Thursday 24 October 2013

Ditched (part 4)

  “You're dead, Jimmy,” I look up at my impossible friend, his face distorted by a tear that trickles down towards my ear. “I killed you. I should have followed orders, I should have let them crash.”


  “Old news, buddy, I forgave you long ago. Don't break down on me now.”


  “Whatever became of us, Jimmy? Why did you ever stick with me? I only ever hurt you, but you were always there, always ready to forgive me.”


  “Ever since we were two lonely, scared kids, trying to be brave, trying to do a job a long way from anyone else. Craving comfort, understanding and intimacy. We moved on to other things, other people, but I knew we'd always have that connection, always be linked together.” He grins. “We still are. Don't let it bother you.”


  “Don't let it bother you,” The patch on the suit says 'Mohammed J. Mahdi', but I called him Jimmy when we were first paired up and the name stuck.


  I try to ignore the water, imagine it as the cold hard vacuum we are training for. The EVA suit is bulky and snug, it fails to hold out the crushing pressure I feel in my mind. I concentrate on the task in hand, replace the damaged system and let Jimmy close the hatch. I put my mind on the ultimate goal, escaping the atmosphere and working out in the booming space industry. Still the water is there, enveloping me, enfolding me, trying to smother me with its embrace.


  “Focus, they are monitoring your heart rate.”


  I decide that the rescue divers are not helping and close my eyes to block them out, there are no bubbles in space. I click the new aerial in place and tighten the securing bolts by feel alone, I have practised this and will not let some leftover childhood fear spoil my career.


  “Quit talking, I've got this.” But after they hoist us out of the tank and we are left alone to strip our suits and get dressed, he holds me until I stop shaking.


  I lie there a weep for a while, mourning something lost in the past. The rational part of my mind wonders what else I have left behind, feels the need to prod it to see if still hurts.


  “C'mon, don't flake out on me.” Jimmy is still there, his discovered non-existence hasn't dissuaded him.


  “You're not real.” I tell the ghost.


  “Sulking is not going to get us anywhere. You were doing well with the memories.” Jimmy is young, lacking the salt and pepper hair that gave him a distinguished look, the skin graft marks on his hands from a cabin fire and the lines on his face properly earned. He looks like he did when we joined the war ourselves.


  I arrive at her door in a state, wrung out and quivering, not knowing where else to go She takes one look at me before pulling me inside and making me coffee.


  “Imogen...” The cup sits in my hands gently scalding them, not hurting enough. “The fire in Bonne...”


  “Your sister? I saw it on the news, I didn't know...” I had introduced the two women in my life briefly at a party a couple of months ago, now my last family member was gone.


  “Her company signed the Freedom from Interference agreement last month, but their I.T. Supplier is in government pockets. Someone used a backdoor exploit to get into their servers.” I recalled the newscasts, smartly dressed people standing in from of a blackened building using phrases like 'multiple systems failures', 'tragedy', 'essential services deactivated', 'trapped' and 'cooling malfunction', talking and talking until I could stand it no more.


  “What will you do?” Her arm around my shoulders.


  “My company are starting a private security force, we reckon there's going to be fighting, the talking is failing, the electronic war is now killing people, we need to bring this to an end. I'm joining up.”


  “It won't bring Imogen back.”


  “It might save someone else.”


  “Imogen...” More tears blur my vision.


  “For fuck's sake, man, get your hand on the stick!” An angry ghost, he shakes his fist at me. He would probably punch me if he was real. “Becoming maudlin isn't going to help. What's next, the goldfish you found floating belly-up in the tank when you were six? The sandwich that seagull stole in Gothenburg? The boating accident that took your parents?”


  “Fuck off, Jimmy, you're still dead.” He's right, of course, I've spent too long lying on my back hurting and feeling sorry for myself. Time to do something. “And it was a fantastic sandwich, don't demean it.”


  I use my hands to manoeuvre my torso so I can search Peterson's body. My body feels light without the weight of my legs, but not being able to kneel makes movement awkward and clumsy. I hold my body up on one arm and use the other to check the corpses pockets, hovering on the edge of balance. My hand brushes his skin, paper-thin but not yet cold, something has sucked all vestiges of life from him. I guess that was me.


