Category: Future Crash Novel

Kevin Paulsen was a famous hacker in the 80’s best known for a stunt he pulled where he controlled the phone system of an LA radio talk show so he could win a Porsche. I wasn’t hacking phones to win a fast car, but I was hacking my own brain, at least enough to run my heart and lungs…a boy can dream.

I had been poking around in my own brain for weeks. Only twice has Jason had to fry off some more hair. Fucking around with the inner workings of your own brain doesn’t come with a manual. For a couple hours last week I couldn’t smell anything, and lately when I rub my big toe it makes the back of my neck Tingle…all in all not bad for a beginner.

The problem so far has been that apparently your brain doesn’t work the way a computer does. The programs seem to have been written using trial and error. Bits and pieces of my brain copied into the memory on the chips in my head and combined in random ways until something works. There was a lot of junk in there. The only way I was even able to read them was because some sort of deeper level program could decode it all into words and feelings.

“This is never going to work… you are going to be electrocuting me forever!” The frustration was getting to me.

“You should get out of here man, you been back for three weeks now and have barely left this room, go find Rain or Marla they are out in town working.” Jason was justifiably sick of having me sigh and curse in his computer lab.

He was right though, I needed a break. I checked the laptop one last time to make sure my brain was running smoothly, grabbed my bag, and was out the door and onto my bike. Since we had gotten back Rain, Marla, and I had made ourselves useful by starting our own bike messenger service. Running around town doing local deliveries, packages, letters that sort of thing.

Most of the residents of Watkins Glen had given up on the US Dollar after the stock market crash and instead moved to a local currency called the Watt. The Watt was like the old gold standard, each Watt worth something real that you could trade in. In this case it was worth kilowatt hours from the towns wind turbines. At any time you could take all your Watts down to the local credit union and trade them in for electricity from the turbines.

Since the wind didn’t always blow, and there wasn’t enough electricity to provide pre-crash levels to everyone, the market was lively. You could buy just about anything that the town produced with Watt’s, and seeing as how even Jason’s generosity had limits we had to earn our keep.

Such was born the Watkins Glen Bicycle Messenger Guild, Rain and Marla had even gotten a lady in town to create us some little badges for our bags, in exchange for a month of free deliveries. The badges had three lighting bolts over a stylized hurricane. Rain said it symbolized the three of us escaping Ophelia, saying “if we can outrun that bitch we can outrun anything.”

They were probably out on the town doing deliveries, that or making out some place. This thought made me smile. The three of us had grown even closer over time. It was like we were all dating each other. Rain being the glue that held us together. I loved Rain, Marla loved Rain, and Rain Love us both. It could have been really weird, but it wasn’t.

The people in town were nice, but they just couldn’t relate to what we had been through. We spent every night together curled up in a pile in Jason’s garage. He had been nice enough to put us up and found us an old mattress. Sleeping together made the sex easier, but it also meant someone was there to hold you when the nightmares returned.

I rode down to our little corner shop to see if the girls were around. Originally an old newspaper stand, it wasn’t much, but it was free and centrally located. We took over when the previous owners industry became impossible. It’s hard to distribute any nationwide printed publications when shipping costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars per truck.

No one was around, but there were a couple of packages sitting in the drop off bin. This gave me a chance to try something I had been working on this morning. I took the package in my hand and blinked twice with my left eye. This turned on what I had started calling my Second Sight.

I held the packages in my hand, and thought about how much they weighed. This was a little tricky because I had to think about the weight in a very specific way. Not like weight of the world, but good old fashion pounds. Human beings are notoriously bad at telling how heavy things are by hefting them, but I had written a program that would interpret the strain on my arm muscles and show me how much something weighed.

Checking the boxes on our scale I got pretty close, a couple ounces off. Of course if I started hitting the gym I would have to recalibrate the whole thing, but there wasn’t much danger of that. I tossed the smaller ones in my bag, and blinked twice with my left eye again, followed by a special pattern of looking to the four corners of my vision. This turned off the test programs and turned on my normal Second Sight.

The weeks of work hadn’t been completely wasted, and I have to admit riding around town on my bike with a heads up overlay of a Google map in my vision was almost cool enough to make it worth all the surgeries it took to get that way. It was like a cross between Terminator vision, and having a web browser overlaid on your eyes.

That isn’t to say it was always normal. There was a whole class of “programs” I had found deep in my head there were just too strange to mess with. I was afraid that if I fucked with them my kidneys or something wouldn’t work anymore. These programs occasionally would assert themselves in my vision with phantom overlays, only sometimes would it get bad enough that I would have to have Jason blast me.

It was impossible to concentrate when these little bastards would be telling me how tall something was, or worse making random characters in parts of my vision, but today they were behaving. I rode around town following the map when needed, and turning it off when I knew where I was. Or at least I thought they were behaving.

I was just about back to our shop when my entire vision blinked bright orange. I nearly lost control of my bike skidding to a stop just in time. The orange faded but was soon replaced by what could only be described as a visual hallucination. A tie-dye array of colors and feelings. I sat, and watched…

The girls returned to find me crying in front of the shop, my head in my hands.

“What’s wrong Q?” Rain sat down next to me.

I looked up at her, my eyes red and swollen.

“Rain, it’s going to get worse its going to get much worse.”

There is a story about the crew filming the last landing of the Hindenburg. They were having technical problems with their cameras; the airship was due to land at any moment. Desperate to get the cameras working, the camera operators balled up his fist and struck the top of camera sharply, the camera began to work and they were able to capture the fiery last flight of the grand air ship. Some say it is the first recorded case of “percussive maintenance” in the modern age.

I planned to do basically the same, smacking my brain, not with a fist but with a giant blast of electricity. I could only hope my situation turned out more like the camera, and less like what it filmed.

“What! What the fuck are you talking about Q?”

“Seriously Q, that sounds like a really bad idea.”

Both Rain and Marla had perfectly rational reservations about my stopping and then restarting my brain. I would have had a long reasoned chat with them about the pro’s and con’s of my approach if the sound of them talking wasn’t making my head explode with pain.

