Short Fiction Car Talk, Joshua Marinacci In The Blood, Eric Lewis Intellectual Capital, Cathy Smith Life without Possibility, David Tallerman Siberia, Darragh Savage Special Feature Miami Cop, Xennon UnCanny Valley, Asher's ArtCrime Serial Works Easter Egg, Gustavo Bondoni
November 2019 & December 2019 Write Ahead The Future Looms
Volume 6
A cyberpunk magazine from Britain and Zurich
Life Without Possibility, David Tallerman
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table of contents
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Easter Egg, Gustavo Bondoni
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The internet of things crosses paths with an A.I. burdened by manners. Yet what will come of it all when an emergency breeds cracks in a fragile etiquette.
Cover image: The Gate of Spring Back image: Venus by: Tais Teng
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The Spyder is flushed out, now all that remains are the cobwebs. Once he's done picking through the lair, will there be a payday to be made? Or just an Easter Egg to crack?
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Section Header
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editor@writeaheadthefuturelooms.com
Siberia, Darragh Savage
@AheadLooms
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In The Blood, Eric Lewis
Founded in 2189CE, by a small group of Bunker Fugues, former researchers and Prols, this organisation's goal is to leave a record of the last stages of Homo Sapiens.
Article Title
When society ceases to shed individuals like leaves in the fall, do the sinners cast from the structure and locked below deserve to last? Is there a right to a chance?
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MIAMI COP, Xennon
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In marrow, thew and sinew we have carved out our past. Our body a testament to the path we have chosen. What else may we find 'In The Blood', when we dig at it?
UnCanny Valley, Asher's Artcrime
www.writeaheadthefuturelooms.com
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Car Talk, Joshua Marinacci
Intellectual Capital, Cathy Smith
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It's cold down here, beneath the mechanised jackboot, but at least it isn't Siberia, yet... Fingers crossed.
Clarity, certainty of purpose, can a trinket provide such things? Or is there an element beyond sense and sensation. Something in the dark, yet to be defined watching each thought with eagerness.
A new epic concept album with heavy cop-show and 80s synth-wave vibes. Check out the story behind the sounds!
Contact
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In The Blood
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Eric Lewis
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Article Headline
ORK IS LIFE. The words hung over the entrance to the slave mine in iron and gold filigree, and the overseers made sure we saw it once before they strapped excavators to our arms and neurowhipped us down into the darkness. You've probably never heard of chauroscods, but you can bet your hide you've benefited from Denovia's once and only native life-form. Who knows how many billions of years ago the little buggers evolved immunity to the planet's harsh sun, but their fossilized shells are made into the best starship radiation shielding money can buy. Well, second-best. There's a competitor on Kantrevius, but they don't allow slavery there. You can guess which product is cheaper. We had this thorium reactor down there, must've been a hundred years old. Light, air, power, what passed for food, all provided by that damn thing. Got to the point where it'd automatically power down from overheating a couple hours each shift. Ordering a new one meant months of delay, months of lost profit. Instead, the overseers just disabled the auto shutdown. “That's insane!” said K992—Kay—as we sat slurping the protein-nutrient slop they fed us. “If that thing goes supercrit we—” “They won't let that happen,” I replied, with more certainty than I felt. “They might be evil greedy bastards but they're not suicidal. And there's a safety margin built in, I saw it on maintenance duty last week. Anyway, nothing we can do about it.” “I can think of something,” said a gruff voice on the bench behind me. Zee. Z840 had defied the odds and survived ten years in the mines, an aged elder. That longevity must've given him a false sense of immunity from the consequences of dumb ideas. I glanced nervously at the listener-speaker on the wall. “Come on, not another harebrained escape plan.” “More’n that, Teex.” My barcode read Tx3227—like everyone else I'd forgotten my given name. Side-effect of the neurowhips. “I was thinking—” “Bad habit for a slave to fall into,” remarked Kay. “No, really! Listen, if we can knock out that reactor they won't be able to charge their neurowhips, then we rush 'em all at once—” “They got backups juiced up and ready,” I snarled half under my breath, “and good old-fashioned guns besides. Stop it, you'll just get us punished again—aargh!” Electric agony crackled out of my compliance implant, and those of every slave in the mess. Overseers rushed in and began beating Zee while we waited helpless for the shocks to wear off. “Enough o' that,” announced a voice over the listener-speaker. “Rest of you, get on down to Level 82! Rich new vein found yesterday. Make quota and maybe I'll forget what I just heard.” We went while the overseers dragged Zee away. We spent a week working Level 82. A