Wake, wake, wake.
The words came through his skull from a great distance curled about with chill fog and lack of interest.
</i>"Okay, young feller, next time, don't leap so hard for the ball." The eighty-five year old doctor said with a warm smile and bright eyes. His hands were deft with generations of practise, and the something... It faded on him.
"Next time, I'll incorporate my jeet kune do falling techniques into the snatch dive for the ball. I won't break my collarbone again, that way, anyways." The young boy said, his voice earnest and analytical and accepting.
"But its not neccessary for you to try so hard." The doctor said with soft eyes shared by the boy's parents.
"Isn't it?" He asked back, a bit hurt himself, and he saw pain in their eyes. He was eight. Their combined age was two hundred ninety-three.</i>
Words came to his mind. They were insistent, and demanding.
Wake, wake, wake.
He ignored them.
"But I am creative. Look, at my science fair. Not just the teachers, or my fellows in the multi-continent study group, but even that doctorate with the four degrees was impressed." The boy waved his hand at a diorama which showed the glaciers melting (due to heating coils as unshielded X-ray lasers were forbidden to middle school elementary students which had been his first choice), and the seas rising. After that, little robot men fled inland, and began building boats to send forth armadas to attack Egypt and its freshly built Pyramids.
In truth, the man knew, it was a little crude, but making the whole thing with human Bronze Age warriors at the scale of a ladybug, his younger self had hoped to impress. It had combined the New History, Robotics, and even a battle tactics sim as differing beginning conditions could result in different armies sweeping the simulated Mediterranean Sea. Just moving one captain could tilt the war for new lands after the sea stole Atlantis from the Cretans to the Egyptians. It was a living, breathing (or so it seemed) refutation of both the Great Man and the Historical Forces Theories of History.
His younger self waved at the diorama, and his teacher over the Net, a rather young sixty year old sighed in sympathy.
"It is superlative." And then he delivered the fatal thrust. "Better than all but four percent of the seventh grade science projects in the category of Multi-disciplinary Creative."
"Oh." Four percent. The magic circle was two percent. If you could do something better than ninety-eight percent of humanity, and it was deemed valuable, you could make your own way with others hurrying to open doors for you. Or you could take a well-paid job, do useful work and all at someone else's bidding for decades until you reached at least sixty minimum, and your real career finally started, maybe. If you still cared to be more than a worker at that time.
More insistent and louder the words came, covered in ice, and ice crackling all around them at their power.
Wake, wake, wake.
"The world could be worse, you know." The truly old man said with a faint smile. He was nearing his second century, and given the job of counselling the gifted children as he waited for the death angel.
"How?" Michael snapped.
The man smiled in the gentle way that was common in the world of the early twenty-second century After Death.
"You told me you enjoy reading the fiction of my youth. Alas, Babylon. Mad Max. Deathworld." The old man grinned, having a liking for those books of the days before even the Fall of Communism.
"They're so...crazy." Michael looked embarrassed, but he had been taught to be honest first, and polite and respectful second.
"Indeed. They are. Our half-pagan ancestors locked in a death struggle with a system devoted to looting and rampaging and sadism under the name of brotherly love and equality of outcome. How could our ancestors be anything but mad? But that's not my point. I tell you indeed, that those books might have come true."
"And Max's world would be worse than this one?" The older boy, still a boy, Michael did not sound wholly convinced.
"It would be an easier world than this one."
"Easier?" Michael is incredulous.
"Oh, absolutely. There you only have to fight for your life. Here you have to be brave and honest and love and be kind and dream great dreams of a bright future we don't let you make without a decades long apprenticeship first."
"There I could be a man. Right now." Michael said sobbing as he sat by the old man on a bench in a park that was not unusual in the slightest for its great beauty, and its hundred year old designer.
The old man patted him on the shoulder. For some tragedies, there was no cure, but love and patience.
Still louder, and Michael wanted to flee, so he did.
Wake, wake, wake. The words came softer toward the end as he slid away from something.
"I'm sorry." Michael did not know what to say. He knew it was his fault. Yet, he could not see where he had made a mistake except in attempting to be more than society was glad to give him.
The older man, a father of five, a young eighty, bowed his head after an all-seeing glance that seemed to read Michael's soul. It was as if he expected more from Michael, but upon not getting it, he turned to his private grief. To the inanimate body of what had been his son, torn and twisted by the hangglider's crash, that lay on the floor between them.
Michael had a vision of a great future, and so he enlisted a few others like himself who wanted more than a corner office for the next sixty years. He thought he could take his microbots and use them to load up a hanglider, and use a solar celled glider with a human pilot to get around legal restrictions on in city flight by robots. Then the microbots would jump off from the glider and bring the item they were delivering piece by piece, and assemble it in front of the customer without the pilot having to do anything but fly.
It worked well for two weeks. People were enchanted by the idea. And then Bor got hit by a crosswind and swept into a lightpole above a tollway. It was a long way to the ground wrapped around a lightpole which prevented the opening of his safety cube which should have protected him.
And now Michael wept for his friend.
The voice came and with it some concern. Michael needed to heed it the voice seemed to suggest. And Michael was happy too now.
Wake, wake, wake.
The man leaned back with a small smile, and put his cowboy boots on the empty desk in the small room. Michael stared at him, and took the proffered chair.
"Not quite the terror I'm made out to be, eh?" The man said wryly.
Michael said nothing, as his base core of terror suggested even though there was an overlay of curiosity. The man, with pale green eyes, did not seem to be offended.
"Michael Roger Hammer. That's a good name."
"Um, thank you sir."
--Inside, something exulted. He knew his name. He remembered.
"Do you know why you're here, Michael?" The man tossed in a piece of bubblegum into his mouth, and began to chew it.
"I've messed up royally. You've got the power to kill me if you decide too."
"I do." The man nodded. "Never used it once."
Michael's eyebrows rose in shock. Officers of the Last Court were fabled to go through life executing waitresses who brought them burnt toast.
"We do not advertise that. Simple fact is, some people won't pay attention until you have a blaster stuck up their nostril. Although most who are bent that way are dealt with before now. Either in crime, or they're given positions where their natural predilections do little harm to others or theirselves."
"Mort got that job as a fire ranger a bunch of us wanted." Michael burst out. The man flicked his eyelids, and a tiny screen flickered in front of one eye for a second.
He nodded.
"Got it in one. Mort does not realize it, but he is disbarred from over fifty percent of the jobs out there. No one would hire him. Because one day, he'd do something. It might be an accident. It might be deliberate even, although that's unlikely. Its even possible, he might go violent and mad. Mort believes the universe owes him. He deserves what those who have spent decades honing their skills have as a matter of right."
"But...is he wrong?" Michael asked thoughtfully. It was not a question the culture overmuch encouraged. But they did encourage honesty.
"That's a philosophical premise, and thus, in some sense, unprovable. Since we base our society on the Textus Receptus, the revelation of God to man, by our premises, yes, he's wrong. The universe owes you nothing."
"I-I don't think he's right." Michael said slowly. It did seem to him that someone who spent the last seven decades learning to be a violinist and was thus arguably better than Michael with his ten years of practise would probably have more power, more status, more money, more freedom, more connections than Michael. And Michael could not argue with that.
"It hurts doesn't it?"
Michael nodded intensely.
"You're somewhat like Mort. Oh," He waved off Michael's instant protest. "You respect others, and yourself, and your God. You respect reality which is the same thing really. But you find yourself in the intolerable position of having to wait. And so you try, so very hard. First with Active Team Sports, even in our time, more of a young man's game. Then Creativity. Then Dangerous Testing. Then Charm. Then your Hanglider Company which was very clever."
