fishtheimpaler

by doctors

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/21984201

I had to give up on nanowrimo when the family blew up, but I'm still working with what I got, going back over it and editing it. Fuck you universe I will do it.

So here is chapter the first of Nuisance Animals, in which Sarahconnor is terminated.

xxx

33407 Laracroft, Hidden Rock Confederacy, Asteroid Belt, 5 March 2169
The female voice continued, as it had for the past two hours:
“Colony-wide curfew and security measures are in effect. Proceed immediately to dormitories on in your present complex. Colony-wide curfew and security measures—”
Jack Pielczark pulled himself upright relative to the weak gravity and the steel hatch, toggled the hydraulic latch beside it with his thumb. One tangle of worry among all the others knotted in his belly snapped as the actuators hissed and spun the the manual wheel-lock in the center of the door. Part of him had feared that some maniac, fearing for the children in the same way as the ones that had cut their spawn’s sleeping throats to save them from the wrath of God, back during the last war, had cut in the pressure failsafes and left them alone and unknowing to play with each other and whatever oxygen was already past the filters . . . .
He pulled back the hatch.
The park was the pride of Lara’s B-complex workers, even if they’d had to name it after whoever management’s chief of mining operations was five years ago. Two hundred sixteen cubic meters dug from the rock, space paid for with their own calories and sweat and inactive cycles. Even if you couldn’t work a drill, you gave up what little you had coming that management didn’t withhold for food, air and water rations, buying your neighbors’ shifts from management so they could steal a day a week out from the new deep-level D-complex tunnels and mines and drill at home instead. The result wasworht it, as nice as anything you could find up in the command-suite in A-complex. Polished black-composite walls and ceiling, lined with grips and places to clip a harness; each wall had at least one display ready to show art, video, or a false window on the vacuum outside. No plants—the water and nutrient feeds,outside of biomass division, would have been somewhere between a mess, a disaster, and far too expensive.
Today, there also wouldn’t have been room: the park was packed. It looked like everyone in B-complex who hadn’t told the kids to hide in a dormitory storage locker had stuffed them in the park and told them to wait until mom came back. They were swinging and tumbling and bouncing off the walls with the shrieks, exuberance and skeletal resilience of the young. A lot of boys and one or two of the less self-conscious girls were stripped to the waist, the arm-sleeves of their tan jumpsuits tied about their hips, trying to shed the radiant oven heat of all those other respirating bodies.
Drawing less attention, quieter kids were clinging to the walls and corners. Some of their faces had begun to show the suspicious boredom that children get when they realize they’re being talked down to, that the parents are worried. Some of them watched the displays, which weren’t showing a starfield, but instead white letters on a black background: STAND BY.
Then Jack realized that even the ones that were just playing were playing at monsters and people.
“That’s what you would do. The Protectorate isn’t like you! It’s not people,” a boy who looked twelve proclaimed loudly from the ceiling. A knot of peers were clustered around him, eager to hear his monstrous lies so they could challenge them with ones they hoped equal or superior. “If you wanted to kill everyone in Sarah, you’d throw a rock at it out of the Kupier Belt. And I would, too. But it’s not a rock that’s coming.”
“A bomb!—”
“Not a nuke neither,” the kid interrupted, rattling off nuke with an ease that reminded Jack of boys he had known growing up, ones with an unhealthy interest in the abominations of the long gone war, all nervous, excited mutters about viruses and chimeras and ecocide processes. He drew his legs toward the ceiling and he lifted his shoulders conspiratorially. “It’s a big—” He wracked his brain for another word he’d learned from some pornographically violent history file. “Animal. That’s the kind of thing they are now, that they can be when they want to. Big animals that can live in vacuum, and can eat a—”
“Meg?” Jack shouted over the nonsense. Several faces looked to him, then turned away—it wasn’t Dad, it was someone else. “Meg honey? Megan Pielczark? Has anyone seen Megan Pielczark?”
“Mister Pielczark?” Right at his hip, a mousey, dark-skinned girl with her hair buzzed tight to her head, tightly clinging to one of the perch-bars beside the door with one arm and one hand. She had already been trying to talk to him for a while; Jack could barely hear her. She didn’t look like one of Meg’s friends—she had so few—but she seemed to know him by sight, and her quiet voice had assurance. “Meg was here, but she left with Miss Pielczark.”
“Oh shit,” Jack breathed. Li—
Just like that, half the eyes in the room were on him again, both admiring proto-delinquents and those too-smart, frightened kids in the corners. “What’s going on, Mister Pielczark?” the girl asked. “Mom told me to wait here, but it’s been—”