rich vein indeed, a great fortune! For someone, anyway. Chauroscod shell shatters into this kind of nanoparticle dust when you mine it, gets into all the equipment, including us—clothes, hair, skin, even blood. It'd certainly give us cancer if any lived long enough in the mines to get it. None did. The overseers had protective suits and masks, but we weren't worth the trouble. I was digging through a fresh rock face when O4851—Oaf, we called him—staggered past, coughing up so much dust you could've mined his lungs for a profit. I tried to help him to the infirmary, but I only got a few steps when an overseer saw that I'd stopped working. The lash of a neurowhip overrode the will of my muscles and I was forced to lie there and watch Oaf try to crawl the rest of the way on his own. At the end of shift we had to step over his body to get past. After that we were rotated back to reactor maintenance. I spent hours cleaning dust from every nook and cranny of that machine. With the auto shutdown disabled the overload gauge—an old-fashioned needle, less to go wrong I supposed—crept further and further out of the safe green region and into uncomfortable but not quite alarming yellow territory. When I raised the fact with the overseers, they said they'd shut it down again if it ever hit red, then kneed me in the gut to put the point to rest. That offshift—no nights in the mines, mind you—we lay exhausted on our communal sleep racks. Zee's fresh bruises made his skin a patchwork of purple among the gray dust. He'd said little most of that week. Then, out of the dark, quietly: “I wish it would.” “Wish what would what?” muttered Kay. “I wish the reactor would go supercrit. Wish it would melt this entire hellhole into glass!” “And kill us all. Good wish.” “I don't care,” Zee said, almost frantic. “We're dead already! How much longer you think we've got? I've got? I ain't goin' out like Oaf. Long's I take them bastards with me—” “Stop it,” I growled again, wishing I had the strength to get up and wallop him myself. “You'll just get beaten again. And get us zapped.” I wondered whether I was angry at Zee for his defiance, or at myself for my lack of it. More and more we had to clean and lubricate the reactor's accessible parts to make up for the neglect within. Zee began taking his sweet time, lingering next to it, and I wondered whether he might try to make good on his wish, might actually sabotage it and take us all out. But the vital bits were sealed inside, nothing we could get at. Zee fixated on that gauge, though, spent half his time cleaning it, watching the needle inch ever so slowly redward. One shift he said, “I'll finish up here Teex, you go grab some slop.” “You sure?” “Yeah. I know all the parts to scrub with eyes closed by now. Go on.” I went and didn't complain—any time off my feet was welcome. For the next few shifts it was like that, but I didn't say anything. I suppose I should’ve felt a twinge of suspicion in the back of my head, but the whips had dulled that part of me. Or maybe some part of me actually wanted him to cause his meltdown. Offshift Zee lay on his rack staring at his fingers, saturated with dust like all of ours. Like our whole bodies. Except the overseers, of course. We were back down on Level 82 when it happened. The screams of excavators gnawing into rock to get at its shell fossils were suddenly overcome by alarms. “Keep working!” ordered the overseers as they ran every which way, scrambling to find out what was going on. A sickly green glow erupted from somewhere, and I dropped my equipment to shield my eyes. It only lasted a second. Shrieks came from the lift shaft above. “What the—?” someone said. The lights went out and everyone, slaves and overseers both, began shouting. When the backup batteries kicked the emergencies on again I saw Zee standing over an overseer with a face bashed into meat, Zee's excavator dripping red. “Zee! What, what did you do—?” “You! You son of a...” Another overseer charged Zee, neurowhip held aloft and sparking. But before any blow could land, the overseer halted, eyes wide. “Oh...” he moaned, then collapsed to the ground writhing. In the heat and dim emergency lights we eventually discovered that in fact all the overseers had been incapacitated. Zee marched to the lift and we followed him. The batteries had enough juice to bring us up to ground level where more overseers greeted us. All dead. “But how?” asked Kay. “How'd this happen?” “The reactor,” I said, nodding at Zee. “You sabotaged it after all.” “Not the reactor,” he said, stepping over a corpse. “Just the overload gauge. Used my excavator to open the cover, then fixed the needle so it never said supercrit, even though it was. They pulled the plug before it exploded, but not before radiation leaked out.” “Sneaky bastard,” said Kay. “But...why weren't we fried, too?” I knew. “The dust. That's it, isn't it? It's on all of us, in us. The chauroscod dust shielded us! But how’d you know it would work? How could you be certain?” Zee shrugged. We walked right out of the mine. Not all of us—some were too close to the reactor when it went and caught lethal radiation, even with the dust. But most walked out. We stole an overseer ship to escape Denovia and make whatever lives were left to us. I stole that sign. WORK IS LIFE. I took it with me, cut it right off with a laser saw. Souvenir of an ironic truth, I thought. When news of our escape got out the price of chauroscod shielding shot sky-high, but I didn't care. I'd already paid for mine. It was in the blood.