  The search reveals nothing until I disturb his coverall sleeve and see a small terminal strapped to his wrist, like a streamlined version of the old pilot's watch I used to wear. It takes an effort of mental and manual dexterity to figure out how to remove it without falling onto the cadaver, but finally I have my prize.


  “Good thinking,” say Jimmy. “We've done all we can here and should probably get moving.”


  “You talk a lot for a dead guy, Jimmy.”


  “There's different kinds of dead, you know.”


  The air fills with bullets and as I dive behind a vat I feel a tell-tale tug at my leg. I bark the command to engage and the armed drones commence to make a mess of their human adversaries.


  “Little more than a graze,” Jimmy tells me. “Won't slow you down.”


  I let my little mechanical army fight the battle without my clumsy interference. I scan the factory for any other sign of threat, but it is a fairly low-tech set-up considering the nanoculture in the vats. By the small scale of the place, it looks to be some sort of experimental manufactuary, a lab trying to cook up the next batch of nasty.


  “Verrek! You have to see this!” Liefman seldom breaks into profanity, or indeed her native language, so I risk sticking my head back round the side of the tank.


  The man has been pierced several times by the projectiles of the small, flying, insectile drones, but he still keeps backing away from them, dragging his shattered leg behind him. I stand and walk over to the figure, my leg inconveniencing me less than the rip in my trousers.


  “Davis, I killed you properly. You're dead.” I tell him despite evidence to the contrary.


  “You never did grasp the implications, did you? Try thinking big for a change. Why just be one person. Hseng figured it all out.” Davis hisses through pain.


  “Hseng was mad, she threw herself into a furnace. Why didn't you do the same?” I draw my gun.


  “And miss being the architect of the new world?” He gives me the smirk that had made me hate him the moment we first met, so I empty my clip into his face and chest.


  “Liefman,” I say into my microphone. “Bastard's cloned himself, this isn't good.”


  “Bring him back,” She replies into my earpiece. “We need to know if he managed to replicate the controller. And get out of there quickly, I've leaked the location and the scouring squad will be there very soon. Take the rear exit, I've arranged transport, should be okay for two if you don't mind being intimate.”


  “Is this all revenge for something I've done?” I say as it dawns on me how much of this could be my doing.



  “Yes. If he wakes up on the way, put a bullet between his eyes for me.”

Friday 18 October 2013

Ditched (part 3)

  “We killed Peterson.” I slump back down, overwhelmed and unable to comprehend anything.


  “Peterson panicked. He couldn't handle it. Calm yourself, you're not like that.” I let my breathing slow, my heartbeat ceases its drumroll. Jimmy is right, panic doesn't serve any use. “That's better. Now tell me what's happening, I know its in there somewhere.”


  In here somewhere, part of a rich soup of anecdotes, memories, fantasies and lies. A sea of me that I am floating on the surface of, unable to make any sense of the murky depths. I am a creature of the air, the water scares me.


  My father's attention is held by the sailing boats, jostling for position out on the water. My mother's attention is held by the squirming and wailing bundle that is my baby sister. My attention is held by the sleek, shining form of a fish hanging beneath the jetty. My arm is only long enough to dangle my fingers in the water, my stomach against the worn wooden boards, I need to grasp the fish with my chubby, four year old hand. I inch myself forwards.


  The transition to the aquatic world is instant. I watch with sadness as the fish darts away from my reach, a stream of bubbles escaping from my mouth. I look up to the surface, getting further away and for the first time wonder how deep the water is. Things grow darker and I start to worry, but down here I cannot scream for my parents. As everything goes black I spy the light of the angels as they embrace me and bear me back up to the world of air.


  “The angels...”


  “The angels, yes, do you remember?” I have disappointed Jimmy, he needs me to be rational. The horror connected to me is what? Something important, something necessary. Jimmy knows the answer, he won't tell me, it must be better that I remember.


  “I remember the war, there were no angels.”


  “Tell me about the war, then.”


  “So,” I address the class,”Who can tell me what the Company Sovereignty War was really about?”


  “Freedom, the companies didn't like the laws.” I really need a drink, but it was drinking that got me into doing community service.


  “Good answer, but not quite right.”


  “Power, 'cus they are stronger than the nations.” I shuffle my weight onto the prosthetic leg, it tires slower.


