A man named Fool watched the jagged, deformed hands scroll by from the backseat of a hired car, the tint on the windows giving the solar collectors a gloomy feel, even as they sparkled like fractal stalks of pure obsidian. None of it had existed in Fool’s day. He gone on countless runs with his abuela to the massive cornfields in the surrounding counties to steal a trunkful of corn. Now all that...
It’s hard to recognize gunfire if you’ve never really heard it before. The sounds you hear on TV aren’t the most realistic, and they lack a certain proximity factor, a physical deforming of the surrounding air that you can feel at the base of your spine. Real gunfire is at the same time higher pitched and gut-rattling, such that you’re not sure how you’re supposed to respond.
The tunnels in the lower levels were always dark and smelled of chalk. There was something about the dust in the air that made Ash want to gag. It was hard not to think of all those particles getting into her lungs when she could see them so clearly in the beam of her flashlight. She had a mask—basically a tube top for her face—that she’d pulled up over her nose, but she didn’t trust the thin...
The email was from Daemon78756. The subject was Anomaly, and the message body contained nothing but an address. Scott selected the address—2811 Shoalwood Ave—and pasted it into Mapquest. A few seconds later, he had a rough idea where in Austin he needed to go. He clicked on Directions, entered the address of his trailer, and printed out the turn-by-turn to get him to his destination.
Rider made good on his promise of a proper beer, returning to the table with two glasses filled to the brim with dark, almost muddy liquid and a small but well-defined head. He sloshed her drink on a paper coaster and cringed.
If it hadn’t been for the bright green signs calling out the exits for the city of Holliday, Trace Butler might have driven right past what appeared to her as an endless black prairie with hardly enough evercrete and glass to reflect the bright moon hanging overhead. Driving west out of Wichita Falls had been like watching the brightness go out on a display, until the only lights left were those...
Nobody hung out in the break room of the tech shop on Level 3, mostly because it smelled like plastic. More accurately, it smelled like plastic after it had passed through the digestive system of an orange fungus for which the Biology books had no name but the other works had taken to calling the Stuff. The Stuff loved the break room because that’s where all the old equipment was stashed—routers...
At first, Clyde thought it was just the weather, something about the barometric pressure dropping as a storm slid down over the mountains. The gray clouds brought only a fine mist, but they blanketed the land, cutting visibility down to almost nothing. Clyde was on the south edge of the ranch when his fingers began to tingle in his leather gloves. He’d been working on a section of fencing that...
There had been rumors about VNet circulating around the message boards and chat rooms, stories about a virtual world that felt more real than reality. And while some of the claims were wild and their sources questionable, one common thread always seemed to come up—the idea that when the two services were put side-by-side, it was VNet where the user felt more present. The Net was home to many...
The synth didn’t hit until later that night. Curtis became aware of it in stages as foreign threads in his biochip popped off, executed some quantum change to his mood, and then expired. Over and over, like pop rocks sizzling at the back of his throat. Only this time, the sensation was far more intense than a little tickle behind his nostrils; the synth code ran on his biochip, and the biochip...
The advertisements for Metro Futurology featured a cavernous lobby full of glass and metal in a building that resembled the Tower of Babel stretched too thinly toward the sky. The sleek videos boasted finely appointed rooms with climate control, memory foam mattresses on the bed, and enough square footage to do a simple home workout. Blurbs from previous customers extolled the unmatched comfort...
There was a sticky note at the top of Hunter’s monitor that read in case of emergency, call Shawn. He’d hardly noticed the sharp black lines of the text before, but now, as the time passed two in the morning, he’d taken to reading the hastily scribbled phone number over and over again.
