SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Search the dwellings!” the Mihari overseers ordered. “Find the stragglers, kill anyone who resists.”

The city was ordered, built in the caldera of a dead volcano and offering protection from dust storms. The Rulani fanned out, moving like ants down streets, and 873e found itself forcing its way into a house, the door hastily barricaded.

As it entered, words came to him, the tone making the inhabitant’s threat obvious: “Come one step closer and I will kill you.”

873e stopped.

The native was protecting a female, her legs obviously defective as she used a staff to walk. They were trying to escape the house through a tunnel bored into the bedrock, likely an escape route out of the city. The male was a boy, anger and terror in his eyes, his scales the calm blue of childhood.

These two weren’t like the rest of their race. The natives of Saruvoi might be sentient but what 873e saw in his eyes was deeper, memory that went beyond existence. Worse, they saw the same in it, understanding that behind the blank expression there was a conscious mind screaming for release.

873e stepped back and lowered its weapon. Then it focused and projected a thought, hoping the native would hear.

“Go.”

The boy cocked his head, then realised this wasn’t a time for questions, rather it was a chance to run, and motioned his companion further into the bolthole. “Alia, quickly.”

There was no time for questions. 873e watched them go as the male sealed the entrance behind them and it returned outside. Its superiors knew there had been people in the house and it realised retribution would come, swift and unforgiving. Had it been worth it?

“There it is! You two, follow the two who escaped! Find that hobbled girl, she’s the what passes for royalty here, and we’ll need her if the rest of the populace are to be tamed!”

The overseers sounded angry and advanced on 873e, their spittle landing on its skin as the Mihari vented their rage with kicks and blows. 873e was grabbed; it dropped its weapon and made no attempt to fight back. There was no point. They forced it to its knees, then a weapon was pressed to its temple and fired. Its body slumped into the dust but, in the microsecond before its death, 873e realised that its batch number wasn’t just a designation, it was more than that.

It was a name.

The hologram of the Rulani, one of the engineered Mihari zombies, rotated on an invisible axis, spinning slowly a few inches above the library floor. Sandis sat looking at the creature, transfixed as he mulled over an afternoon’s worth of research.

They were drones, shock troops, and yet once they’d been a vibrant society with their own customs and technology. Most people thought of the Rulani, not of the Sankai, their precursors, the ancient culture the Mihari had almost completely wiped out. Did they even exist anymore? Were they hiding on some distant moon, some forgotten asteroid waiting for the Empire to burn itself out?

Rheia would know; there wasn’t much she didn’t. He wondered if anyone had asked her that. Disabling the emitter, Sandis collected his things and decided, as it wasn’t too late, to see if she was still in her office. He had a few more questions to ask that only she, he suspected, could answer. It was, after all, still Ask Anything Day, even if classes were done.

Originally published by AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review

A thousand new stars came to life one night in September; a great sparkling swath of them dancing along the southern horizon. And then as quick as they appeared, they leapt away in a dazzling, white rush. Donald was camped out past the tree line. He looked up from the kettle of Labrador tea he was brewing to see the whole astonishing display. It lasted no more than ten seconds. As soon as the skies had returned to crystalline fixity he went back to his fire, adding some birch shavings to the peat and blowing the tea into a boil. He thought of Interface as it steeped. He thought of Interface, and of isolation, and loneliness.

It had been great grandmother who had first found Interface. She was nineteen at the time and had been hunting for scrap metal along the burn zone that surrounded the old uranium mine called Big Echo. The automated weapons had not fired for years. The gun towers were crooked and rusty: exhausted sentinels waiting for the great wind that would finally topple them into eternity. But the scavenger worried that some senile fragment of intelligence might yet linger there, half asleep in the guts of the things, in the tangle of wires and tubing, waiting for the quirk of movement that would startle the infernal machinery into life.

She had seen him through a tear in the perimeter fence. He was naked in the autumnal chill and staring at her. So pale, she had said, he was almost shining. She recognized what he was meant to be immediately. He was the very image of one of the celebrated engineers she had seen on the news when she was a child, one of the heroes who was going to teach humanity how to fly to the stars. Dr. Schwann something; something very German, very formal sounding, very correct, echt . And there he was, alive again, looking helpless and cold. He wasn’t of course. He wasn’t Schwann. And he wasn’t helpless. He was something else entirely. She learned that soon enough.

She had come to: battered, bruised and torn. And he was gone. She didn’t see him again for six years. Then one morning he walked into camp without a word and helped himself to bannock and stew. Great grandmother nearly went into shock, and when her daughter asked her who the naked man was, she said, “That’s your father.”

He came and went after that. Or they did. Sometimes the absence was weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years. It been a decade between the day Donald’s mother dispatched one with an axe in a fit of rage and horror, while he slept, cracking open his chest like a watermelon, until he showed up again on the twins’ tenth birthday. Still with the same body, the old folks told them, the same soft, almost translucent skin, the mop of thick red hair, blonde beard, blue eyes. It was always the same body. It was always a thing like Schwann. And it always arrived when they were near Big Echo.

It seemed to them as if the intelligence that possessed Interface was only partially in control of the body, only partially interested. He might lie in his refuse for a day, gnawing on whatever bones were at hand, or squat in the woods for hours, indifferent to the mosquitoes and the black flies. Yet he might also play with the children at their games, splash about in the lakes and the rivers, throwing them high above the water so they would shriek with laughter as they splashed back down. Sometimes he sat about the fire with them all, listened to the stories and the songs, listened to great grandmother talk about the old days, when humanity ruled the world and the machines were just their slaves.

Interface would often sit and stare into space for hours. Great grandmother would say he was sending his reports to Olympus. If there was no adult about when the creature went into these meditations the twins played at distracting it. Donald didn’t enjoy the game as much as Oliver. He always felt a little queer staring into those eyes: the blue irises contracting against the light, the lids blinking at the wind, but the pupils void. He felt helpless against the indifference of the thing. Besides, it was a game which no one ever won, even if they resorted to acts of petty violence—glowing embers on his lap, slivers under finger nails, poison oak rubbed onto his bare back. It was just as well. In their naivety the boys did not understand that to have the full attention of Interface was to have the full attention of Olympus.