Tag Archives: bombs

The Burning City

Posted by zxvasdf on

The Time Traveller sat at the bar and watched the city burn through the plate glass window. The snooty establishment was empty, its occupants fled many days before. He had made a martini—shaken, not stirred—and lit up his favorite cheroot. A hard lifetime’s work was finally done, and he basked in the simple pleasures. The horizon swam with incandescent needles shedding great globules of burning steel in a dreamy haze. Infiltration, notoriety, fame, then betrayal. He held no qualms about what he did. He stared down the horror in their faces as the bombs fell and he walked from the city on a ruined road in his best suit. They came at him from the crumbled buildings and he shot them point-blank, with all the emotion of putting an animal to sleep. He was an agent of chaos, no hard feelings, baby. It had to be done. He stopped to smell the roses, even as they wilted from the hellfire at his back. Now, on his plush seat, he considered his options, fingering his white collar and spangled the red air with blue smoke rings.

Word Catalyst Workshop Prompt 1/2/08

Run and Gun

Posted by zxvasdf on

Neo Reno, once a crusty hunk of rock orbiting a blue star, glittered with decadence.

It was everything Las Vegas of Earth endeavoured towards, but could never become. It was the resort center of corrupt politicians seeking to lay down their lying smiles to rest and of the skewed celebrities who could afford to trash hotel rooms day after day. The place bristled with large men wearing immaculate two piece suits who murmured to themselves, their eyes losing focus as they accessed security networks. The bodyguards numbered from two to four for every personality that docked.

This world would burn. He had made sure of that for over two years. Spending the day as the placid banker, passively and dumbly crunching numbers, he moonlighted as a vigilante, surely, patiently outfitting the small planetoid with a network of explosives. Components of his gun came in the spacetransit mail, unobtrusive miscellanies, which he constructed with painstaking detail and patience; grinning through cigar smoke, he had clicked in the last piece and made the final adjustments to the teleportation mechanism last night. He was itching for action. He was sick of the rich sonsabitches. He would go out with a bang.

His legs blurred as he moved inexorably towards the center of the city, leaping over scorched vehicles, grappling the sides of structures, hurtling the chasms between buildings, his gun pouring burning casings which made his biceps sing with delicious pain. The clatter of his gun and the soft jangle of casings falling hotly to the asphalt was the lullaby with which he put his enemies to sleep. A seasoned veteran of war torn tours, Mack Razer sucked on his cigar and did what he did best, killing. His cannon, the model Infinity Series no. 2, housing a miniature teleportation device that fed ammo from a 100 square kilometer warehouse facility several light years away, provided the illusion of limitless firepower. It was a ballet of bullets, a danse macabre, its rapt audience also unwilling participants.

He had to begin ahead of schedule. A routine infrastructure search, which he normally subverted with faulty paperwork, turned up one of his projects and investigations were pending. He didn’t mind. He missed killing. It would not be apparent to the outside observer, but he was prudent, even thrifty, with his bullet count; each shot served a purpose. He dialed the Infinity into scatter-shot and swarmed with pleasure with the maximum destruction he rained down with every satisfying thud! of a trigger pull. They shot at him. He turned them into pink mist. They tried smiling at him through weasel words. His bullets chipped teeth and painted the walls with bone and gristle. They tried to reason with him, waving great briefcases leaking currency. He burned them with napalm from his very special gun. Then they tried harder to shoot him. He drew a swath of pain and destruction through great many blocks, and the blood ran between the burning cars. His objective loomed ahead, an giant erection that stabbed the horizon.

It now towered above him and he found the time to glance at his chronometer. He had to hurry. His carefully engineered act of terrorism was set to go off in minutes. His hands blurred into his vest and whipped behind his back as he plunged into the hatch. Napalm mines. They would buy him some time. Dull concussions rocked the ship. He programmed coordinates that would bring him to a geosynchronous orbit just outside the blast radius. Just a minute before it was ready to go. Fucking standard warm up procedures! Too bad it wasn’t fitted with interstellar drives. He could have taken it out-system.

He looked at the chronometer again and checked the onboard system. Shit. The exterior cameras showed soldiers with rocket launchers. His escape would be cut off. What the hell, he liked dramatic exits. He set the ship to autopilot and burst out of the ship, unsheathing the ceramic samurai sword he had stolen from the corpse of the Japanese Ambassador—who had no bodyguards and put up a hell of a fight—and jammed it hilt deep into the ship’s hull. He strafed the thin lines of vapor that streaked his way into a chain of distant firecracker light, all the while idly admiring the ruin he had visited upon the city. A dull shudder groaned in his bones, and he laughed as he squeezed a final victorious burst, grabbing the sword.

