Tag Archives: corpse

Sasha

Posted by zxvasdf on

Sasha sat in the crèche, a sprawl of connectors snaking from her shorn head to an outlet in the wall. She wore mirrorglass lenses swarming with halogen text.  It was a code read-out of the future, specifically that of the SecResCorp Inc. grounds. The spatial-temporal dimensions belonged to an agent in deep cover. The identity of the field agent, codename Janus, was deeply classified. The length and breadth of experience in space-time within his proximity was fed backwards through time.

It was a power of godlike proportions. A complete three dimensional data capture of a single spatial-temporal slice unfolded in her mind. It was a security complex. The higher aboves wanted an article from the desk of office space 24D in Complex HAZK8. These slices of space-time could be put in a containment field, the electromagnetic equivalent of an ol’ mason jar, and using this method Sasha was able to investigate all the possibilities to ensure maximum survivability rate.  In rapid fire she undertook several scenarios. Virtually, she experienced each iteration, died and lived through each failure and success until the options towards the best possible course consolidated. Ghosts of pain tingled where limbs were scorched off, slashes gashed, internal punctures ruptured. She finished these sessions feeling like a patchwork woman.

She was an artist, dancer, philosophizer, warrior, architect, general, and a woman. Sasha applied herself to her bloody art with finesse, rough-hewed when necessary, and ultimately outputted a scenario that yielded an 100% success rate. She downloaded a copy onto a datachip. She grinned with satisfaction and swept the nodes from her skull. She had even accounted for Johnny Kester. Sasha headed for the mess hall, jiggling the datachip in a hand.

Johnny Kester was a pilot, and relatively new with the company. It would be his first time working with Sasha. His specialty was the Cricket, a small thopter, capable of flying with payloads under a thousand kilos. Any heavier, it would still fly short distances, hopping long parabolas from point to point. Johnny was supposedly the best. He probably was, Sasha surmised. The superiors never half-arsed on help and resources when it came to Sasha. She found him just leaving the mess hall. He stopped when he saw her.

“It’s just like a dance.” She pirouetted, tossing the chip to Johnny who caught it with the reflexes expected of a pilot. She grabbed him by the coat and slammed him against the wall. “Don’t fuck it up.” With slackjaw amazement he watched her ass recede down the hall.

Final Scenario:
She always felt alive in free fall. Clouds rushed past her. When she was a little girl she dreamed of angels, little plump baby cherubims flitting among the downy clouds. She would frolic with them, leaping from puff to puff, and they would have snowball wars. Snowballs like small comets shedding chlorofluorocarbons and ice in the thin cold reaches. She remembered catching God square in the face, his smile of shock. The wind tore the chuckle from her lips.

Ka-chump! Firing downwards the marshmallow canister, she tucked her knees and straightened into a dive. The canister impacted and exploded in a rapidly expanding bubble of translucent gelatin. She punched through and the gel absorbed her mass velocity, bulging, spreading it along its circumference. She tumbled slowly, turning to land in a crouch. She could see small impacts bursting small bubbles in the gel. They were shooting. Wait, wait, wait. The gel destructured and foamed to the ground. She slid, her guns haloing. In a smell of carbine smoke, she had dispatched an entire squad.

The layout burned bright in her mind as she unerringly traversed labyrinthe corridors, squeezing off bursts of her rifle with heavily rehearsed rote. She fired at empty doorways and danced past falling corpses whose rolling eyes showed they didn’t know they were dead. Running, wild and fast like in the green fields of her childhood where butterflies kept pace in a squall of grasshoppers and crickets, her trigger fingers blazed tracers of bullets thin and deadly. She dashed into a stairwell, shedding a mine as she ran steadily upstairs.

A miniature rocket launcher did the job, punching the door inward into a flurry of burning splinters. She ran into the smoke with her eyes closed, her trained legs flawlessly navigating every obstacle. At the desk, she stopped, knelt, and looked at the framed picture. The frame was brightly coloured, as if painted by a child’s hand. The picture showed a little girl with a beaming smile, tongue sticking through the gap where her baby teeth had fallen out. So the higher ups had a heart. Usually it was money or damaging information. Sasha brushed an unexpected tear from her eye, and grabbed the picture.