“Wait here,” he said, floating back out the door and pulling the hatch to behind him.
Rumors that one of Lara’s two sister-colonies was on course to collide with an unmapped object from Jupiter orbit space broke four shifts before. Jack had been skeptical—“unmapped object from Jupiter space” was what kids like the one on the ceiling who didn’t grow out of their fascination with death learned to talk about instead of giant hungry monsters; you might as well just substitute “Protectorate” for “Jupiter” and “death machine” for “unmapped object.” The Protectorate was somewhere far out on the elliptic, everyone knew, and maybe it was even still fighting the war with yet another splinter-branch of itself in some unrecognizable form out in the Oort Cloud. It would make some kind of sense, according to the logic that had detonated in some military network back on Earth, when the homeworld’s war had leapt from politics into biology, and the augmented ranks of the American Protectorate decided they no longer had need of free-willed workers, an ecology, or anything else besides themselves. They destroyed the planet and blasted out from it like the front of a solar CME, burning through Mars, the belt, out into Jupiter space and beyond, exterminating anything human, anything capable of thought, any possible enemy.
Ancient history.
The Confederacy’s founding company and refugees had dodged the destruction, hiding in rocks that hadn’t been rich enough to attract a mining operation. The wave had passed them and gone on, and now they were safe—cramped, frustrated, only able to communicate between the three asteroid colonies at irregular intervals with tightbeam laser, but alive in the silence. If what ever the Protectorate had become was still somewhere on what could be considered the far reaches of the solar system, they couldn’t know where they were without scouring the belt for signs of human life. They couldn’t just peg one of the colonies out of Jupiter space.
And then management came down on the gossips harder than they ever had before. Two entire families got hit with serious food debits for disrupting public order, and there were secondary rumors of a stock forfeiture. Everything but a public flogging in the central core.
They might as well have confirmed that the entire Confederacy had incoming.
He fought the urge to kick hard off the push-plate beside the hatch and nudged himself down the steel-plated hallway at a safe velocity, floating with his hand close to the guiderail. For all his nearly two meters of absurd, expensive height, he wasn’t strong; take off the baggy paper jumpsuit and he would be a pencil sketch of a human, rib-cage starkly outlined by his flesh, sharp elbows and knees that poked from his limbs like steel joints stressing an air bladder against vaccum, a tight black crewcut and a taut line of a worried mouth to give it a little personality. But in the microgravity, if nothing stopped him, he would go fifty meters before Lara’s mass and gentle rotation brought him back down to the floor.
Twenty-five meters before him, people were kicking their way into and crawling their way out of the open hatch to the commissary. He had seen video of an ‘anthill’—one of Li’s obsessive hoard of files and trinkets supplying her false memories of a planet she’d never seen—and the hatch looked like an anthill, like a human hive, workers all dressed the same, all nourished on the same food, living side by side.
It looked like over half of B-complex’s adult population was there, rather than at work. Maybe turned away; when Jack had tried to report to the secondary B-complex oxygen plant, a security team was watching the sealed hatch, one of them holding a big-snouted flechette gun from the deep armory, the kind of thing that could shred a man to blood confetti with a single pull of the trigger.
But maybe some kind of work stoppage, instead, which was a serious problem. People put up with management, management kept them safe. But now, perhaps they didn’t. Anybody with an urge to start something stupid had an excuse.
Li. And she had brought their daughter along with her. The guards would bring those flechette guns.
Jack spun, reached his left hand back and traced his fingers along the guiderail, slowing his mass and pulling himself closer to the wall to let a man pass him, and then heard a familiar bellow: “Make a hole!” Thin-limbed colonists scattered as Pawel pushed his way out of the galley with arms that wrestled a drill on a D-complex cut crew. A big, shaven brown skull and tiny black eyes that widened when he saw him. “Jack!”
Jack grabbed onto the guiderail and promptly slammed into the wall-plate cheek first. He felt the welt start to rise as he rudely pulled his way toward the galley. “Li!”
Pawel drifted to him and grabbed his arm with a grip like a mag-lock. “Inside,” he said, quietly.
“What’s happening?” Jack could feel the sweat beading up on his face in little globes. “Has Sarah been hit?”
“Nothing yet. She has Meg in there with her,” Pawel whispered, and with the tone he didn’t have to say get them out. He squeezed Jack’s arm.
“Where’s safe?”
“I don’t know. Try the dormitory; block yourself in.”
