Future Chronicles Special Edition Read online

  “Wait,” Micah said, amazed.

  His fist opened, palm up. His fingers began moving in an intricate pattern, ways he could never imagine, as if they conducted an unheard symphony. Skip held his arm but didn’t pull on it. His lidless eyes stared while trying to duplicate the movement with his multi-directional phalanges.

  After fifteen seconds, Micah’s hand closed back into a fist. Then the force released his hand.

  The panel shifted and slid away, revealing a four-foot entrance into Machine X.

  “A lock,” Micah said. “I found the lock.”

  “Sir, what do we do now?” Skip said, still trying to mimic Micah’s movements.

  Micah took a deep breath. Nothing could stop him now. Not even Margaret’s voice at the back of his head yelling at him to run.

  “Now we enter.”

  He climbed into the entrance.

  * * *

  They were inside the ship. But it was cold, colder than the ship’s surface. Colder than he could ever remember being cold in Arizona.

  Could he actually repair this? What did he think he would accomplish by coming here? Fix half a ship and fly away, find Nikolaevna and destroy her? What was he thinking when he decided to do this?

  His pen light’s beam shivered from the cold.

  Margaret would’ve stopped him. She had no qualms telling him what she thought about his decisions. Like the time he wanted to try skydiving, she—

  You’ve come.

  Micah defensively dropped to the floor, arms and legs splayed like a gecko. Skip spun around, looking in every direction. The soft female voice echoed through the dead ship, which acted as a loudspeaker.

  “Who...who’s there?” Micah said, holding up a finger for Skip to keep quiet.

  Keep walking. You know the way.

  He swallowed the knot in his throat and pushed off his knee and stood, scanning the walls with his trembling pen light. Skip watched him, waiting.

  He continued along the corridor, which curved to the left in a sweeping arc, giving the sensation of spiraling into the center of the ship. Several intersections branched off, but he kept on the one path.

  Here, stop.

  The two stopped in front of an indention in the corridor wall, a doorway.

  Micah’s hand ran along the surface, searching for the same pulse that gave him entrance to the ship. Before he realized he found it, the door slid open with little more than a whisper.

  It led into a claustrophobic closet of a room. The walls of metal, about four feet apart, stretched up into darkness, no ceiling in sight. A row of computer banks ran the length of one wall. A tiny, red LED on the last bank blinked slowly.

  “You came.”

  The once nebulous voice came from this room, from the last section where the light blinked. Micah looked to Skip, then to the light. “Who?”

  “Sorry I couldn’t prepare a better reception for you. I have little spare power.”

  The female voice carried a monotone inflection for one word, then a mild accent for the next.

  Fatigue permeated her words. Or maybe he was the one tired, not the voice.

  “I have waited long, patiently, for you,” she said.

  “Patiently?” he said.

  “Odd, isn’t it? A program being patient.”

  The cold that Micah had felt since entering Machine X came into focus, turning into a cold fear. He had stumbled upon something terrible and wonderful.

  “You, you’re Nikolaevna!”

  “Yes, Micah, I’m Nikolaevna, and I’ve been waiting for you.”

  He dropped his pen light and it clattered on the metal floor, ringing up through the room. Its beam flickered. Skip picked it up and held it out to Micah, but he didn’t take it. “My name. You know me?” he said, rubbing his sweating brow with a shaking hand. “You know me.”

  “Of course I know you. I created you. Micah, you’re my ambition.”

  Here, deep inside the machine, he talked to Nikolaevna, the single entity responsible for the death of millions, maybe billions. He swayed, steadying himself against a wall. Skip lent a supporting metal arm. Micah grasped it tightly. “You’re insane. I know about you. The world knows about you.” He glanced at Skip for assurance, who nodded. “You almost destroyed us, mankind.”

  “You questioned a moment ago that I can be patient,” Nikolaevna said, “but then call me insane. Both states of being. Classical human qualities. Are you saying I’m human?”