oston. A narrow street. Tall buildings with dark windows that seem to lean inwards. Jackson’s car, off-white and shaped like a throat lozenge, pulled over next to an empty dumpster, a dark shape with a strobing blue light descending out of the sky towards him. -Lowering your window for scanning. It was the same voice Mitsubishi had used for all the harri units, a lazarus of a fossil-age movie hard man, inflected with bass tones you felt in your gut. Command Authority. Jackson’s car emitted a brief chirp of surrender as the override kicked in. The displays flashed black, then switched to a scrolling disclaimer of legal responsibility for damages that might occur to his person or property, the last line instructing him to obey all instructions from relevant authorities. The window slid down into the door frame. Outside the night was hot and dark, a lazy breeze carrying in the smell of rot from the Atlantic, moon hidden by thick clouds not yet quite breaking into rain. An old mechanical watch on Jackson’s left wrist, scuffed glass face, cracked brown leather strap. 11:57 -Eyes on the unit. He looked up. The cop’s body was a fat black bulb the size of a small child. Four disks housed the rotors on top, guns and stubby cameras telescoped from its belly like retractable genitals. Discrete white letters stenciled down one side, too small to make out unless you’d had your eyes done, read: Boston PD, 53-223a. -For the safety of the officer, all recording equipment and outgoing signals have been disabled. The cop came down slow, eerily stable in that gyroscopic way. Part of its scanner package snaked out with a little click, and there was a sheet of light moving across Jackson’s face, blinding for a moment so he closed his eyes and looked down again. -FACE THE UNIT, FUCKER. Jackson complied. The cop was hovering about two meters above the road, weapon trained on the center of Jackson’s forehead. Behind it the city fell away towards the flood-lands and was almost entirely dark, only the dim glow in the windows of a few abandoned hotels which marked squats far above their drowned lobbies, and further out, flashing red in warning, the string of beacons on the ragged skeleton of the abandoned seawall. The scanner’s white sheet of light returned, and Jackson held his face still and his eyes wide open. -Criminogenic features present. Authorizing identity check. The cop lifted back up a couple of meters, paused for a moment, then up a few more. Signals traveled poorly here. Twenty years ago there would have been a pair of eyes behind the camera and ten years ago there might have been one man watching a wall of feeds, but now you were alone with the algorithm. 11:58 Before Jackson had called for the car that morning, he’d been watching Border Rush on Tv.Gov. It had been the top federal show for years, but ratings were falling off. The heat belt was still suffering, but so was America, and people knew that the crossing was hardly worth the risk anymore. Still, there were always some desperate enough. The episode had featured one of the new Boeing Sentinels, hunting the southern border at night from behind the clouds, detonations flashing white on the nocturnal camera as its missiles found the little red boxes which highlight the targets for the people at home. When the Sentinel fragged a kid and they failed to cut away in time, a pretty blonde press officer popped up and reminded the audience that there were signs clearly demarcating the area as a free fire zone, that defense of borders was an inalienable sovereign right, and that the security of the United States would not be undermined by the sort of fanatics who were willing to sacrifice their own children to make a political point. -Commercial records show that your presence in this location may be a deviation from your routine. Probable cause effectively established. DO NOT FUCKING MOVE. The cop started to descend again. 11:59 Just above the ground, legs extruded from its body, four of them, long and thin so it looked like a spider someone had bored of torturing halfway. Rotor housings folded backwards, legs clicked as they locked, and its weapons module slumped, offline for a certain short interval. On the ground next to where it landed was a spray-painted mark, the kind of thing workers might leave to indicate a water or gas line. 11:59 The harri had been state of the art once, but now these models were mostly surplus, sold on to local police departments for traffic duty and crowd control; they had known weaknesses, ways in which their simple heuristics could be exploited. 12:00 Jackson ducked behind the door as the pavement underneath the drone folded upwards like cracking ice, right at the spot Tran had marked with the red paint. Jackson had taken care to shape the charge so that the explosion would be directed straight upwards, at just the distance from his vehicle that they had known, because it was predictable, that the harri would land. The key was to hit it in the moment it couldn’t return fire, and he knew it had worked because he wasn’t dead. 12:01 Time to go. He swung himself out the window of the frozen car into the acrid air. His eyes watered and he coughed. A light in a window overhead, on then off again, brief impression of a figure looking down. Not your business. He examined the cop. The explosion had mangled its weapons pods and blown off three of its four legs completely, but it was still partially functional. Jackson reached into the pocket of his jacket, removed a small thermal charge, pulled the pin to start the mechanical timer. -YOU ARE NOT COMPLIANT. Escalation authorized. The cop’s remaining half-leg speared blindly, and dark mechanical fluids wept onto the broken ground beneath its