Greaves let out a hiss.

Izz winced and touched her earpiece so the noodle stall owner wouldn’t think she was talking to herself. Then again, most stationers left others alone unless it was a safety issue. The odds had proliferated space beyond anyone’s imagination, with a genetic predisposition toward independence that rubbed most of the original colonists in ways that had them clutching their oxygen masks. To each their own, on most stations, unless the odd wanted to let the oxygen out.

Still, it would attract unwanted attention until the wizened woman who ran the best noodle stall in five parsecs determined she wasn’t a threat, so Izz left her hand near her ear in the universal sign of comms-in-progress. She twirled noodles clumsily with her free hand. “You don’t have lungs. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing…”

An eavesdropper wouldn’t have known Greaves was a sentient AI inhabiting her ship, and that was how Izz liked it. She eyed the woman carefully intent on stirring the pot of broth and decided some misdirection wouldn’t go amiss. “Whatever, you cyborg. Do I need to come back?”

“No…”

The woman with the broth turned to a new customer, and Izz took a huge breath in relief. It made her chest hurt. She needed to get used to people again, and stop making stupid comments about not having the normal amount of body parts. Carelessness would get them both caught, and the salvage business would have been impossible without Greaves’ assistance.

And maybe she was developing a fondness for a sentient that she shouldn’t. It was hard not to develop feelings when something – someone – kept you alive in space for months on end, with a bonus of profit to boot.

“You sound like a sulky teenager.” She nibbled at the edges of the noodle ball she’d created. Wavy lengths of pasta flailed for tremulous freedom. She’d conquered most of the escapees before the noodle ball dropped with a splash that splattered her jumpsuit. “Are you done sorting those antique recipes yet?”

“I am a teenager.” Greaves had escaped the postwar purge. “And of course I’m done. Sorted, and sold. Who knew recipes could be so profitable? Look, I’m nervous.”

“About what?” Izz grabbed her bandana and patted her coveralls. At least she’d remember this broth for a while, until she could get her clothes into the cleanser. It was worth remembering. She picked up the bowl and started slurping. “You don’t get nervous.”

“The ship coming in…” Greaves trailed off again.

“It’s really annoying when you pause like that.” She stuffed what remained of the noodle ball into her mouth and chewed, not bothering to keep the conversation going.

“They’re from the war,” Greaves said. “I remember them.”

“Stand by. I’m on my way.” Izz slapped a coin down. She’d paid before the babushka had deigned to give her the steaming bowl, but a tip wouldn’t go amiss in this area. Might help her become forgotten.

It certainly wasn’t for the service.

She dodged clumsy robots thudding with new construction materials, mixed with the chatter of a thousand dialects. Animated flea market bargainers waved hands amidst the trailing scarves of rich wives, sleighs of wrapped packages obediently trailing behind. At the sight of armor-clad marshals on patrol, she slipped easily into the airless construction zone, pulling on the ever-present O-mask filter as blue-white welding sparks flew.

“Old habits,” she murmured to herself with a mischievous grin. Her smile faded as darker memories floated at the edges of her consciousness, and that was enough, even if the marshals weren’t gone. She was a private citizen now, upstanding and proudly freeborn. A responsible adult. Even paid taxes, sometimes.

She spotted a wheel-doored metal tunnel and ducked back onto the dock. Izz stayed under the scaffolding a moment to let her eyes adjust to the port’s floodlights, slipping the O-mask back around her neck where it would be less noticeable. “Almost there.”

Greaves didn’t comment on her rapid heart rate or breath, even though she surely noticed. “Good.” A note of worry flickered through the single word. “Avoid everyone.”

Izz rolled her eyes in exasperation and shoved her hands in her pockets. The four docks between her and her ship seemed endless. A crowd of people, bots, and creatures she couldn’t identify filled most of the docks, up until the near-pristine ramps that security bots enforced if the non-rightful owner tried to approach. “Nearly as crowded as the flea market, but I’ll try.”

The silver-skinned man blocked her path with his bulk near some freshly unloaded plasti-wood crates. “Fry dough?”

