Writers of the Future: 29

  How did they…know…?

  When I regain consciousness, my optic readout shows me that sixteen minutes have passed. I can’t move my arms or legs. Vision clears, but my head feels as if someone has put a drill behind my ear. I’m on my parent’s bed, limbs strapped to all four bedposts. The pillow is wet behind me.

  Mom is holding bloody knives and smiling.

  “Mom?”

  “Cut the charade,” Dad says from the corner. He flicks something at me and it lands like an earring on my chest.

  My kill switch. He must have dug it out of my head while I was drugged.

  “Who are you?” Dad says. He sits down like a gargoyle beside me, hunching and eager, the old jackal expression on his face. “I already know you’re not our son. We grafted a rotating verbal tic into his consciousness when he was young, triggered whenever he steps into the kitchen. He’s not even aware of it. Subtle, comes across as mild OCD.” When I don’t answer, Dad’s nostrils flare. “You’ve got a damned name. What is it?”

  “Maximilian.”

  Dad turns to Mom. “Take out his eyes.”

  She springs into action so fast it’s as if she’s been waiting her whole life for this. Mom kneels beside my head, still wearing the checkered apron from breakfast.

  “What is it with you and eyes, Peznowski?” I shout.

  “Wait,” Dad says. He’s almost too late. Mom has already positioned the tips of both blades a half inch from the corners of my left eye. A horrific stainless steel V in my vision.

  In my right eye, Dad’s hybrid face appears. He’s flush and excited, eyes like pale lanterns behind his glasses.

  No kill switch, no kill switch, no kill switch.

  Dad looks apelike, cheeks swollen, eyes sharp. “Do you know me?”

  “I’m Harris Alexander Pope.”

  My parents let out an astonished gasp in the same instant. Their heads rotate to regard each other, slack-jawed and gratified.

  “Harris?!” Dad sits back, laughing heartily. He stands up and does a fist-pump in the air. “Oh! The universe loves me!”

  Mom leaps upon me, knocking the wind from my lungs. Her laughter is shrill and hideous as she gouges both my eyes out.

  Harris? Look at me.”

  Dad’s voice, followed by wicked female laughter.

  I turn my head in the direction of the voice, trying not to think of my mutilated face. My throat is ragged from screaming.

  “You know,” Dad intones in my ear, “I would never have known you were the traitor. I died up there…no memory of what happened. We always planned on regrouping in New Haven if things went wrong and at first, I wondered why you didn’t regen with us. I spent hours combing through the files for your save. Then I saw all the magazines and news clips. Harris Pope, war hero, went undercover with the Partisans and popped our headquarters like a bad blister. Who sent you here?”

  “The ghost of Christmas Past.”

  There’s a terrible silence. The pain in my eyesockets fans into my skull. Fear is an incredible emotion. We are nothing more than ragged pulses of fear, tossed out of wombs and onto a great frying pan. Even with technological miracles delivered through syringe or ingestible, we are still the primeval beast howling for all time.

  “What was the plan?” Peznowski asks. Can’t tell if it’s Mom or Dad. Husky voice, almost a whisper. “You kill us, and then…what?”

  “They didn’t tell me. Honest.”

  “They?”

  “Christmas Past, Present, and—”

  It must be his fist that smashes through my teeth. The attack stuns me into mute stupidity, the broken teeth in my mouth like peanut shells. I spit them out in a gob of bloody saliva.

  “I’m going to torture you forever, you know.” Mom’s voice in my ear. “But not like this. Matthew and I have been talking about how Peter grew up too fast. We want a little baby again. How would you like your consciousness downloaded into a helpless creature, engineered to never grow up. Your mind trapped in that prison for all time, slowly turning to mush, while we feed you, and wrap you up and change your diapers …year, after year, after year? Forever?”

  A new scream starts in my throat, shredding my resolve.

  I stutter through broken teeth and blood. “Earth will eventually step in.”