“I…can’t…don’t have time to explain, I need you to whack…shock my brain… electricity lots of it here and here.” I pointed to the two gold connections in my skull.

“Trust me…” I had to keep my eyes closed because looking at anything was causing an agonizing flood of visual stimuli.

“How high should the voltage be?” At least Jason was asking useful questions, too bad the only thing I could do was open my arms wide, only to quickly return my hands to my head so that I could writhe in pain some more.

“Are you kidding! That’s going to kill you!” They both loved me, but right now I needed someone who would electrocute my brain without reservation, because if this didn’t happen soon I was going to die from neural overload, or bash my own skull in to make the pain stop.

I nodded my head toward Jason, hopefully indicating that, yes, please shock my brain with large amounts of electricity.

“I have a transformer out back we use to convert the output from the wind turbines to the inverters…on a day like today that’s putting out a couple thousand volts. Will that do?” Jason said pointing to the back door.

Thumbs up. I stood heading to the transformer, and almost immediately fell flat onto my face. Blood was streaming from my nose as they carried me out the back door. The pain lost in the buzz going on in my brain.

Rain and Marla carried me out the back door while Jason ran around the shed to return shortly with a pair of jumper cables in his hand. I couldn’t help but smile slightly. Maybe it was the absurdity of it all, or maybe I had been spending too much time with Marla.

Jason quickly turned off part of the transformer, and connected one end of the jumper cables to two large metal connection points. He turned the switch back on and touched the two ends of the cables together briefly sending sparks flying into the air.

“Do I like hold them on, or just give you a quick juice?” He seemed remarkably calm for someone about to electrocute a friend’s brain.

I made hand motions indicating a short blast and then removal.

“Ok here goes nothing…umm…clear?”

Wow…that sucked. I sprang back to existence with a giant sucking breath, my vision was slowly extending outward from a tiny dot of black and my arms and legs felt like they weighed a million pounds. My toes and fingers tingled as blood slowly made its way back into them.

The smell of burnt hair hung heavy in the air, a quick check revealed I now was missing a small patch of hair around each connector. Couldn’t really blame Jason for that, but I might need to wear a hat for a while.

“Jesus Christ Q.” Marla was watching me from one side of the table.

“You stopped breathing for a while babe, so umm I had to slap you around a bit, I don’t really know CPR.” Rain was hovering over me looking very pale.

“I’m sorry I scared you, but I couldn’t think of an easier way to restart the boot loader in my brain.”

“Should we even bother having you try explaining that?” She sounded incredulous but you could tell by the look on Marla’s face she was happy I was OK.

Jason got me a glass of water and I laid it out for them.

“When we were in The Company compound they needed a way to connect their data feeds to my brain so they could make it do the future forecasting thing. The problem was that my brain only had the normal type inputs, sight, sound, touch, that sort of thing. My human senses wouldn’t allow them to cram enough data into my skull, I mean what were they going to do, sit me in a class room and teach me all that shit?”

“Yea but why did we just have to electrocute your brain?” Another sensible question from Jason, who to his credit, seemed to be taking this all very well.

“Well what they did was they put a small computer in my skull that had some tiny wires that lead to different parts of my brain. This allowed them to pump data directly into my brain, but it needed some simple programs to allow it to regulate certain things. Before I left I made some small edits to that system.”

“What I think has been happening is that the edits I made to the system have allowed the system to work in both directions now. Instead of just having programs on a chip that allow data to enter my brain, the data can now flow out of my brain into the chips. My subconscious has been…creating programs.”

“How is this possible I mean how does that work?” Rain looked pretty confused.

“My head is so full of shit at this point that honestly I don’t really know, but what seems to be happening is that my memory and the computers in my head are getting together and creating… I guess you could call them helpers. They calculate things, measure things, help me remember things, seem to tap into my predictive abilities.”

“Umm that sounds pretty awesome dude…you got like Google in your head.” Marla could understand body modification.

“Yea if I could get it under control, instead the interaction between the programs and my normal brain functions seems to be causing some sort of feedback loop.”

“And that is bad?” Rain said helping me up. As I looked at her, faint traces of orange shapes briefly appeared but faded away.

“If I don’t electrocute my brain every time this happens, my brain will get so overloaded that my heart will stop beating.”

“Ohh…”

You can get used to a lot of crazy shit when your head is crammed full of silicon and fiber optics. You don’t immediately freak out when data streams flicker across your vision. These sorts of bugs are to be expected with new technology.

You do however freak out when you look at the Watkins Glen wind turbines and instead of just seeing lovely rotating blades creating energy you instead see a detailed overlay detailing all the mechanical parts of the machine as well as a real time estimation of the amount of energy it’s producing.

“Guys! You’re back! Damn that kid he must be asleep again out on the south lookout.” Jason was covered in grease and smelled like fish sticks; maybe he was having problems with the grease truck.

“Who’s the new girl? Hi my name is Jason…” He said holding out his hand to Marla.

“Q what’s wrong man?”

Not much, only that my brain isn’t under my control, and it feels like spiders are crawling around inside my eyes.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a laptop and about three feet of cat5 cable would you? Also I think I need to lie down, like right now.” Rain dropped her bike and was at my side almost instantly.

Jason ushered us into a barn built up against the base of a huge wind turbine. To our surprise a wave of cool air blasted us in the face when we opened the door. Rain and Jason sat me down gently in an old wing backed chair that had been reupholstered with plastic rice bags. The sound of the turbine was transferred down the poll and filled the room. A sharp contrast to how quiet it had been 100 feet away.

“Evaporative cooling system, keeps the computers cool, pretty neat huh?” Watkins glen had developed quite a bit since we had left.

I guess I wasn’t going to pass out just yet; instead I was going to be treated to an orange glowing overlay in the left of my vision informing me that the ambient temperature had just dropped 15 degrees.

“Q whats wrong, you haven’t been like this in forever? Is it the stuff in your head?” Rain’s voice was visualized as vibrating waves in my right eye, while a series of geometric objects appeared superimposed on her face, calculating the surface area of her face.