She kept her head down and gave a vague gesture as she darted to his left, hand in her pocket seeking the switchblade she’d left in the eye of the stalker she’d caught on Delta-4. She’d forgotten to replace it in her rush to return. “Dock market’s behind me.”

He didn’t move. “Fry dough with sugar?”

“Ask for Zelko’s,” she snapped, and tried to the right. Great. A sentient AI protecting her at all times other than on-station, and here she was, about to get mugged, half a dock away from safety.

“With cooked fruit mash inside?” the man persisted.

She blinked and looked up into glowing sapphire eyes. “You mean jam?”

Greaves set off an alarm siren in her ear that made it hard to concentrate. “Leave! Leave now!”

“Jahm,” the man said with exaggerated enunciation. His brilliant smile literally glowed. “Yes. Jahm. Is cooked fruit mash. Inside fry dough.”

“Zelko’s,” she repeated faintly. The sirens were well on their way to giving her a migraine. She pointed again. “Straight until dock fifteen, then right, then right again. Look for the red scarf with white dots hanging from the second story.”

The silver man barred his teeth and glowed at her again before stepping to the side. “Thanking you.”

“Welcome.” She took five tottering steps before breaking into a run.

Greaves lowered the ramp, but it wasn’t even down all the way before Izz leapt onto the platform and hit the red button for emergency closure.

“What was that?” Izz could feel Greaves’ disapproval in the silence.

“That was an elite assassin, noodle brain.” Each word was bitten off precisely, with the cutting edge only a trained actor could have emulated. “A group known for bringing the night and the darkness, until you welcome death because it is a release from the horror your night has become.”

Izz swallowed hard, wishing she hadn’t fallen back on rat wharf instincts. Had she only taken a different path – not tried to avoid the marshals – been the respectable citizen she pretended to be.

“They are interchangeable, with each member looking the same and known as Mr. Blue Sky. These assassins are unstoppable. If one fails, another will take his place.”

Izz wrapped her arms around her middle and leaned her weight onto her right foot, rocking back with a huff. “He just wanted doughnuts.”

“I hope that’s all,” Greaves said quietly. “The Blue Sky assassins were responsible for the Sentient Purge. The man who wanted sweets may well have been the one who killed my family.”

***

Whew! I had no idea what to do with this one, and ended up spitballing ideas with The Guy, who suggested an assassin. I’m going to have to explore what it means to target sentient AIs…thanks, Leigh, for the musically-inspired challenge!

My prompt this week went to Becky Jones. “Burn it. Burn it all. I want no memories.”

Check out more at MOTE!

We saved humanity by destroying it.

Let me start over. Back in ’53, the Great War began. You’d think we’d know by now not to spout phrases like that. It’s right up there with “home by Christmas,” or “just one more push.” If I didn’t know how the whole thing started, I’d probably want to smack the next person who used that term.

But it really was a great war, from an adversary we never expected. And no one expected the aliens to speak Earth languages, no matter that we’d been beaming broadcasts into space for more than a century.

It was only looking back that we pinpointed ’53 as the year it began, piecing together memories and pieces of archival records that remain.

Let’s face it, we barely noticed when the information war began. We were busy with our insignificant lives, years before anything kinetic kicked off. Sure, we saw the disruption and the dissent, but the clips were exaggerated flashes on the nightly news. Used to be only around the holidays when you couldn’t find the turkey or the latest hot toy for your kids. Used to be, riots and shortages were rare.

It sounds ridiculous now that we didn’t see it coming. Maybe it was denial.

Most people paid little attention when small crises popped up worldwide. The transport strike couldn’t possibly be related to the race riots, and the religious zealots wreaking havoc over there were nothing compared to the hacker collective going after data to release your secrets to the world. Or the other one, sneaking in your systems until your data’s corrupted beyond recovery, slowly succeeding in tanking the worldwide economy.

No one expected the aliens to be able to code, even though that’s just another language. No one expected them to transmit a signal back. Certainly not with subterfuge, disruptive signals hidden within noise.