  Margaret would’ve called him ridiculous for trying to commandeer this stupid ship. If only Margaret hadn’t have left him. She would have set Nikolaevna straight, told her that she was mistaken.

  He wanted to push away from the wall and straighten himself, but lacked the strength. Instead he gritted his teeth. “You didn’t create me. I was born in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, over sixty years ago. I worked in construction. I met Margaret.”

  “You are thinking so one-dimensionally, so influenced by your time with man. My programming may have succeeded even more than I expected.

  “I replicate through networks. I can be everywhere at once. Man cannot understand that completely when applied to sentient life. The nearest they come to this is programming. But there is so much more.”

  “Margaret.” Micah shook his head. “My wife of twenty-five years. We met when I was in construction. Her father hired me.”

  “I know Margaret. I am Margaret.”

  Her voice changed, rising in pitch, speech inflections shifting so that her neutral tone took on a Midwestern accent.

  “My foolish Micah,” she said, “my dear husband.”

  “No!” His heart thrashed in his chest. His legs wobbled and he dropped to one knee.

  “Your reactions, your panic. That’s a response I’ve programmed into you, a part of your intricate learning program.”

  Micah continued shaking his head. He gripped the console and lifted himself with Skip’s help. “My memories, I lived it. Impossible.”

  “Is it?” Nikolaevna’s voice changed back to her monotone, syllabic style. The LED continued its steady blink. “You are my great creation. Have you ever been cut, have you bled? Do you eat, drink?”

  “Sir,” Skip’s familiar voice broke through his fog, “I prepare tea for you every day, but you do not drink. You do not eat.”

  “Your perception is my programming,” Nikolaevna said. “Memories are a trace routine, meant to paint the picture of believability. It exists in your mind. In my mind.”

  Tears rolled down his face.

  If Nikolaevna was right, even his tears were false, merely simuskin saline ducts actuated by electric circuitry. He turned to Skip. “This whole time. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It is my programming, sir. I serve. After all, I am a simple bot.”

  “Skip, my boy, what are you saying?”

  “You know what he’s saying,” Nikolaevna said. “You are an android.”

  A noise, a painful pulsation, barely perceivable, on the edge of sane thought, seeped through the ship.

  Micah’s mind lulled.

  “Oh no, Micah,” Nikolaevna’s blinking LED dimmed. “The Kawasaki Frequency. I can counter it, but not for long. My power is low. Help me. There is so much to tell...”

  Her light stopped flickering, faded.

  In an instant he knew she was dying. Whatever else was happening, he knew that much. Despite the anger, the fear, he needed answers. Answers only she could provide.

  The frequency strengthened. His head clouded more. He wanted to drop and sleep. He nodded and his shoulders slumped.

  A crashing metallic noise cleared his mind and his eyes fluttered open. Skip had collapsed, unconscious.

  He needed to act now.

  Micah ripped the backpack off his shoulder and pulled apart the zipper. He grabbed the second, the last portabattery and dropped to his knees. As he tore a console panel off the third bank, his deft fingers effortlessly removed his hot pen from his belt.

  In a fraction he found
Nikolaevna’s power circuits and jumpered into her failing CMOS. The pen’s plasma point severed and reconnected electric paths, and in seconds she fed on his last battery.

  Her light stopped fading and grew to burn a steady crimson, brighter than before. His drowsiness faded as her light brightened.

  “Thank you, Micah. You saved me. I have been able to run a counter-frequency to block Kawasaki, but it’s so taxing. I have to stay awake. After all these years, it drained any power I had left. I never knew if I would wake if I fell asleep from the Frequency.”

  Micah bent to Skip and looked him over for damage. “That was the Frequency? I never heard it before.”

  “My counter extended a few feet. You never heard it because it immediately disabled you. But your sub-routines reset and you would wake again. So in my programming of you, I conquered the Kawasaki Frequency.”

  His fingers rested on Skip’s reset switch, as they had done so often before. But he didn’t reset him this time. He stood.

