The OrphanAGE, Vol. 1.16

First Lines

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call 'out there. ~Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

No need kidding around, we all have our favorites. This issue of The OrphanAGE is one of mine.

Almost as if 30+ years of acquaintance left traces, lingering assonances in the work of this week's features. Long before the push for gentrification (before so many old buildings burned or were erased), the West Bottoms was home to myriads of artists. The parties were legendary.

Jeff lived a couple floors above me in the old warehouse. Our spaces were open. Huge. 3,000+ unwalled, square feet served by an elevator big enough to carry a car. A swing, hung from the exposed rafters, and a 4 square painted onto the floor offered relief amidst the deafening clatter of trains passing just feet from our door (which they did 20...30 times every day, making most forms of human interaction impossible). Jeff filled his loft with large format work: painting, photography, more tactile endeavors... and a sea of models. Between poetry and fiction and songwriting, Jon Lee was a regular. Jerame, squeezing in time between composing soundtracks for travel documentaries ["Ashes Before Dust," "Where the Glacier Meets the Sky" and "The Air Above" all on Vimeo] had a pick-up band, writing songs with Jon Lee. The two even appeared together in the Ryberg-Rizer short sci-fi film The Boss.

Peace,
Dante

In this Issue

• Fiction by Jon Lee Grafton
• Images by Jeff Hogue
• Music by Jerame Gray

Fiction by Jon Lee Grafton

My Name is Tara Dean (excerpt)


Wikipedia.holo Excerpt (Last Updated 2077.09.11) Regarding 21st Century Alcohol Addiction:

…third time offenders scheduled for SAMCL surgery will be housed on a secure wing or hospital floor. These areas are called slaughterhouses by the pro-alcohol subculture…

She stood and forcefully shoved the door open. Bak! The walnut panel struck something metallic, leaving only a narrow opening. The door immediately began to push closed. Tara Dean flipped her body sideways and slipped through, at last standing beneath the free night sky.

  

She was greeted by a computerized male voice emanating from a two meter tall robotic door droid, “Greetings, Spencer Hotshine. You have a scheduling conflict. This egress cites a deviation from your normal break schedule. Please submit to retinal scan crosscheck before proceeding.”

  

Tara Dean had not factored a door droid, “Fuck.” 

 

The black and gray robot let the large wooden door swing shut and seal magnetically, “Fuck is not a recognized response.” It took a mechanical step closer to her, “Your combud may be in need of service. Initial biometric scans indicate you have shrunk by 22.86 centimeters, Spencer Hotshine. Please step closer for retinal scan crosscheck before proceeding.”

“Fuck me…”

  

“Fuck me is not a…”

 

“Oh, fuck off!” she yelled and kicked the door droid square in the waist, toppling it.



Before the robot struck the cement, klaxons began to sound. Every light inside Greystone Behavioral Hospital burst to life.

 

The door droid squirmed and rattled awkwardly on its back.

  

A row of LED’s in the head designed to appear where the mouth would be blinked angrily, “Security breach. Hotshine, Spencer. Apprehend. Hotshine, Spencer. Apprehend. Please remain still. You are in need of assistance.”

  

“Piece of shit,” Tara gave the door droid a final kick and bolted across the short winter lawn towards the staff docking lot.

 

She was fleet of foot and had long since memorized a layout of the hospital grounds.

 

As she sprinted towards the far end of the docking lot, leaping a short manicured hedge, a bright swath of light illuminated the ground three meters around her in every direction.

 

Fast drone. Probably armed too. These aren’t COD’s…

 

She leapt over another short hedge row without breaking stride. She juked and flipped between the closely docked hovcars, trying to make erratic course changes, but the drones were too fast. Their computerized trajectory algorithms predicted her path before she had even decided on it herself. She was only able to escape the light for a few seconds at a time. She screamed in frustration. It was the middle of the night, there were too few hovcars to hide behind. She tore across the open asphalt.

Tara Dean clutched Spencer’s holotab in her hand, shouting at it breathlessly, “Prep hovcar, spool to fly. Full manual, protocols off, firewall external access, FLOAT NOW, NOW!!!”

  

Across the docking lot, fifty meters away, a silver Ford Mustang spooled to life. From that distance, Tara could barely hear the stabilizing fans engage, lifting the Mustang off its rubberized docking mounts. She ran harder, faster. The lot was bigger than she had realized, and Spencer had docked his float at the far end, out in the open with several empty spaces on either side.

 

Tara was pleased to see that it was last year’s 2079 Mustang GT with eight 600 kg geothrusters and a single, massive 8,000 kg propulsion fan. It would be damn hard to fly her down in Spencer Hotshine’s high school graduation present.

 

I’ve gotta make that hovcar or I’m gonna be an unconscious turnip…

 

“Tara A. Dean. You are in violation of the terms of your incarceration. Arrest your movements or we will be forced to disable you.” The computerized male voice was menacing, pealing in night-splitting stereo from the comport on the nearest hospital security drone. The bright searchlight beams were now narrow, focused and locked, no matter how fast she ran, juked, jumped, ducked or hid. The last twenty meters of docking lot were wide open asphalt.

