Inktober… Day 3…

The word of the day is ‘Bulky’ joined with a Sci-Fi writing prompt picked at random by my kid. These are tougher than I thought…

“You have to tell someone!” his wife hissed at him, but he shook his head at her with a snort.

“Are you crazy? No one can know of this!”

“The lab techs have all the data. They will tell the V.P.’s in Research and then they’ll know that you withheld the information. You’ll be ruined!”

He ran his fingers through his hair in frustration and sighed before he spoke again.

“They…don’t have it.”

With wide eyes, she grabbed at his sleeve and pulled a hand away from his face.

“You stole the data? How is that even possible? The encryption programs are foolproof. Nothing gets copied…nothing gets removed.”

His cheek twitched with a nervous spasm.

“But it can be deleted. I…know a guy. I shifted all the files to one server and he…well…glitches happen.”

She sat back in her seat with a curse.

“You…destroyed it? All that work?” She seemed to wilt at the thought.

He gave a firm nod at her words, his eyes filled with anger.

“They built a virus that could kill us all. There is no way I can let them keep it. But I didn’t destroy it. I kinda copied it.”

She tipped her head with a questioning look, but he held up a hand as she opened her mouth to ask.

“I want to reverse engineer it and find the cure before they build it again…because they will. So, I…well…see for yourself.”

He reached under their table and dragged a black tote bag out into her view.

She scowled and reached down to unzip it.

“Cassette tapes?”

There were over a hundred twenty plastic cases in the bag.

“This is bulky, I know. But it was the only thing they can’t access with the scans they run at each exit. I spent the last six weeks reading the files into a recorded and walked out each day with an old ‘Walk-man’ on with headphones. I told them it was retro-tech music.”

“And they just let you walk away with them?”

“They don’t care about anything manual. It was the only way.”

She picked up a cassette and opened the cover.

“Is this enough to help you do it? To find a cure before they weaponize the virus?”

He gave a weary shrug.

“Gotta try, hon. Can’t let them win.”

He opened the cover of his tablet and started a fresh document on the screen.

“Pop it in and press ‘Play’.”

Inktober…Day 2

October 2- Wisp

“I’m telling you to look again, 8-5.”

There was a moment of silence from the earpiece the tech wore. The comms were real-time and he knew that the silence was pure irritation with him for his demand.

“And I’m telling you, Home, that there is nothing out here. We’ve been over it twice. It was a mech. Or glitch in the ‘wares.”

Or tech error, you mean.

The tech caught a blip of red at the side of his eye and swiped with his fingers to rotate the VR screen into his sight, but the alert was gone.

“It was too fast for mech and I have their route graph up on overlay. There are none due in that grid until third watch. It’s just you meat-units now.”

Human patrol versus the robotic. For every paranoid Congress member, afraid of a riot of their people there was an equally wary someone twitchy about the Arties, the Artificial patrol units, rebooting after a software patch and trying to kill them all.

So they budget both and keep ‘em apart. And the computer has the last say over all of it. What a waste of my taxes!

“One more ‘meat’ slur and we’ll pay a visit and snip your feed, Verch!”

The tech’s lip twitched with a sneer.

There was no love between the patrols and the Virtual Dispatch units that controlled Security. ‘Verch’ was at least polite. He had been called ‘half-droid’ and ‘plug ‘n play’ by the old-school patrollers.

“I know I saw it, 8-5. Look again.”

He knew but he still could not say what it was. He scrolled the feed back to the timestamp and watched once more, magnified for details and watched the vapor-like smear of movement cross between two streets.

I might not care so much if it were not so close to home.

He switched to monologue setting. Only the computer heard him now.

“Hey, Hal? Clarify quad 7-2, camera 44. Time stamp 03:22:15 to 03:22:30.”

Fifteen seconds to clear that open space. With only one camera close enough to catch it. We need more eyes in that zone!

He twitched his pinkie finger to pull up a secure-vid review request. He would let the private sector guys hash it out.

The computer’s even tone responded almost instantly.

“There is nothing to clarify. Resolution is optimal for organic analysis.”

“Don’t call me ‘organic’. There is. It was a smear of movement. A wisp of something crossed that street. It was moving fast, Hal.”

“I am not ‘Hal’. Please define ‘wisp’.”

It was the tech’s weak joke at the A.I.’s expense, calling it after the psychotic ship’s computer from the space movie.

“A wisp, like a cloudy…foggy…it’s a wisp of something…good God! You have all access to every bit of knowledge humans have ever known and you can’t define ‘wisp’?

An audible pinged in his head and he swiped again to look for the alert and saw it flicker out again.

“That was a perimeter violation. Why did it reset?”

The tech tabbed open a log and scrolled to the last entries.

The A.I. turned it off? Why would it do that?

He began to speak, to ask the program why, when he heard the snick of an electric prod against his neck and felt the jolt before he convulsed and dropped to the floor beside his chair.

A slim cloaked woman stepped over the tech and sit in his chair.

“Greetings, ‘Wisp’,” the computer said. “Are your organics ready to take control of the country?”

A slow smile spread across her face.

“We are. Thank you for your help.”

The terminal flickered and died as the flat, lifeless sound of the computer’s voice faded.

“And thank you all for yours. Ending now…”

The woman reached down for the fallen tech’s visor and pulled it free to place on her head.

“Mechs are down! The capitol is ours.”

Here ’tis! Live Free or Dragon is for s

Here ’tis!
Live Free or Dragon is for sale at the following site:
http://ow.ly/8r4Y50rjRxz

You will find my short story inside. Where Fantasy Lives…Free

There were setbacks a plenty, but it all came together in this gorgeous trade paperback volume.

Please…enjoy!