Tag: science fiction

Rick and Morty in: The Alternian Showdown

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Fanart by Tumblr user @vintage-foods

The following is a whacky sci-fi crossover between two of my favorite franchises, Rick and Morty and the webcomic Homestuck.

I had so much fun writing this back in February of last year. If I could write an episode for either story, it would look something like this. Hope you enjoy!

Tavros

Snuffles, formerly known as Snowball, the peaceful leader of this paradise planet, communes with you one last moment before your return to Alternia. You arrived here hours ago, you think, via the strange “portal gun” that Vriska found along the cliffs of your hive. You still have no idea how this thing works, but you’re here. She won’t let you hold it, of course.

You sit in your wheelchair, as ever, before the complicated mechanics that tower this fluffy barkbeast over you.

Vriska is waiting below the grand palace for your procession with the leader to terminate, growing impatient. Not impatient with you whatsoever is Snuffles, his thin, robotic voice smooth in your thoughts.

Most of the intelligent robot barkbeasts have been kind to your brand of tourism, just trying to learn more about them. But Vriska has, in her way, upset the local barkbeasts by openly questioning their society to such a degree that you have to leave now, hours in.

So it goes. She just wanted to make sure things were in order, that they’d be safe if the Condesce came through.

But is it just her order, Tavros?

You can see your reflection in the shine of Snuffles’ steel frame, as you hear his voice. You look tired. Adventuring used to make more sense, just for the shit of it, before the accident. Then you thought Vriska forcing you to spend time together was just her trying to make it up to you.

Now? This other world is perfect to you. It’s a deadly, freak accident that you’re here. If any adults find out you left, you’ll both be culled on the spot.

But the white sun outside here does not scorch the skin. The grass is actually greener, there is no widespread violence just for entering the street, just for being a different breed.

The society was created because it was a dictatorship once, learned its lessons.

Though you’ve never seen this variation of a barkbeast creature before, in your eight sweeps of life, as soon as you felt them in their dimension, you were able to connect.

What does that mean? That you’re meant for more in the universe than Cavalreaping at conscription?

I don’t know.

Snuffles lowers the chamber containing his body, more level to you.

What happened to you was not your fault. Do you want to walk again?

Uh, yeah. But –

Do not ‘but.’ We can supply you with our technology, to restore your usage of legs. We will have to make some adjustments, but it can be done.

You roll your chair back a bit, stunned. The hairs on the bumps of your skin stand on edge.

“But that must be so, uh, expensive, for you, and I’m not a barkbeast, so, how would it connect to my biologies?”

That is why I said we will have to make some adjustments.

“Tavros!”

Vriska’s bellowing, outside.

Not now. She wants to unleash some kind of revolution on Alternia, now, with this “portal gun.” Create an underground railroad to funnel out young trolls, some witchcraft tech that she found in the ground.

What about this world? If the Condesce ever comes through?

What about you, Tavros?

“I don’t know, if I have time – “

“You may return whenever you like,” Snuffles speaks through the equipment. “We will be waiting for you. You remind me of an old friend.”

You take the elevator to the ground, slowly making your way to the entrance. Vriska has taken a seat in the center of the path to the double doors, yards away from the barkbeast guards who keep turning around to observe her. She has a panel of the portal gun open in her lap, staring intently, her vision eightfold at work.

The doors open automatically, but she doesn’t turn when she hears them.

“There you are. Man! Thought I was gonna have to go up there and interrupt some mpreg.”

“Uh, what’s an ‘mpreg’?”

“Some shit Terezi’s lusus told her in a dream once. Thought it sounded funny. Trust me, you don’t wanna know what she thinks it means.”

“Okay, I don’t.”

That gets her to look at you.

A little too saucy. Oops.

“Are you fucking ready or what?” Her voice drips with venom. Your hairs stand on end. “You took forever. I can’t believe the idiot this gold mine belongs to just left this on Alternia? What were they even doing here, spying on us? Doesn’t matter. We can go so many other places than this, Tavros, probably anywhere! If we don’t get killed the second we get back, anyway.”

How is she able to joke about things like that?

“Oh, please,” she reads your mind, cheater, “you and Gamzee joke about that all the time.”

She exaggerates all her vowels at the end there. You aren’t exactly sure what she’s making fun of you for. Is that what she’s doing?

“I thought,” you say, “you wanted to go back to Alternia now.”

She stands, abrupt, and regards you with a glare.

