The Night Watch (by James Mickens)
June 30, 2016
“A s a highly trained academic researcher, I spend a lot of time trying to advance the frontiers of human knowledge. However, as someone who was born in the South, I secretly believe that true progress is a fantasy, and that I need to prepare for the end times, and for the chickens coming home […]
Woken Furies
June 22, 2016
“Two centuries.” “What?” “As I said. You have been in storage for a little under two hundred years. In real terms—” Envoy cool goes out the window, rapidly. “What the fuck happened to—” “Please, Kovacs-san. Hear me out.” A sharp note of command. And then, as the conditioning shuts me down again, pared back to […]
Broken Angels
June 22, 2016
Final Selection In recall, their faces come back to me. Not the faces of the beautiful rad-resistant Maori combat sleeves they wore up to Dangrek and the smoking ruins of Sauberville. Instead, I see the faces they owned before they died. The faces Semetaire claimed and sold back into the chaos of the war. The […]
Altered Carbon
June 22, 2016
The Smith & Wesson was at eye level, gleaming silver, still where I had left it less than two minutes before. Perhaps it was that, the scant shavings of time that had been planed off since Sarah was alive and all was well, that drove me. Less than two minutes ago I could have picked […]
Bolo Brigade
June 21, 2016
LOAD SLFDIAG/LEVEL 4 ELAPSTIME: .23 SEC RUN SLFDIAG LEVEL 4 POWER SYS: 21.05% DRVTRAIN: OP, REDUCED CAPABILITY: 42% NAV: ONLINE TRACK/SENS: 12% SUSPENSION: FNCTNL AT 52% TAC/COMM: ONLINE/JAMMED SYSOP: LOGIC ARRAY INTEGRATION AT 87% MAGSCRN: ONLINE, REDUCED CAPABILITY: 53% WEAPSYS: ONLINE INFRPTR 2, 3, 5, 6, 9 DSTRYD INFRPTR 10, 15, 18 DMGD, 40% END […]
Neuromancer
June 21, 2016
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d […]
Count Zero
June 21, 2016
Count zero interrupt: “On receiving an interrupt, decrement the counter to zero.” (Old programming language) . . . It was such an easy thing, death. He saw that now: It just happened. You screwed up by a fraction and there it was, something chill and odorless, ballooning out from the four stupid corners of the […]
The boxmaker
June 21, 2016
Something slid past, ten centimeters from her face. An ornate silver spoon, sawn precisely in half, from end to end. She had no idea how long she’d been there, when the sereen lit and began to flicker. Hours, minutes . . . She’d already learned to negotiate the chamber, after a fashion, kicking off like […]