaged the coupling links. A warm buzz vibrated the hull; the vessels were bound.

  Shepard switched on the intercom. “Homeward,” he announced. Without waiting for a reply, he initiated the return sequence and abandoned the cockpit. Back in the cabin, he settled in opposite Caine’s corpse while the engines struggled sluggishly toward an unknown speed. When they had attained a comfortable scream, he pushed a little deeper into his seat, knowing it would get worse before it got better. Outlines shivered as the engines sang. The air gelled, becoming difficult to breathe. He stretched his mouth wide in an effort to relieve the building pressure.

  And then something new. Something wrong. It manifested as the sound of marbles bouncing in an empty tank. In a matter of seconds, two became twenty, twenty became thousands. Barrels of marbles poured into the rotors. The pitch of the engines took an ugly turn, refusing to quit in the face of this new difficulty.

  Shepard popped the buckles of his harness and leaned forward to stand, but spilled out of his seat instead. Beneath him—all around him—the tug shook in the grip of the laboring engines. Shepard pushed to his feet. If he could get to the deck, if he could abort the return sequence and cut the engines . . . one step toward the cockpit and a monstrous bang kicked his legs from under him.

  He found himself on his back, breathless and gasping for air. A klaxon blared while strobes sprayed emergency lighting across the bulkheads. Somewhere, metal twisted in anguish. The last of the marbles were bouncing away. Shepard rolled to his feet and stumbled toward the cockpit.

  Everything had failed, or was in the process of doing so: internal atmosphere, hull integrity, flight coordination; all of it dying in front of him.

  “Alarm,” reported a soothing female voice.

  Shepard slapped off the audibles, silencing the klaxons. Amber lights raced up and down the deck, screaming for attention.

  “Assessment,” he said to himself in a failing effort to remain calm. “Step one: assessment.”

  “Alarm,” repeated the patient voice.

  “I know,” Shepard said, and directed his attention to the monitors, where reports from the exterior drones were beginning to post. The same drones that had scoured the derelict were now running looping circuits around the tug, relaying information back to the deck. Trying to watch everything at once, Shepard saw his atmosphere venting from a dozen torn seams. He felt empty space creeping in, forcing open rifts with icy fingers even as the auto-sealant blossomed outward like cancerous growths to stanch the hemorrhage. Things were at wrong angles. Other monitors were populating with overlays of the tug, helpfully directing his attention to malfunctioning systems.

  Shepard stood ready to act, but there was nothing for him to do but watch. Struggling to stabilize itself, the tug needed no help from the likes of him. After long moments, lights began winking off, whether from the passing of danger or an awareness of futility, Shepard didn’t know. In time, he realized that the tug would not turn inside out; he would live at least a while longer.

  He sank into the jockey’s chair, face in hands.

  “Alarm,” the gentle female voice reminded him.

  Shepard lifted his head to see what fresh disaster had visited.

  Out there in the blizzard, the derelict had come alive. The drones, with nothing more to report about the state of the tug, had turned their attention elsewhere, and found much of interest in the derelict. Racing up and down her length, they streamed continuous video back to the deck. Running lights underscored aggressive angles and matte black assets. Shepard saw the tug attached to its hull, a sucker-fish latched to the belly of a leviathan.

  One of the screens blinked shyly, drawing Shepard’s attention. Caine’s face was barely there, a ghost of an image all but lost in the snow.

  “Shepard, look at it,” Caine breathed. The jockey then turned an accusing glare on Shepard. “What did you do?”

  Affronted, Shepard sat erect. “I didn’t—I want to talk to myself,” he demanded. “Where’s me?”

  Caine looked offended. “I don’t know. Where do bluehairs go?”

  “Caine . . . ”

  “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  A sick dread turned Shepard’s stomach. He couldn’t look at the jockey anymore, so moved his attention back to the derelict. The massive glory of the alien vessel filled the monitors, a landscape of bristling armaments and eldritch lights. It seemed endless and impossible—alive and awake.

  The heating didn’t work as well as it had before the incident, and the tug bled warmth into space at an alarming rate. Pulling the thin blankets from both stateroom bunks, Shepard wore them over his shoulders as he watched the derelict on the monitors. He slept for a little while in his chair, but woke suddenly to an ominous bang. He listened for a bit before deciding it had been imagined. For a little while, he tried to raise Caine and Shepard on the intercom, but found only static.

  Shepard knew something from outside had found its way into the tug when—all bundled in his blankets—he lifted the lid of the head and startled something that had come up through the drain to get comfortable in the bowl. With a splash, it pulled back down the pipes. Shepard slammed the lid and fled.

  Back in the cockpit, he turned the intercom all the way up. “Caine,” he said. “Shepard. Something’s in here with us. Something got in.”

  But the static wouldn’t talk back, and no one came to the monitors. Shepard called into the ventilation ducts. He tuned the com channels to empty space and listened for voices that weren’t speaking.

  A faint rhythmic pounding leaked from the ductwork, bringing him the shouts of an event taking place elsewhere. He thought maybe the cafeteria, so he started that way, but met something massive in the corridor. It blocked his way like a mass of bone-white webbing plastered to the walls, floor, and ceiling. It moved as though breathing. Shepard retreated to the cockpit and locked the door.