"But even now, Michael, you're burning the candle. I can see the incredible determination, the willingness to take the dangerous route to the top of K2 or Olympus Mons, a favorite of mine, by the way, is flagging. We made this route available for people with that determination."
"But I'm not good enough."
"No, you're not." The Judge paused. "I think in about five years, you'd finally give up. You'd spend the next fifteen as an apprentice. And then you'll kill yourself."
Michael almost sobbed again. It was all too likely. The fire inside him would end up destroying him.
"There are options, Michael. Other paths for someone like you. In fact, you, might be almost the ideal candidate for these."
Michael looked up to see an approving smile on the man's face.
"One, the JumpGate out on Triton. And two, a little secret project called the Torchthrowers."
"Torchthrowers?" Michael said curiously, having never heard of it. The JumpGate, where a man went naked into the gate because only biology survived through the gate, he had heard of, and indeed he had done a school project on it. Torchthrowers was tabula rasa to him.
"Yes, Torchthrowers, Captain Michael Hammer. Wake, wake, wake." A female voice intruded into his ears, and ice cold water dripped off him. With his vision blurry, he looked up to see the dark skin, and evenly parted hair of Doctor Tanya Morrow.
Suddenly, he felt dizzy, and grabbed the sides of the cryobath he was sitting naked inside of. Icebergs suited for tiny robot soldiers bumped into his pectoral muscles.
"Thought you were going catatonic on us, for a moment, Captain."
"No, me?" Michael scoffed even as he remembered his pain and fear.
"You're allowed to be human sir, especially after you've been frozen for three hundred forty nine years."
"Whoah?" Michael said, feeling the dizzy rush come back again. Hopefully it would pass. Now he needed to find out what crisis had called his battallion of operators out of cryo to solve. But first, a uniform, and some hot oatmeal with raisins.
End of Chapter One.
The History of Michael Di Vars? Whether or not, this looks cool.
I'm afraid that the original history of Michael di Vars is considerably more mundane than that, and that he would not see any reason for anyone to put him in cryo given that he doesn't age.
--M. J. Young
unless this was before the verse. (for the cryo thing)
But yeah, I thought it was a longshot.
Glad you're interested. This is me yammering with a SF novel idea of mine, but its easily enough used for world inspiration, perhaps...
Fifteen Minutes Later...
Michael sat in in the Commandant's ready room, a place of dark splendor, when it had not been dismantled for storage over three hundred years ago in Earth orbit. The last workers had left the Torchthrower Project starship centuries ago and gone back to their jobs in the Near-Earth Economic Zone, and except for a sophisticated software program, and five hundred cold frozen human beings, and several dozen rats, the Era Auria was empty. Venting the atmosphere did for the rats, and helped the crewsicles store better on the long, cold ride into interstellar space.
Driven by a laser cannon placed inside the chromasphere of Sol, the Era Auria, the Golden Age, had quickly reached 98% of c, lightspeed, and time dilation had kicked in. Bouncing the laser off an ice planet in the path of the onrushing starship had served as a brake as the laser shifted halfway there from the back of the ten mile square molecule thick laser sails to the front.
And then it waited after it arrived in a location in deep space surrounded by a dozen likely worlds where trouble might develop.
Michael remembered.
"Its a simple concept. Torchthrowing." The instructor had said from the front of the classroom to the room full of freshly shaven young men. He pointed at one fellow in the front row.
"How would you characterize our time?"
"Um, good, ah, sir." The recruit just barely remembered his military ettiquette.
"Not eloquent, but essentially right." Instructor Carpas said with a small smile. Unlike the DI who never smiled, the instructors were always cheerful even as they ripped you to shreds with sympathy. "Perhaps a bit more detail."
His finger landed on Michael's spot.
"Most genetic diseases are done for. Longetivity. But these are symptoms."
"Symptoms. An interesting analysis and choice of words. Makes them seem like diseases."
Laughter.
"Morality enacted on right knowledge enables the production of numerous goods."
"Someone's been reading a textbook."
More laughter.
Michael shook his head in disagreement. He did not know it then, but later he was told that that moment marked him out for higher command.
"Morality is what is rational enlightened self-interest." The instructor replied. A number of would be soldiers nodded in aggreement. Michael did not.
"You disagree. Explain."
"First, the benefits of morality often tend to be emergent properties. One does not Edit: discover (instead of 'see' which could have a lesser meaning than I meant) the effect until the action is taken. Secondly, this is a notion of morality based upon utilitarian philosophy which is disproven by the Intelligent Design Theorem and the Anthropic Principle."
The instructor smiled.
"Michael gets a cut to the head of the line for chow today. Those of you who nodded to my statement of utilitarian philosophy can run an extra three miles tonight. You know who you are."
It was the Project's honor code. They were sending people into the far future, and out of control. Arming them with vast weapons, and knowledges arcane and esoteric. There was no practical way to control them, so in the end, it was left to honor.
Second post...
I think I need to ground the 'Fifteen Minutes' section more firmly in the present, and do so with a larger opening bit before the exposition and the memory. And I probably need to have some questions developed in the present moment so as to get some tension going forward, and not just rely on him being woken up and carrying that emotional charge forward...
Probably need to start giving him his mission in a clever way that raises questions, and is unusual enough to spark interest.
I read through, which is rare for me, not because I don't enjoy Eric's writing, but my attention span for things is short. It was a good read, I really have nothing to suggest or offer other than that.
Insert before the 'Fifteen minutes later...'
Doctor Tanya Morrow requested a doublecheck from Nurse Delisossian, a Nordic-Fijian almost Olympic skiier who was like everyone on the starship, not quite good enough. 'Deli' flickered her glance over the invisible manifest that Dr. Morrow had pegged in the Virtuality, an overlay of normal reality manifested by sophisticated computers built into the main spine of the Golden Age. She flicked her finger with the unstealable personal signet through the 'paper' floating in mid-air, visible only to herself, giving it her approval. Dr. Morrow did likewise, and hurried on to the next 'cryobum' as the wakers called their coldfrozen brethren.
Michael Hammer braced his arms on either side of the ice bath that had been his constant residence for centuries, and lifted himself out in a maneuver known to gymnastics students of the parallel bars for ages. The plastic flexed under his hands, and he suffered a moment when he wondered if the bravado he had planned back on Earth...
"The Marine Power Armor guy, he was doing calisthenics before he got out of the ice." He had imagined others saying. It did not hurt to have a reputation as the baddest of the bad.
...would be repaid by humiliation. But he came to his feet, and nothing broke. A bot rolled up to him, blew dry his skin, foam sprayed him for cleanliness, and for oiling up his parchment dry skin. The foam evaporated, and he was clean and still a bit dry.
The dark royal blue jumpsuit went on over the skintight combat suit which would theoretically stop anything short of a heavy rifle bullet. Boots, because they had room for electromagnets, in case the centrifuge had to be stopped for battle, and because boots were military, and everyone needed reminded.
A brimmed cap he placed on his head with customary flair. It held the emergency bubble in case the starship got penetrated, and was designed to stick to head in conditions up to seven g. His name tag, his medals, and his rank badges were all intact. Mother had sewn, or more accurately, personally supervised a professional sewer who had done the job on Earth before he left. Then a computer took snapshots in every detail, and reconstructed it because no matter how good the cotton, three centuries of vacuum was not that good for it.
Now it was time to find something with heavy smoothness and sugar to appease his stomach in a gentle way because doctors said no one would be ready to go from zero.
"Aaaaagghg!"
A giant naked man rose screaming in the cold bath two down from his. Sergeant Andrew Taylor, he remembered. Good man, steady with a long rifle for something not good enough to be called sniping, but very impressive all teh same.