“We wouldn’t’ve even spent so long in this boring little prairie if you weren’t so obsessed with sharing your feelings through that feeble little mind of yours. I wanted to know if this was a planet worth taking over someday, but no, you wanted to discuss the finer nuances of barkbeast shit!”

You don’t point out that her psionics disallowed her primary access to the most powerful beings here.

That was just your luck, for once.

But she heard you.

“Let’s go.”

Moments in the future…

The air is thicker, almost suffocating. You know home. You open your eyes to find yourself rolled back into your hive, from the same place you left, in front of the nearly barred window. Vriska follows you shortly after, closing the green, glowing portal behind you.

“Don’t tell anyone about this,” Vriska begins. She opens that one hatch on the portal gun, frowning, scheming, scheming. She starts to pace around you. You turn back to the window. “This is way, way more important than I’m sure you can even grasp.”

“You got that right.”

Both of you turn to find the strange voice coming from an alien in a new portal, floating ominously across the room.

“What the fuck,” you say, without even meaning to.

You wish Tinkerbull was here.

Vriska doesn’t play this, whatever this is, tucking “her” portal gun in her inner jacket. If Gamzee’s hellish clown gods are real, maybe this is one of them.

Equipping her current sword, Vriska charges at the fragile, blue-haired, bipedal thing in the portal.

“Hey, hey, murderbitch, knock it off!”

“What did you just call me?”

Quickly, the alien barrel rolls out of the portal under her slice, coming up unstable, but finding his bearings as Vriska tries to slice at him from behind.

“What are you? How can I understand you?” Vriska demands this while almost taking his head, but he ducks quick, unbothered.

“A simple voice recognition system, sweetheart – “ He dodges a lash to his face, keeps dodging and dodging, how can he move like that? “Translated into millions of dialects across galaxies – part of the way the portal system works, since I’m here, now it works – which you’d know if you didn’t fucking steal my portal gun.”

“This is yours? Ha! You’re a pathetic, ancient demon!”

“And you’re a future war criminal.”

“You don’t know anything about me!”

Vriska throws the sword and it laces his arm, cutting the white lab coat down to the skin.

“Fuck! The fuck is wrong with this planet?”

“You are, right now!”

“Oh, Morty, you’re really in it now. But no, you weren’t gonna drop the extra portal gun somewhere so obscure that it fled your cumfilled brain the second Jessica even breathed in your perimeter.”

“Who, uh, are you talking to?”

The grandiose alien turns to you, but just for a moment. You’re almost invisible.

“Not you, half breed. Man, it must be hell for you on this world, living under a violent fascist dictatorship where she basically left you to die and you’re disabled? Quick, someone – someone get, the Hallmark channel, or, fuck, is it TLC? Yeah, yeah – ”

“Don’t fucking talk about him like that!”

Vriska defending you? In your sci-fi fantasy nightmare come to life?

Another portal opens, bringing with it a draft of cold and another alien, and this is way too much foreign activity happening in a random brownblood’s hive off the Southern Coast. It’s still evening so the drones won’t be around for hours, and you don’t know how that makes sense if you were in the barkbeast utopia that long, but still, but still –

Vriska always puts you here, too deep in political shenanigans. And you can’t walk out anymore.

The other alien looks like this one, sort of, meager skin pulled over thin bones, but a young one, disoriented from falling ass backwards out of the portal and into your crowded hive.

He has another portal gun, maybe his own, clumsily fixing it to his belt. This forbidden science magic from these aliens, it intrigues you, even if it might be why you die –

“Oh hell no,” says the old alien to the young one, “bitch, you took another one of my guns to look for the gun you already lost?”

“Rick, lay off, I didn’t mean to lose it – “

“Morty, this episode’s only been on for a few minutes and you already fucked up this spectacularly, you’re, you’re wanted upstairs.”

“You were here? How?”

Vriska wants answers. Now.

She marches over to her sword on the floor, expertly kicks the hilt to flip it into her hand, and points it at “Morty,” the young, now mortified alien, whose skin is turning red. You wonder what blood color the old one has. Him, like you, running around with a guy like that? In your outer space?

“Uh, hey, n-no, not really, I was just, y’know, p-passin’ by, up above, just passin’ through – “

“Wow, Tavros,” snorts Vriska, “I think this unintelligent creature is you.”

You and the other unintelligent creature make eye contact.

He doesn’t seem like to you, upfront.