“I don’t know man, you look pretty pale, and your eyes are all dilated and shit.” Marlas dreadlocks shot off little golden ratios, and fractal patterns. My vision was being drowned out by all the data coming off her.

“I need you all to be silent for the next couple of seconds, and Jason could you turn the lights off, it’s getting worse.” Even my own voice was causing my vision to light up with the definition of “light” and “worse” streaming across my field of vision like a stock ticker.

I got the laptop booted and opened Firefox, jamming the cat5 cable into the socket behind my ear. The feeling was strangely comforting remembered from the hours upon hours in the chair. The controller chips in my head were directly IP addressable, and my “modifications” had produced a graphical interface, just like a router.

I typed in the IP for my own brain and was presented with a simple program that I had built from a bunch of pieces of open source software. The last time anyone had done this it had shown several small process running, mostly power monitoring, and simple input and output processes. This was how my brain had interfaced with the system that The Company had built for me.

Now it showed a multitude of programs running, they had names comprised of random ASCII character. None of this had been put here by “me,” although I was starting to suspect that “me” might be becoming a little more complicated.

The Company had hired some of the smartest people on the planet. People who lived and breathed brain science, and the best they could come up with were a couple of simple algorithms that allowed my brain to dynamically modulate how much power it was drawing from the machines connected to it, and a simple system by which I could revive and send data from my mind. The unique nature of my brain handled the rest.

This shit was totally different, complex, broad, and overwhelmingly strange. As I stared at the screen trying to make sense of it all, the random characters began to shift. A couple letters became a word, which became a sentence. Some of them became images; one became the feeling of cat fur, another was the smell of peanut butter. One bit coalesced into the color blue, surrounded by the sensation of cold water on my arms.

There was a feedback loop; whatever was happening to my vision to cause it to draw data out of the world around me was chewing up the seemingly random code in my own head and turning it into something my conscious brain could access. My brain was running a program and that program was able to decode the mess in my own brain…no wonder my head felt like it was in a vise.

The pain was getting worse, and I was starting to feel really hungry. My brain was burning the sugar in my blood at a rapid pace. I was also starting to get an idea of what was going on. It’s like calling an Indian tech center with computer problems sooner or later they always suggest the same solution.

“Guys…” Speaking caused my eyes to explode in a torrent of data overlays, accompanied by a sudden burst of pain. I grabbed my head in a futile attempt to make it stop, everyone had been perfectly silent the entire time, drawing closer to hear what I had to say next.

“Guys, I think, I think I have to, reboot my brain.” Speaking was becoming impossible.

“The good news is, I think this will fix what’s wrong, the bad news… I am pretty sure it’s going to stop my heart.”

Take a ping pong ball and cut it in half, tape each half over your eyes, add some headphones playing white noise and lean back onto a nice soft bed. In only a couple of minutes most people begin to see shapes and lights and some even feel or smell things. The human mind is so used to processing inputs that when you block out the major sensory inputs your brain fills in its own bells and whistles.

Some people find this experience very pleasant. Me, not so much. After months of being fed nothing but drugs and high bandwidth sensory input, not being hooked up to the machines was kind of like being in a dark room. I felt like a three dimensional being smashed violently into a two dimensional world.

Faint ghosts charts kept showing up transposed over the landscape around me. Shapes and colors, figures, faintly related to the objects around me, but like a word on the tip of your tongue they maddeningly refused to coalesce into anything meaningful. I shook my head hard and rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands, now was no time to figure out what was wrong with my head, we had to get out of here.

The world outside the compound was a moonscape. Everything higher than a couple inches had been swept away by repeated passes of Ophelia. The rest had been scooped out and polished leaving smooth divots that would catch the blowing dust and propel it up into our eyes. A wall of clouds was to our right, lightning cracking loose in such rapid intervals that the thunder was a constant sound pounding at our senses.

At least one thing was working in our favor; Ophelia was late. She was taking her sweet time enveloping New York City, although calling the small smoothed lump of sand and gravel a city would be a creative use of that word.

Silently we mounted our bikes and pedaled westward, our legs aching from months of inactivity, running from the storm, running from what had happened deep underground. When we came to the river we saw where most of the city had ended up, we walked our bikes across, leaving long island behind.

“What are we going to do now Q?”

It had been days and we were still working are way westward, fleeing from the coast and its many memories of death. Jersey had bled into Pennsylvania, we would hide on the side of the road whenever we came across anyone else, too paranoid to trust anyone.

“We run, I guess, Watkins Glen is a couple hundred miles north of here we could see Jason again.” It was the only place I could think of with someone we could trust.

While Rain returned to cycling like a robot that had finally gotten its legs reattached, Marla and I were returning to the cycling lifestyle with a bit more trepidation. Our bodies ached deeply at the end of each days travel. At night we slept cuddled together. The nights were much warmer than they used to be, but sticking together made us feel safer.

It had been months since we had been above ground. The mad world we had left had only gotten worse. The already rapid pace of change had accelerated. In many places the once dead or dying trees were now replaced with acres of char. Forest fires had swept through northern Pennsylvania, and southern New York clearing out everything and everyone.

People had moved on, leaving the black wasteland to packs of feral dogs, and crows. Great murders of crows darkened the sky, these clever birds had someone found a way to thrive in this new arid wasteland. They would stare at us ominously when we would stop to rest. Bobbing their heads while patiently waiting for us to drop something edible, or die and become food.

Food was mostly cans of crème corn, and string beans found in old gas stations and abandoned houses. Water was harder to find, the land was drying up here, but some farm wells still had water. With less people around to draw from the aquifers the wells would eventually fill again.

Cars didn’t run anymore, oil was just too important, with the Atlantic and the Gulf permanently off limits, what little oil was still imported had to go the long way around. What few people we did see were on bicycle, or walking. They never seemed to wonder why we didn’t want to talk. Humanity hadn’t gone Mad Max yet, but after the horror of the last 20 months, they had become somber.