  “Well, if they hadn't thought that then there wouldn't have been a war, but it wasn't a contest of strength.” I wonder if I was like these kids when I was their age, but this is a company school, all these children will work for Qorsa Inc. for at least a few years to repay their education, I had a choice.


  “Taxes, they didn't want to pay them.”


  “Bingo. It was all about the money.” The teacher gives me a disapproving look and looks ready to leap in with the company line, so I continue. “Or rather, it was all about what was happening to the money. Even back then some companies generated more money, employed more people and accomplished more than many nations. They had to pay tax to the nations they operated in and the nations used this money to pay for infrastructure (that's stuff like roads and cables), schools, armies and lots of other stuff. But the companies saw how much of this tax was being wasted on stuff no-one needed and thought they could do a better job for the people.”


  “We were overseeing the automatic drones for one of the asteroid mining companies,” I search for the name and to my surprise it pops up immediately. “Blaze Horizons. Basically flying them when the computers broke down again. Remember the input lag you used to get working drones that far out?”


  “Yes, its just like talking to you.” Jimmy's smile shows me I am putting the shards together properly.


  “The whole non-taxable space earnings thing kicked it off, then while the international courts were arguing about that along came the re-entry taxes, then the retaliation with the government incompetency suite. It was a muddy bureaucratic mess long before anyone fired a shot, no-one could follow the issues, it was all debates, meetings, summits and protests.”


  The rain has not dampened the fires of passion and hate, so we try to escape the erupting violence between the two protests as they meet in the plaza. I lose track of the others in the swirling mass of people and decide on hiding my “Manage Not Rule” T-shirt, but find I am not quick enough to escape being caught in a three-way scrum between both factions and the police. Something airborne and heavy catches me on the head me and half blinded I fall into an alleyway.


  Using the wall to guide myself and keep myself upright I follow the alley, but I hear people following me. I pick up speed, but stumble on something unseen, the world swims around me and I lose track of up and down. Strong fingers grasp my arm and propel me through a doorway and I collapse in a heap.


  “Eat mace, fuckers!” The door slams and standing over me is a vision, light streams through her fair disarranged hair, murky green eyes and sharp nose fit perfectly above a small mouth and pointed chin.


  “Are you an angel?”


  “No, I'm a jazz pianist.”


  “That's nearly lucid. You're doing well, except the parts where you drift off, still having trouble with names?” Everything shudders slightly as the world settles another couple of millimetres.


  “I can think of a few I would like to call you, if that's what you mean. The trip down memory lane is so much fun, but what are you not telling me, Jimmy? What's up with my eye for a start?” I have resisted touching my face, fearful of my hand coming away wet and sticky, fearful of what I might or might not touch with my fingers.


  “Its damaged, temporary, but there are more important things at the moment. We need you to remember more.”


  “The dead guy, Peterson, tell me what the fuck that's about before I lose my mind, what happened to me?” Something is caught in the tangle of wreckage above me, its not part of the craft we're in, could be organic, but its in too much of a mess, no flesh, to have been a person.


  “You've got to trust me, don't dwell on it. Exercise your arms a little, you might need them.”


  “And try not to panic, I get it. Can you answer me one question straight? What the hell is that hanging over there?” Jimmy may be infuriating at times, it is always a question of catching him off-guard.


  “The remains of your legs and left arm, we salvaged what we could and then let go. Happy? Now don't lose it.”


  “Don't lose it!” Jimmy cries over the cacophony of alarms. I vector the drive thrust to combat the manoeuvring jets.


  “Liefman, lock them out of the control systems,” I shout into my helmet microphone. Base has hijacked our systems through the main communications array and we are fighting our own ship.


  “Got it, main comms going offline!” My own screens flash her handiwork up among the frame stress reports and a list of errors from things that we have sabotaged and jury-rigged.


  There is a grinding noise that shudders through the ship as I correct the thrusters and our contact with the artefact slips. The window showing our trajectory updates its estimates, its more optimistic but not quite enough, the alien device will still plough into the Earth. I tell myself its just another misfired rock from my mining days, but we never had to catch anything this massive. I up the power an increment and glance at the stress indicators, not good.


  Over the internal voice comms I can hear the choral symphony that the artefact broadcasts onto our net, control has been trying to decode it since we picked it up. Liefman has been trying to find a way to block it. I have been trying to ignore it.