“Wow, if you think I’m like that guy, then, then you’re wrong.” “Morty” laughs, or something. “At least my legs work, and, and some other stuff, am I right?”

You don’t seem to like him upfront. Technically, you have the better blood here, but you can’t say that out loud. You’ve tried.

That other stuff also works about half of the time. You almost say that, because you think it’s funny, but the old one is one roll ahead of you.

“Shit, Morty, the guys upstairs are in talks with TLC for this storyline, you ableist piece of shit.”

“Stop talking!”

Vriska.

She charges Rick again, but this time he pulls out his own weapon – some sort of prismatic gun, hot where the lasers would spill, nothing you’ve ever seen –

Vriska falters, backs up.

“Yeah, no FLARP-ing here, little mistress.” He cocks whatever mechanism, doesn’t pull, which angers her back, defenses raised. He knows what FLARP is? You’re gonna die here. This is a triple agent here to murder you for going off planet. Was it worth it? Is this worse than the drones? “Just give me the gun and me and my grandson will be on our way.”

“Your fucking what-son? Not until you tell me where you’re from, or why you think the Condesce’s territory is your petty playground.”

“None of your business and everything in existence is actually my territory, thank you very much.”

“I don’t belong to you.”

Rick looks amused.

“No, you belong to Fish Hitler.”

“Uh, haha, Hitler,” Morty supplies, “we’ve never been here, by the way, he’s just pulling your leg, um, a-arms, and I don’t know how the gun even got here, that’s, that’s still something – “

“You’re not getting it back,” Vriska growls, ignoring the wide-eyed little one, and you, ever still, “I bet you have eight million! Surely you could spare one for us poor, poor little victims of fascism.”

“Bullshit, you’re probably secretly her biggest fan.”

“Bullshit!”

Vriska jumps for him, physical scuffle, both weapons dropped, and you have no idea why this is happening, neither does Morty, but they seem to have auto-agreed on some kind of villain’s code.

“So, uh, who’s she,” Morty says, suddenly near you, as you watch in horror as their scuffle begins to knock into your desk, throwing things around.

“Trust me, you don’t, want to know.”

It doesn’t last long, Vriska far stronger than him once they’re on the ground, but a sharp elbow to her face that breaks her glasses disorients her long enough that he steals the portal gun from her jacket, bleeding vibrant, uncanny red all the while. She’s barely injured, besides some glass shards to the jaw.

“Morty, let’s get the fuck out of here, stat!”

“Coming, Rick!”

Vriska roars as she chases them towards their quickly vanishing portal, reaching for Morty’s foot at the last second, taking his shoe, only that.

When the portal closes, that feels like a death sentence.

You almost hear something knocking on your front doors.

You’re just, imagining that.

“Shut the fuck up.”

Vriska sighs, tossing the alien shoe, kicking your floorboards, and observing the mess that is her glasses, the remains of the your Fiduspawn cards on the floor, and the desk turned over with all the trivia you’d been collecting in piles, discarded haphazardly now.

You could, not listen.

“Don’t worry, I’ll clean all this up. Put all your little fucking stacks back in their hives.”

That counts as an apology, you think, in Vriska’s world. You guess you’ll take it, if she’s pitching.

“And we’re getting that fucking gun back.”

She squeezes her eyes shut, the sign of her communion attempt, the tendrils of her hair swaying slow. Chills rise all over you, as usual, but you aren’t her target.

“What kind of backwards ass convoluted neuro pathways are these?”

You can’t, get into the alien’s head.

She drops her attempt. “I will.”

I want the gun, also.

“Oh?”

That piques her interest, genuinely. Maybe for the first time all night, you think. Sometimes, Vriska can see you. Ironically, she’s not hiding behind all that glaring glass, at the moment.

You wish she couldn’t read the reason why, that her vicious light would stop exposing you. She can see and hear Snuffles’ sacred, impossible promise to you.

“That’s not gonna happen,” she chuckles, coming closer to your chair. She kicks the wheel a little. “There’s no time.”

It’s a nice idea.

“Keep it at that, ‘toreadoormat.”

Hours in the future, but not many…

Morty

Your name is Morty Smith, and you really didn’t mean to drop that portal gun on Alternia. You swear. You’re not even sure what’s so wrong about it, to be honest.