The rocked evicted New Reno with a slow urgency on a trail of blue plasma and he dangled from its hull spitting warm red-orange fires like a baby comet. His skull grinned through his flesh and his gun melted away into ball lightning. He was still laughing, his vocal cords vibrating with the heat of escape velocity. He needed to lose some weight anyways. He was getting fat from pushing cash.

His body was a cocktail of nanomachines: the skin was capable of withstanding great extremes of temperature and was covered with an organism that protected against immersion or vacuum; the bones were nanoceramics, flexible with rigid strength, and if a juggernaut of a force should splinter bone, it self-repaired; its organs self regulated, and although its default was homeostasis, their processes could be consciously controlled; muscles were nanostructures which allowed for extrahuman strength and performance; the respiratory system consisted of standard absorption from the atmosphere, but if sources of oxygen were cut off, the lungs would manufacture oxygen from the water in the body, or the skin from the environment; food sources were standard as well, with an emphasis on protein consumption, and as was the case with the lungs, the body would use remaining tissues to provide nutrition. He regenerated limbs and organs at a rate that was proportional to the supply of raw materials. In effect, he was almost immortal. If worse came to worse, he would just shrivel up like the ancient Pharaohs, only he would wake up after the end. They could just cut out his brain and throw him into a new body if there wasn’t time for regeneration.

With his remaining eye he watched a white hot bloom erupt from the core of New Reno with tranquil grace, then fade into a dusky pink swirl. He felt like Rembrandt. It was not his masterpiece, but it wasn’t too bad. He was rather proud. He had decided not to go into the ship. He felt cooped up these days. Two years in one place was too long, dammit! Besides, although he had a helluva lot of beans and broccoli for dinner the previous night, he hadn’t accumulated enough intestinal gas to break inertia. He shrugged, stretched out in the vacuum and crossed his arms under his head, content to merely drift. His superiors had his signal, and would be along.

He closed his eyes.

Was It An Inside Job?

Posted by zxvasdf on

I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t think there were planes. Just a magnificent, sweetly orchestrated hoax in a symphony of lies.

In deep greed and perhaps a misguided attempt to unite the country (a la Watchmen) the powers that be plunged the America into an unprecedented, unwarranted war. The twin towers, a display of enduring strength after having survived several disasters, were brought down by a pair of aluminum planes on September 11, 2001. Americans were glued to their televisions with the viscosity only horror could provide. Panic attacks palpitated many an American heart and the common man cowered in the streets, imagining dynamite strung under each turban they encountered.

The powers that be, in their high silvery towers, smiled, chortled over brandy, shook cigar-studded hands in grand congratulate. Job well done, heel well ground! Instant obedience, utter solidarity under questionable leadership, total acceptance of suspect laws. Fear does that to people. Not your fault, not our fault. Seven years later, many still engage in the blind faith that suited them just well before, and others have opened their eyes and begun to wonder for themselves.

As for myself, I knew from the beginning that something was up, some game afoot. The footage of Bush in the classroom: a harried man damned to a timetable he has to meet, cursed with a devil’s deal, tarrying in the room of children who are much better company than the insipid, evil lot that somehow congealed under his wing. Price of power. The strange move of targeting Iraq made even stranger by the fact that all the people who stood to profit from the maneuver were in some way connected to the administration. Halliburton, the Carlyle group, Saudi connections, and as an aside, Silverstein (who bought the WTC a few months before the date, and after the incident he tried to get double its value from the insurance company, citing that two planes meant the policy should be counted twice. He stands to profit from the Freedom Towers 2, 3, 4. Dumb luck, damned misfortune, or calculated move? Your pick).

I also don’t think there were planes and I think the media was alerted. At least they all were playing from the same script. Two things, probably both. Bombs in the buildings. Missiles from the planes. A fly by of planes squirting strategically placed rockets, and the evil minions man the news cameras (all from the same vantage point, same orientation) and make the necessary on the fly editing. Clever. The amateur magician in me is awed at the elegant sleight of hand, incredible in scope and scale; the cynic in me scoffs with disbelief, that’s crazy! but there’s a creeping doubt tracing my nervous system. Brings chills. Makes me think of the Illuminati. The stuff that bubbles from the crackpots of them crazy conspiracy theorists? Lunacy is getting normal, and become the smiles of politicians. Perhaps the world is full of forever hidden truths, its history a strata of lies layered upon lies, sunken in its own tar pit of half-conscious guilt.

I can’t believe this turned into a rant. It isn’t a rant, really. I don’t much care. I admit I’m a bad citizen. I can’t complain about the political situation and pretty much everything else. I don’t vote. I get dirty looks for that: “You’re running the country down.” “Apathetic sumbitch!” “Go move to Canada or something!” All things considered… I would vote in Canada.