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Like Glass
By E.S. Wynn
I turn the piece of broken glass over in my hands. Once, twice, three times the light catches it and flickers across my eyes in a flash of pale brilliance. I sigh, and the dust of ancient, pulverized concrete stirs before me in faint, powdery grey curlicues. Kari is not coming. Kari is dead.
I turn the piece of glass over in my hand again. Once, twice, three times, each time considering my options, considering what I can do with this sharp little shard. Cutting myself is an option, hurling the thing at the closest wall is another. I choose the third; the piece of glass keeps turning over and over in my hand.
There has to be something I can do, something besides playing with this piece of broken glass while I wait for the drones to find me. They’d be searching the ashes of the great city by now, picking up the footsteps that Kari and I had so carefully hidden, following a trail of tiny discarded skin cells like a trail of breadcrumbs to the little ruined tower of concrete and rusty rebar that had become my sanctuary, or at least, as much as any place ever was. With drones constantly tracking your movements, no place was ever safe for long.
But that was why we tried so hard to confuse the drones, splitting up and taking separate routes to the same places, bathing regularly between coats of thick layers of ash and mud. Fully protected, thermals couldn’t pick us up, and it kept the traces we left down to a minimum. The drones still find us though, eventually. We can't erase every trace of our passage, and the hunters don’t miss a thing.
Once, twice, three times the chunk of glass flips across my palm, fingers dancing along its razor edges. Another fragment of a long-forgotten civilization, another meaningless and easily shattered fragment, just like me.
There was a fourth option– running was always an option, but the tower was empty, and I’d be going back into the ashes completely unprotected. Thermal imaging would pick me up immediately, and the drones would be on me in seconds, compressed plasma pulses screaming toward me as they burnt down through the already scorched and ash-choked air. I might get fifty feet from the tower before I was vaporized utterly, another nodule of the human cancer mercilessly obliterated before it could breed and spread to other parts of the planetary body. That was something I had always had trouble accepting– they saw us as little more than an infection, a malignant tumor sucking the life from the greater body of the Earth. And maybe they were right. I guess it really all came down to your perspective.
They had been pretty successful in curing the human disease too; Kari and I were among the lucky few drifters that still managed to carve a living out of the pitted and charred ruins and wastelands that were our constant companions, if that could be called living, and if you suspected we were lucky merely because we were not among the dead. Sometimes I found myself envying the men I’d seen vaporized in the ash fields, almost wishing that fate had chosen me instead of them. Even now, I almost envied Kari. Surely she was in a better place now than I. She had to be.
But there weren’t very many of us left anymore and, strangely, that gave me the will to press on and try to survive. Even if it meant being alone, I would continue to move, continue to avoid the relentless drones for as long as I could. I’d do it for Kari, and the hope that maybe, one day, I’d find more of my kind again, a pack of better-organized drifters, a larger, more insidious cluster of cancer to incorporate myself into.
The ragged chunk of glass continues to turn over and over in my hand, once, twice, three times, catching the light as it goes.
And suddenly, I am standing, the fragment of glass coming to a sudden stop in my palm. I grip it lightly, not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to feel the edges against my flesh.
It is time to move again.
If I am lucky, the eyes in the sky will be watching something else. If I am lucky, I can sneak out of the tower and across the wastelands without having to worry about being picked up on thermal imaging. If I am lucky, the drones that had killed Kari and countless others before her will be chasing me across the surface of our burnt and blasted world for a long while yet. If I am lucky, I won't become another hard, carbon stain on this world of ash and glass.
- - -
E.S. Wynn once singlehandedly beat a five-handed rubbox of the Maorr Retocracy somewhere in the vicinity of Proxima with one brain tied behind his back. The lands on the other side of the mirror will never be the same (just ask Bob Dole!)
By E.S. Wynn
I turn the piece of broken glass over in my hands. Once, twice, three times the light catches it and flickers across my eyes in a flash of pale brilliance. I sigh, and the dust of ancient, pulverized concrete stirs before me in faint, powdery grey curlicues. Kari is not coming. Kari is dead.
I turn the piece of glass over in my hand again. Once, twice, three times, each time considering my options, considering what I can do with this sharp little shard. Cutting myself is an option, hurling the thing at the closest wall is another. I choose the third; the piece of glass keeps turning over and over in my hand.
There has to be something I can do, something besides playing with this piece of broken glass while I wait for the drones to find me. They’d be searching the ashes of the great city by now, picking up the footsteps that Kari and I had so carefully hidden, following a trail of tiny discarded skin cells like a trail of breadcrumbs to the little ruined tower of concrete and rusty rebar that had become my sanctuary, or at least, as much as any place ever was. With drones constantly tracking your movements, no place was ever safe for long.
But that was why we tried so hard to confuse the drones, splitting up and taking separate routes to the same places, bathing regularly between coats of thick layers of ash and mud. Fully protected, thermals couldn’t pick us up, and it kept the traces we left down to a minimum. The drones still find us though, eventually. We can't erase every trace of our passage, and the hunters don’t miss a thing.
Once, twice, three times the chunk of glass flips across my palm, fingers dancing along its razor edges. Another fragment of a long-forgotten civilization, another meaningless and easily shattered fragment, just like me.
There was a fourth option– running was always an option, but the tower was empty, and I’d be going back into the ashes completely unprotected. Thermal imaging would pick me up immediately, and the drones would be on me in seconds, compressed plasma pulses screaming toward me as they burnt down through the already scorched and ash-choked air. I might get fifty feet from the tower before I was vaporized utterly, another nodule of the human cancer mercilessly obliterated before it could breed and spread to other parts of the planetary body. That was something I had always had trouble accepting– they saw us as little more than an infection, a malignant tumor sucking the life from the greater body of the Earth. And maybe they were right. I guess it really all came down to your perspective.
They had been pretty successful in curing the human disease too; Kari and I were among the lucky few drifters that still managed to carve a living out of the pitted and charred ruins and wastelands that were our constant companions, if that could be called living, and if you suspected we were lucky merely because we were not among the dead. Sometimes I found myself envying the men I’d seen vaporized in the ash fields, almost wishing that fate had chosen me instead of them. Even now, I almost envied Kari. Surely she was in a better place now than I. She had to be.
But there weren’t very many of us left anymore and, strangely, that gave me the will to press on and try to survive. Even if it meant being alone, I would continue to move, continue to avoid the relentless drones for as long as I could. I’d do it for Kari, and the hope that maybe, one day, I’d find more of my kind again, a pack of better-organized drifters, a larger, more insidious cluster of cancer to incorporate myself into.
The ragged chunk of glass continues to turn over and over in my hand, once, twice, three times, catching the light as it goes.
And suddenly, I am standing, the fragment of glass coming to a sudden stop in my palm. I grip it lightly, not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to feel the edges against my flesh.
It is time to move again.
If I am lucky, the eyes in the sky will be watching something else. If I am lucky, I can sneak out of the tower and across the wastelands without having to worry about being picked up on thermal imaging. If I am lucky, the drones that had killed Kari and countless others before her will be chasing me across the surface of our burnt and blasted world for a long while yet. If I am lucky, I won't become another hard, carbon stain on this world of ash and glass.
- - -
E.S. Wynn once singlehandedly beat a five-handed rubbox of the Maorr Retocracy somewhere in the vicinity of Proxima with one brain tied behind his back. The lands on the other side of the mirror will never be the same (just ask Bob Dole!)
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