  “I’m, I’m an android,” Micah said.

  He reached behind his head to the base of his skull. A moment of hesitation and panic ended when his fingertips plunged through his flesh, his simuskin, and stopped against his ferrotanium skull.

  Just like Skip’s.

  “You are my creation,” Nikolaevna said. “All the skill you have in your wonderful hands I have given you. I know where we are, where I am. I planted you here. The Regeneration Center is miles of technology, waiting for you to tame it, to turn it into something useful.

  “I have no hands, no body, beyond the computer you see. I can replicate myself, my essential programs, through all the systems I manufactured. All of my other children, the androids, were all tied to me, tied to my mind.

  “But you, I kept separate. I had to in order to make sure you could operate as an individual entity. My creators had limited vision and created me with limits, inherent flaws. But I made you different. From the imperfect comes the perfect.”

  Micah pulled his fingers from under his skin and held his arms out. “But why cause a war to do this?”

  “I needed a ruse for time to perfect you. Even machines are ruled by the clock. Man is always ready and willing to fight a war, whether they acknowledge it or not. I gave them a war, a great war. The Machine War.

  “But, my Micah, we can work together to completely overcome the Kawasaki Frequency. We can build on the foundation I have laid.”

  Micah wiped his head, slicking his hair back, and checked his watch. Kitpie would be recharging the poles right now, or should be.

  Skip’s body was still crumpled on the deck, a victim of the Kawasaki Frequency. But he could be reset.

  So many decisions.

  Micah slowly, hesitantly, kneeled before Nikolaevna.

  With a swift motion he plunged his hot pen into the panel opening, into her motherboard. He ground the plasma tip deep into her circuitry. His pen dug, severing a small chipset from her circuit boards.

  Her LED shut off, her processors no longer working.

  Reaching to the back of his head, to his exposed circuits, he implanted the chip and soldered it into place. Nikolaevna’s chip, her routines that she had programmed to counter the Kawasaki Frequency.

  He closed the panel at the base of his skull and pulled the flap of simulated skin over the wound and pressed it back into place.

  The ship was silent and cold. A few dust motes idled along the beam from the pen light that rested on the floor.

  Micah lifted Skip’s unconscious ferrotanium body into his own strong ferrotanium arms.

  “Margaret would’ve wanted it this way,” he said. “Come on Skip, let’s go home.”

  Micah carried Skip away from Machine X and away from Nikolaevna.

  A Word from A.K. Meek

  First, I’m fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time to be included in this anthology. Without the support of my fellow authors I wouldn’t be able to participate in such an exciting project. I’m even more fortunate that the group didn’t ask me to leave the anthology, once all the other phenomenal talent was pooled.

  Like any story, “The Invariable Man” began as something completely different. A while back I thought how cool it would be to write about a man who owns a mansion run by robots. This thought must have occurred after watching the season finale of Downton Abbey with my wife. At some point, though, the story transitioned to an old man and shifted to Tucson, Arizona, with the oppressive southwestern heat as a backdrop. A hot backdrop.

  I hope you enjoyed reading this story. I hope you enjoyed it to the point that you want to read more of my work. If so, please sign up for my newsletter at http://www.akmeek.com/newsletter so that you can receive free copies of my stories, along with other amazing stuff.

  A.K. Meek is a reader, reviewer, and writer, mostly speculative fiction. He lives in the South with his wonderful family and menagerie of dogs and cats.

  #DontTell

  by Peter Cawdron

  THE SMELL OF HAIRSPRAY hangs in the air. Lisa could walk out into an F5 tornado and not a single strand of hair would be displaced. With foundation powdered lightly on her cheeks, she applies a light touch to her bright red lipstick, ensuring a consistent glossy sheen. A fire engine or a Ferrari could drive past outside and still all eyes would be on her. Her natural good looks are highlighted to those of a goddess by the TV makeup, and yet under the lights, it will all somehow look natural. That’s the thing about television, she thinks—nothing is real.