He bounded out of the bath, slewing water everywhere, and making Michael wish he had remembered to ask for waterproofing of electrical panels. In his face was rage and terror and ignorance. He slung Deli back as if she were nothing. And despite her black belt in Aikido, she really was nothing for he was berserk. Nobody willing to listen was at the driving wheel.
"Sergeant! Attention!" Michael snapped the order, hoping that long military protocol might reach teh sergant. But alas, the sergeant only slowed for a half second, before he dove to tackle Michael with a savage grin of delight.
"He woke up bad." Dr. Morrow said.
"On the wrong side of the bed, gotcha." Michael said wishing the doctor would stop wasting time, and stab the guy in the neck with a sedative in a needle.
Let's try to rewrite Chapter Two.
Theme: Illusions about the nature of reality lead to pain. This gets demonstrated in a physical way in the Fight Scene as the opponent is seeing things not there.
Chapter Two: Let's Get Started
"What'd you wake us for?" Captain Michael Hammer asked, then interrupted himself before Doctor Tanya Morrow could halt in her medical examination.
"Turn away, Tanya and Elise."
Tanya's face turned snappy, her fingers poised in mid-air and mid-info stream as she manipulated the Virtuality. Elise, her Nordic-Fijian nurse, just behind her, just grinned at his impudent command. They both elaborately turned. Michael kicked off the front of the icebath, and rotated backwards on his center of gravity up to a near spread-eagle push-up on the shivering sides of the plastic container before thrusting his hips sideways to come to a solid ,thudding plant on the ceramic decking.
"The judges give you a nine." Tanya said with starch in her tone. "But your doctor has not released you yet."
MORE LATER>..Slightly edited for better verbs and stuff.
the re-write works better indeed.
Shrinkage, still a problem in the future :P
Michael strove to keep a smile off his face as the two blushing females hurried through the last of his medical exam. He wanted it done, and over with now, and they wanted to be sociable and enjoy their moment of power over the leader of Hammer's Hulks while making sure he was thorougly vetted. After all, no one had been cold frozen as long as they before now. It was a moment of scientific interest, worthy of a paper or two if such things still applied.
So instead of attacking prepared defenses, he attacked on the flank. Sexual embarrassment got them finished quickly with what he saw as unneccessary box-checking even as a bot rolled up, foam sprayed him and then vaccuumed the foam off, leaving his scaly, dry skin, less scaly and less dry.
'Cryoskin' was a layer of dead skin not abraded off by normal life, and you did lose about a month of life for each ten years in cryo, so he'd lived over three years without a bath, or even the exceptionally mild scraping imposed by slipping on a t-shirt.
Obviously, Tanya and Elise, with their glowing skins had woken up a few days ago. Tanya, the more certified, had almost been good enough, 2.7% or .7% short of the magic circle of Immediate Work. Her Jamaican-American heritage gave her good solid genes, and a musical lilt to her voice, and a love of Yankees baseball. Elise, was taller, and heavier, a young giantess, six foot in her stockings, with a knifeblade nose, and an easy laugh. Her hair was gene-split with tufts coming in Polynesian and tufts coming in straight, golden blonde, and tied back in a long ponytail. Her skills had been a mere 5% off of optimum which in another age might have led to her becoming a chief nurse of a hospital, but in the past golden age would have relegated her to supervisiing machines for the next fifty years.
The bot, a three foot tall, man of all work, called Sydney, handed him the skin-tight mesh suit that could stop a .45 bullet, or reflect a laser burst, and with the hood pulled out and over could enable the wearer to survive ten minutes in space. Its chief problem was that it was nearly impossible to get on without help. Thus, Sydney, his personal valet, had a total of five arms, and one anchoring magnet/hook. The hook and the five arms were needed, and by the time it was on, his two interrogators had flicked their personal signet rings through the invisible 'papers' floating in the Virtuality, and signed off on letting him free.
Now he was not Patient #9, but Captain Michael Hammer, CO of Hammer's Hulks, and Torchthrower Project Marine. It felt good. He slipped on the royal blue jumpsuit, and the heavy combat boots with a sense of relief.
And then across the large chamber, near Tonya and Elise, he heard a scream like a mortally wounded bull. It was loud, and piercing, denying and enraged.
MORE LATER...
Lieutenant Liam Wainwright flung Tanya back into a cryounit across the aisle with bone-cracking force. She hit above deck, and slid down bonelessly, dead or unconscious. The muscle preservative regimen had built on Liam's natural body-building enthusiasm and he outweighed the two hundred thirty pound, six feet tall Captain by another thirty pounds.
He reached out for Elise, and she did a straight drop and somersault back to get out of his way. A second later, and he stomp attacked her way. This gave Michael time to sprint across the cryo-vault and leap to a flying side kick that toppled Liam after impacting with his shoulder, and hopefully broke his collarbone, or so Michael devoutly hoped. It was always better to finish the fith with the first strike.
Liam bounced to his feet and charged Michael who was still sliding, and regaining his feet. The enraged man's face was someplace beyond sanity. Michael found himself up against the door to the corridor outside, but the controller taunted him from on the other side of the sliding metal door.
With no time to lose, he pushed his right foot into the outside edge of the door jam, and snapkicked himself upward to land his left foot on top of the still unopened cryo-unit of Corporal Jamie Carruthers. Another step with his back against the wall, and Liam interrupted his escape by grabbing the ankle on his left foot and yanking him off the wall.
Having no choice, Michael went with it, and manaage to land with his right knee in Liam's chest, overbearing the heavier man. With a woof of expelled i, Liam hit the floor, and Michael kept on going, and rolled free.
Both men rose to their feet, and then waded in swinging.
Michael remembered.
"Pair up, everyone." The Drill Instructor poked about in the middle of the hollow square of recruits in the Tamwyn Gym. He smiled with a lethal promise of pain and brutal injury. "The guy next to you, ladies." He spoke as if explaining the dreadfully simple to toddlers, but with a condescending patience he would never have shown to a three year old.
The choice simplified from finding the best possible partner before anyone else got him, to taking the guy to his right. Liam grinned at him ruefully. Michael was already marked out for Command. Liam was one of those who might wash out. He was willing, enthused (most of the time) as everyone in the Project had their dark moments when faith turned inward and naturally flagged. But he was skinny, metabolically the sort of fellow who spooned up three milkshakes, an all bacon meatloaf, and a pile of healthy spinach salad garnished with all the extras, and lost half a pound.
"Its only Monday." Liam said softly. The point being that each man in training would have a different partner for each day of the week, because people most able to be a Torchthrower tended to be the sort who were individualistic. They were not anti-social by any means, but they did things their way. And so High Command had come up with some techniques to get confirmed blockheads to work together.
On Monday, he would be partnered with Liam, and his grade in the afternoon session, would be averaged with Liam. Michael looked at him with an analytical eye. He had a good frame, a shock of dark black hair which showed he was healthy and getting all his vitamins. Science had shown that graying hair had a partial cause in lack of vitamins, and that humans were designed to like glossy hair because it was a sign of good health. It had taken Michael a couple weeks to take a course when seven on the precise gradients and details that could be wrung from a picture. It was by no means as detailed or accurate as a doctor with his supporting biomachines, but it had been surprisingly effective had helping him pick the strongest players for the sports teams he was trying out for back when he had dreams of going All Pro.
"You have an hour of free time before bed. It now belongs to me." Michael said. Liam flinched at the curt command, but then nodded. That day, Michael and Liam scored near the bottom on the obstacle course. That night, Liam began lifting weights, and speedpunching into Michael's kinetic dampening glove covered hands.
They'd stayed near the bottom for a week, and then, as his speedpunching improved so did the scores. Eventually, Liam became a sergeant who would follow his Captain anywhere.