  There is a crash and the ship lurches, something in the nose section not designed to be used as a bulldozer gives way. A new alarm sounds in my helmet, the air pressure monitor has detected a leak.


  “Is there anything on this ship that doesn't have an alarm?” I ask as fight to keep the contact and the thrust under control. The stress indicators go red and start to drop offline.


  “If there is you haven't managed to break it yet.” Jimmy sends a revised engine profile to my screen and I okay it. The cabin shakes and settles again. Peterson starts screaming and I add him to the list of people excluded from the comm net. The trajectory indicator looks good, but only if I can hold the power in place without destroying the ship.


  There is a ripping sound and then external sounds lessen as the air flows out of the hull, wearing the vacuum suits was my one concession to Peterson's objections, looks like he saved our lives. Something inside the ship snaps, sending a shockwave through my seat, the floor erupts and a broken structural spar spears into the cabin. I recoil against my seatbelts but it is not aimed at me.


  Jimmy spasms once as the jagged point pierces through his suit, through his body and through his seat. I open my mouth to shout a denial, but without Jimmy's assistance the craft skews across the face of the artefact. I cut the engines, and try the manoeuvring thrusters, but we slam side on into the object, tumble out of the groove the nose was lock into and impact heavily into a rounded pod we thought might be some sort of sensor array. The impact sends my screens black, I catch a glimpse of stars through where the hull used to be.



  Over the sound of my own cries I can hear the angels singing.

Saturday 12 October 2013

Ditched (part 2)

  “C'mon, Chief, you can't keep on drifting out on me like that, I know there's a lot of shit going on in your head, but right now I want you to pay attention to what's happening out here. Can you do that for me? Can you nod your head to let me know you're in there and not panicking?”


  The idea to rebel crosses my mind, but I have no other ally, crazy hallucination or not. My neck seems seized solid, but I put on a display of will, I move my head a few millimetres and then relax it. I am rewarded by a coughing fit that shakes my body, refilling it with the sea of pain and threatening to send me back into unconsciousness.


  I choke on the smoke, now filling the cabin and starting to obscure the canopy and instruments. Systems are failing but the craft clears the border fencing and hits the hardtop, the landing gear holding up despite the warning messages and weapons damage. The logos of an allied company stream past as the 'chute deploys and I decelerate to a rapid and uncomfortable stop. I hit the manual release on seatbelts and canopy, hurl myself out of the seat, slide down the craft's side and fall to the tarmac, flopping on the hard surface, coughing and retching. Sirens and fire-retardant foam start to fill the air.


  “Easy there, relax, using two lungs takes a little getting used to. Was that nod for me?” I nod again, carefully. “That's good, it means I'm probably not going to have to start from day one and get you toilet trained. Try to keep still, we're getting there, but we're still not quite ready for moving about. Try your right arm, slowly now.”


  I ponder for a moment on which is my right arm, make a decision and find that it seems to be pinned under a heavy weight. Suddenly it spasms and jerks, I realise it was not trapped after all. With careful concentration I lift the aching limb until the hand comes into my eye-line. The flesh is red and a little puffy. I wiggle my fingers experimentally and am pleased to watch them respond.


  “Fantastic.” Says my spirit guide. “You'll be playing the piano before you know it.”


  We sit side by side on the stool, one arm around the other and one hand on the keys. She laughs as my inexpert touch messes up another chord and improvises around it. The tune becomes a parody of itself, a music joke at my expense. My attempts to get the song back on track make it worse, her laughter is infectious.


  I rub some life into my left arm and soon have the use of two limbs. My physical world appears to be pulling itself together, I feel stiff and raw, but there is no longer any great pain. My mental world is still a forest of clashing images, snatches of memory that I cannot put into order, familiar times that seem to have happened to other people.


  With a grinding noise the floor moves again, something shifts and crashes down to my left. I turn my head and try to bring my working eye to bear on the source of the sound, but all I can see is a damaged and dark visual display, some sort of liquid has adhered to its cracked surface and congealed.


  “Yes, we'll have to make a move before too long, but we'll cross that bridge in a while, stay patient and try not to panic. I need to know how well you're doing in there, can you remember your name? Or my name? Or even her name? C'mon, think deep, it must be in there somewhere, get your hand on the stick, push that throttle forwards.”