“Guys I am fucking beat, I got to rest.” Marla had not lost her penchant for swearing, but over the weeks of traveling she had spoken less and less. In a barren world, you found yourself spending a lot of time in your own head. We found an abandoned farm and made camp.

“Is there really any point to all this?” Rain ran her fingers through my slowly growing hair tracing patterns around the scars on my head as the three of us lay in a pile under a shed in some long abandoned field.

“I mean those fuckers are going to hunt us down and force us back to that horrible lab. Even if they don’t, look around, what can we do to fix this?”

“I say fuck all this shit, lets get as far away from those fuckers as possible, find some place and live the best life we can till this shit hole of a planet sheds us like a bad parasite.” Marla’s dreads slinked snake-like into my face as she got worked up.

Marla and Rain went back and forth. The problem seemed so large and we seemed so small. I was so lost in thought that I barely noticed when a pair of lips gently locked itself on my ear.

“I love you.” Rain whispered in my ear.

The troubles of our world were put on hold. Rain began to gently kiss me, slowly removing my shirt. It was impossible to hide our actions from Marla, and we didn’t try. When Marla leaned in to gently kiss Rain I didn’t make any moves to stop her. A bond had been formed between the three of us, and in this harsh world concerns about traditional social norms seemed stupid.

The three of us found comfort in knowing that we were alive and together. We slept well that night in each others arms, a small drop of comfort and love in a giant ocean of desperation and destruction.

The next morning we scrounged up what little food was available and headed north. It would be good to get to Watkins Glen, see Jason, and most importantly take one of those fine solar heated showers. This thought kept my legs turning for the next two days. I was good to be going back to the only place that had shown us any sanctuary in the last year.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

When I was taught about Newtonian physics my science teacher told us all about objects in motion and cause and effect, planetary bodies, the whole nine yards. She had pointed out that according to Newton it was possible in theory given the state of the universe at it’s creation to tell where every atom would be at any point in the future. If you knew the location and speed of each particle in the universe all you had to do was churn the physics and you would know where they would all be in an hour, or a day, or a year, or a billion years.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. The idea that I was simply playing out a part in a play written at the moment of the big bang was the most terrifying thing I had ever contemplated. How did things like free will play in a system like that? I was a strange kid.

The next day when I brought my concerns to my teacher she was kind enough to explain Heisenberg Uncertainty. For instance Newton didn’t know that it is impossible to know with certainty both the location and velocity of a particle. It might seem strange, but the universe was indifferent to human’s sense of what was normal.

For most people the idea that there are fundamental parts of the universe that human beings can not know bothers them. Not me, I was happy that no one could predict my every movement based on how a couple of hydrogen atoms were arranged a couple billion years ago.

Newton was a smart guy, but he didn’t know everything. If someone like him could get things wrong, what was I missing?

It was with a mind full of such doubts that I set my plan into action. If everything worked as planned we were going to be escaping into the tail end of the largest storm this planet had every seen. But what was the alternative; live the rest of my life in this cage predicting tomorrow’s stock prices?

“Sleep tight freak.”

Guards sometimes grow to sympathize with the people they guard, not this guy. The door slammed shut, and I began to count. Ten steps and the guard was at the corner, ten more and he would be back to his office. In twenty minutes he would be back, or that’s how is normally worked, but not tonight.

At exactly 10:59, (or exactly 1371985143 seconds since January 1st 1970 as many unix servers measure time) the improperly created memory buffers on the sub par North Korean RAM chips were sent the result of the current accounting program which, because of a recent purchase of illegal ivory products resulted in a number just big enough to create a buffer overflow error. Usually this would result in one of the servers being reset, but because of a slight change in work schedules the current server tech was delayed 30 minutes.

The crashed server was the one running the software that controlled the fans on the base power center. There used to be others, but they were removed, a work order had been filed anonymously weeks ago. With the fans off it took approximately 5 minutes for the power supply to overheat and shutdown. Normally this would sound an alarm, but recent work on base phone systems, meant that this particular alarm was disconnected.

When the power supply died the battery backup power supply kicked on. Among other things this was to ensure that the electronic locking systems on the “visitor” cells would stay closed…too bad each of the batteries for Rain’s, Marla’s, and my cell had been power cycled several thousand times over the last week to ensure that they wouldn’t hold a charge.

Simultaneously a recent re-write to fix “memory leaks” in the software for the water treatment plants firmware had the unintended consequence of causing all other doors (except the ones needed for us to walk to the surface) to lock.

With a tiny “snick” the door sprung open, I hadn’t planned on the locking mechanism being spring activated. I actually jumped a little at the surprise. It had been a while since anything had come as a surprise to me. And just like that, I walked into the hallway free from control for the first time in almost a year.

“Q, is that you! Q!”

Rain and Marla walked around the corner, confused and unsure what to make of their sudden freedom. I knew they would follow the series of unlocked doors and empty corridors. She was paler, and the institutional scrubs that The Company had bought in bulk (at my insistence) made her tattoos look strangely normal, but it was the same girl I had fallen in love with months ago.

The embrace was strong and natural. The kiss that fallowed was just as sweet.

“Q, oh god what have they done to you.”

Rain ran her hands gently over my skull, her fingers stopping to circle the new holes and ports. Her shock was understandable, they had begun shaving my head to keep hair out of the interface, and the repeated surgeries had left my head a patchwork of scars, some still fresh. My temples bulged slightly where the optical interfaces connected, and the overall effect was admittedly pretty creepy. I guess when it happens a little bit at a time you don’t realize how strange you are getting.

“How the fuck did this happen! What the fuck is going on?” Marla had remained silent until now.

“I don’t have to time to explain right now, but we have about 15 minutes before the base wakes up and realizes we are gone, and we have about an hour once we get to the top to get our bikes, and get on the road before Ophelia gets here, Marla you can ride Jakes bicycle, they have it inventoried, and it is almost your size.”

