A Requiem For Bill and Bob

A darkened bridge, the infamous face and panic and an ice-cold grip dragged him into the darkness.

He was spinning slowly in vacuum. He turned to face his ship mere moments after he died.

She had murdered him by teleporting him one hundred meters outside the hull into deep space.

Bob left behind no parents and ten thousand identical twin brothers. It is unlikely anyone would have grieved for him.

He was a model 110 clone, optimized for boredom and button-pressing, requisitioned on the same work-order that had commissioned the frieghter he tended, conditioned to know the operational procedures and parameters of this and similar vessels -- and little else.

Any of his twin brothers could have taken his place.

His crew-mate Bill, another model 110 from a different batch, was ejected shortly afterwards. The pillow was still in his mouth.

Goodbye, Bill and Bob. Rest in peace on a vector to Suburbia.

As Seen On TV

Thresher looked up from a panel on the bridge of the Nightstalker, Honor Guard's patrol ship. He was a veteran powered armor trooper who was ambushed by a Reyll pyrokinetic; unlike many other casualties, he opted for superior replacement parts for his lost limbs.

"All right, kid -- listen up. I just sent you an arming code for your tac nuke."

On the view-screen, a shaken and nervous Victor pulled a beer-can sized grenade from his utility belt.

"Got it."

"You know what to do, Ensign. Hit him before he closes in!"

"Yes, sir!"

The young super-soldier in training flipped open the breech of the stubby grenade launcher, inserted the cartridge, and snapped the chamber closed. Control computers in the gun and the ammunition exchanged credentials; circuits energized within the shell and the gun. A blast of electrical energy drove the metallic sabot covering the physics package down a superconducting rail, driving the shell out of the barrel at a velocity carefully calculated to be slightly below the speed of sound.

"Duck and cover!"

The soldiers assumed the position, rolling into lethal armored giant pill bugs; their hard suits might have protected their bodies from the radiation in the event of a premature detonation downrange, but the shock wave from an atomic could easily tear an articulated limb from a main battle suit.

One kilometer downrange, the physics package produced a chaotic magnetic field inside the core of some few hundred grams of neptunium, drawing together the isolated paramagnetic clusters that formed around the super-heavy dopant atoms. Thousands of tiny super critical points formed, evenly distributed throughout the fissionable core.

Neutron begat neutron as nuclei shattered. A golden egg was laid at the feet of the oncoming fungoid monstrosity. The radiation blast shriveled and blackened its surface before the fireball tore the monster to vapor.

Bob swore and finished his can.

He paused the stream and looked around the bridge of the freighter. The re-run had been punishing by the rules of the Honor Guard drinking game; Victor had saved the day, again, and had demonstrated the value of regulated personal possession of nuclear weapons.

Six empty cans were strewn over the grubby bridge. Behind his back, a yellow light blinked on a panel; a momentary air pressure anomaly just occurred in the sealed, airless hold of the freighter.

He ignored the warning light. Pressure seals did, after all, just wear out sometimes. The hull was intact, it's only an internal problem.

His own virtual "Liquid Waste Storage Full" warning light was burning an angry red; he staggered off to the head.

The door to the sleeping quarters was closed, which prevented a great deal of screaming. His crew-mate had made a successful attempt to eat his pillow and had smothered.

On the bridge, a single light lit on the communications console -- video was being uploaded from the freighter's internal cameras. The lights dimmed, and the view-screen filled with blue static.

Bob, visibly relieved, walked into the bridge to see three words flashing on his view-screen in a field of static.

YOU'RE A WINNER!

He walked up to the window-sized flat screen, visibly confused.

A face appeared -- leonine with ice-cold blue eyes and a shock of dark hair, a short female with hypnotic eyes.

She said, "Don't turn around."

Bob panicked, and did.

An arm reached out of the view-screen and grabbed him by the nape of the neck, pulling him through to the other side.

"I told you not to turn around."

A moment later, the woman stepped casually out of the view-screen.

She sat down in the captain's chair, brushed an empty can off the armrest, and summoned a squat, fat brown toad-dog thing with flapping bat wings and scaly skin. It hovered uneasily a moment before the woman's gaze fell upon it; it spasmed and turned to face her.

"Enter, Demonslayer."

The imp opened its mouth to speak, and its voice was that of an old woman with a sing-song voice.

"Number Six. You've secured the vessel."

"No, just captured it. What do you need me to do to the cargo?"

"Ensure the charges can be armed locally, without outside interference, then land as per the flight plan. My agents will meet you at the East Pole star-port."

Jinx Bubastis thought for a moment. The cargo of ten thousand bug bombs would take days to prepare, although her mind raced for short-cuts. Perhaps she could steal the private key of an exterminator or demolitions specialist, provision a few thousand security modules, set them up to be unlocked with a simple transaction modules and a short PIN code...

"It will take a while."

"Don't rush."

The imp tried to pause dramatically, which was somewhat sabotaged by the frantic fluttering of his undersized bat-wings.

"You will betray me. I know this, I have prophetic dreams. But you will give me the tools we need. Fare thee well, hireling."

The imp went limp, and flopped gracelessly to the floor.

Jinx Bubastis glared at the ectoplasmic lower astral ambient tulpa, and it wearily opened a single urine-yellow eye.

"Clean up the bridge. I have some corpses to space."

We're On A Video Raid

A girl, probably prettier than the girl next door, considered taking a shower when she heard the thumping from the ducts. She walked to the source of the noise, a access panel attached to the ducting near her small apartment's bathroom.