One fire, after another, after another. Each aimed at weakening the intangible lines of stability that hold the whole system together. Hell, even some days I don’t believe it all built into disaster rather than rebalancing, and I was one of the Informed, on the front lines watching it all happen. Even we only had a vague wiggle of awareness.

The aliens were strategic geniuses, flat out. Their campaign targeted all of Earth, a single operational environment. Our brains can’t handle that much information without decomposing the problem into something smaller. I heard the concept called the monkey bubble once, where we can only handle so many relationships before we lose someone else from our personal world bubble. Our poor monkey brains broke the issue into limited, local situations out of self-defense.

We even chose our destruction, diving further into the information bubble and isolation to the point where disputed facts destroyed it all. Friendships, marriages, alliances, the whole world splintering.

It looked like bad luck.

By the time we realized it was all related, we’d been at war for years without even knowing. And we were losing.

That’s exactly what they wanted. You can’t underestimate the demoralization effect that comes with knowing you’re about to be crushed.

Worse, we’d done it to ourselves. Torn ourselves apart over petty differences, while aliens cackled madly from the stars.

And we were out of time.

When kinetic war finally arrived, it came at speed and scale we couldn’t interpret. Most of us were busy fighting for survival by ’57.

Doubt, more than anything else, killed us when we should have lived. Doubt, and skepticism over whether or not aliens existed, when it didn’t take the Webb telescope to see the coming clearly, headed steadily and straight for Earth.

The silver rings in the sky over Kansas – well, it gave new meaning to the phrase about not being in Kansas anymore, because you could be, but there was no denying the blue sky above the prairie was different from what it should be. There’s no getting used to the shock. Who looks up at the moon expecting to see an alien megastructure surrounding it?

The nanobiologists were the ones who let us compete. I doubt Sir Tim anticipated what his creation would become once unleashed upon the world, not sixty-some years after the internet went live. Deep brain implants were the tale of science fiction, up until they weren’t. Oh, there were a few unwieldy efforts with electrical stimulation and such, implanted into neural nets.

This was different. We couldn’t afford human slowness. The remnants of command were desperate by then. Scared men, desperate women – at the end of the day, none of them knew what to do. A redneck hiding in the woods had a better shot at survival. Maybe still does.

Humanity needed three things. A strategic view to make the connections between disparate pieces of information. Faster decision-making to preempt the aliens’ next moves. And the ability to regenerate, without having to wait for arduous levels of physical therapy and pain that shocked the human system into unconsciousness.

’Nanos offered us the ability for all three.

They called us the Watchers, and later, the Informed. At first because we were the ones to see the connections, see it coming, just barely before the bombs went live. Later, because our nano-enhanced ability to see everything at once lent us an inhuman air.

Notice, of course, that we were never called the Wise. For all our insight, what we did was little better perceived than those shattered, shaking Generals who insisted at full volume that we had the unique quirks perfect for the first testing.

They gave us power, and we seized it with hands that no longer ached from never being warm enough once the electricity died. The nanos did their job. All that was asked for and more.

Speed – the vaunted and oh-so-desired speed that we needed to struggle our way to stalemate – came at the cost of skipping over explanations and debate. We skipped over the doubt and skepticism we’d fought against back in ’56, bare months before the missiles screamed into the holiday evening and disrupted millions of summer barbeques.

We made decisions. We pushed the aliens back, stopped them at the moon. Only a few hundred lost when the base went dark, and that an acceptable loss. And we did so at speed.

It made us incomprehensible. Unpredictable. Suspicious. Never mind that we were right, that our decisions worked. Bio-nano testing stopped. Banned worldwide, except by the Neo-Russkis and one or two other holdouts.

They used us nonetheless, in part because we were incapable of breaking at this point. The ‘borgs are what will let us win the war, one of our new jailors told us, and praised our sacrificed humanity and freedom as support worthy to the cause.

We didn’t know the ‘nanos were contagious until the alien attack on our command post failed. When one of our captors dug out of the rubble a day later, covered in dust, already having regrown a cybernetic arm.

I laughed for hours after that one, long into the moon-ringed night.

Humans can acclimate to anything. Even being inhuman.

They’ll have to.