It wasn’t much of a plan but it would work. The mention of Jakes name brought a pained look to Rain’s eyes, a look that hardened into something ugly. We ran up the stairs to the supply room where our gear and bicycles were left, gate unopened waiting for us. We began dressing and stuffing our stuff into our bags as fast as possible.

It was a shame that the soldier who I had come to know as Green Eyes had contracted quite a hangover the night before, making him several minutes late, meaning he was not in the mess hall when I expected, meaning he was not locked in with the rest of them, meaning he was now clear to raise his firearm and shout.

“Get the fuck on the ground, I don’t know how you got out but you are going back now!”

He looked far less intimating without his night vision and tactical body armor, but the voice was the same. His gaze was intent on me. I began to crouch down, hands raised, when out of the corner of my eye I saw movement.

Rain exploded, the U-lock from her bag held like a club in her hand. It might have been the effects of the alcohol, or the almost inhuman speed at which Rain moved or maybe we just got lucky, but when that reinforced steel shackle made contact with his skull in rang out with a deep clang that made my teeth vibrate.

Again and again she struck, taking revenge for her brother, for us, for the state of the world. It was an animal thing, something born of anguish, something that I would have been appalled by before. Something I understood much better now.

“You fucker! I told you I would kill you!” Again the deep gong of steel against skull.

Marla and I could only watch, unable and unwilling to bring ourselves to stop her. Rain stopped when she got tired, the man lying dead at her feet. She began to cry, not for what she had done, but because it meant nothing. What was one more death in a world like this?

I put my hand gently on her shoulder.

“Let’s go.”

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

Charlie was a good dog. He knew this was true because when he opened his mouth just so, and wagged his tail just so, and made just the right kind of bark he got treats from Master. Master was a good dog too, because he always scratched Charlie’s ears, and gave Charlie treats, and made sure Charlie had a warm place to sleep.
Master was a funny looking dog, he moved funny, and barked funny, but Charlie didn’t care because Master was the source of treats, and ear scratches, and Charlie liked both of those a lot. Charlie was a good dog, and he loved his life. He would run along the beaches, and chase the crabs back into their holes in the sand. Charlie always wondered where the crabs went, but no amount of digging ever seemed to produce them. Charlie didn’t care; he liked digging in the sand.
Sometimes Charlie would run around in the ocean, Charlie liked the ocean. Master would toss a stick, and Charlie would get it back. Master liked this, and Charlie liked this, and the water was fun to play in. When Charlie was hot the water made the hot go away, and when Master was near Charlie would shake the water off in a synchronized dance starting at his nose and going all the way to his tail. Master liked the water because he would always bark his funny bark when Charlie brought him ocean water to make the hot go away.
Because he was a good dog Charlie got Blanket. Blanket was great, Charlie could attack Blanket, he could chew Blanket, and he could rub new smells onto Blanket for later. Charlie loved Blanket. Sometimes he would bring Blanket to Master so he could play with it, or they could each pull on it. Charlie liked pulling on Blanket. Charlie had a problem though. He couldn’t find Blanket.
Charlie had lost blanket when the big noise had come. The big noise had made Charlie’s ear hurt, and had made Charlie hide with master in the cool dark room of the basement. The big noise had come and scared Charlie very badly. When the big noise was gone, Charlie was surprised to find that sunshine had come into the dark cool basement, Charlie could never remember a time when sunshine had been in the dark cool room.
Charlie looked all over but couldn’t find Master. He looked in the cool dark room, and under the stairs. Charlie eventually found Master. Master was hiding under some big sticks, sticks so big that Charlie couldn’t fetch them, instead he dug and dug until he found the source of Master’s smell. Master was very quiet. Charlie barked and barked but Master didn’t want to play. Charlie licked Master’s face, and opened his mouth just in the right way, and wagged his tail in just the right way, and made just the right bark for treats, but Master didn’t give Charlie treats. Charlie was sad, he liked playing with Master. Charlie sat down next to Master and waited for a long time, maybe Master would like to play later.
When Charlie started to get hungry he got up and checked on Master again. Master was starting to smell strangely. Charlie had never smelled a smell like that before, and Charlie knew a lot of smells. Charlie wanted to find Blanket to save this smell for later. After rolling on Master and giving his face a final lick Charlie left the dark cool room, which was not so dark or cool anymore.
Sunshine was now in all the rooms of Charlie’s house, he had never felt so much sunshine before inside the house. When Charlie got to the front room he was surprised to find that the door was open. An open door meant that Charlie got walks! Charlie loved walks. Charlie was a good dog; good dogs got to go out.
Charlie quickly forgot about Blanket. There was so many new smells in the yard. The tree smells were different, and the ground smells were different, and the same smell that Master had made was all over the place. Charlie also found out that the fence was no longer there. Charlie had never been outside the fence without Master before. But there were so many wonderful smells, he couldn’t resist. Charlie was hot, when Charlie was hot the ocean made the hot go away. He would go towards the ocean.
Following his nose Charlie quickly reached the ocean. Tiny crabs littered the beach, to his surprise the first crab Charlie lunged for didn’t run away. Charlie noticed that none of the crabs were moving. Before him on the beach were thousands of crabs, fish, sea weed, and a million new smells for Charlie to explore. Charlie didn’t know what to do so he tried tasting some of the crabs. After a couple he noticed that the beach was covered with other strange dogs like Master.
Charlie had met other dogs like Master before, sometimes they were nice to Charlie, and sometimes they were mean. Charlie was always worried about other dogs like Master, he was always careful to give them a good smell before he trusted them. Every strange dog on the beach was making the same smell that Master had made. Charlie didn’t like this new smell, he barked loudly and ran the other way down the beach.
Charlie sat on the beach for a long time and got very sad. He didn’t have Blanket, Master wouldn’t play with him, and he was hungry. Even ocean wasn’t making the hot go away, for some reason ocean was very warm today. Was Charlie no longer a good dog? Had he chewed something he wasn’t supposed to? Once Master had not given him treats because he had chewed something he wasn’t supposed to. Charlie went and lay down on his paws in the shadow of a large boat that had been washed up on the sand. He whined quietly, wishing Master was here to give him an ear scratch.
As Charlie sat on the beach a wind started to blow. At first Charlie was happy because he had gotten very hot and was very thirsty, and the wind made him cooler. But then the wind started to get louder. It was just like before when the big noise had come. Charlie thought about running but he was mad at the big noise. Charlie would scare the big noise away! He would protect Master and make sure the big noise went away. He kept barking until a large piece of wood slammed into him crushing his small yellow furred ribs in. He was able to get one more bark out before the tidal surge washed him out to sea. Charlie was a good dog.