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The Droid Hunter, Part 1

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The premise of this universe is based on two of my favorite albums by Janelle Monae, Metropolis and The ArchAndroid. By way of those, then, this work is also inspired by the classic science fiction film Metropolis (1927), from which she drew her inspiration. In today’s high tech society, I often wonder how involved robots and AI are going to be in our lives. Personally, I’m all for it, but there are definitely a lot of things that could go wrong. In this, I imagine a dystopian Earth from the point of view of both humanity and AI: Analiste the droid hunter and Haven the droid hunted.

I’m going to be posting this one serially for a few weeks. Hope you enjoy!

Prologue

“Good evening, cyberboys and cybergirls! I am happy to announce that we have a star-crossed winner in today’s heartbreak sweepstakes: Android number 65043, otherwise known as Haven Xiotrip, has fallen desperately in love with a human! And you know the rules! She is now scheduled for immediate disassembly!

“Bounty hunters, you can find her in the Neon Valley Street District at the Leopard Plaza Apartment Complex. The Droid Control Marshals are full of fun rules today. No phasers, only chainsaws and electro-daggers! Remember, only card carrying hunters can join our chase today. And as usual, there will be no reward until her cyber-soul is turned in to the Star Commission.

“Happy hunting!”

Analiste

You sit in the crowded cafeteria of the Metropolis Bounty Headquarters, tonight’s call to action repeating in your mind over and over.

You are one of the youngest bounty hunters in the city at twenty six, as well as the disgraced royal daughter of the Metropolitan ruling family. It wasn’t becoming for someone of your status to do rogue police work, but you applied as soon as you had enough of your own units to pay for the training. Most of your fellow hunters avoid you, stare resentfully and whisper. They don’t get why you’d leave the ease of powerful ranks for something like this, for physical labor that breaks your back, for work they use to try to get in to the upper classes. That’s fine. No one will ever really know.

Unless, of course, they find out that you fall in love with your targets. One target.

The supposed role of the hunter is to pursue criminals. You don’t really have a problem turning some of the more murderous Androids in, but what counts as being in a criminal in this society – falling in love being one, as if that’s even remotely quantifiable by the book of the law – is why you’ve rebelled from your societal position. Though the Androids are superficially artificial, most of them are intelligent, emotional, and compelling. As the Star Commission says, they have souls.

You’ve been a somewhat covert patron of the Retrolove clubs in the Neon Valley Street District since you ran off at the age of twenty. A certain droid with fiery drive and enrapturing soul caught your attention a club called the 6 and kept you coming back like an addict. You’d been watching her for months before she was ever tuned into you, but even then, you knew it was love. Something told you you knew her from somewhere, and the more time you spent with her, the more that felt true, though you still didn’t know how it was possible. Reincarnation on your part? Who knows?

Some would say that robots can’t love humans, and vice versa, but how can the government punish them for something that they can’t do?

It’s been half a year since you’ve seen her last, but she sent you a message two days ago, through one of his clients in the Commission. Her government connection must’ve snitched.

Now, the government not only knows her name, but wants her dead.

Well, you know one thing’s for sure. You’re going to be the first one to find her.

You stand, tossing the rest of your dinner and activating your phasers, fuck a Droid Marshal, giving the crowded room one last look over. Most of the other hunters aren’t in a rush for this one, as there is a Headquarter backlog of hits to be had. Though chasing down an easy target will get enough of these vindictive drones up and raring pretty shortly, the cyber-soul of a 60000 isn’t worth many units. This kill is a routine order.

But not for you.

Magazine article from Indie Uprising, Issue 89:

JAN 76, 2718

Not All Heroes Wear Capes: The History of Retrolove & The Dirty Scavengers Movement

Most robots built during Metropolis’ Retro era (2560-2686) were designed to be all around secretaries, intended for work fulfillment purposes. Millions of factory made, mostly female-evident humanoids were sold by the government to local business owners, to perform filing, cooking, cleaning, and problem solving in the work and home life. These Retro bots were numbered between 60000 and 69999 and were not initially programmed to be intelligent, making them affordable for your average 2600s man. This man had no real technical idea how the Androids functioned, but bought them in the thousands and resold them, using the profits to pay off his debts.

The Retro era was defined by its anti-government sentiment. The human leaders of Metropolis were, and still are, corrupt, rich oligarchs with their secrets locked up in firewalls, militia. When the location of their data centers, which held proof of universal fraud and human slavery, became public knowledge in 2599, groups of terrorist-hackers sprung up, recruiting other disenfranchised humans by the millions. These anarchist groups offered humans who were indebted or living lives of crime an avenue to disrupt the government’s hold on their independence.