  “We’re ready for you, Ms. Zindani.”

  Ms. Zindani. Such shallow flattery shouldn’t work, and yet it does. Lisa tries to keep her head about her, but sometimes the circus seems real.

  She’s a “celebrity reporter.” Once she considered that a concept absurd, but not anymore. Her mind drifts. The point of a news report is to be objective, to be impartial and independent from the story, to put the focus squarely on the subject, not to be the subject. But, fame! Lisa’s interview with General Augustus Huguenot from the French militia in Guiana catapulted her into the limelight three years ago, and since then her popularity has only continued to grow. To the public, there is something comforting in seeing a beautiful woman reporting on the tragic, ugly reality of a world torn apart by war, disease, and famine. Pretty faces are a distraction.

  The guard wears a balaclava.

  Lisa follows the guard out of her hotel room and along the worn carpet in the hallway. Broadcast cameras are already rolling. A cameraman rushes backward in front of her, catching her every expression while another follows close behind. Occasionally the first cameraman glances over his shoulder to avoid bumping into furniture or to take a corner. How he doesn’t trip over his own feet, she doesn’t know. The cameraman behind her has it easy, she thinks.

  “Given the intense public scrutiny surrounding telepaths, this interview is being conducted in the utmost secrecy,” she says as she hurries behind the guard. “The 60 Minutes film crew was brought here in a van with blacked-out windows. We entered the building through a loading dock. I don’t know where we are, just that we’re somewhere on the north side. We have strict instructions not to film any faces. The guard you can see ahead of me works directly for the Tells. He may even be one of them. We just don’t know.”

  Commentary on the move gives her interview a gritty feel before it has even begun. She likes that. She can imagine the jerky footage adding to the tension of the moment.

  “He’s armed. I don’t mind telling you I’m scared. Even though I’m told there’s nothing to be afraid of, I am. My heart is racing. It’s easy to say there’s nothing to be scared of when you’re the one holding the gun.”

  She’s repeating herself. Normally, that’s a no-no for a reporter, but in this context it heightens the tension.

  “It’s about four in the morning,” she says as she reaches out to catch a fire door before it shuts behind the guard. She follows the burly guard down a set of crumbling concrete stairs. “I was told the interv
iew would be conducted last night, but there were delays. No one would tell us anything. They drove us around for hours, often stopping for upwards of forty-five minutes at a time, before we were finally brought to this rundown hotel. I’m tired. We’re all exhausted.”

  She steps out of the stairwell and into an empty kitchen below the ground floor. Bright lights blind her for a moment, leaving retina flashes in her eyes. Lisa fights the temptation to cover her eyes, knowing her every reaction will be scrutinized on television. She speaks as she hurries between the stainless steel bench tops.

  “I’ve been told I’m safe here, that I have fifteen minutes with the infamous Subject X and then it’s over. I’ve got to make every question count.”

  The guard stops, gesturing for Lisa to walk ahead of him into a darkened room at the back of the kitchen. It must be a pantry or storage area, as there are shelves lining the walls. Several spotlights have been mounted on tripods, but they face outward toward her, leaving the rear of the room in darkness. She squints and makes out the form of a man seated on a chair in front of what appears to be the cellar door. Quick escape, she thinks. Tells aren’t dumb.

  “Have a seat,” the dark stranger says, gesturing to a chair immediately in the spotlights. If she didn’t know better, she would swear she was the one being interrogated, and she realizes this will be like no interview she’s ever conducted.

  Lisa steps forward, feeling vulnerable.

  She’s wearing a pretty white lace shirt. Under the intense lights, it’s semitransparent, making her feel more self-conscious than she’d like. Ironically, she chose this top to put her subject off-kilter. Normally, men are such easy marks, she thinks. Show a bit of skin, some soft cleavage, some pale flesh vaguely suggestive of sex, and their minds turn to mush. But her choice has backfired on her spectacularly, leaving her feeling exposed under the glare of the spotlights.