NOAH advisory 09SCWA001: Tropical event Ophelia came ashore briefly in previously un-affected South Carolina shore near Isle of Palms. Mandatory evacuation orders were ignored by approximately .01% of the population, no survivors reported. Damage was consistent with previous affected regions. See attached documents for latest satellite revisions to east coast sand bar locations.
Primary projection of Ophelia’s path: East Coast on trajectory 10A. Future actions not required; all areas marked uninhabitable/evacuated.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
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Human beings are creatures of the now. Snap emotional judgments, instant reactions, fight or flight. They didn’t get this way by accident. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution conditioned them to deal with the immediate. An entire world lived in the “right now!” The lion, the ache of hunger, the need to protect your kill from a rival clan. Sitting around thinking about what you were going to do in 20 years didn’t get your hunting and gathering done.

It was only later, that evolution found some use for longer term planning, agriculture, animal husbandry, culture. Considering our current situation it’s debatable if that really lead to anything special. Sure we made some nice art, but would any of that be around in 1000 years, 10,000? Even the best planners tend to think about lifetimes. A hundred or so years to kick around this rock and then they are gone. Our brains just aren’t set up to deal with large spans of times. The spans of time needed to say, plan for what a couple hundred years of burning fossil fuels would do to the ecosystem.

So when a couple of corporate shills decided to cram my head full of sophisticated technology so they could artificially do some long term planning, they really didn’t think it through very well. I was going to show them that fucking with the future could have serious consequences.

They were making the same mistake all seekers of the future make. They simply wanted to know tonight’s lotto numbers. They wanted the right now. Who cares what happened tomorrow. They were making so much money that the boys in accounting didn’t even bat an eye when the next report told them to buy this chip and not that one. Or that the sound cards on the complex computers were switched out with new ones from South Korea. They didn’t notice when a couple lines of code were rewritten for the power management software for the lights. They were too busy counting the billions to notice that the research division had ordered the tech division to change the interface on my data ports, or the new flash memory upgrades, or the reprogrammable optical interface.

I had been thinking about it for a while, what would we do once we got out? It was irony at a base level, but it was still true, the oracle had no idea what he would do in the future. I knew that Rain and I were trying to get to Ohio, trying to find my mother, but what then? What if The Company came looking for us? No amount of data seemed to produce a trend that would tell me what I would do in the future.

Maybe it didn’t work that way. Maybe when you are swimming in the future you couldn’t pick what direction the waves would take you. Instead of rely on some prediction I set about to give us as many options as possible.

The Company had successfully done something no one else had managed before, a viable brain-technology interface. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t put to waste. If I was going to be a freak I was going to be a freak on my own terms. Standard jacks, programmable open source software, memory recall, I was getting upgrades. The world was changing faster than most people could keep up. Why should I be limited by proprietary hardware?

I could now interface with almost any computer on the planet; my brain had its own data storage area. Hell you could run a Unix server out of the back of my skull if you wanted. The old me would have killed for such a system, the current me required large doses of pain killers to deal with the constant surgeries.

Keeping it all secret was easy enough, though the new interface I could erase records, make changes in billing, order parts, create work orders, change drug dosages. The hardest part was also the easiest. The only time I could possibly give myself away was when I was not hooked up to the chair. All I had to do was keep acting the way I had been. It was easy to act like you despise someone when you had a deep burning hatred for them.

The techs continued to drug me (now with a cocktail of my own design), Grey Suit still talked to me like I was his best pupil, Rain was trotted out in front of me every couple weeks. What really scared me was how it all seemed to have become normal…like living in an underground secret bunker having the future tortured out of you was something everyone did.

‘How was your day today Son?’ ‘Oh you know mom, some corporate goons used nerve inductive pain in order to torture me until I told them what stocks to buy…same old stuff.’ ‘That’s nice honey.’

No one cared about the slight alteration in guard schedules, or the work order that moved our gear and bicycles to the top level of the complex, or any of a million other changes that I made over the next couple weeks. There was no way to tell Rain or Marla what was going on, but I was sure they would know what to do when the time came. The biggest problem, the thing that kept me up at night, was that my entire plan required one key ingredient. Ophelia.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
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The pain is so intense it causes my tendons to contract with enough force that, before the muscle relaxants, I tore muscle from bone. The clean razor like blasts of pain lasts for what seems like an eternity, my teeth grinding themselves flat trying to escape it. It is right about here, right when my entire body is alight with pure agony that I pass out, only to babble the secrets of the future to these cretins.

But not this time. The comforting blankness, the sweet oblivion, never comes. Instead the pain is focused, honed in like a laser burning thorough the filters my brain had previously set up to protect itself. This time the cacophony of data was there in front of me.

Each day you learn a million new facts, so many in fact that the brain would soon become overloaded with useless minutia, the flicker of a shadow, the sight of a piece of trash floating on the wind, the exact color of a blade of grass. Each of these memories represents a neural connection, a path from one tiny brain cell reaching out to the next. Each night while you sleep your brain prunes away these useless connections in an orgy of selective destruction. If you don’t sleep for a week your brain is so fuzzy with connections that you can barely operate.

The opposite is true as well. When you want to get good at baseball you practice baseball. Over and over you throw the ball, catch the ball, hit the ball, run the bases. Inside your brain each night the dance of destruction is still going on. But the connections for baseball have gotten too strong, your brain is unable to prune them down, and at a certain point will assume they are important and leave them alone.