Pavel gently pushed away, floated toward the opposite wall. Jack grabbed and tore his jumpsuit. “Help me—”
“She doesn’t want to leave,” Pawel said, which Jack already knew, however much he didn’t want to. “She’s talking to everyone about Earth—”
“Alright,” Jack nodded, not looking at Pawel. He tightened his grip, felt sweat squeeze out from the lines in his palms. Before him a pair of legs were sticking out of the galley hatch, paddling at the air. “Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Pawel said, and he was gone. Jack pulled himself forward and looked inside.
The galley had been transformed. Someone had disabled the normal LEDs, and the emergency circuits had not cut in. The anchors and seats, the tables, everything in the room was another place for a body. People were crowded on the tables, pushed into the walls, hanging from the O2 vents and LED mounts on the ceiling. All of them in paper, all of them workers, not a single shareholder in the crowd.
All faces were turned to a signel display panel that had bee leaned against the far wall, ghostly with its light. It showed a starfield. In the middle like a hole in space with just a sliver of sunlit nickel-iron gray to show its reality, hung 38604 Sarahconnor, the third of the Confederacy’s asteroids.
“Is that real?” Jack wondered, eyes on the display.
“That’s Sarah alright; Jenny cut into the line from the surface optics,” said a blonde wisp of a man who somehow thought Jack should know who Jenny was. “Management’s as interested we are. Has it trained with one-K optical and computer-assisted mag. That speck to the left is the bogey. If it hits, it’s going to hit soon.”
“They should never have spun it up,” someone said. “It was suicide.”
“What else could they do?—”
Jack winced. How many times had he heard that strong, sharp voice utter the same words in their quarters, over the squeak of the springs as she worked her legs, arms and spine, strengthening her bones and muscles for a trip that she would never make? How many times had he told her that of course he understood, that no one wanted to live in barely-insulated microgravity, eating and breathing the same atoms, year after year? How many times had he told her to keep her mouth shut in front of others? In front of their daughter?
Li had either staked out or shoved her way to a perch just beside the display. She was a small woman, or she had been before the isometrics, before her obsession with Earth. Now, though she was shorter than almost everyone in the room at one and a half meters, her body was stout with muscle that a biomass worker would never use. Her head looked too small on her thick neck, and the tightness of the ponytail strapping her fine, carbon-black hair down to her scalp only made it worse. It was like some posthuman Protectorate monstrosity had removed the head of a beauty—the soft mouth, the high, delicate cheekbones, the jade eyes—and vivisected it onto a hulk, and then shot the monster full of some sort of muscle-building cocktail of hormones and engineered bacteria and nanomachines, and programmed its mind with one fixation.
“Humans were meant to live in gravity,” she cried, ignoring the wave of exasperation that passed through the room, riding the faces of the people that knew her. “On a planet. Spinning Sarah for centripetal counterforce—”
“—Showed those fuckers right where they are!”
“—could’ve seen the thrusters from the Oort Cloud!”
“—going to scour the belt—”
“The Protectorate is just waiting for a chance to feed us vaccum, and—”
“Yes!” she shouted, stabbing a finger out into the display-glow. “They are. They won’t let any humans live. They won’t let anything live but themselves. And we are vulnerable. It doesn’t matter how many decagrams of rock we hide under, how much we give up. They’ll freeze us; they’ll starve us; they’ll blow the air right out of our lungs. The belt practically does it for them. We do it for them, by living here.”
While she took a breath, the room was silent. Waiting for her to say it. Meg, clinging to her knee, wrapped her little arms tighter around her mother’s leg.
“But on Earth—”
Meg buried her face into the paper of Li’s thigh, but her ears were still poking out of her shaggy black hair, and heard it all.
“Shut up!”
“The Toronto virus—”
“The hybrids—”
“The radiation—”
Li pulled herself higher, dragging Meg’s shoes from the floor, shrieked at a room of half-seen fists, eyes, glistening teeth. “On Earth, we could live like we’re supposed to! We don’t have to live like this!”
“That’s goddamn right!” someone roared above the other shouts, and Jack thought it was Atcheson. If Atcheson had his way, the entire complex would be throwing itself on the flechette guns, trying to get to the Board of Directors and slit throats.
The room had been packed to the ceiling before; now that the occupants were screaming, it was a whirlwind of half-seen arms, drifting and colliding bodies. Through it Jack could see Li’s mouth wide open, Meg’s fingers pulling the fragile fabric of her pant leg so hard her fingertips punctured it.