  He switched off the intercom and crawled beneath the panel, packing himself among the insulated cables and sweating conduits. He clutched his blankets tighter around himself, praying that whatever had come into the tug wouldn’t hear him breathing.

  During the initial hours of hiding, Shepard was haunted by the slow, agonized groaning of the tug. It penetrated the bulkheads and came up through the grating in the floor. It was the sound of something invasive working through the tug’s guts, forcing itself into and through all the private spaces. For a little while he heard faint voices from elsewhere, a terrified, incomprehensible litany that swelled and faded to the rhythm of unseen currents. “Oh God,” he heard it declare once in a tone both exhausted and horrified. It was hard to tell, but it sounded like Caine.

  Twelve hours later the internal temperature had dropped to minus five degrees Celsius. Having heard nothing for a long while, Shepard emerged from beneath the panel, blanket clutched around him. He felt stiff and burdened, as though bundles of wire had infiltrated his blanket to loop themselves about him. Painfully, he hauled himself up to peek over the panel, upon which a hard white frost had formed.

  Images of the derelict had been wiped from the screens, replaced by an unfamiliar face. Seeing him, it loomed closer. Shepard watched its mouth move before remembering he’d killed the sound. With stiff fingers, he tweaked the volume until the voice came through.

  “—ear me?” it shouted at him.

  “Shh,” Shepard whispered. “I hear you.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Here. All the time here.”

  The face studied him. “Which one are you?”

  “Shepard.”

  “We’re on your port.”

  Shepard glanced at an exterior view. He saw a military frigate bathed in its own lights, dim in the deep hydrogen blizzard. “I see you.”

  “Where’s Caine?�
�

  “Dead.”

  “Both of him? How?”

  “I don’t . . . ” Shepard shook his head. “There hasn’t been any communication for a long time. The engines failed. Something—I don’t know what—something went wrong.”

  Having turned aside to read from another monitor, the jockey nodded absently. “I see that. The derelict didn’t want to move. Tug couldn’t handle it.” Looking back to Shepard, his expression changed.

  “What’s that?” the jockey said, pointing.

  “What?”

  “On your neck. There.”

  Shepard brought a hand out from under the blanket to touch a long, hard lump under the skin alongside his jugular. It had come up from under his collar, and retracted from his fingers like a living thing. With great apprehension, Shepard opened his blanket to assess himself.

  There were no bundles of wire around his legs, no cables or conduits. Pale white tendrils, like roots, had snaked up through the grating to coil intimately around his thighs. The larger ones had worked their way under his clothes; the smaller ones had already burrowed painlessly into his flesh.

  “What’s happening there?” the jockey asked, angling for a better view.

  Too quickly, Shepard snatched his blanket closed. “Nothing.”

  The jockey gave him a reproachful look.

  “It found me,” Shepard confessed.

  The jockey slumped. “Sit tight,” he said, and the screens went dark.

  Beneath the blanket, Shepard felt pale tendrils worming under his skin, pushing things aside to make room. He didn’t want to see what they were doing to him, but it afflicted him with a sickening heaviness.

  Having been gone hardly a moment, the jockey returned to all monitors at once. He didn’t seem to want to look at Shepard. He scratched behind an ear, looking truly regretful. “This is breach,” he said, then cleared his throat as though to read a prepared statement. “Standard operating procedures were probably violated. Mistakes were almost certainly made.”

  The jockey stopped to look at him directly. “I won’t lie to you. Yours is a bad situation.”

  Shepard swallowed thickly. “You’re leaving me here?”

  “No,” the jockey said, then again, but stretched out, as though Shepard were not simply wrong, but very wrong. “No, they want you back. You and your guest.”

  Relieved, Shepard struggled to his feet, tendrils weighing him down like shackles. “Please hurry.”

  “We need you to drop your coupling with the derelict.”

  With shaking hands on frigid controls, Shepard disengaged the links. A hollow bang echoed through the tug upon release.

  “Now get me out of here,” Shepard said. “Please.”

  “I’m afraid extraction at this point would only complicate things,” said the jockey.

  Shepard stared at the screen. “You can’t leave me here. I can’t be here with it when we go back. Where will it go?”

  “You should lie down,” the jockey said. “I think lying down would be best.”

  The tug shivered when the frigate took hold.

  “This wasn’t our fault,” Shepard objected.

  The jockey made a face to express that such matters were beyond his jurisdiction.

  Shepard felt the frigate’s grown-on engines bunching up. He felt it in his teeth, and in his groin. As the outlines of everything solid shivered away, others became clearer. A crowded latticework of bone-white webbing piercing the bulkheads, stretching through the fabric of the tug. He opened his mouth to protest, but the frigate’s engines banged, and both vessels were gone. Flakes of hydrogen swarmed to fill the vacant spaces.

  About the Author

  Greg Kurzawa studied theology without purpose before being handed a career in information technology. He and his incredible wife are busy building a happy family. Some people mistake him for Gage Kurricke, with whom he co-authored Gideon’s Wall.