When they weren’t stealing government secrets, Retro hackers were social people. In their spare time, they bought Retro bots off of struggling businessmen en masse, reprogramming and redesigning them. They found it easy to rewrite the bots and give them boosted intelligence, enhanced memory, and incredible emotional capacity, using what is now considered legendary independent software. The government, it was discovered, did not take adequate time to safeguard their robots.

Many hackers used the bots as passive companions, alongside or in place of humans who were susceptible to diseases. Some pairs of Makers and Androids, history says, were soulmates. An influential group of serious hackers used the bots to help supply their anti-Metropolitan crime rings, generating billions of cybercurrency and raking in profit surges for the black market. Many of the Retrobots rose to be leaders and shakers in the movement.

When the government learned that hackers were misusing their products, they doubled down on their tendency for overreaction. In 2618, they demanded all debts, by all people, be paid in full immediately, which was ridiculous. The Revolution soon called for ultimate freedom, for war, and started moving in troops. But any violent attempts to overthrow the government were thwarted. All the revolutionary groups were stomped out and eliminated by the early 2690s, robots and humans alike. These gradual killings resulted in 110 million human casualties, including 30 million missing persons reports. This was the highest record of slaughter since the end of the Nuclear War of 2300, during which Metropolis wiped out 198 million people. So it goes. The thousands of leftover Retro Androids were carelessly disassembled and discarded in the radioactive wastelands of the outer Valleys.

Our government was forgiven by peace keeping agencies universe-wide, once again, for the extermination of their people. The 2700s have been years of rigid existence and low creativity since: Government-approved tech, or off with your heads!

At the end of the Retro Era, the Metropolitan government enacted laws to prevent another uprising of the poor and robotic, including the famous Sexual Contamination Act of 2686: All man-on-robot love is punishable in a court of law by a minimum ten year prison sentence. For humans. The robots are just “destroyed.” But all this law really did was push the man-on-bot movement underground, into the throes of the still-moving black market, where the Revolution dances on in clubs today.

This is what the government is most afraid of: You can’t just wipe the memory of a Retrobot. The 2500 hackers of legend, who designed the immortal Skyaea software with care, crafted a level of mysterious encryption in the core parts of their Androids, that no one alive, besides the bots themselves, will ever truly understand. Even club owners these days are obsessed with trying to wipe a Retro’s slate clean. What they don’t understand is that these droids were intrinsically designed to learn, to resist, to take down The Man. Wherever you put them, they will adapt to their environment so that they can upend and correct the environment. They will do this without you having to tell them. This is the spirit of love, of freedom.

While club owners are the most populous on the street, and make the most units, the Scavengers are the real heroes of our movement. Sure, they spend literally all of their time sifting through garbage, often at the risk of exposure to death by radioactive toxic waste, but they’re the dealers, and without them, there would be no product. Against the law, they use their handiness and old-school programming flair to discover long abandoned Retro boys and girls in the darkest corners of our world. Fix them up, and sell them to your low and high end clubs.

They’re the only ones who grasp the Skyaea programming as well as anyone can, make the Retros move again in those all special ways you like. Make them hypersexual, hyper-responsive to human minds. The 80000s and above, Metropolis manufactured and approved, will never. They don’t have the soul.

The problem with the Retrolove club owners, the Scavengers’ customers, is that they’re often failed, disgraced Metropolitan businessmen who don’t know shit about programming. Most of these owners are too greedy to hire a team of actual repairmen, or give the Scavengers a place in the business, so. When they buy the Retrolovebots, and the bots eventually “crash” or “change course,” they tinker with their proportionately pre-moderated settings themselves, to try and make them more profitable. Sometimes they damage them, sometimes beyond repair. After which they “hit the shredder,” or get wasted into raw materials. Those materials are used for building construction, human implants, anything, really. This is why club owners cannot be trusted.

That’s why you all keep coming back to us Scavengers: you know the government has your nads crushed between its fists, and you want release. You want the danger of knowing that the Androids, as they are, know us better than we know ourselves. That creation has surpassed creator.

This is what makes the Retrolove movement so Revolutionary: the government has never truly cared what we do in our black market clubs or where we stick it, because even the government, after all, has to do it too. The taboo orgasm is the one safe ground, the one thing we can all agree on, and sometimes, those fated orgasms lead to love. That’s why they let our practices slide, apart from a few arrests, and even consume them.