  “Are you really going to go through with this?” He brushes imagined dust from my dress uniform's collar, and looks straight at me with those eyes that could have won any girl he fancied, if he wanted to. His hand lingers on my shoulder. “Is this what you really want?”


  Through the small window I can see that the bridal party has decanted from the beribboned vehicles. There are murmurs from the chapel, I should already be stood at the altar. Our families are small, but the place is packed with her orchestra and my squadron. A break in hostilities coinciding with a gap in their schedule and we jumped at the chance without really thinking it through.


  “Yes.” I finally reply. I lift his arm away from my shoulder.


  “Then get your hand on the stick, push that throttle forwards.” He says. We clasp hands, reseat our caps and then Jimmy leads me out in front of the congregation.


  “Jimmy,” I force out of a throat only now coming under my control, little more than a croak, but Jimmy's face opens up with a warm smile of relief.


  “Hey, you're actually in there, how much do you remember?”


  “Bits...don't connect...wedding...her...flying...war...saving plane...” I realise that somewhere all these fragments must connect into a coherent narrative, but they flow too fast for me to put them in place. I am a crippled man trying to run.


  I fall again onto the gravel, a victim of the uneven and shifting surface. She starts forwards to help me but stops dead at my angry bark. Unwarranted, I pour my frustration into her and watch her recoil in horror. Tears are in her eyes and suddenly they are in mine. We cry for a while, then I let her help me up and readjust the prosthetic. She supports my weight all the way to the memorial and I tell her how little I am without her.


  “My leg!” I struggle to sit upright, but my lower body doesn't work properly. Jimmy stretches out his hand to hold me down, so I sink back onto the floor.


  “Easy, now, remember what I said about not panicking?” I recall Jimmy's penchant for relaying bad news in the calmest manner. “The leg is old news. You were in an old military surplus orbital-to-ground lander when the computers failed. You were drunk and you'd just had your licence revoked, but the inquest covered that up. Computer simulations say you should have hit the ground hard enough to leave a crater, but we all learned a few things about those birds during the war and you managed to bring it in horizontally. You still smeared it over a couple of kilometres, but the survivors forgot how you basically hijacked the craft and declared you a hero.”


  “Any landing you can walk away from...”


  “That's just the point, you didn't, remember?” Jimmy's attempt to distract me fails, I have myself up on my elbows, head raised, before he can react. I am having trouble recalling my own name, but no-one can prevent me exerting my will. It is a mistake.


  My clothing is gashed and striped in gore, with no real clue as to what style or colour it was originally, I can see a large patch of my raw looking chest through a tear. Worse lies further down, my vision moves steadily to greater devastation. My clothing and my body both end abruptly where my pelvis should be, only tatters of flesh and cloth lie any further. My vision swims, but I force focus and look beyond.


  Running from my truncated torso is a length of what I take to be intestine, it spans the arm's length to the corpse of a man, where it plunges into his abdomen. It pulses slowly, some obscene, adult umbilicus ferrying sustenance from the dead to the impossibly alive. The cadaver's skin is sunken, pillaged by whatever unholy process is keeping me alive. The name on the breast pocket of his coverall is Peterson.


  Peterson struggles against my grip. I outweigh him and while my years of judo practice in low gravity should give me the edge, he has the strength and determination of a madman. His arm breaks free and flails out, striking Liefman and then dislodging his gag. He starts screaming again, his wails drowning out Liefman's complaint and threatening to expose our furtive endeavour.


  “Sanders, for fucks sake, help me!” The look on Sander's face tells me that his courage is wavering and if we don't finish this soon then the game will be up, but he repositions the gag while I catch the wayward arm.


  “Hurry it up,” I bark at Liefman, unnecessarily. The airlock door beeps and then slides slowly back, she looks up from her pad to give me an accusatory glance.


  We manhandle Peterson through the opening, throwing him against the far door so he has no chance to come back at us before he is sealed inside. Liefman works to keep the alarms from going off while I run through the manual sequence, Sanders stands there looking sick. The vocal alarm refuses to be silent and a calm synthesised woman's voice announces our crime.


  “Unauthorised airlock discharge, unauthorised airlock discharge,” She accuses as the expulsion of air takes Peterson's struggling form outside the limits of the space station. The automated drone senses the garbage tag we planted on him, grabs his body and flings it towards the Earth's atmosphere for cremation.