  “No, they won’t,” Dad says. “We made a mistake in our earlier dealings with Earth. Strict isolationism doesn’t work. The birth world needs to be brought to heel. With their environmental problems, economic problems, political problems…all it will take is one big disaster to reduce them.”

  “Earth will show up sooner or later and erase every last Partisan file!” I hear desperation in my own voice.

  “A dozen captured asteroids too small for detection,” Dad says. “Hurtling toward Mother Blue. You think Mars was hit hard? Earth will be thrown back to the Stone Age, and we’ll make sure they stay there.”

  The terrible majesty of what he is saying is underscored by its plausibility. Even at the time of the Partisan war, Earth had been collapsing under the weight of environmental and economic pressures. If the Partisans strike Earth in the way he proposes, civilization really will come apart at the seams.

  And meanwhile, I’ll be screaming wordless for all time, cradled in my sadistic mother’s arms…

  “You Partisans always have a contingency plan,” I say numbly.

  “Yes,” Mom and Dad say together. “We do.”

  I open my sightless sockets. Black room, swirling in an oily eddy. Through the squirting fluids and ruptured flesh, my optic nerves are firing in dazzling pixilated bursts of color, a swansong for the world of light. The nerves are still reaching for information to process, phantom images like black plates of glass, all the same color, shifting over each other.

  I clear my throat. “So do I.”

  In my head, buried where Mom’s knives couldn’t get to, the dom patch is running. Since injecting my subject last night with the neuro-remote hidden in my fingers, it has never stopped running. Doesn’t work on humans, but it turns lower life-forms into remote-controlled toys.

  The dom patch menu tells me that these last few minutes of conversation have been successfully recorded by our ever-so-quiet listener in the doorway. I scroll down to the next option.

  ATTACK PARAMETERS: ALL.

  I’m naked in a steel tub, and Traci is helping me sit up. Shane is nowhere to be seen, and my mouth still thinks I’m in midspeech at the save center. Behind Traci, I see Charlotte’s lovely face, but it’s strangely aged now. A towel is in her hands.

  I snatch it from her and cover my nakedness. “Do you mind?” The surroundings settle into my thoughts. A regeneration pod, where they grow new bodies for mental downloads.

  Which means that I’ve died. And I don’t even remember opening my eyes.

  Traci laughs, her shock of chestnut curls dancing with the movement. “Sorry, hero. What’s the last thing you remember?”

  Towel floating over my groin atop the slimy water, I look back and forth between their faces. A wave of irritation flickers in me. “It was three days after I returned from Phobos. I was talking to Shane. He said there were seven seconds left for the file uploading.”

  Traci’s smile straightens out, and she looks at me with strange respect and sympathy. “There’s a lot to talk about, Harris.” She steps back, taking Charlotte’s arm. “Get yourself toweled off and meet us in my office, third door down from the showers.”

  Their celebratory joy is visible, and I get the impression of being the birthday boy about to be led into a surprise party. I glance at the regeneration pod again, my anger subsiding. “Is this Bradbury Station?”

  “New Haven.”

  “My contract states—”

  “See me in my office,” Traci interrupts, and she walks away with Charlotte.

  I finally notice a wall c
onsole within reach, and I slap its screen.

  The first stunner is today’s date on the ticker at the bottom of the screen: May 20, 2316! Forty-two years separating the blink of an eye and flash of a neuron! Then I see two recent news articles posted by Traci for my viewing. The first headline rocks my core. NEW HAVEN PARTISAN REMNANT ERASED, “GRISLY” PLANS MADE PUBLIC.

  The Partisans? Hadn’t we defeated them four decades ago?

  I stand up, dripping synthgel, and tuck the towel around my waist. Forget the shower. Traci needs to explain a few things, and I think I’ll start by prodding her about that second, weirder and older headline:

  FAMILY DOG KILLS

  DEPUTY MAYOR, WIFE, SON.