It was the speedpunching that brought Michael back. And it nearly finished him. He was used to Liam's top speed, and so he was set for it. But he had never seen Liam berserk, with his eyes wide in stark terror, with his lungs thundering at maximum overdrive, with his reactions and his strength maxed out by fight or die buckets of adrenaline. If the first punch had not sagged Michael's knees, and got him below the machine gun like plane of attack, Michael would have died on his feet.
Instead, dazed, he drooped, and training kicked in,and he dropped further, and pistoned his huge calve muscles, and slammed the top of his left shoulder into Liam's solar plexus,lifting the slightly smaller man off the ceramic deck, and he kept on driving so that Liam, despite his frantic efforts to regain his feet found himself slung into the floor with bone-cracking force with Michael coming in down on top of his stomach like a hammer.
But instead of folding, or even dying as an ordinary man might, with his internal organs bruised, Liam clasped his hands and brought them down in a hammerstrike on Michael's broadly muscled back, just behind his heart. If Michael had not been wearing his armored skinsuit, that might have been it. It was just possible to stop a man's heart that way, if you knew what you were doing, and if you were dreadfully strong. Liam had both advantages.
Realizing the problem a moment later, Liam reached down gaping hands to gouge out his superior's eyes, but Michael was already moving. He slipped his head from Liam's side, and plunged up, driving the foretop of his skull into Liam's jaw with enough force to slice off a tongue bit, which it did.
Still, Liam's hands fell on Michael's face, and Michael desperately dug his face into Liam's chest seeking to avoid being blinded. A finger plunged, and Michael shrieked like a banshee as he lunged upright,a nd unthinking drove his elbow down into Liam's head.
Gasping he jumped to his feet, and Elise came toward him, and before he knew it he was moving into a combat stance, and heading her way. She simply fled before him, until halfway across the room, Sydney extended an arm and tripped him. Coming skidding to a halt, with his chin bruised by the floor as he had taken no precaution to save himself, he regained his sanity.
Laying there, breathing, he assessed the situation.
"Nurse, check that Doctor Tanya Morrow is alive, and then Sergeant Wainwright, and then once they are secured, you may attend to my eye. I apologize for..."
"I should not have come up on you when you were in full combat mode. Are you sure..."
"We need doctors more than captains, Nurse. Do your duty." Michael grated out even as he desperately wanted to have the gentle, and strong hands of Elise tend to his left eye which was leaking down his cheek. Some days it just did not pay to wake out of cryosleep.
Next step, we cut back to 'Fifteen Minutes Later....', and add a bit about Michael dealing with his lack of eye. Maybe a pun or two about 'there's no I in team'.
Elise entered with her hair swinging from her rapid step, and stop, the blonde tufts from her Norwegian heritage intermixed with her straight mahoghany hair, a variation not seen until gene-splicing made it possible. She saw Michael's drawn face.
"Captain, sir, Michael, we can wait."
"No. No we can't." He muttered to himself, feeling the building fear. Here he was tens of lightyears and centuries away from Earth. It was uncertain until Tonya recovered from her concussion and cracked vertebrae in her neck, so close, so close to losing one of their few doctors ten minutes into the mission....He paused. What was uncertain? Oh, yes, whether his eye could be fixed, or just how to do it. Elise did not know enough to say for certain.
"Sir?" She asked, and Michael prayed for focus. Renewed, he rose to his feet, and picked up the dark metal combat staff which had some features he did not understand. The manual claimed that could multiply hit force, and reccommended Force 2 for unarmored enemy soldiers. Force 4 supposedly could remove legs.
Michael failed to see how a heavy metal pole, with grip bubbles running up and down its four foot length, could rip a man's leg off. But, he hefted it. It felt good, solid, durable, and so he thoughtfully popped off the end cap, and set it for Force Three.
With that, he followed Elise left down the ceramic walled corridor, over a gangway that loomed over the vast storage pit where they kept the lightsail folded when it was not in use. Thousands upon thousands of acre sized squares of monomolecular fabric were stacked next to each other a few angstrom apart. Fall of the gangplank, and there literally would not be enough DNA left intact to identify your body. You'd be reduced to something much smaller, and finer diced than a mere red mist in the air. At least a third of the water molecules in your body would be sliced back into their component atoms before recombining into a goop that stank much worse than a skunk could dream of managing. Or so the engineers who had installed the lightsails said.
No one knew if they were telling the truth, but no one particularly wanted to find out, and so the fearless marines always breathed a little easier after going over the gangway bridge. On the other side, a drop down a hatch, and a turn to the right in the ventral fin corridors, and another left halfway down that cannon to the stars, and you were back in Cryostorage One.
Michael breathed in as he looked at the fifty units, only two of them open. He had nearly gone catatonic, and Liam had come out berserk. Not good odds. And his only doctor was in medbay, two hundred yards by corridor away, or fifty yards as the neutrino flies.
He turned to Elise, his nurse, and fingered the combat staff.
"Open it up." He jabbed the staff at the next in line, and waited with a grim patience.
test
I tested because my 'World: College of...' was closed, and I wondered if this one was as well.
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I'm trying for a very violent setting here. In 'Cereal Novel' which I think I'm going to ultimately name 'Disorientation', its not super violent. But here, I think it works. But I need to have a variety of violence so as to keep surprising the reader. Its like music, you can't keep hitting the same note over and over. Most music also has few LOUD bits mixed in with softer bits....at least in classical music. But some such music is Thunder All The Time. This should be so, I suspect.
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So now I've promised the reader a set of club-smacking beatings....because even if most people end up okay (not crazy) there's still going to be some. One way to do it is to get a war of attrition going.
The door gets bashed so it doesn'twork. People fight, some get unconscious some wounded, more wake, but are okay, more wake but are crazy...most of the good guys are knocked out....hero fights on....more good guys show up....hero gets bashed in head and nighty nite.....hero wakes up as one last good guy fights four bad guys....hero joins in....hero wakes up a few more and they are good guys.....end....before bad guys wake...the door is repaired and more meds are retrieved and things are straightened out, or it seems they will, but one of the bad guys had been faking, and he bolts to somewhere in teh ship where he can do great harm....
...my 'World: College of...' was closed....
Can't think why that would be. Get me a link and I'll take a look at it.
--M. J. Young
Start with hero deciding to sneak up on enemy...he's going to sit on top of the next cryo unit up on the wall....need to make clear the room....but then he realizes that sometimes there is no way to be clever, and takes his stand.
Later....
I thought to make Michael an Odin like figure...what with losing his eye, and then he could have more data because of a cyber eye ( more data is sorta more wisdom). But then I think we're trying to do a Christian story. Odin is an example of bargaining with the gods...I give you this, you give me that.
Christian is more about undeserved mercy.
So...Liam's eye is also injured because Michael the Hammer cracked his skull and a bit of skull bone jabbed Liam's eye.
One of the pschyo's has escaped. He opens Pod Two, and releases those cryos. He also does some attacks on the ship. End result is the medbay is going down...real soon now. Michael orders them to fix Liam first even though he knows there's a real good chance there won't be time to fix himself. So Michael get's the cybereye.
Michale and various good guys fight the pschyos, who are mostly from Pod Two....it seems that there was a second group sent through a jumpgate directly to the ship and then cold frozen...this group was from a couple hundred years in teh future and has cyber muscle implants, but is socially degenerate (although they don't see it that way...they think the original torchthrowers are stupid religious nuts).
Liam wakes up, and finds out what happened. He faces Michale as he's n the hospital bed.
Liam is guilty, and he wants to know the punishement, and he wishes Michael had not done the eye thing.
"At some level, I knew. I knew. But I was so afraid, and then there in my mind was an explanation that seemed to make perfect sense. I'd been sent to Hell, and you and all the others were demons in disguise out to torture me. I see its stupid now, but I can remember when I thought it totally logical."