Bob took another hit from his ice-cold can of Heroin Dry. Systems were nominal, all displays were cyan, engines on-line, life support idling at two percent capacity, autopilot on course and locked onto the East Pole starport's synchronous orbital beacon, buzz at the back of his head and rising steadily.

The girl moved to remove the panel and find out what was causing the commotion when she was stopped suddenly by a voice behind her.

"Ma'am? I'm a fully qualified engineer. Stand back from the ducting."

It was a super hero, a member of Honor Guard. His codename was Arsenal.

He was tall, like most superheroes are, with white fur and yellow-green eyes, dressed in a simplified version of a dark-gray police uniform. He had been on the show for a few years, but had not yet received a personalized costume.

He released the latches holding the access panel, reached inside, and pulled out a small brown rodent.

"Oh! It's adorable! Can I eat him?"

"I wouldn't, ma'am. Wild meat is the leading cause of internal parasites."

The young woman took a deep breath; she began to realize that she may still be in danger.

"I need a drink." The woman walked over to her refrigerator.

"Ma'am? Be careful. Your apartment's unsealed -- there may be something else here."

Arsenal, still holding the duct vole, walked over to the refrigerator, stopped, and seemed to go into a trance for a few seconds. He motioned to the woman to step away from the line of fire.

"When I say 'now', open the refrigerator door and run for your life."

The woman carefully reached for the door handle.

"NOW!"

The beam of laser light was invisible, well into the ultraviolet with a wavelength of 337.1 nanometers, produced by exciting diatomic nitrogen. Unlike a real nitrogen laser, the beam did not pulse; the cloud of excited, ionized gas before Arsenal spat out a continuous beam, producing several kilojoules of energy in the second the dazzling gas cloud existed.

In post-production, the next fraction of a second was slowed down and desaturated to the viewers could see what happened next. A formless bluish blob shot out dark, semi-metallic tentacles to seize whoever opened the door. They arced and sparked as the ultraviolet beam focused on the amorphous body of the fungoid horror lurking inside the refrigerator. In an instant, the monster's body, covered with the remains of shredded packages of convenience foods, burned, shriveled, and then exploded into a cloud of carbon dioxide and water vapor.

"Wha- what was that?"

"A worker drone. It came to collect organic material for its master."

"Arsenal, report!" The belt-mounted hands-free speaker of his communicator buzzed angrily.

Arsenal pressed a spot beneath his ear with his right index finger.

"Yes sir. A civilian had something nasty in her fridge. It looks like the mushroom cultists are at it again."

Bob finished his can of ice-cold fizzy narcotic. The Honor Guard drinking game specified one swallow for Arsenal breaking away from the rest of the team, one swallow for every scene where an extra is placed in mortal peril for no immediately obvious reason, and finish the can if the bad guys are the damned mushroom cultists again.

Bob pressed pause and belched mightily. Five minutes into the first episode, and he'd already finished his first can. It was going to be a long shift.

TV Casualty

Media in Corporate space was distributed asynchronously. Maintaining reliable data streams between two points separated by a few light-years was expensive, and considering the differing diurnal cycles of the colony worlds and the star-ships traveling between them, live distribution would have been inconvenient.

The crew of the deep-space cargo freighter had just received the current delta feed from Entertainment Division for subscribers on Deep Space Distribution Plan 9, which contained the following:

Thirty hours of news and public-interest broadcast archives for the previous cycle from Sedgewick Station, Suburbia's West Pole, Astes, Trojan City, and Parkland. The Big Five media markets generally provided twelve half-hour news broadcasts, sorted and indexed to let homesick crewmen catch up on current events from somewhere near their home.

Twelve hours of the highlights of the last cycle's sporting events, cut into short segments, covering sporting events like competetive pack hunting, combat golf, ski jousting, and chess.

Ten hours of entertainment programming.

The news and sports streams contained elaborate, time-coded indexes that could be used to mix short segments into one of the feature streams.

The feature streams were where the various distribution plans began to distinguish themselves. Plan 9 was reasonably popular among spacers, residents of deep-space installations, prisoners, and bar patrons; it concentrated on super heroes.

The Fe Arrans had records of individuals with extraordinary abilities back into the depths of their written history. These once ruled as warlords over the packs they adopted; over time, the religious philosophies of the Reyll prophets slowly limited their political and economic domination, and introduced more sophisticated and egalitarian social structures that encouraged artistic and scientific progress. The paranormals became useful atavisms, conscripted soldiers used in the quiet, civilized wars fought between the Reyll industrial combines.

The Corporation, on the other hand, turned its paranormals into media figures, dressing them in colorful costumes. They were integrated into police and paramilitary forces, and used to communicate information about public safety and war-time propaganda to vast audiences. However, their intrigues, rivalries, and friendships were scripted and managed by a cadre of writers and producers, producing worked scenes that provided continuity to knit together the footage of what the heroes called "shoots" -- usually combat or some other perilous, unscripted situation.

Honor Guard was a relatively popular super hero series. The setup -- the protagonists were a team of advisers to the Space Patrol, attached to an experimental heavy corvette -- ensured variety in location and tone, combined with the comforting conventions of spacer life and police procedural and search and rescue fiction.

This particular feed contained six hour-long episodes of Honor Guard adventures, two hours of short worked comedy skits and celebrity interviews by Awesome Man, a clownish empath in a garish costume, and a two-hour block of music videos and out-of-context clips from documentaries and old movies hosted by former villain Master Decontrol. As such, Honor Guard was the meat in the media soup doled out by the Deep-Space Distribution Network, playing to a captive audience of bored, inebriated space truckers.

It wasn't high culture, but it made the hours pass between sheer boredom and frantic terror -- just the thing for long-haul space flight.