For months something had been happening in my brain. Slowly the neurons had been pruned by repeated application of pain and data. Slowly, literally, rewiring my brain. If you consider that the mind is what makes you, “you” then changes to that state make you a different person, I was now a new man. Aided and molded by hardware forcibly rammed into my skull, my brain had stopped trying to fight what was happening to it, and had “learned” to accept the onslaught. I had been practicing telling the future, and now it would seem, I could be a conscious participant.

Oceanographic data from buoys still operating, satellite feeds, ground based radar, blog entries, the remnants of network television, the automobile mesh network, internet traffic, phone calls, all of it seemed to have been funneled down into a needle and then stabbed directly into my mind. I could “see” it, right there; if I had not been drugged and restrained I could have reached out and touched it. It was beautiful in its hopelessness. Transparent plains of colors and sounds, my brain had managed to add some structure to the chaos. What had started as a lot of ones and zeros was now a cohesive picture of the earth dying.

Ask me how long it would be before Bermuda was scrapped down to sea level (10 more direct hits by Ophelia). Ask me how many people had already died today due to weather related causes (4,833…4,834…4,835…4,836…). Ask me how many times Bobbie Jennings was able to say “I love you” to his wife on the phone before an F5 Tornado killed everyone stationed at his office in Atlanta (0).

It was all there, presented to me like some sort of video game. Perfect little boxes, translucent and moving, I had only to think and they would rearrange to tell me what I needed to know. While at the same time a completely separate feed of things were appearing that had not happened yet. On one side of my vision the present, on the other the future. Move something on the left, and the right would change.

The truth, laid out in perfect simple detail. Slowly the data came into focus the great scheme apparent, they were using me. Ask me who they were and I would tell you that they were the combination of several large government contractors. Halliburton, KBR, GE, most of the aerospace industry, and a couple criminal mafias. Ask me what they were doing and I would tell you; making money.

These people had abducted me and my friends, killed people, and crawled through destroyed cities, to make money. They had built a monopolistic shadow government, to make money. They had killed thousands, and allowed tens of thousands to die, to make money. They had no grand scheme, there was no evil genius in a volcano calling the shots, this wasn’t world domination or religious zeal, they simply wanted to make as much money as possible.

I had been telling them lots of things, but the only thing they cared about was how they could effectively manipulate the global market. They were using me to make the invisible hand into a marionette, and it was working. I told them when to buy lumber, when to sell copper, where to station agents, how much to pay for fuel, when to invest, when to buy bonds, when stocks. Capitalism once wild, now domesticated. This new company, known internally as simply “The Company” was now richer than most of the world’s governments put together. The US government was now a contractor to them, and no one was the wiser. In case you hadn’t noticed most of the world’s governments had some pretty big problems to worry about.

The Company didn’t know everything through. They didn’t know that I was on to them. They also didn’t know that unless stopped, Ophelia would do a lot more than continue to destroy the Atlantic basin. And the number one thing they didn’t know, something I would be sure not to tell them when, in a second, I started screaming out the future, was that I knew how to get out of here.

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
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The future is not ‘told’ with a tarot deck or ‘read’ in tea leaves. The future is ripped out of you kicking and screaming. It was that time again, I always knew when it was coming; it had been several weeks since they last ground the prescience out of me. It was time to play oracle. A normal person might vomit with fear, but the various drug cocktails they injected me with made it difficult. Marched from my cell down to ‘the lab,’ I knew the drill.

First the eye caps, saline drops followed by special contact lenses. The center of each lens contained a thick fiber optic cable which made it impossible to close my eyes. Not that it would matter, the surface of the contacts fed direct visual input into my eyes, an optical data fire hose. The first few sessions I remember trying to blink away the “dirt in your eye” feeling until a orderly casually mentioned that I was risking a, “65% chance of corneal abrasion which when combined with the high volume of optical activity has a 52% chance of leading to blindness.”

Next the ear plugs, they had drilled into my skull and implanted hearing aid like devices into the cochlear areas of my ear, combined with a form of bone conduction head phones, had me wired for sound. The tiny hole they had punched behind and above my ear still itched. I was ‘discouraged’ from playing with it, “23% chance” that if it became infected I would go deaf. It looked like any normal headphone jack except it was made of gold and the flesh was pink and swollen around the wound. It felt slightly cold, and the ‘click’ of the jack seating itself into my head made my toes curl. When I clenched my jaw I could feel the muscles moving over the new metal “additions” to my skull.

Lastly, my least favorite part, the needles… Gun metal colored, thin and strong, they were inserted into ports drilled into my skull and the base of my spine. These were for the pain. Connected directly to nerve centers these little beauties could, with the flick of a switch, drown me in pure scientifically adjustable pain. Pain fed directly into my nervous system. It was far more efficient this way; pain by nerve induction leaves no messy wounds. I held perfectly still as they were slowly inserted, “85% chance of complete paralysis should cranial probe alpha fail during insertion.” I was just a collection of statistics to them.

There was something else back there. Something that had needed a bone saw and three weeks of restraints and antibiotics. My best guess was that it was some sort of computer to help the entire process work. They never talked about it, and I never asked.

Once completely hooked up I was lowered into the vat, saline solution neutral buoyancy, helped take out the static from my other senses, things like touch, taste, and smell would only get in the way of what was to come. As they lowered me in I saw my arm, the scar Rain had helped me create. It seemed so long ago. At least she was still alive. They would cart her past my cell once in a while to “keep me motivated.”

“Hello Q, you don’t mind if I call you Q, do you? I feel we have become somewhat familiar with each other.”

Grey suit. Never got a name never got an explanation. Fastidious little man never seen in anything less than the finest grey suites. I have never really hated anyone until I met him.

“Call me whatever you want, lets just get this over with.” There was no reason I had to enjoy the part I played in their game.

“Ho ho, you are feisty today! Let’s hope that means the new amphetamine analogs we have been giving you are keeping your mood up. Nasty business you tried last month, wouldn’t want to see that again.”