"Elise says that parts of your brain were still asleep while other parts were either active or hyperactive."
"But I knew,and I was just so afraid. What's my punishment?" Liam asked fearfully. "Shot? Spaced?"
Michael opened up the file on Liam, and wrote in one word. 'Cowardice under extreme duress and mental disorder due to medical condition.'
"Extreme duress..."
"Yes." Michael snapped.
"And?" Liam wanted to know the punishment.
"That's it. You failed, you apologized, and while we remember, we move on. No attempting to redeem it because you can't. But instead, you can learn bravery for future actions."
"That's too generous. I don't deserve that."
"Its mercy. And you're right, you don't, but I like you. Now get to work, and quit loafing in bed, I mean, my goodness, its been at least three hours wince ou underwent major surgery. I need your help."
With that Micahel left the room to givve Liam time to make ready in private.
The Pod 2ers are more arrogant and sure of themselves.
Once, the running battle in the ship is stabilized, then we have the training nd preparaion for the attack. It turns out that the TP has been sending messages with hi tech data. One of them is a way to run a jumpgate on a low power setting to things a short distance away astronomically. But our heroes have to build it first. And then, after training with some weapons (which they have to choose from the files as to what they think goes best for this environment...which lets me compared various weapons), and some scouting of the planet through the jumpgate (they see a Megacroc or an Allice that is 25 feet long....'that's the size that a croc gets in a giant swamp if left alone for a couple hundred years'....such things can hunt sharks on teh surface and win, often they tale smack a shark, and then jump it. Smarter sharks avoid them so they mostly live on dolphin when they are in teh sea...it takes about a week for a megacroc to move out of the estuary and into the saltwater sea).
And then after training and learning their weapons the men have to doff weapons and jump through the jumpgate without anything...so on the far side they have to build their own weapons.
This goes to 07's idea of improvisers.
Second post...
MJ, here's the link...http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-the-college-of-manly-arts
I am unable to find that thread at all. I'm not sure why not.
World: the College of Manly Arts.
--M. J. Young
Chapter Three: Join the Club
Elise looked over the vitals on her Virtuality overlay which Michale (name change from Michael) had tagged in to using his Command override. He hoped that some sign of insane fury in the now frozen cryoman would be obvious,like a sky-high blood pressure, or an adrenalin overload spike to let him know just a second or two beforehand what juggernaut was heading downhill toward him and his mission.
Some star system near to the Torchthrower Project starship needed help desperately. And his crew of flash-frozen Project Marines from Earth's Golden Age, when Faith underpinned Reason and Commerce and Innovation, to the point where practical longetivity made it neccessary to find new jobs for the young folk rapidly being born. Thus had started the Solar Diaspora, and thus had started the dream of Torchthrowing, of taking some of the magnificent specimens of that Golden Age of moral and visionary height, and sending them via Science, and armed with Faith, into an unknown Future.
Because the one thing everyone knows about Golden Ages is that they end. Rome fell. America almost fell before opening the door to the Age of Gold. Babylon fell. Atlantis fell as the Bronze Age and the Ice Age simultaneously ended. All things of Mankind eventually end. Even the Age of Gold. Michale was one of the two people currently awake whose heart would stir to a badly sung 'Star Spangled Banner'. The other was the Nordic-Fijian, with the genesplit hair, nurse in front of him.
Satisfied, Elise nodded at him, obviously nerving herself up to the task, and punched the unfreeze protocol Start One control line with unneccessary force. It hovered in the air of the narrow room, lined on both sides by walls of cryobaths, or so it seemed to the users of the Virtuality. Energies flowed into the four hundred pound block of ice, and the two hundred thirty pound man inside the block. The ice began to melt. His heart began to beat, very slowly. Oxygen was forced to his brain, and the anti-crystallization liquid did one last service as it sucked in heat, and decayed or molecularly changed to produce just a little more oxygen in his brain, by shedding oxygen molecules, and turning into something inert to the body's processes.
The numbers flashed across the dials, and Elise leapt back, but not fast enough. Rising out of the almost unbroken ice, a beefy arm grabbed her left wrist. It yanked her to him, and let go to grab her neck. Such was the force that she had no way of resisting the incredible strength. Which is why Michale slipped to her right, and counter-rotated the club bar so that it crashed into both the bones in Corporal Mark Hopper's left forearm. Shards of bones jutted out, and the man convulsed inside the still thawing iceblock as Elise bumped the block hard with her head.
Michale drew her back with a smooth, extended left arm, as she let him, knowing herself dazed, and not fit for making judgments at the moment. He kept his club ready, and waited.
Hopper did not move for a long second, and then his numbers began to come down. Michale feared the shock of having his forearm shattered might have sent the Marine into shock. But he did not know enough medicine to cope, and the Doctor was in her own medbay as a patient, and the Nurse was nursing a bloodied scalp, and checking in the Virtuality for signs of concussion by having the Virtuality show her a look at her own eyes.
So Captain Michale Hammer waited. The ice thawed, and Corporal Mark Hopper sat up slowly. He winced as his left arm moved.
"Sorry, sir. I=I don't know what to say. Its hard to explain, but you snapped me back to sense."
"Mucked your arm up real good too."
"I'd say don't beat yourself up over that. You've already beaten me up." Hopper laughed a little at his own joke. Michale did not. "Come on, sir. You did the right thing. I'm the one who should feel guilty."
There was a long pause, and then Elise asked from the floor.
"Why?"
"I-I can't explain it well."
At his look of frustration, Elise smiled.
"A certain mental fogginess is expected on waking." She got up, and made her way to Mark. A cabinet in the wall opened at her command, and out came stiffeners and wrap, both of which obeyed words and intentions more than motions. In a couple minutes, Mark was beginning the healing process which would take a couple weeks due to the regenerative capacities built into their bodies by the home folk.
She ordered him to bed, and after he left, she turned and looked worried for Michale.
"If everyone comes out crazy, we're going to be in big trouble."
Michale nodded, and rubbed his jawline in thought. Looking up, he told her to take a break, get some food and rest. She acceded with a slump of her shoulders, and left the room.
He passed out, taking one look back at his double platoon of Project Marines still frozen. No doubt, if this ever made it into a military manual, it would fall into the 'what not to do' section, he judged himself harshly. So far, he had all of his alert command injured, or out of combat completely with serious injuries, and he had not even faced the enemy, or found their name yet. Time to rectify that, and some other things as well.
Strolling slowly through the currently empty ship, he passed Pod Two, and looked in because the green light was on outside it. From what he remembered, Pod Two was a backup for his Pod One room. It should not be in use. But it was, and all of the cryobaths were filled with bodies.
Michale left the ventral fin section to port stern, and entered the main fuselage area where the giant machines dwelt, and the cafeteria, and the gym, and finally up near the nose of the central fuselage, his office. It was the Visionary's the last time, Captain Michale Hammer had been this way, walking down the non-ceramic halls (because no one had yet invented the spacesam, or 'microgravity and extreme temperature tolerant ceramic metallic composite' that the last half of the Golden Age was built of. An insanely brilliant homeschooling kid, age twelve, had invented it, halfway through the building of the starship.
Michale and a dozen other officers who were to lift on the ship had walked with the kid down this hallway to see the Visionary. And they had strived to be nice to the kid who after all, might have helped save their lives by providing better protection from meteorite strikes in the ventral fin storage holds not yet built. But, gratitude and good manners could not disguise the fact that all of the officers of the Torchthrower Project had tried, tried desperately, to be That Kid. The one uber-genius who would not have to ever wait in line for decades to do something cool. It was hard not to hate him.