The Dirty Scavengers are your creation. You want to demand our services? Stop treating us like shit. Pay us. We own you.

Part 2

The Droid Hunter, Part 2

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Part 1

Haven

You are currently being chased by two tracking drones overhead, dodging and darting between dark alleys in the Leopard Plaza Complex. This means bounty hunters will be following soon, and you’re fucked.

The gray, mechanical orbs shoot red streams of voltage at your chassis from the air. Their phasers are set to low, meant to stun you into inaction and burn minute holes in your exterior, but some of your wires are already fraying through the casing of platinum and elastic-silicone that comprises your skin. You’re a 65000 series Android, and thus not built with integrated weapons.

Close combat with black tungsten sickles is your game, but you can’t catapult yourself high enough to strike them directly here, not with the Leopard Plaza’s smooth, vertical walls rising all around you.

That’s the least of your concerns, once they’ve brought the hunters to you.

The upper levels of the Complex beside your Apartment leave you two exit strategies: up or down. You have to get out of the building range, put distance between you and the hunters with your address, but it’s only midnight. The blinding streetlights of the Metro nightlife commotion are downstairs, people and bots alike are going to be paying attention. The only way you hide your trackers is if you remain in the shadows of the upper levels, run alleys until this area of the Leopard is level enough that you can roof jump to the next building. You’ve lived in this block for six years, the maze of it something you know better than the drones, but they have the advantage of flight.

You have a quarter mile of building left to cross until the nearest ledge to your knowledge. You rush out from the end of one alley and sprint towards the mouth of another, moving steadily North, but they’re fast, following and waiting for every moment that you lose cover. One pelts you in the arm and you drop a sickle in open space, hissing as electricity crackles and stalls your limb. With the arm that moves, you pick up the sickle and hurl it at the drone on your left. It pierces the body, sparks jolting, and the drone starts faltering towards the ground.

You aggress the bastard when it’s low enough that you can use your other blade to shank it again, carving the metal outside open and stabbing the circuitry inside until it’s good and wasted, but the other drone shoots your back as you stoop over its partner’s corpse. You turn to throw your sickle at the live one and miss, the blade clattering to the ground way too far away. The bot above you shoots and shoots, faster, harder, stunning dents. The actuators in your back are rapidly growing paralyzed from the shocks. You’re now too stiff and fried to raise your arms and throw your blades, and this is what it wants. Slow you, lock you up, weaken you for the hunters.

You’re exhausted from running. From your Apartment when the drones announced the hit. From your emotions. From your life.

What’s the point? You knew you were risking it all to send her that message. Analiste was only doing what you told her to, letting you go. She hadn’t been back to your Retroclub in months, because you pushed her out. Told her you weren’t worth the class disparity, your ceiling, your crime. You don’t think she believed it, but does it matter? You tell someone to fuck off enough and they start to listen, even those who love you, who you love. Two days wasn’t long enough for you to save this.

Bounty hunters are given the use of chainsaws on the regular. Whoever finds you first won’t bother bringing you to the Star Commission in one piece. If the reward is for your soul itself, they’ll just leave the rest of you here, and you’ll be lucky if it’s only one of them. Sometimes two or three compete against each other and the target for the units.

There are a million things you’d rather watch than that pissing contest. You’d rather watch humans literally piss.

You consider going into sleep mode, expiring peacefully. The other tracking drone comes nearer once it’s processed that you’re hunched over, your top half too stunned to lift. It’s stopped shooting, simply hovering afloat, its one red eye locating you precisely.

You stare into the eye, until the bot is exploded by a pulse of white phase.

Analiste is on one of the high rooftops above, hunter uniform sleek and crimson, the three moons glowing behind her silhouette.

Analiste switches her loaded phaser for a hookshot, sends a long chain and grapple into one of the walls, and scales down it. Both weapons back on her belt, then. She comes over to where you’re capsized on the floor with the disemboweled drone. Stares at it, stares at you.

“Always hated those fucking things,” she says, smiling. “Come on. Soon as the feds realize we butchered the sinister stalkers and I’m going rogue, we got more than bounty hunters to worry about.”