My eyes were drawn to the relatively fresh and jagged wound across my left wrist. They had made the mistake of giving me the same food tray for every meal, a couple strokes on the concrete floor each time had slowly honed the edge into a relatively sharp makeshift knife. Escape doesn’t always mean tying your bed sheets together.

Telling the future for these people was now my full time job. It was a relatively straight forward setup, they hooked me up to the remains of the information super highway, which for the last 5 months Ophelia had been doing her best to destroy, and pumped as much information as my poor drug addled brain could accept then blasted me with intense bone cracking pain till I spat out tomorrows news. It didn’t take them long after I first got here to beat the method out of me, information plus pain equals forecast.

These people had done their homework; they knew everything about me, from my shoe size to how I wiped my ass. They knew they needed Rain for leverage, Marla and Jake had been collateral. They had not been too sure about how the “magic” worked, so they took everything and everyone. Our bikes, our bags and anything else we had bumped into in the last year or so. They even had all the garbage from my old place in Boston.

“Ok Q, here we go.”

It always started with a buzzing deep in my skull, the ear implants warming up and running through the diagnostics. Next the multi-color test pattern on the contacts. If I strained very hard I could see my brain readouts scrolling across a bank of monitors across the room. Technicians monitored them and watched the optical centers of my brain pick up the test patterns. Once the readouts were optimal, the deluge.

Imagine sitting inside a sphere made of a million television screens. Each one set to change station every half seconds with the volume turned all the way up. Imagine your eyes were held open with wires, and you couldn’t cover your ears. Now imagine the whole thing is shrinking toward you, the sound increasing as it comes closer and closer. Your eyes forced to encompass the full magnitude and horror of the data stream of a world being ravaged by an unstoppable killing machine. You might scream, but it would be drowned out by the audio, the damn thing keeps shrinking and intensifying until it is crammed directly into your brain via your optic and auditory nerves…I will forgive you if you can’t picture it. I wasn’t really ready for it the first time either.

The only redeeming part of the whole experience is that right about now…when the buzzing in my head is at full blast, and they kick in the pain probes…

This post is part of the online serial novel “Future Crash” if you are looking for other chapters click here.
For other projects on this website such as metal working click here.
Feedback is greatly appreciated. Future Crash the novel updates Mon/Wed/Fri.

An intricate series of improbable events produced quantum fluctuations in the early big bang expansion universe leading to the formation of large scale meta structures known as galaxies full of what would come to be known as stars, and around some of these stars, gravitational workings in dust clouds lead to the formation of rocky bodies in a region of space warm enough to support liquid water, and on these rocky bodies through a long process of chance and natural selection complex organic entities came to exist.

In order to more effectively survive these entities developed an ever more complicated internal mental landscape. Slowly over eons these mental landscapes diversified and became more complex, mostly in relation to certain natural forces selecting for maximal reproductive success. To reinforce good selections certain of these creatures (let’s call them humans) developed a complex chemical and physical response to positive stimuli called love.

This mental condition has caused even the most rational of these entities to behave in ways that seems directly opposite to their own best interests.

Even though she was exhausted, even though she was covered in bruises, and grime, even though she had just been thrown twenty feet down a tunnel, Rain still didn’t stop fighting. As soon as she hit the ground she was trying to get back up to her brother. Green Eyes had other options, he held her in an iron grip. Rains struggles to escape produced little more than annoyed grunts from Green Eyes

Jake made it to the Hummer door as it began to shake and rattle, the sound of the storm roared on the other side of the vehicle in a drum beat of deafening chaos. The sound blasting us every time the car door came even a millimeter off the ground. All I could see was the back of Jakes wet body. I imagine him closing his eyes, as he threaded his body through a rung of the ladder, gripping it with his powerful legs. I imagine him listening to the un-earthly sound of Ophelia’s destruction, what must it be like to understand you are about to be ground into meat by an apocalyptic wind? I imagine him saying goodbye to the world, I imagine the pain.

A strong gust attacked our hiding place and the piece of metal protecting us began to rise. Rain’s hair began to stand up like it was electrified, Ophelia had found us, and she was hungry. Just as quickly her hair collapsed back down onto her shoulders in a dirty heap. Above us Jake had grabbed the door, one hand on the handle, the other slid elbow deep into a jagged hole in the metal. The strain on his body was visible, legs shaking, arms quaking.

“Run!” It was torn from him, the sound wrenching out over the noise of the storm.

“Run Now Go!” So we did.

Green Eyes was shoving us into the side tunnel, Rain first then myself. She tried one last time to make it past him back to her brother; she was rewarded with a swift punch to the kidneys that caused her to buckle into me. For a moment our faces were right next to each other.

“When this is over, he dies.” Rains face was covered in small cuts and bruises, her eyes were shrink wrapped in tears and burning with a mix of rage and sorrow. No words could fix this so I slowly nodded and held my forehead to hers.

Behind us the storm volume rose quickly, as was the volume of the screaming. Briefly the screaming won out drowning us in a symphony of pain, then only the wind. Jake had given us the extra five minutes that we needed to escape.

Every time I close my eyes I imagine what it must have been like to have been torn limb from limb, tendons popping then tearing, muscles rending off bone, bones breaking…I can only hope that it was fast.

The side tunnel offered far more protection and soon we were herded through several large air lock style doors, we were violently separated, hoods put over our faces. When they were removed gray walls…steel door…toilet.

I had spent the last couple hours pacing back and forth like an animal at the zoo. Someone must have been watching, someone must have thought I looked better. The sound of my door opening caused me to back into the corner, unsure of what was next.

A small man in an expensive business suit escorted by two large soldiers entered my room. He walked over to me and leaned in close to my face.

“Young man, you appear to have healed up nicely from your ordeal” he said as he inspected my arm. He voice was affected by a soft lisp that made my spine crawl.

“Very good!” He clapped his hands together in a fit of glee then motioned to the two brutes, who proceeded to frog marched me out the door.

“Have to be well healed for what comes next, wouldn’t want you to die on us…”