A hologram of the Visionary and his famed rocking chair flicked on when Michale came into the dissassembled office. Once, it had been splendid dark woods from six continents, and a table around which all the officers could talk, and portholes through which one could see space (for it was important to See Space, and not just a very good LCD screen.) Now it was a desk broken apart, and stacked against a wall, and a giant table in seven parts also stacked against a wall. Both were tied down for safety.
"Congratulations, Michale. You're the first of the Captain's to be woken so you will be an example to the others that follow. I hope you can live up to the faith placed in you by Earth, by your family when they cried and tried to joke as they said goodbye..."
Michale's throat tightened in memory. Missy, Cameron, Camellia, and Dove were his older sister and brother respectively, and then the last two younger sisters with his parents, and all of them trying so hard not to cry as the tall man with the black jacket, and gold braid, and white cap shook hands, and then fell into their arms for the last time. His parents stood back, knowing he needed this moment, and then joined in at the end, encircling everyone as they did, at weddings, and house buying, and Christmas.
By now, they might be still alive. What with longevity experiments, it was possible. Granted the odds were against it, but Michale had already determined to ignore the odds in this one matter. But even if they were alive, they were a very long way aways.
"Michale, we've only woken one company, and we can waken more if you decide its needed, but this looks fairly straightforward according to the analytical engines."
Michale knew the Visionary had said several thousand words to the computers, or as people called them today, analytical engines, and the machine was putting them together to give the message it wanted to give. But still, the eyes were no lie. The Visionary was a man with a holy dream, a desire to extend civilization, to break the hold of the Dark Ages when reason and faith were lost. And in talking to him, you found yourself catching the old man's fire.
"Yes, sir." Michale said saluting physically the hologram, but in reality, the memory of the old man who lay still in cryosleep somewhere in the ship, the Golden Age, despite the risks his age put upon the procedure.
Michale began to access the data files, and found as he expected that the people at home had continued to send information packets every year, on New Year's Day, to be downloaded into the local database. He saw technologies which made his memories of high tech seem quaint.
A metallic fist slammed into his cheekbone, and hurled him the length of the room to slap against the bulkhead. Sliding down, he saw a metal beastie, four legged, with a tube tongue with a fist attached to it. It was standing in the doorway, low, and heavy.
"What's going on, AE?" He snapped.
"Unable to say, Captain." The voice of the Golden Age replied.
The tongue fist lunged at him so fast that it took all his effort to throw himself to the left along the wall. It returned almost as quick.
The tongue came at him again, and he rolled the other way, and came to his dropped combat staff. The tongue fist hit him in the side, and slammed him into the tied up table parts on the wall with a great clatter.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the tongue move again, and he slumped, and then kicked his legs up, bringing them together. If he was wrong, he was going to break a thigh, or perhaps his back. The fist passed over him, ruffling his hair in its wind, and his legs locked on the tube before it could retreat.
So it yanked him across the room even as he raised the combat staff like a lance. Its own speed drove the combat staff into its guts, and sparks and smoke came out in profusion.
"You have passed your first surprise random combat drill, Captain. Congratulations." The AE said warmly, or with a passable imitation of warmth.
Panting for breath, Michale rose to his feet.
"You mean, this ship is going to be trying to kill me as I'm getting ready to go to war?"
"Likelihood of death was only .8% Captain. Far safer than the cryobaths." The AE protested.
"I'm going to assume serious injury was somewhat greater in probability." Michale said with such dryness that even the AE could figure out that silence was a virtue at this moment.
"That was not in the protocols."
"Not at your time, Captain, but one and half centuries later, the first of the New Protocols was added."
"New...?!? I really do not like the sound of that." Captain Michale Hammer said softly to himself. At some point, all the experts had agreed, the people back home would drop from the great heights of morality they had been guided too, and if those less than stellar individuals had then decided to reprogram the Golden Age at a distance, well, who knew what mischief they might have made?
Michale could feel a headache coming on.
excellent stuff!
Michale, despite his protesting body, snapped the desk together. The tolerances were right at the 'snap point'. Any looser, and the desk would wobble. Any tighter, and it would require a machine press to push the parts together. As it was, he could dance on it, and it would not move, or he could dissassemble and reassemble it in five minutes. Ultra-precision cut parts were a joy to build with, and like many good things, it had started with childhood toys, specifically LEGO blocks. No tools, no nails, no screws, or pegs, just follow the hidden arrows indented on the underside of any Snap Part, and you could build a desk in five minutes, or a bachelor's pad house in a day.
Personal fabbers, a computer connected to a variety of cutting and polymer adding part formers, had changed the world. They had destroyed the construction industry, and then far more importantly done the financial 'wizards' in as well. There was no way to cheat someone who could build everything he needed with a few free downloads for 'blueprints' off the Internet, and cheap stock which was also sold on the Net as a commodity.
Eventually, the big boys recovered, or new big boys did, more accurately. But they were the sort who intended to provide value for money. They made stuff so good that you wanted their products despite the additional cost. And any time the big boys strayed, the prosumers just went back to handcrafting with their personal fabs. It gave the prosumers a way to register a vote of no confidence in their business leaders that the older consumer did not have. In fact, Thomas Jefferson, with his respect for yeoman farmers would have understood it better than the passive Consumer did until he was transformed into a Prosumer.
Finished, Michale retrieved the folding chair from a hidden closet, and sat down at the desk to start studying the files...
Insert the first 'Fifteen Minutes Later' here...
Edited.
Michale hissed. He was already being pulled in so many ways. Not yet had he found time to visit Doctor Tanya Morrow in the medbay, or Liam Wainwright. And just what was he supposed to do about a sergeant who struck a superior officer without provocation?
He needed his troops out of their cryobaths, and getting conditioned. But he could not do that until he found out what the problem was with their brains.
A bit of creep went down his neck. What if the process was mostly unfixable, especially out here, so far from Earth and its resource base? What if he were doomed to spend the rest of his life with unthinking monsters who would chomp at his face at the slightest chance.
Zombies in Space. Michale chuckled, and felt better for it.
And then there were the New Protocols which might not be bad, and the combat tests. Not to mention, he was still sore from the last two fights he had been in.
(Was he supposed to take on another guy by now?)
Thinking it over, he realized he could do nothing but check in on Tanya. He did. It requiired his command override, but the ship reluctantly gave him 'private medical information' as it sniffily described it. Of course, after the initial barrier, it flooded him with data, including a number of personal issues, he would rather not know about, or were utterly irrelevant to the key questions of 'Is she going to be all right?' and 'How soon can she be back in service because I really need my doctor to figure this garbage out!'.
Instead he was treated to an analysis of an old broken ankle from her teenage years, and concern for an incipient case of carpal tunnel syndrome in her left arm. Snarling at the computer did no good, but when it started in on its analysis of her preferences in partners he used his command override again to get it to shut up.
Something was seriously awry in the AE. Its logic tables were way out of whack to produce such initial resistance, and then oddly personal deluge of data. His questions he thought were appropriate, and not even worthy of an override. But the way the AE had gone into specific detail about her mental patterns with some words that seemed to mean something different than he thought they meant worried him a lot.
One of his first men to get usable if he could would be a computer tech. He really needed to find out what subsequent centuries of downloads had done to his beloved ship.
Chewing his thumbnail, Michale muttered to himself.
"What to do?" But decisiveness was in his nature too. "I need to find out what the threat is, what my threat group has been woken up to deal with."
Sounds swirled up around him followed by lights, and he tried to leap to his feet to dive out of the oncoming attack. But sonic neural interference had overridden his nervous system, and so he moved no where. Unsure what else to do, he looked about and...
The swirl slipped into a pattern he knew.
Post-hypnotic commands dropped him into a trance, and he relaxed finally knowing what was going on. Those cursed New Protocols evidently took his thoughts to himself, even muttered, as action commands. Old Protocol, you had to say 'Computer run.' at the head of each command line.