***

This week, I took nother Mike’s prompt of “The rings in the sky told them they weren’t in Kansas anymore…” to a dark future landscape. My prompt went to Padre: Twelve towers were built by the gods…but there is another tower that no one knows exists.

Check out these, and more, at MOTE!

“Like this?” June sliced the apple in half with great enthusiasm and vigor. The top half skittered on a dusting of flour before landing on the floor with a thud. The bottom of the Granny Smith wobbled, then spiraled in an elliptical orbit of green and white, straight toward the pie crust Helen was rolling on the other half of the countertop.

Helen caught the escaping half and returned it to June, pursing her lips slightly before putting on what June thought of as her diplomat face. “Not quite, dear, you forgot to peel that one before slicing.”

Peter snagged the apple half on the floor with poorly suppressed laughter making the corners of his mouth twitch. “I think they’re supposed to be cut down the vertical middle, not the horizontal.”

“Hush,” Helen said. “I’m glad June wanted to help. I don’t see you helping, now do I.”

“I warned you, Mum.” He rinsed off the apple half, took a bite of the fruit, and wrenched his head sideways at the tartness.

“Peter Caden Ridere, I did not raise you to be rude.” Helen gave a full body wave of the rolling pin in his direction, her salt and pepper hair emphatically shifting with the effort. A strand stuck to her forehead. “Check on the turkey, love.”

“It’s true,” June rushed to reassure her. A cloud of flour rose as she tried to dust off her clothing. She gave up and began to use the chef’s knife to peel the apple skin back. “People don’t normally let me in the kitchen.”

“I do appreciate the assistance. I’d like to make sure it’s right before we have the faculty over. We cooked a few times to host Americans, of course, but this will be our first Thanksgiving in the United States.”

“Practice makes perfect. And gives us extra dinner.” The scent of cooking poultry filled the kitchen. Peter studied the steaming pot of potatoes on the stainless steel professional model stove. “Bird looks fine. These are close to boiling.”

“How small is the apple supposed to be without the peel?” June asked. “Ow!”

Red drops dripped onto the countertop, just as the water overflowed with a hiss. The gas burner flickered out. Helen sighed.

“There’ll be bandages under the sink in that lav off to the side there, love. Peter, if you aren’t going to help, why don’t you taste test that pumpkin pie and get out of the way?”

June headed for the restroom to clean up with a tea towel clenched in her hand. Helen turned off the stove and eyed the potatoes.

Peter beelined for the orange circle to cut himself the first slice. “Smells great. Like autumn, all cinnamon and nutmeg. I’ve grown partial to the diner’s pies.”

“This custard’s a new recipe,” Helen admitted, stirring the potatoes with a wooden spoon and turning the burner on again. “June helped me make it earlier today.”

He coughed into a napkin. “I can tell.”

She smacked his hand with the dripping wooden spoon. “What did I say about being rude? It can’t be that bad. Just a bit of an incident with the pressure cooker, and we cleaned up most of the mess before you got here.”

“Other than the stains on the ceiling, sure.” Peter reached into the napkin and pulled out a metal teaspoon. “Flavor’s great, except for the extra iron.”

Helen’s lips opened, but air merely wheezed between her teeth for a few seconds. “Well.” Another breath. “Well.”

June reentered the formerly spotless kitchen, mumbling apologies. “Let me just clean this up.”

She wiped down the counter with a paper towel, pulling apple peels the size of sliced apples toward the trash can, holding the bag in one hand. The trash can bounced away with a ringing clang of metal. June knocked the handle of the knife she’d cut herself with an elbow. She spun, and the blade slid straight through the plastic bag of trash to embed in the floorboards. Potato, carrot, and apple peels oozed onto the once-pristine floor, mixing with flour to form a slippery paste that piled against the steel knife.

A gizzard plopped onto the hilt. June backed away, into the counter. “Oof. My kidneys.” She bit her lip and overcorrected with a wild swing of her arm. Helen’s wine glass crashed to the other side of the kitchen island.

Helen sucked air through her teeth again. And again, with an odd whistle. She snatched a hot pad and tossed it at June. “Out! Out of my kitchen!”