  The Great Leap Sideways: SF and Social Media

  Mark Cole

  Science Fiction isn’t always about the big things.

  Nor does it get it right all the time.

  Consider the first SF visions of the internet: for William Gibson and the other pioneer Cyberpunks, the online world was home to a chosen few—the corporate elite on one hand, the radical fringe of cowboys and hackers on the other.

  But it didn’t work out that way.

  Instead it became something far more democratic, a vast virtual space filled with countless millions of users who had no idea how their computer worked or how to create new programming for it. Far from the secret data caches Johnny Mnemonic carried, most of that traffic is entertainment, commerce and even idle chatter. The gleaming city on a hill that was cyberspace had become sprawling suburban subdivisions within a generation. Perhaps the measure of how prosaic it has all become is that it is now possible to talk or write about social media without the once obligatory references to SF.

  Not that SF has exactly ignored social media. Once it became a major force in our modern world, SF writers got busy extrapolating it into their future worlds. William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2005) came out only a year after Facebook launched (although parts of it are already badly out of date!). You can even find its precursors as far back as 1909, in E.M Forster’s “When The Machine Stops,” in which everyone lives in his own little hexagonal box in a monstrous hive. They can chat with their friends or carry out their day to day activities without ever leaving their cubicle—one character even delivers a speech to her club from within her room.

  However, no one guessed just how popular sharing the private details of our lives with the world would be, or how eager people would be to make virtual friends online. Reality had left SF in the dust. Social media burst into the consciousness of SF at about the same time it seized the attention of the rest of the world. And, curiously, it is one of the few realms in the world of SF which movies began exploring at the same time—or even before—the print media did.

  One of the earliest appearances came in legendary anime director Mamoru Oshii’s live action film, Avalon (2001). Set in a rundown future, Avalon is an illegal MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) and one of the few ways to escape the harsh realities of the world. The greatest players, like the film’s protagonist, Ash, can actually make a living playing Avalon. The idea seemed strange at the time, but now many MMORPGs tie their currencies to real dollars. A select few Second Life players earn over one million dollars a year.

  VR games have appeared in a lot of SF movies—and yet very few of them offer anything like a convincing cinematic portrayal of a computer game. The gameplay in movies like Existenz and Nirvana makes little sense and hardly seems playable—let alone like the work of a master designer. Avalon, however, seems reasonably plausible, with its “Boss” characters, lag time, character stats and game economics, where players must earn points to buy their equipment. Part of Avalon’s authenticity stems from all the hours that Oshii spent playing Wizardry during his bouts of unemployment in the eighties.

  In 2009, Mamoru Oshii returned to the world of Avalon in a new film, Assault Girls, although it explores little new territory.

  MMORPGs were one of the earlier forms of social media: while its predecessors go all the way back to the Seventies, the first true MMORPG, Meridian 59, appeared in 1996, only a year after the NSFNET lifted the restrictions that had previously prevented their development.

  Video games have remained a constant source of inspiration for movie makers since Tron, although few of them have soared to the heights of lunacy reached by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s Gamer. The directors first made their mark with Crank, an absurd, non-stop action film that feels as hopped up on meth and adrenalin as its lead character: Gamer gives no indication that they ever intend to slow down to let the audience catch its collective breath. This of course makes it even more of a surprise to find a movie that is crammed full of intriguing SF ideas, centering on a frightening—and particularly perverse�
�new form of social media.

  Billionaire inventor Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) created a self-replicating nanite which, when injected into someone’s brain stem, allows someone else to control all his motor functions. Using this technology, he created a game called “Society,” in which online players can take control of a real person within a real environment. There, they interact with real people controlled by other unseen players. While it resembles William Gibson’s idea of “meat puppets,” Neveldine/Taylor have taken that idea and carried it to new and even creepier heights. In one deliberately disgusting scene, we see a guy putting his moves on a beautiful woman avatar, unaware that she is being controlled by a fat and enormously grotesque man.

  The avatars within “Society” are all paid actors (if that’s the right word). However, this is not true of Castle’s other hit game, “Slayers:” its human avatars shoot at each other with real weapons, and when hit, they really die. While all the players are “volunteers,” Castle recruits them from death row, promising them their freedom if they survive thirty games. These death matches are then televised, so the millions who cannot afford to control one of the slayers can also enjoy the game.

  “Kable” (Gerald Butler) is the most popular player in the game, the only one so far to survive twenty-seven games, and an odds-on favorite to actually win his freedom. However, Castle does not want Kable freed, so he brings a ringer into a game, a vicious psychopath who does not have a controller. This gives him a tremendous edge over the other avatars, as he is not affected by computer “lag” or the reflexes of his controller.

  While many reviewers argue they stole this plot from Rollerball (a more apt comparison might be Peter Watkin’s Punishment Park), Castle is not so much worried about the political or societal repercussions should anyone survive the game, as he is about what Kable will do if he gets free. “Kable,” whose real name is John Tillman, was one of the first nanite test subjects—and under their control, Castle forced Tillman to kill his best friend. In the end, Tillman gets the upper hand by planting a suggestion in Castle’s mind by far more traditional means.