Soldier proof, that was.
The mixture of trance and hologram produced by VingeCorp, a major electro-holographical designer back in the Day that had been headquartered in India, used human eyes and ears to put the mind into the scene without doing something profoundly scary like setting up a computer jack into the brain. Such had been tried several times, but each time, they had lasted less than a weak before hackers were able to download viruses direct into human brains. Hologram Trance systems were far safer, and almost as quick because the brain had been obviously designed to accept information in this fashion. Downloads were just unnatural to the human mind, and even in the best of situations produced a certain number of solipsistics and amnesiatics.
And with that he stood....
No, she stood on a dusty road outside her home town of Prokina...
Not Prokina...we'll start with the Servants of Cthulu country first....
Chance breathed deeply of the morning mist as he clambered down the tufted hill side. His men were in loose formation around him, stretching out to the right where the ridge they were descending met the mountain split by the road five hundred yards away. A hundred yards to his left, the other outwalkers kept pace.
Whirling his hand above his head, his men began the maneuver he called 'closing the door'. The furthest man to his right was the hinge, and he stopped moving a few seconds later as he caught his leader's signal. Others walked, faster and faster as they came out toward Chance, and the outwalkers beyond him had to genuinely hop to keep the line straight at 'the door closed'.
This maneuver kept the crowd control protocols in the overwatching satellites quiescent, while still getting everyone to the top of the cliff wall at the same time. He had told no one in his ultra-macho group, but it was his training as a band member in the Academy for Young Men that had been the most use in the sprawling, many-sided civil war.
It gave him some basis of tactics when most everyone else was content to bunch up in a tight group and blast away at the enemy. Of course, there were the actual Warlords who had men with real military training, but Chance was seventeen, and older than most of his 'army'. His training had consisted of two weeks of target practise and camping every summer along with enough military protocol that he knew how to salute, and sign pay chits.
Every male in Yoslan had taken such training.
Reaching the top of the cliff wall, Chance looked down into the chasm cut by industrial lasers. Its sides were still polished enough that they could blind you if the sun reflected at the wrong time. But this early in the morning, the canyon was still in shadow with its bottom three hundred feet below.
Along this road into the mountains would be coming a bus. Its owner was foolishly depending on speed and stealth instead of brute power. He thought that he could snake a cargo of Ross Valley girls out of the Valley and into Morekan Valley on the other side of the Sundra Divide. Any girl was a treasure, but young, pretty, and exotic ones were a vast wealth. If he could take the bride price, and then rush to the other side of the Divide and sell them again, and this time with the bounty of their genes being different than the Morekanners, why he would be very wealthy. Enough money to buy himself a place outside of the Ten Valleys, and join the Expatriates in lands where girls were as common as boys.
The problem was that he had stopped for one night in Sanjo, a small village from which Chance had come. No doubt, he thought himself slick, a big city man. The locals would never see him coming. Unfortunately for him, Chance had been happy to pay his informant, a eunuch, the asking prince of two laser rifles, and a handful of gold dust for the information.
Chance got his 'army' set up. He pointed out good rocks as cover, and made the few who wanted to use the small thorny bushes as a hide to stop.
"I do this all the time when I hunt." Morc said complaining of having to get up and move. Chance clouted him behind the ear.
"Deer don't shoot back, you idiot. I know you're a good shot, but I'd like you to take more than two shots before they laze you down. Idiot." He said the last with a bit of affection.
The deerhunter nodded and scooted back to a less hidden, but more protected rock that jutted up from the sloping hill that ran down until it would reach the vertical slit down to the canyon floor.
Then they waited, and Chance entertained himself with wondering what the girl he was about to capture would look like. Oh, he knew that he could not keep her. If he and his band of a hundred captured thirty girls, he would have to sell at least twenty-five of them. Otherwise, a Warlord would come down and just take them from him despite the effort required to track his band through the green mountainsides of the Sundra Divide.
But, Chance could count on both hands, the numbers of times when he had actually talked to a girl. And he still remembered the time when his third cousin, Shari, had kissed him. He had been fourteen. And he never saw her again. She married, some years later, a much older man, he heard.
It was the way of things.
A low shout brought his mind back to business. The truck was coming down the road, powered by an electric engine which got recharged every few hours by a laser pulse from orbit. The Laser Energy System was controlled by foreigners who had no interest in getting involved in the travail and madness of the Ten Valleys. Although he had heard that some hotshot Expatriates were trying to buy into the energy corporation.
And then a glinting light hurt his eyes. He looked up across the chasm, and saw a line of irregularly shaped humps of small mirrors rise into view. Uncertain what he was seeing, but not liking it, Chance waited.
The line was straightened out, and it became two long lines. And then the muzzles of laser rifles presented themselves out of each hump, and Chance understood. The lines were not some weird form of robot, but men with suits draped over them.
He vaguely recalled something from science class, something that set bells ringing in the back of his head, but one of his undisciplined troop opened fire. And he joined in with a war whoop that got the rest going.
Each boy in his army had a laser rifle, or if not that, a laser pistol. Energy was cheap, and micro-capacitors could hold enough to power a single shot. A rifle, with its boxy backside, tucked up under the shoulder, could hold up to fifty micro-capactitors, although Chance's had one of the better ones, and he had only thirty-two mc's. Laser pistols went for five and ten mc's. A 'fiver' was considered a street punks gun, not worthy of a serious warrior.
Still a dozen of his troop had them.
They blazed away as rapidly as they could at the enemy, grateful that he had not hidden, not spread out, was shoulder to shoulder so that even with most of them being poor shots, they could not miss.
Dazzling light radiated in a dome from the double line of soldiers. And Chance closed his eyes, and kept firing. Red and black spots appeared in front of his vision, and he hoped that not too much of the eyeburn salve would be needed tonight to save anyone flash blinded.
It looked like these mirrors made that far worse of a problem than ordinarily. Another bell rang in the back of his mind, and still Chance ignored it. But then he noted that he was drenched in sweat, and he could feel the loolly plant drooping in his mouth.
The loolly is nice and stiff at cool temperatures, but in any sort of warm day, it collapses back to hide under its sturdier brethren from the white light in the sky. And so, Chance had learned to use it from another guerilla as an indicator of hot the lasers were.
"Cease fire." He bawled out over the k-rack and ba-booom of laser fire. A few shots kept on, but most stopped. This was not their first rodeo.
He looked at the line, and felt utter dismay. Two of the enemy were down. They looked as if they had melted together. Everyone else was standing, a heat mirage effect rising from them, making the air dance, but still standing. The plain fact was that with that much laser fire, he could have destroyed a force three times as large. They should be running, what few were left alive.
And then they began opening fire.
"Choose your shots. Fire at will."
The enemy commander's voice came over the chasm, and bolts of light flicked out. Laser energy shoved air aside, and then the air collapsed back into the vacuum behind the laser blast. Just like a lightning bolt and a thundercrack it was, except lasers are photons and lightning is a charged particle, an electron.
His troops began exploding into steam as lasers dumped heat energy into their bodies, and the water flash boiled and then evaporated in the space of half a second. It left tattered rags with an unwashable goop on them behind, and a smell in the air of good barbecue.
There was a reason most of the experienced soldiers in this civil war were vegetarians, or stuck to fish and cold meats and eggs. A frying hamburger smelled like a battlefield to the veteran.
Some fired back, and their bolts went askew. They hit the mirrors, and shivered into pieces flying all over creation, and leaving the protected soldier still standing. More of his men died, and Chance roused himself from horrified apathy to scream.
"Run. Retreat. Now. Rally point."
His men fled, the taste of defeat bitter, but overridden by terror. Chance realized that the War to Find a Wife had become a much more problematic thing.