Peter chortled, following his girlfriend as she fled out the back door and into chill autumn air. “Wait until you hear the egg salad story.”

***

Becky Jones prompted me this week with “It seemed that breaking things was becoming a habit for her.” My prompt went to nother Mike, inspired by a recent morning’s drive: The sky suited the day, with bruised-peach coloration and a red-tinged moon.

Gina gave a tight smile and set her teacup back into its saucer with a double clink and hid a wince. It was less firm than she’d have preferred. Confidence, that was key. She straightened her shoulders, grateful her back was to a wall, and tried to widen her expression into something welcoming. “It’s been a while since I’ve had anyone over. I’m afraid I’m out of practice.”

The words passed muster. Samantha tucked a nonexistent strand of hair behind one ear and re-crossed her legs. The duchess slant, of course, and her shoulders were already straight beneath the shell-pink cardigan and matching pearls. “The pandemic was hard upon us all.”

Gina covered her jolt with a sip of tea. “Yes…yes, of course.”

She didn’t relax for another hour, but the other woman had agreed Olivia could join her precious princesses twice a week, and that was what she needed. “Let the indoctrination begin,” she murmured to the photo on the wall, with a hand upon the tension in her lower back as she shut the door. No one needed to know the snapshot of a bearded man camping was stolen from the internet in an attempt to look normal. She rubbed her neck and stretched. “It’s a step toward trust, anyway.”

“What’s indoctrination, Mommy?” The voice broke through her reverie.

Her grin was real this time. The carpet rubbed across exposed knees as Gina knelt down and opened her arms for a hug. “Nothing, honey. Remember Samantha? She’s a little formal, that’s all.”

Stepford wives formal, but there’d be time enough for that conversation in a few years. She hoped. Besides, it might provide stability amongst all the moves.

Olivia wrinkled her nose and tossed her head, dropping her fuzzy school bag by the plastic desk and aiming straight for the miniature kitchen with its plastic food. “I’ll cook dinner!”

“Sounds delicious.” Gina put both hands on her neck this time, pressing to the point of pain. “We’ve been in this house a while. Do you like it here?”

“S’okay,” her daughter mumbled. Plastic pots and pans banged against each other. “Chicken! I miss the woods. And my pet chicken.”

They’d left the last house at a dead run, minutes ahead of the harbinger. Gina’s adrenaline spiked at the memory, and she sank back into the floral armchair. Sweat beaded her forehead.

Better Olivia never knew what happened to her beloved chicken. A cloud of white feathers and blood caught in frantic headlights, still drifting in the air, as tires squealed with a desperate crunch of gravel as rubber bit into pavement and the car slewed its burdens, screaming, into the night.

She’d thought they’d be safe if they couldn’t be found by humans. That rural Wisconsin would have offered protection.

Several deep breaths later, she rolled her arms in circles to ease the twitchiness that had been coming on for the past month. Perhaps deciding to trust in Samantha was a bad idea, but she could really use those extra hours at the diner.

“The bunny would be good as a pet,” Olivia said casually, and put plastic spaghetti onto a trash can lid serving in lieu of a plate. “All soft and furry. Do you think he’d let me pet him?”

“Bunny?” Gina went cold. A hand grasped the wall, and she hadn’t realized she’d gotten to her feet. “What bunny? Where is the bunny?”

“Come eat dinner, Mommy.”

Interminable minutes later, Gina had “mmmm’ed” her way through four plates of fake spaghetti. “I guess you’d better get potato peeling duty next.”

“Ew.” Olivia had giggled, and for just a fleeting moment, Gina could pretend all was right with the world, and that the juice she’d served her daughter with plastic food hadn’t been spiked with a sleeping agent.

Her world was still cold when she went into the closet. “Too good to last,” she whispered at the go-bag. Gina studied her phone’s security camera app. “Yep. He’s found us, the little…sniff.”

Habit made her self-censor.