  She is still chiding us when security apprehends us, stood staring at the airlock.

Sunday 6 October 2013

Ditched (part 1)

  Everything is a mess. I am a mess. This isn't anything new.


  Everything hurts. Something is burning somewhere, I can smell that, its probably why I can't breathe so well. I can't see so well, either, a blur, half a blur, one eye doesn't seem to be working. I try to move my hand to touch my face but a stab of pain almost sends me back into unconsciousness. I lie still while it subsides.


  Nearly everything hurts, nothing below my waist hurts, but neither does it respond to my efforts to move it, I guess I won't be dancing any time soon.


  Dancing, the lights sweeping across the floor, the band filling the room with the beat and melody, and her, eyes beaming, hair streaming out as we flew together between others. Two people as a comet.


  I try to place the memory, but draw a blank. She doesn't even have a name. It occurs to me that I don't even know where I am now, why am I here and what I did to deserve this pain.


  I am lying on my back in the wreckage of something. There is a groaning noise and the world moves slightly and then settles again. I concentrate on my eye again and manage to get some kind of focus. Just above me is some kind of chair and control apparatus, part of a vehicle of some kind.

  We are crammed close on the seat made for one person. I steady her hand on the stick. Giggling we fumble together for the throttle, laughing at the voice of the computer warnings.


  Something coalesces by my head, a man crouched next to me. Bizarrely he is wearing a white suit, is somehow sharper than his surroundings and glows slightly. Is he an......?


  “Before we start, no. I am not an Angel, get that out of your head.” His voice is clear, clearer than I feel it should be. “Really, why is that the first thing you always think of? The Angels are gone, they left long ago, forget about them.”


  Something about the dark skin, the long nose, the deep liquid eyes, the disapproving lips and the floppy black hair is familiar. I file it under things I really should know but are failing to make much sense. I feel the whole world could fit in there and I can go back to lying on my back in agony.


  She is there by my bedside, her face is framed by her hair, made hazy by the drugs. Somewhere there is the noise of a busy hospital, but she is all I can focus on. I try to raise my hand to stroke hers, but it seems to be tied down.


  “Hey, stay with me.” He waves a hand in front of my eye, I think I might be able to see through it. “You might need to move quickly. Well, relatively quickly. We're going to turn the pain down a bit, keep still and try not to panic.”


  I open my mouth and try to ask him what I was supposed to not panic about, but I can't even make a croak. The pain ebbs as though it was the tide, there is no increase in fuzziness, so it must be direct neural intervention, not pharmaceutical. My thinking seems clearer, or at least more able to grasp abstract concepts.

Somewhere some liquid is dripping. A broken fuel line? Or something less dangerous, hydraulic fluid or a coolant. Whatever happened, this vehicle is not going anywhere in a hurry, not under its own power, anyway. I lie there for minutes or maybe hours, listening to the dripping.


  The rain has finished, but the water still drips from the pine trees. We are arm in arm on the veranda of a little log cabin, miles from anyone. We huddle together watching the insects and the birds come out of hiding and begin their evening flights.


  “Okay, things are really starting to happen now. First the other lung and then we can start restoring motor control.” His white suit has acquired colour, a deep blue, brass buttons, some sort of military uniform. “How are you doing there? Comfortable? Concussed? Constipated? Confused? You lost it completely and now I'm hanging around an empty shell? No, I certainly don't have the luck for that. You've jarred you brain and fucked up your memory. Again. Let me guess, you haven't got a fucking clue where you are, why you are here, who the fuck I am, or why I would even bother to help such a fucked up individual as yourself.”


  The vehemence is sudden, I feel like I should be wiping spittle off my face. He stops, takes a breath and adjusts his jacket cuffs before continuing.


  “Well, I can't answer the last one. Look, I know everything is confusing, you're in some pain and everything reminds you of some girl whose name you can't recall. I need you to know that, despite everything you've done and are probably about to do, I'm your friend.” I believe him there, the touch of tenderness on his features, a friend that I have betrayed. My mind fishes for a name. “As for the girl, I'm not doing that again, you can tell me her name if and when it returns to you. Above all, I need you not to panic, can you do that for me?”