Jack pulled himself hand over hand to the floor, coiled his legs behind him, and then pushed in their direction as hard as he could. A moment later his skull was throbbing, he was looking at some impossible angle of steel and glass, and someone was kicking him in the stomach. He coughed, then retched, then crawled and pulled his way forward on wriggling legs, a sour, acid burn of spiced seitan in his throat and nose. His elbow slammed into a bolt and pain shot up to his shoulder. Somone else cried as a thin-soled shoe bashed him in the small of his back. He squeezed his eyes closed, curled into a fetal position, but the back of his head hit stell anyway. He took it, letting his neck and spine bend to eat his momentum until his dull, tingling right hand found a grab bar and slid in behind it so he could simply hang, a limp bag of ache.
“Dad?”
He forced his eyes open and Meg was looking at him, sideways in his vision. She had his pale skin, but was otherwise almost a little mirror of her mother, complete with the excess musculature from the springs Li made her use. She was still one day away from the water ration for her shower, and her hair was twisted into greasy, thoughtless sculptures over her brows and ears.
“Hi, sweetie,” Jack croaked.
“Jack!” Li bent down and pecked her lips sharply to his, rubbed her hand against something hot and wet on his forehead. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he lied, putting his left arm on her shoulder. “Pawel says if we secure the dormitory—”
“You need to help me,” she said, and before he could ask her what was wrong, she went on: “We need to make them see. We aren’t safe here.”
He nodded. “We need to get to the—”
“Sarah could be gone,” she hissed, eyes shining. “We aren’t safe in the belt. Things have changed. We need to go to Earth.”
“Yeah,” he said, like he always did whenever she showed Meg her treasure, the pressed flower with the yellow petals in the plastic laminate, crumbling to brittle dust. “But right now we have to go to the dormitory—”
She grabbed his head, pulled her nails through his meager hair, and the pain cleared his mind for her words: “No! This is it! This is the first time that something has ever happened, Jack! You need to help me make them see! We can convince them! Air, water, gravity, all the food you could—”
She kept talking but her voice sank back down into the others, the ones shouting about what trusting management gets you, about why the children of people who ran a lunar transport station would be any good at hiding in the belt, about why they didn’t ever come down in waste processing and get their hands dirty. Even too close to see her freakish body Li’s face seemed strange now, her eyes too big, her hair pulled so tight that it was like her skull was about to pop out of her skin.
When had they gone wrong? Was it when her parents gave her a name from a culture that had already been erased by fire before she was born? When she first saw the picture-files of the ocean as a child? When he decided that the arguments weren’t worth it, let her prattle on as much as she wanted at home to the echo of an occasional passionless yes, hon?
Earth wasn’t all the oxygen you could want, or a field of golden flowers, or water you could bathe in every day. He’d seen the other pictures. Earth was a gravity well filthy with drifting debris from shattered orbital habitats, frozen hulks of dessicated flesh. It was a city like a burst blister in the landscape, scarified towers surrounding a crater of seawater and muck, a wound oozing radioactive pus. It was an alley clogged with corpses, cheap paper masks half-hiding faces blue with death anyway, a feast for things that were half-dog and far less than man, their commands and their conditioning forgotten along with their rifles as clawed digits tore into the meat that could keep them alive.
Li pressed her thumbs into his cheekbones, a euphoric grin. “Listen to me! Earth, Jack!”
“You’re crazy,” Jack realized.
“Impact!” someone shouted.
The room was instantly dead quiet. On the screen, Sarah hung in space, rotating too slowly to see.
“Well the bogey’s occluded,” the same voice said, lamely, as the people nearest the display drifted closer, squinting.
“Debris? Are they outgassing?”
“Could be in transit behind her.”
“What if it—”
A flash.
There was of course no sound from the screen, just the quiet gasps from around the room like air whispering out a hairline fracture into vacuum as the glow spread, sustained, the far side of Sarah suddenly visible in stark silhouette that fuzzed into glow as the surface began to boil, and then lost all sense as the asteroid seemed to swell, spread. Blown apart.
Jack had Meg in his arms almost before he knew it, definitely before Li knew it or could react. The shouts and screams were too loud to bear any sense. He tucked her to his chest, braced his shoulders, thought he heard her voice like a vibration in his ribs. “Hold on to me!” he shouted. “Close your eyes!”
He thought he heard Li, too. Even though by the time he was in the dorm with the others, bolted in the darkness that had settled once management cut the lights to the entire wing, there was certainly no way that he could, any more than he could hear the distant gunshots.

Post links to your stats here for humiliation and embarassment

http://www.nanowrimo...aladvice/novels

Mods please move to news forum thank you

"That's bone."