  Planetary Scouts

  written by

  Stephen Sottong

  illustrated by

  JOSHUA MEEHAN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Stephen Sottong was born and raised in the rust-belt town of Kokomo, Indiana. He was introduced to science fiction by his brother and sister. The first book he checked out of the public library was Ben Bova’s Star Conquerors. From there, he made his way through as much of the library’s sci-fi collection as possible, reading the classic novels of the ’50s and ’60s from Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Brunner, Le Guin and others. He started writing at ten and continued sporadically throughout his working career but never did so in earnest until retirement. In the interim, Stephen repaired radios in the Navy and afterward in civilian life until he decided to upgrade his education.

  After ten years of engineering and another stint in college, he became an engineering librarian for the rest of his working career. As an academic librarian, he wrote numerous dull, scholarly articles published in library journals. The possibility of early retirement offered him the opportunity to return to his first love and write fiction full time. His short stories have been published in regional magazines but Writers of the Future is his first national publication.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Joshua Meehan was born in Nevada in 1990 and raised with his five younger siblings in Anchorage, Alaska. His interest in art began at the age of three, when he used crayons and markers on the walls and pillows in his house. His parents were always extremely supportive in his artistic pursuits. Since Joshua was home-schooled, they made sure to foster his passion through an art-focused curriculum, which included private lessons from Betty Dye, a local art teacher.

  Joshua and his family moved to Tucson, Arizona in 2002. Here he studied fine art at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and attended Ironwood Ridge High School. In 2008 Joshua received the grand prize in the Congressional Art Contest for his district and earned the honor of Eagle Scout. Later he studied fine art and illustration at the University of Arizona and pursued large-scale game and film projects, creating content and direction for production teams. Today he resides in Tucson, where he works as a freelance illustrator and concept artist and looks forward to the future in such a passionate field.

  His website is joshuameehan.com.

  Planetary Scouts

  -1-

  I was about to order another beer when a rumbling in the floor announced the arrival of the passenger liner. I thought about letting my new partner find me in the bar but decided against it. New recruits are impressionable. No use scaring off another one.

  Picking my left leg carefully off the bar rail, I placed the offending appendage on the floor. My knee had locked again. Hobbling would make me late. I forced the scarred fingers of my left hand into a fist and smacked the back of my knee. It gave with a jolt of pain. I was barely able to grab the edge of the bar to break my fall. Levering myself up, I flashed my credit chit at the pay station and made my way unsteadily to the door.

  Some parents and their Scout son were standing at the door of the bar making “oo-ah” noises at the painting on the bar’s domed ceiling. The owners had hired a starving offworld artist to immortalize the Planetary Scouts. The artist was talented, but he never talked to any of us. To start with, there’s the motto: Discover and Explore. That’s our motto all right, but we don’t do discovery any more. The boredom of hop to a planet, take a few readings, and repeat endlessly, had driven humans nuts, so discovery is now left to robot ships. The only reason they use us for exploration is because they’ve never come up with a computer that’s as adaptable as a human; although there are more than a few Scouts who wish they would, and pronto.

  Then there’re those planets the artist has us exploring. All the planets look a whole lot like primitive Terra or one of its clones. The fauna looks cuddly—nothing with claws or fangs. Some day I’d like to explore a world like that. Hasn’t happened yet.

  The space dock wasn’t far, so I walked. The night was typically warm and cloudless. In spite of the lights along the commercial strip, stars shone. One of the two moons was rising, and the docking stations that ringed the planet formed a brilliant necklace. A street vendor was preparing a dish that smelled of curry for a wobbly-looking Scout. As the knee warmed up, my pain eased.

  The railing by the dock’s reception area was filled with expectant Scouts waiting for visitors and new partners. Brushing the hair away from my artificial left eye, I zoomed in for a better view of the disembarking passengers. I had no idea what an A. Lester would look like. A short woman in her late twenties wearing a fresh Scout uniform came out first, long brown hair pulled back from a fine-featured face. Her body was full, lithe, muscular. She carried a large pack on her back.

  “Oh yes,” I said under my breath, “if there is a good deity, this will be the one. I deserve her after that last mush-for-brains.” The young woman spotted a middle-aged female Scout holding a sign with a name on it, approached, and shook hands. So I reverted to being an atheist.