======
Michale shook his head, and did the ritual gesture which shut down the holo, and released him from the trance. The Ten Valleys War was serious. He had no idea how to stop what looked like thousands of young men eager to get a girl. Perhaps he needed more troops.
But for now, he needed to know how their society got into this mess. The most obvious problem was some sort of sex-linked disease which slew girls disproportionately.
Michale settled back into trance, and requested the information. It had been FTL commed, and stored for a couple decades for this moment...
........At this point, Michale gets aborted several times, exposed to the environment, dumped in a trash bin where she has to fight off rats....He discovers the truth, the Ten Valleys aborted their baby girls.
Blast--crash ate my extensive response. I'll have to try to do it more concisely.
You are obviously modeling China, but it strikes me that it won't work absent two factors: a compelling social reason to want boys and a powerful authority limiting family size.
If it's just a matter of shortages, those who want boys and have girls will keep having them, based on Tragedy of the Commons factors; those who have boys will stop having children. You'll have an overabundance of girls.
If you have the authority that can prevent large families, it can also prevent the wars.
The disparity is self-correcting--within a decade it will be so apparent that there is a shortage of girls that female children will become highly valued. A decade-long shortage of girls is going to have a significant impact on availability for a long time, but it's not going to create the kind of disparity you're suggesting. You'll have some younger men marrying older women and some waiting until their late twenties to marry teens, and you'll wind up with maybe a 2:1 ratio which is uncomfortable but temporary.
You'd do better with another cause--a foreign power taking the daughters, or a polygamous culture which has the young girls becoming parts of harems of older men and the young men left without brides.
I, at least, don't see how you get the cultural outcome you want.
--M. J. Young
I do that as well. Write a long reply, its gets eaten, and I just try to get it done.
Correct on 1. And in China, you have both. The boys are supposed to take care of the parents, not the daughter. Plus, having a boy is more honorable or something. Those are the social reasons. The One Child Policy is the family limit.
The Ten Valleys will have a strong social force of gov't, but then it disintegrates. We're into serious disintegration mode. This has another effect....most TV young men think of their fathers as idiots for getting them into this situation. So not only do we have young men rampaging, but young men not listening to their elders and rampaging.
I see the Ten Valleys situation as a very likely outcome to the current state of affairs in China.
What you're going to have is A. Armies attacking other nations for loot, power, and girls. B)Social disintegration which may be controlled by A to some degree. C. The swingiest, wildest courtesan and homosexual city in the world. It'll make Amsterdam and San Francisco look tame. D)Elite Expatriates, the sort of guys who are just better than almost everyone else. They have multiple 2@ attributes, and a lot of drive and nerve. Ruthless, charming, robber barons and Wall Street stockbrokers and young billionaires. E)Life just really, really stinks. You'd have to encourage these guys to get them to the point where they decided to burn the city down. Video games all the time, hanging with the buds, trying to find food, indulging in whacked out conspiracy theories. F) A music scene devoted to Black Metal and anarchy. Burn, baby, burn. G)Occasional riots put down with extreme force....aka machine guns, and on the worst occasions flamethrowers by hard pressed military officials backed up by terrified civil servants.
That said, my theories tend to be darker than reality turns out to be so we'll see.
Is that your analysis of Ten Valleys or of China?
I agree that the Chinese situation is bad and promising to get worse; it's also obvious that absent the government's population policy these families would simply have more children. (Is it my imagination, or is it the case that whenever an American family adopts a Chinese child from overseas, it's always a girl?)
I also see how the Chinese government is able to enforce the policy; but it can only be done through strength. Absent that, the policy would crumble. With it, though, you're not going to have much in the way of rebel armies--they government will crush them, and solve their gender disparity by executing any males who complain.
So I'm curious how you get the Ten Valleys situation. Without the government, the small family policy collapses and girls become favored children; with the government, the policy is maintained but the rebel armies are nipped in the bud.
--M. J. Young
Of course, its a self-correcting situation, but that takes time. And a fragile gov't doesn't have that. Obama went from the Messiah to a probably One Term President in two years, and he had far less problems and greater strength than the TV/China will have (its an analysis of both).
Michale ran his right hand through his hair while his left gripped the Snap Tight desk. He had to get a grip on things somehow, start moving them his way. But the problem looked worse than the Analytical Engine had thought it to be. Why?
"AE?" He said dangerously calm.
"Yes, Captain?" The voice and mind, if not heart of the Golden Age, the Torchthrower Project ramship cum long storage space station replied.
"Why is this not graded a full ship mission, instead of just sending in twenty-five troopers and little old me?"
"Why should it be?" The too cutesy reply irritated Michale, but he recognized it as a variant on how it used to reply when it sought more data for an analysis.
"General societal breakdown, multiple avenuses of attack and defense, multi-sided civil war. The Ten Valleys Kingdom is going to be lucky to bottom out in a Dark Ages feudalism. They are more likely to fall all the way down to an Outer Edge Sumerian Frontier aka 'Caveman' society."
"Its your job to stop that." The AE replied, reminding him of his duty. Michale snarled, and leapt to his feet, and paced down one side of the commander's office.
"Yes, AE. It is. The issue I'm having is why you're sending in a penny packet..." Michale had no idea what penny packet meant originally. But the idea had stayed tagged with the words.
"It is not significant problem to the degree that it requires full ship resources." The AE replied, and such was its bland assurance that Michale double-taked, and looked inside, and asked himself if it was right. Was it merely because he was afraid, after all, this was his first serious challenge as an officer of the Torchthrowers?
But he remembered Bors' dead body, his certainty that the Hanglider Delivery Company would work, and it would have, it would have. But for unforseen circumstances that everyone admitted he could not have guessed would happen. And here, he could see great dangers rising, he could see this was not going to work unless everything went exactly according to plan and better.
"I disagree."
"Is that your final answer?" The AE replied with an undefinable menace. It had the power to relieve him from duty, to order him to go back to cryosleep. Oh, he could challenge it, but that challenge would require he wake the Visionary who might not survive the experience, or lay in a report that would be read by the next officer to wake perhaps hundreds of years from now when the Ten Valley's problem was in the distant past. In such a circumstance, the word of the watching AE who had been there, seen it, would take on great power to the judging officer.
Michale had not realized in what a weak spot he put himself.
But he could not betray his men.
"Yes."
"I can, release you an extra battalion under your command, Captain Hammer." Michale thought the AE's voice was extra waspish, but relieved, he agreed. It would be tight, but with twice the troop, he should be able to do something. After all, the locals were still using laser rifles and had just figured out primitive mirror cloth.
"Acceptable, AE."
"Very good, Captain. Follow the green line." A flashing line at his feet led him out of the room, and up to Pod Two. As he reached to open it, he wished heartily that he had insisted on troopers from his era.
"Can I have my own time...?"
"Your cryomarines are available in your Pod One. But it seems clear that some form of temporary insanity afflicts them. It seems best to go with more modern techniques for cryofreezing which may alleviate the problem." The AE replied, and Michale grimaced to himself. It was a good point. So far everyone who had woken in the Marines, except for him had been berserk. He wondered what separated him and the doctor and nurse from the other two who had been woken.
Sighing, he opened the door to Pod Two, and walked over to the first cryobath. Once there, he hit the red 'wake' button, and then stepped back. If this fellow woke nuts, maybe Michale would have a case for the AE giving him marines more to his time. But if he woke nuts, Michale hefted his power club, first Michale had to deal with him in a non-fatal way while the berserk marine would be under no such limitation.
Michale sighed. The glamorous life of a Marine officer in the Torchthrowers was not turning out like he had expected.
Bump.
I think I need to simplify this, make it more direct. A leads to B instead of A goes to D, and then C, and back to B.
Bump.