 

Nothing but me out here.

 

She ran like only a madwoman can.

 

“Arrest! We will fire in five seconds. Four, three, two, one…”

The pounding of breath. The muffled thud of each sprinting step. The shaking of her small body. The hovcar was less than five meters away. It was unlikely that… a thudding pain struck her from behind, spinning her like a hammer punch. Out of the corner of one eye she saw the glass housing of a tranquilizer dart fall and shatter on the asphalt.

 

Botulinum darts!

 

The projectile had glanced off her backpack.

 

“You have been neutralized,” barked the drone. “Arrest your movements at once to avoid bodily harm. Central nervous system failure is imminent.”

 

Tara jumped the final rubber docking divider and screamed at the idling Ford, “Pilot door open!”

 

The Mustang’s silver door cracked with a pneumatic hiss. The hovcar was already engaged, floating sixteen centimeters off the ground, ready to fly. The force from the levitation fans was so powerful that her clothes were blown flat against her body.

 

“Arrest! Arrest your movements or we will fire,” called the nearest drone, though she could no longer hear clearly over the electric roar of the turbines.

She flung her backpack into the passenger seat and for the first time turned to look at the security drone. She had seen a thousand, million drones in her life. But this time she really looked. Up close they appeared like small, squashed, black blimps. They were about a meter in length and were covered in a scaly, black Kevlar housing. The drone’s sensor array formed a thin, illuminated belt around its midsection that oscillated rapidly through varying shades of red. The bright white searchlight shone fiercely into her eyes from the center of the drone’s belly. Tara ducked behind the safety of the hovcar’s door and extended the middle fingers on both hands.

 

She was carefully mouthing the words, GO FUCK YOURSELF… when the hovcar shuddered violently. The roof caved in, causing the shotgun side window to crack.

 

The Mustang rocked again as what appeared to be a gray fox jumped squarely onto the hovcar’s hood. The creature stared at her with a single radiating blue eye.

 

Cyborg.

 

She studied the animal in shock. There was nothing but an empty, metallic cavity where the other vidorb should be.

 

There must be another on the roof.

 

The fox’s paws crumpled the Mustang’s hood in four separate spots.

 

If she had been able, over the din of the hovcar’s turbines, she would have heard the security drone’s computerized vocal subroutines tripping over command lines as data flooded its sensor array, “Arrest! Unidentified biological org… termination requ… possession of fusion basssssss… arrest!”



Tara Dean also would have heard a low, rumbling growl vibrating from the cyberfox’s throat. Her eyes inflated to saucers as the fox drew back its jowls and exposed a row of ragged, synthetic teeth. But the teeth were not white, they were… chrome? Silver?

 

Tara felt herself chill with terror.

 

Synthetic jaws? A fighting battborg?

 

Before she could follow the thought further, three, four, five botulinum darts slammed into the fox’s head. Each projectile glanced off the animal, clear liquid payload splattering on the hovcar’s windshield.

 

That fox ought to be a pile of spaghetti.

 

She was relieved to see the creature turn its attention, now focusing on the drone. The drone floated directly overhead, squawking like an raging parrot. Blinding light. The Mustang’s screaming levfans. The hovcar rocked and Tara cringed. The second fox leapt from the roof with so much force that the back window on the Mustang cracked down the center. The animal on the hood followed, claws ripping gouges into the light metal as it too went airborne.

One directly after the other, the foxes collided with the security drone and brought it crashing down to the asphalt. Tara gasped, her lower lip shaking. The foxes savagely drove their teeth into the security drone’s dorsal ridge, ripping through the unit’s Kevlar chassis. Sparks erupted from the downed drone, and its sensor array flickered and went black. One fox pulled a small black box free with its teeth and spat it on the ground.

 

Another private security drone, just arriving, immediately changed course and flew higher into the sky as it fired nine, ten more botulinum darts that harmlessly glanced off the foxes’ heads. Two of the darts penetrated each animal’s ratty skin and the needles stuck, dangling from their necks.

 

Tara Dean could not believe what she was seeing.

 

The foxes raised their paws in unison and swiped the darts to the ground. Then they turned back to her. Two blue eyes glowed angrily on one animal. A single eye pulsed in the other’s dark face.

 

Tara didn’t have time to know what was happening. As she yanked the Mustang’s door closed she noticed… more eyes? Twenty to thirty additional blue lights hovered in the bushes at the edge of the docking lot. For a moment she thought she heard a high pitched howling.

 

Fuck me…

 

She dropped the hovcar’s air brake and slammed her foot against the accelerator. Instead of dodging left or right like one would expect, the eery metal-mouthed foxes leapt straight into the air as the hovcar rocketed forward. She had every intention of running the damn things down, but they were obviously smart. The Mustang lurched as it flew over the carcass of the trashed security drone. Tara could see the gates on her left rolling shut as she took a wide swing towards the Exit.

 

“Shit and balls!” she screamed at the dashboard.