  The remaining passengers were all civilians. The railing cleared. My knee ached.

  A female flight attendant with short red hair left the hatch, the kind of woman—tall, poised, gorgeous—who managed to look great in the shapeless uniforms the spacelines pack their attendants into. She was laughing and talking to the person behind her.

  A young man ducked out of the hatch. I zoomed in. The kid was nearly two meters tall, with short blond hair, strong features, and a body capable of towing a small excursion vehicle out of a swamp. He joked amiably with the flight attendant who didn’t take her eyes off him. The man carried both of their bags effortlessly in one hand. Hell, he even had a cleft chin. I turned my eyes to heaven. “There is a God: it’s Loki.”

  I made my way to the gate. “You must be my new partner.”

  The young man dropped the bags and sprang to attention. “Scout Private Lester reporting for duty.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I turned to the flight attendant. “And you would be?”

  “Marina.” She offered a flawlessly manicured hand.

  I handed Marina her bag. “Thanks for keeping the kid safe.” I turned to Lester. “Come on, kid.”

  Lester shrugged and waved goodbye to the crestfallen woman. He fell in beside me. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir. Aidan Pastor is a legend in the Scouts.”

  I flinched. “Right, kid.”

  “We study your tactics in Planetary Scout Academy.”

  “I better check on my royalties.”

  “I can’t wait to take off on our first mission.”

  I waved my credit chit at a ground car, and it opened. We climbed in, and the door swung shut. The seats were too small for Lester. “Scout enlisted quarters building 42,” I said. The car moved out.

  I looked at the eager face and pulled up my left shirt sleeve. “You know what these are, kid?”

  “Burns?”

  I nodded. “My last partner played by Academy rules. That’s why I’ve got these. We’re going nowhere till I’m sure you’ve got my rules down to instinct. So what do you do when an unknown lifeform comes at you fast?”

  “Attempt to
determine if the lifeform is intelligent.”

  “Wrong. Rule one: if the local fauna or flora starts chasing you, shoot it. My last partner wouldn’t shoot the natives because he thought they might be intelligent. They were intelligent—intelligent enough to have a catapult. The creatures he wouldn’t shoot hit us with a boulder as we tried to get the hell out. It damaged the ship—caught on fire, burned him to death and nearly killed me.”

  “It was bad for you, but it saved the beings.”

  I stuck a scarred index finger into his oversized chest. “Nope. When they hit the ship, there was a radiation leak. Killed everything for fifty kilometers. Wiped out all the intelligent life on the planet. Only thing that saved us was our suits. If he’d shot a couple of them, there’d still be intelligent life on that planet, he’d still be alive, and I wouldn’t be in constant pain. You don’t shoot, I’ll shoot you.”

  Lester quieted. “Yes, sir.”

  “Part of the reason that the Scouts were formed was so humans wouldn’t wipe out any more intelligent lifeforms, but we’ve got to protect ourselves so that we can protect them.”

  I held up a second scarred finger. “Rule number two: this is work; we’re not on vacation. Get in, get the info, get out. The longer you stay on a planet, the better the chance you’ll get in trouble. You want a vacation, go to Vega 5.”

  Lester nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “Last rule: I make the rules.”

  “You’ve got the experience.”

  “Just remember that when we’re in the field. Now, we’ve got a few months of training before we go anywhere.” I looked at the kid. Kid—I was barely twenty years older than him. His eager, unscarred face reminded me of a dozen other new Scouts I’d watched come off that passenger ship. Most never made the return trip home. “You ready for this?”

  “Yes, sir.” Lester sat up very straight. His head touched the roof of the car.

  “No, you’re not.” The car reached the barracks. I got out and grabbed Lester’s bag. I waved my credit chit at the car’s sensor. “Lakeside Hotel, also credit one return trip for the passenger.” The car flashed an acknowledgment. I saw Lester was puzzled. “You got a credit chit?”