On her doorstep crouched a rabbit, for all the world an adorable bundle of harmless fur. The bunny was innocence personified, even sniffing at one of Olivia’s scattered toys. A ridiculous phobia. Sandie, one of the other waitresses at the diner three houses back, had laughed, even put a stuffed plushie in her locker as a joke.

She knew better. She’d dealt with that twitching nose and whiskers, felt those punishing kicks, had the scars from those claws.

It had only taken a single instance of ignoring the harbinger to understand the doom that trailed behind. She didn’t need to wait until morning.

Sandie had, and look how that had ended.

Gina shouldered the pack and returned to the living room, where her daughter lay oblivious. Every movement was sluggish and frozen, driven by terror so deep it woke her screaming. The instinct to curl into the fetal position was overwhelming. Had it been just her, she might have given in by now. “Sorry, darling. I thought we’d escaped him here.”

She hoisted her daughter’s boneless weight into her arms and balanced the phone in her free hand. The app showed the back door was clear, and the path to the car. It wouldn’t be for long. She wished she’d cut the grass this weekend so she could be sure.

“Just run. Just run.” She set the phone on the low shelf, below where Olivia’s autumn jacket still hung, near outgrown. Phone and jacket would both remain here. The keys next to the phone, she’d keep until they could trade in for another beater, on the way to the next bolt hole. She twisted the keys in her hand until she found the silver one that read Chevrolet. “Get to the car and go.”

Sucking in rapid breaths, she felt the doorknob, near frozen under her sweating palm. “Go,” she repeated. “Just run.”

She was panting by the time she’d dashed the short distance to her car, an ancient station wagon with wood paneling. The keys had fumbled their way into the lock on the third try, a miracle she was properly grateful for. She’d lain Olivia on the front bench seat, still unconscious, and hadn’t bothered to remove the pack before starting the car. She’d stop in a few minutes. Safety would come with escape, not seatbelts.

The engine made an odd whirring noise.

“No. No!” Gina slammed a hand onto the steering wheel and swallowed, trying to steady her shaking hands. “Come on, come on.”

This time, the whir ended with a thump.

Gina looked up slowly, and met the rabbit’s malevolent gaze from where it sat, whiskers twitching, atop the hood of her ancient beater.

She yanked the keys from the ignition, then seized them from the floor. Her lips peeled back with a hiss. If her only weapon were her keys, she would take care of that rodent, once and for all.

Glass shattered.

A snarl escaped Gina’s throat.

Beside her, Olivia slept on.

***

This week, Becky Jones prompted me with, “The little rabbit was crouched on her doorstep.” Although this deserves far more attention to properly detail Gina’s terror, I couldn’t let the story be nearly as adorable as the suggestion implied. My prompt went to Leigh Kimmel, “I’m told this is the least human time of year.”

Check more out at MOTE, and please wear your seatbelt.

This post has been removed. Why? Because it’s part of Paladin’s Legacy, book two of the Professor Porter saga. I swear, I’m working on it!

***

This week, Becky Jones prompted me with “the empty house stood waiting.” My prompt went to Padre, “the intergalactic mafia.” Check out more at MOTE!

Izz stared out the porthole and into the void. Slipspace held the stars at bay, shrouding glimmers of light in fog and haze. She trailed a finger down the side of the metal rim, feeling the grooves cold against callused fingertips hard-won from hours of rewiring Monster‘s electrical systems.

Not the computer systems, oh no. Greaves insisted she needed practice first, an insistence the illegal artificial sentient enforced with mild electric shocks. Practice that didn’t make the long journey to salvage any less boring, and interfered with salvage inventory.

It made her wish they were close to arrival. Sometimes, after all her dreaming, she wished for nothing more than to see the stars again.

“Break’s over.” The chirrupy voice broke into her fugue from the loudspeakers. “Ready to rewire console number four?”

“There’s nothing I’d like more.”

“Lovely.” Syrup couldn’t be sweeter. And Izz was left wondering, yet again, whether her ship didn’t understand sarcasm or habitually ignored it.

***

This week on MOTE, nother Mike prompted me with: When you wish upon a star…

My prompt went to Leigh Kimmel: “What do you mean, I’ve been upgraded to a hurricane?”