The Mustang’s steering wheel was heavy in manual mode. She hauled on it with both hands. Proximity klaxons blared through the cabin as she accidentally sideswiped a docked hovtruck, ripping away both vehicles’ side mirrors, shattering the pilot’s side glass and one of her headlights.

 

A warning LED in the dashboard monitor began beeping, followed by an irritatingly calm female voice that said, “Oh my, port headlight malfunction. Safety at risk. The sun will rise in 5.6 hours. Travel is not recommended until that time. Reinitiating Govcloud auto control in ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six…”

 

She pulled free of the hovtruck and stomped on the juice, screeching, “Negative com! Full manual pilot! Safety regs off!”

 

The klaxon silenced.

 

A robofox dropped out of the sky and landed on the back bumper, barely missing the center of its target. The cracked rear window of the hovcar shattered completely, littering the interior with shards of safety glass as the Mustang bucked violently from the heavy impact and the fox rolled into the docking lot.

 

“Time to get the hell outta Kansas, Dorothy!”

 

Fifty meters directly ahead, the security gates had already rolled shut.

 

She engaged the morpho-adaptive seatbelt and re-tied the scrunchy around her ponytail with one hand.

“Here we go.”

 

She nailed it.

 

The Mustang roared forward, punching headlong through the antique iron gates that adorned the hospital’s entrance. Tara Dean glanced in the rear view HUD as she and the hovcar flew past the enormous brick and mortar pillars that had held the gates in place. She could see the gray, streaking bodies of the blue-eyed robofoxes tearing across the parking lot with impossible speed behind her. The animals stealthily dodged the collapsing gates, peeling through the clouds of cement dust and iron carnage in focused pursuit. The wind howled through the hovcar’s shattered back window while a thousand glimmering chunks of shattered glass skittered across the floor board beneath her boots.

 

Trying to read the GPS data on the Mustang’s holoscreen, she looked up, barely in time to glimpse a single file scatter of more blue lights closing on her position from the left. The Mustang was traveling 105 kph as it found the open road. The blue lights moved with an unpredictable, jolting motion. She watched them intently, captivated by an overwhelming sensation of deja vu.

 

I know these things…

 

But no lights she had ever seen glowed like that. Or moved like that. And then they were gone. Just as quickly as they had appeared, the string of lights simultaneously vanished.

 

Tara was still holding her breath. She glanced at the rear view HUD.

 

Hah!

 

The robofoxes were no longer chasing her either, gone as if they had never been.

 

Thank you, Spencer. This pony floats!

 

She grinned to herself, weirdly calm on the adrenaline high, despite the feeling that her heart was about to tear through her rib cage.

 

For a fraction of a moment… things seemed almost peaceful, hushed. The pitch darkness of a crisp winter night roamed far and wide ahead as the Mustang flew down the hovroad through the Kansas countryside like a ship disappearing into the belly of a midnight sea.

 

Behind Tara Dean, too far dim and too far gone to see, 18 pairs of cobalt vidorbs the size of acorns re-illuminated in the blackness. They coherently aligned themselves into a single file orientation, then flashed away in a bouncing tracer of light moving due southwest over an adjacent soybean field.

 

The non-emergency tower lights in the hospital’s docking lot blinked on with a jolt. Three black, football-shaped security drones hovered back and forth, their searchlights scanning the grounds for unregistered motion. A fourth drone hovered one meter above the broken chassis of its colleague that had been shredded by the robofoxes. Greystone Hospital security klaxons bleated senselessly over and over from every available com. The faces of patients and evening staff members peered out of windows, stupefied at the smoldering carnage on the hospital’s western grounds.

One of those windows framed the sallow, ghost-pale face of orderly Spencer Hotshine. He rubbed his temple in dull-eyed pain. He could still hear the words repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating.

 

Help… they’re hurting me. I need you.

 

Beside him, closer to the glass, fogging it with her breath, stood Nurse Marlene Fossbender. Her face was contorted and serpent-like, and the caterpillar flesh beneath her chin undulated in a sweat-glistened fury.

Wikipedia.holo Excerpt (Last Updated 2071.04.13) Regarding North American United States Hovroad Infrastructure:

Completed in 2059, The NAUS Magnetic Hovway Reapplication System was the largest Federal infrastructure project in history. All antique Federal, state, county and city interstates and roads, both gravel, and obsolete tar asphalt or concrete, were retrofitted with subterranean magnetic levitation conduits. Similar to antique maglev train technology, hovlev as it is popularly known, assists all independent hovercraft with vertical lift and passive perimeter awareness systems. It is the foundation upon which all current autopilot technology functions. All NTSB certified hovercraft manufacturers have been required by Federal mandate to integrate hovlev rail technology into all vehicles following model year 2060. The self-regenerating, rubcrete-asphalt, hybrid road surface utilized today is based upon this now standardized float automation system.

note: All 5 installments of Grafton's 18th Shadow can be found online or in tactile format ONLY at Prospero's Books.

Images by Jeff Hogue

Music by Jerame Gray