body. Not all the people who made it out of the heat belt ended up as spare parts or correctional fodder. Somewhere—Jackson had guessed Iceland—was a woman who had, judging by the fee she offered, become very rich in the years since she escaped. -WHY ARE YOU RESISTING? Escalation authorized. The algorithm which animated Officer 53-223a—only the most recent of its designations—had a particular history. If you were able to access to its records, which was very difficult, because they were classified as trade secrets and banned from dissemination, you would notice that it had record of making what were referred to in internal reports as regrettable errors of judgment, common to the line but particularly notable in this case. One of these errors had resulted, it was explained to Jackson, in the incineration of a number of people on a shrimp boat in the waters just off the coast of California, family of the woman who hired Jackson (they never really spoke of course, she or her agent only appearing to him as a two-dimensional avatar, a boy with a high piping voice that Jackson vaguely recognized from an old show). Jackson armed the charge and tossed it down next to the cop. Sensing movement the crippled unit tried to turn itself towards him, wires and melted plastic leaking from its belly as it shifted ineffectually. -WAIT UNTIL WE GET YOU DOWNTOWN. Not looking back, he set off uphill at a jog. The city was almost abandoned here, easy enough to avoid cameras. As Jackson ran he peeled off bits of his face, prosthetic make-up designed to make sure the cop set down to give him a second look. Before walking back into a covered area he schooled his posture and face into calmness to make sure he didn’t trip any motion-analysis algorithms. Jackson fell in behind a group of Canadians business tourists leaving the old city hall, water company execs traveling for discounted sin south of the border. Giant advertisements flashed overhead for no-sleep slots, but the plaza was dead, the bouncers and hookers looking bored and irritable. The water company boys went north and Jackson followed them, close enough so that it looked like they might be together. A red-faced blowhard up front held forth on the advisability of marrying someone from the heat belt. Canadian women, he maintained, were too well-fed to be grateful. The Canadians staggered into a strip club, and Jackson continued the last block to the station alone, but he didn’t see any sign he was being searched for. He tensed as he entered the bright station, but went past the banks of scanners at the ticket gates without incident. As he walked up the long flights of stairs to wait for the train, his knees ached in a way that made him think he must be getting old. From the platform Jackson could see back across the city, and he watched dozens of flashing blue lights streak across the sky, converging on the place he’d destroyed the harri. They swirled around for a moment in the way flocks of birds once had before settling into a regimented search pattern, a net slowly expanding outwards over the city. Too late. A train squealed into the station, crowded with medical workers coming in for the late shift at the hospitals. He stood back to let them off and took a seat by the door. As the train crossed the Charles the storm broke, fat sheets of rain washing down the windows and obscuring the city beyond. Jackson exhaled slowly and let himself think about the future. He had been paid considerably more for his role than he had earned in his entire working life up until that point, including the insult of a severance package he’d received when they dissolved the human branch of the 82nd. It was more than enough for the visas. His wife, Zoe, would already be waiting in Vladivostok with their daughter. They hadn’t really decided what they would do after he got there, maybe homesteading, maybe security work, which was after all the only thing he really knew how to do – but it was like they said in the videos for the immigration package: In Siberia, there is always hope!
Darragh Savage
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Siberia
Credits and thank yous. Designer: David Miller. Director: Rob Witt. Lead Writer: David Stauffer. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum.
Log Entry 5197: The final stages are complete. We had no hope of returning home, the damage to the engine core was irreparable. We had no hope of survival. As a group, we examined all our options. We entertained all ideas for survival. Many of the crew chose to try and survive on a small planet within range of the pods. It is a wholely un-earth like environment and, in my view, barely survivable. Some of us chose to stay with the ship, with the small numbers we had a full decade or more. We developed a plan to use cybernetic alterations to increase our longevity and our odds of survival. Many years and iterations later, we've reached our final form. We have become a new evolutionary stage, no longer human. The perfect blend of organics and technology. In this form, we have the potential to reach immortality. There are no stars that we will not be able to explore. We are limitless. As former commander of this vessel, this is my final entry. --- Final Entry, Commander M. Nole, deep space research vessel Nadir 81
The Institute UnCanny Valley Artcrime of Asher
ReTech Asher's Artcrime is an ongoing series of sculptures and stories. Find them here: https://retech.org
Gayle Grayson Gayle is Jack’s partner within the MCPD and is a loyal friend and coworker. She is also an extremely tough cop despite her small size and has been known to regularly save Jack from various dangerous and sticky situations, as well as being the person he confides in.
