Anthem: Speculative Fiction

Posted on 8:04 am in Dystopic, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Story | 0 comments

In a future where quantum computing determines the masters of men, the Little Red Riding Hood Wolf is a liar, a killer, and a cannibal. Copyright © 2009 Teresa Wymore. All rights reserved. “Anthem” is a fictional work of speculative fiction.

She had lost weight. At least ten pounds. Her black-and-navy fatigues belonged to someone much larger, but along with the oversized clothing and wild brunette curls, her wide eyes deceived if they suggested childlike innocence. “You’ve looked better, Alex,” I said.

“Not going back.”

“You’re all leaving.” The voice faded behind the thud of cleats as a ragged soldier stepped from behind a stack of metal pipes. He charged his rifle and nodded an apology to the bald man standing beside me. “Sorry, Colonel, but they don’t belong here.”

“We lost twenty soldiers in the last offensive,” said the colonel. “We don’t need trouble with the Nation, now do we, Sergeant? Alex is leaving. They’re all leaving.”

The Nation’s reputation encouraged cooperation from a careful man like the colonel. The sergeant was another matter, but they were both traitors to their army, their faithlessness hardly a surprise to me. I had spent my life defending my species against sapiens aggression.

Heat from the sergeant’s charging rifle shimmered the air, and when the colonel raised his own, it gleamed with an oily seep. I carried a revolver loaded with jacketed hollow points. The load gave good expansion without excessive recoil and, more importantly, it avoided extensive meat damage. Like all Patriots, I might have been mistaken for an Old West gunfighter, complete with leather boots, a black blazer, and a lawless revolver holstered on one hip. That is, if a woman had ever ravaged the American frontier.

With a discreet finger, I unstrapped and cocked the hammer. My adjutant, Ricqa, did the same.

The sergeant swung his rifle, gesturing with exaggerated movements that covered for trembling hands. “You let one in, and more always follow. And what do you think they want? To help us? To help themselves!”

I watched the sergeant’s lips compress into a tight, white line, and color drain from his cheeks, so when the colonel growled his order again, I was already diving at Alex.

The sergeant fired. Ricqa fired back, his bullets scarring the steel walls as Alex and I rolled. Caught in the crossfire, the colonel dropped like dead weight, a rifle burn leaving a black crater in his chest.

The sergeant took aim but stumbled, hit by a ricochet. As he sprawled onto the floor, his rifle spun away. Ricqa flipped him to his back, used a boot to break his nose, and stood awaiting an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. When I gave a slight nod, he shot the sergeant dead.

Alex fumbled with a rifle until I plucked it from her grasp. Ricqa cuffed her wrists and escorted her to my ship.

***

I spit black water and splashed away from the roar of tanks, their metal hinges groaning as their steel belts crushed the forest. After the water receded and my boots hit hard ground, I felt renewed strength. The deafening roar had faded to a hum, punctuated by explosions of grenades that fizzled out quickly on a planet with no oxygen.

Although a viroskin covered me like a second skin, absorbing the radiation from Dahmin’s suns, the stinging ammonia rain made my lungs burn. Metabolizing drugs created oxygen internally and filtered poisons through accelerated sweating. What the film didn’t protect, the viromeds repaired, but their turpentine reflux was nauseating.

I was on my way to meet with the colonel, and not for the first time. I had been through this moment over-and-over, hoping to undo everything I had done. I wouldn’t make the mistake again of leaving her at the mercy of those with no mercy.

I carried a map and note from one of the cells of Resistance fighters that littered the valley. If I could avoid the tanks, I might also work my way clear of other cells entrenched in the outskirts of the city.

Picking my way through blue foliage, I glanced around, searching through the darkness for something alien on the alien world. I thought I saw the grimy face of a pale man, and when I blinked, the world became a riot of ghostly images. Across the landscape, people stood superimposed, their entangled iterations like trails of motion, but nothing moved. Although I swiped at the closest ones, I failed to move them. Unlike my mind, my hands were trapped in time.

Time travel was not so glamorous as one might imagine. Mostly, there was the insanity. If Einstein had been right, and light speed was a constant, then time travel would have become a technology as popular as the Integrid. Since science had not been entirely successful with its notion of time, metascience developed its own. The technology of Shifting had yet to achieve what I discovered on Dahmin, that its cautionary theory was right: the trouble with “shifting” your mind from one probability to another was the inevitable confusion of who, exactly, “you” were. Hence, the insanity.

I stepped into an iteration of myself and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the phantoms were gone, but my throat was dry. I choked on my own saliva. As I coughed, an exquisite rush distracted me, and I tasted a mouthful of scotch. The heady burn was too real to be a mere memory. Distracted by taunting desires, I didn’t notice the body until I tripped over it. Alex gazed up at me, her body charred and smoking as she sighed away her final breath.

I would have to try again…

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