The thopter whirred into her line of vision. “Right on time. Not too bad of a chap, after all,” she said as she placed her foot on the edge of the roof and threw herself into eternity.

After the mission she took him in the locker room and fucked him until the cartoon sunshine of a thousand megatons filled her body with incandescent ecstasy. She dressed and left him in a gasping heap, smiling cruelly as she pushed out the locker room.

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.

The Blank Slate

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Darkness, the blank slate. Pop pop pop: White-boned skulls flash, of cattle, fish, frog, dog, human, a multitude of calcified blooms on the slowly greening tree that is greeting the light. A neon skeleton of ash flashes solid and boils with leaves and keys that keen in a high wind. Picture this. The disembodied skulls swing in the teasing wind, as if hung from rope… and they are.

Golden hemp, noosed at the necks of rotting corpse bodies slowly fading solid like a photographer’s darkroom trick. Bull’s head above a half fleshed ribcage, cobra vertebrae hissing raspily against paperdust snakeskin, a weasel writhes a facsimile of life under its dead-eyed glare, shark teeth grin at the irony of deathdealer dealt its own card, a man without a face but for a skull wears his skin like a loose robe. The skulls gain a light of their own, red and green and blue and purple and yellow and orange, in soft, blinking auras.

Ornamental tree. Raiments of diffuse death hung on the worldtree, coat rack of the dead gods; the gods have dusted, turned into the very earth the ash roots in, and the goddesses have splashed, a monsoon from which its root suckle greedily.

The White Red Chiaroscuro

Posted by zxvasdf on

A stranger approaches you one night. Perhaps you are alone under the only lighted lamp in a shadowy streetcorner, or it is an empty bus you ride, sullen in your seat and feeling the late hour. The stranger approaches you with bead black eyes and a voice like yellowed parchment paper rasping against dead skin, and submits a choice in the flickering light of street or bus, of knowing the exact circumstances and instant of your death, or an eternity approaching others with the exact same proposal.

You chuckle at the strange turn of events and choose eternity. His bone white face crinkles into a rictus that is, you realize with growing horror, a smile. It is a slash that expels a hot carcass wind and sprouts a jagged range of yellowred fangs filling your vision like some poison portrait of Transylvania. Suddenly that corpse breath is digging at your neck, and you can’t but marvel at the utter corniness of the beast’s next words: You shall live forever in the hearts and minds of your loved ones! You manage to squeeze off a b-b-but I have nothing, nobody! just before your cartoid spurts arterially. A spark of irritation, in your dying mind, conflagrates into a full-out bloom of fury as you behold your very last impression of life, a grinning white red chiaroscuro.

In the white hot incandescence of anger, your thing we call soul like moth to streetlight, away from death  hanging on to that lashing frail thread of vengeance’s lust, back, back, back, your life unspooling to a connate snap where a white cold glare brutally greets you with a hand slap to the backside, heckuva set of lungs this one’s got! You progress through the various stages of human development in a tense anger, the cloud of premonition hanging over your head. You wonder where all this repressed rage comes from, and your high school psychologist keeps on saying you keep it bottled up until you’re forced to find something to bottle him up. One day you slide into a vacant bus, or stride into the littered halo of a lone streetlight. You choose to know the exact instant and circumstances of your death, and he tears out your throat on the spot.

Round round round the merry-go-round you go, the wet warm splashing to a halt with a connate slap in cold fluorescent glare and laughter at baby you boiling with pure pissed off and you grow up kicking at dogs and breaking windows, become took with carrying a pair of pliers about without really knowing why and one night you step into a bus, or you find yourself loitering an empty streetcorner. You fly at the pale thing with the rat eyes and bad teeth, you know this how, without even looking at these poison lips, on pure instinct and sheer reflex, and there is screaming. This time around, it is not you that screams.

Well, mostly not you.