Captain Maurice Carson Captain Carson is the driving force behind the MCPD (Miami City Police Department) and Jack’s mentor. Carson is constantly trying to keep Jack in line as his renegade style can often be destructive to the city and it’s inhabitants. The Captain and Jack Lancer have known each other for over 10 years and have a fairly close relationship despite their constant issues within the police force.
MIAMI COP and the whole concept came from my love of sci-fi, cyberpunk and '80s movies. I always wanted to make a concept album someday and when I started producing synthwave music it seemed like the perfect opportunity to turn my vision into reality. In terms of the story, I wanted to write something that would be found in a number of '80s sci-fi/action movies, whilst at the same time trying to relate it to elements of my own life experiences, so the song writing process remained personal to me. XENNON (2019)
Baron Cleeth Baron Cleeth is the main antagonist of our story and the perpetrator in Jack’s most recent case. Cleeth has been working underground and selling weapons to the various gangs and syndicates around Miami. He and his small band of men have become the main source of weapons for gangs in Miami and they continue to expand each day. Baron Cleeth enjoys allowing gang members to ‘test’ his weapons in a sadistic game of cat and mouse, in which he uses innocent citizens as bait for the gang members to hunt with Cleeth’s vast and heavy arsenal.
Jack Lancer Jack is a police officer working for the MCPD and the protagonist of our story. After losing his arm 2 years ago whilst being held captive and tortured by the notorious ‘Scarlet Cobra Syndicate’, Jack had lost his way and turned to alcohol. Whilst drinking to cope with the loss of his arm, he had also lost everything else that he’d once cared for. The most important being his wife; Holly Lancer, who had left Jack after being unable to deal with the aggressive and unstable man he’d become.
Spider Sanchez Sanchez works for the MCPD alongside Jack Lancer, however they have far from what could be called a friendship. Lancer and Sanchez have had an ongoing rivalry lasting 7 years since they both graduated from the same training academy together and were assigned to the same unit. Sanchez’s sneaky style of work often angers Jack, as he has been known to ‘poach’ the easiest or most high profile cases in order to make a name for himself on the force.
Holly Lancer Holly is Jack’s ex-wife and the main female role of our story. After leaving Jack due to relationship issues, Holly moved house and now lives in a small apartment in the city. A part of her still loves Jack but is unable to stay with him due to his alcohol problems and their various personal issues.
Check out MIAMI COP and more at: www.xennonsynthwave.com They rock! - Eds.
Editor's notes
We meet again, dear reader. Here in this place. As always, we offer a tour of works as yet unseen. But don’t be nervous, dear reader – we will be with you every step of the way, offering a guiding hand through the lonely and desolate landscapes of worlds violated by technology; their skies scratched by dulled metals and glass, where people more machine than flesh dwell. Is it not beautiful? Along the way, you may catch a glimpse of your own reflection in the eyes of a metal goddess, or even see yourself looking back as you stop to take in the scenery. Enjoy it, then, dear reader – you may find yourself staying longer than you first anticipated...
Welcome to Volume 6, and our final issue of the year. We stand at the end of another decade, and here at the ‘Looms’ we have a fresh offering laid staunch by blood and contained ‘In The Blood’. As is known by our authors, in a work of art chaos must shimmer through the order, the prize barely hidden yet off-warm in its reassuring colour. Fun, like an ‘Easter Egg’, yet sharp in meaning, like the ancient bone dust woven within a ‘Siberia’ snowstorm. Something heartening for the hands grown cold, outstretched from a ‘Life Without Possibility’. Desperate and nostalgic for the time when a body image had been left to fade down the corridors of a television sky, the tune of each step fixed upon a dead channel growing clearer. To contemplate meaning out of that buzz was to examine in shadow and weigh out an ‘Intellectual Capital’ locked behind. A mirror like a dark scanner made parallax within mirrored shades, an ‘uncanny valley’ above a smirk and summoned from the illusionist’s empty halls. The risk to to become the visual equivalent of never-ending ‘Car Talk’ and shop speak, like a ‘Miami Cop’ muttering endless self affirmations into the unsure shape locked away in his mustache. The risk is to become the echo of a dead world.
Gysin & Hendren
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