I'm still am unsure what I should not be panicking over. I flick my eye around in its socket to see if there is anything threatening within sight. I notice my companion doesn't quite move in time with his surroundings, I am beginning to suspect he might be not quite real, I consider panicking over this, but madness seems the least of my concerns. Beyond the upside-down chair there is only twisted metal, broken composites and trailing fibre-optics, this thing is not in a fit state to fly.


  I ignore the screams and sobs of the other passengers, ignore the buffeting and pull my way to the front of the compartment. The door to the cockpit is locked, of course, but in these old, re-purposed TRA-119's there's still an electronic override. I put my pilot's watch against the pad and push myself through as the door opens. The co-pilot looks up in alarm as I re-lock the door behind me, he is yammering on to his controller on the radio.


  The pilot is in a bad way, something has gone wrong with the computer systems and fed back into her implanted visual interface, a deliberate attack, most likely. She hangs against her seatbelts and drools. The co-pilot reaches for some kind of stun device, but he is strapped in and cannot bring it to bear before I have anchored myself to a grab handle and twisted it out of his grip; I apply it to his neck before he has time to protest.


  I secure the co-pilot in the chair originally designed to carry a tactical and counter-measure specialist, but spare in this hasty civilian conversion. I seat myself in front of the controls, there are a few added civilian niceties, but its the same old unstable bird. I clip on my earpiece and let my watch connect it to the radio.


  “Respond, inbound 38, please respond.”


  “Shut up, control, this is the situation, the pilot is fried, the co-pilot has been relieved of duty under suspicion of sabotage, you have three hundred people about to die a fiery death unless you do what I say. I need you to patch me through to the Atmospheric Control Centre at Heathrow, I need you to calculate exactly where this bird is going to hit and I need you to tell me how to bypass all the shit you've added to this pile of junk so that I can activate manual thrusters.”


  “Who are you? You can't land a 119 manually, they're too twitchy.”



  “I'm used to coming in hot, I flew orbital insertion during the war, I cut my teeth on these old wrecks. Now do as I say or I will aim this right for your building.”

Thursday 3 October 2013

Adding up the years

  “I'll always be a year older than you.” She told me. It wasn't true, aged 26 she took the newly developed treatment and was aged 26 forever. I didn't.


  “You can afford it, its safe, why don't you get it done?” She whined when I was 27 as she was still 26. I told her I was sorry, but I still felt like I had some growing to do.


  “Why not now? For the children's sakes?” She queried when I was 33 and she was still 26. I asked her if she liked the beard, I couldn't grow a proper one when I was younger.


  “You're going grey, surely its now time, you're much older than all of our friends.” She entreatied when I was 40 and she was still 26. I told her it made me look distinguished, gave me an advantage over all the young bucks at work.


  “I feel embarrassed by you, its like being married to my father. The kids think its weird too, and don't want to bring their dates home.” She moaned when I was 48 and she was still 26. I said she should broaden her horizons, she still did all the same things she did all those years ago, while I had new appreciations of things I used to take for granted.


  “I'm leaving you, I need a man my own age. Just why do you have to be so awkward?” She cried when I was 54 and she was still 26. I told her that I would miss her, but our needs were different now, so I understood. I hoped she would not get hurt.


  “Its still not too late. Take it before you get too old, I'll miss you.” She needled when I was 62 and she was still 26. I told her that I enjoyed her visits, but I was nearly retired and did not want to work forever.


  “I just can't keep up with the modern world, everything is different, be everyone is still the same, except you.” She complained when I was 74 and she was still 26. I told her that I didn't need to keep up with the modern world, she should take it easy, what was the point of moving forwards all the time if you couldn't stop and admire the view?


  “What will I do when you go? I'm not ready to be the head of the family, I don't have the patience to sort out everyone's problems.” She worried when I was 86 and she was still 26. I told her to relax, the young have a way of landing on their feet, adapting to their circumstances, she was still young, it would all work out.



  “What's the big secret? The master plan? Nothing, that's what. You've grown old and now you're dying. You could still be young, doing all the things we used to, but no, you have to be different, have to be the odd man out. You've wasted your chance and soon you'll be dead, that's it. End of story, turn the lights out on your way out. Goodbye world, hello wormfood.” She raged when I was 97 and she was still 26. I told her she was too young to understand.