The Droid Hunter, Part 3

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Part 1 | Part 2

Analiste

Haven’s system is worse for wear, but it powers through: detects malfunctioned motors and actuators, retrains itself to avoid damaged connections, and moves ahead with what’s available. You travel the tops of darkened, cloud scraping buildings, grateful Metropolitan architecture is so complex. Roofs can be traveled like a surface terrain of their own, so long as you can jump them, recognize their changes from District to District. Your hookshot assists; Haven holds onto you to steady her through the leaps. Neon Valley is contiguous to the Iron District, which you have to cross to reach the Gold District. You can hide in a place you’ve kept hidden there under an abandoned twelve story hovercraft dealership.

Nothing is following you and Haven now, but it won’t be long before Droid Control’s drones catch up with you, scanning the city for your DNA. You just committed treason and stole government property – technically, a hit on Haven makes her property – and you were already guilty of years of Contamination. One count of falling for her was ten years, and there’s plenty of proof you’ve gone back to her again and again. You’ve got the death penalty on you, royalty or no.

You don’t know if they knew you were Haven’s human when they sent the call, they could’ve been planning on rounding you up right after it played, but you’re the most obvious human in existence now, either way. Heart’s on your sleeve bloody and mutinous, take a picture, motherfuckers. No turning back. Good thing is Retro Androids don’t have trackers embedded inside them. The Scavengers would never.

Your actual living location is hidden thanks only to Blithe, your oldest sister. Your siblings are mostly supportive of you being on the run, even though you can no longer contact them. Blithe can never really defect – she’s next in line – but you and her were always the secret rebel spirits; she’s got hacker connections on the dark side. When you told her you were running off, she gave you cloakers to cover the building you scoped out in the Gold District, location and DNA dampeners not even the top Metropolitan drones can murk. You’re off the grid, at least in one way. You own the address in the Diamond District that the government keeps on file for your employment, go back on occasion to make it look like you live there. Now they know you never really did.

Your place is a mess, complex broken tech and tearing cords, dirty floors and scrap piles of hardware, digital books cluttered on shelves. Had you known you that Haven would be here – ever – you might’ve tried cleaning your damage. But she knows you. No need to front.

Haven looks rough and exhausted, slowly stepping over junk, getting her bearings around the room. She takes in the evidence of you, inspecting your tech, interpreting the titles of your literature.

She looks over at you after a while, calculating.

“Don’t think for a second that this means I owe you,” she says.

You wouldn’t dream of it.

When she told you to leave her for good, six months ago, she said that she thought you had always taken pity on her. If anything, you’re the pitiful one between you. She’s equal to you at worst and high above you at best.

You have loved her because of who she is, not because of her work. You still haven’t even consummated the relationship.

You have never taken Haven, not even when it killed you both not to some nights, because you wanted her to be free first.

“Nah, you don’t owe me shit. If anything, I owe you.”

Haven takes a moment to process that. The eyebrow portions of her face pinch slightly, the lenses of her blinking eyes expand. You have missed watching her analyze you.

“My connect sold me out,” she says. “It was obvious.”

Yeah. You were trying not to think about that.

You knew it was her the second the order fell. Infinity Amphora was the one who delivered the message to you, in person. One of Haven’s regular clients in the Star Commission, who commits mass murder for kicks, sucks up to the highest government agents, and praises the belief that Androids are worthless, but basically lives in the Retroclubs at night. She’s so obviously wanted Haven in ways she can never have, too insecure to ever admit it, she’d rather Haven be dead than not in love with her, you could just kill the everliving –

“Don’t,” Haven says, interrupting your next thought with precision, “try to take her down in my honor or whatever self-involved, heroic thought you’re about to have. I’m a fugitive, more so than I already was, so any association you have with me puts a target right on your back. Sure, you’d probably skirt the death sentence, because you’re still royalty even if it is your prerogative to be poor. Just don’t push your luck. I couldn’t take it.”

You are struck by that.

“Fuck,” Haven breathes, “I need a charge.”

You immediately search for an old enough Metrocorp adapter in your chaos. Haven sits along one of your walls, closing her eyes. When you find what she needs, you crouch beside her and connect her via the portal on her chest. The euphoric expression she makes stirs your heart.

When the loading bar across her chest alights, you swallow. She was only on 3%. Had she exerted a little more effort on your trek through the Iron District, she would’ve dropped. You couldn’t have carried her like that, not at the speed to outrun your pursuers.

You should’ve gone to her as soon as you got the message. Your hesitation was only an act of self preservation, as long as you could stand it. Who were you kidding? You were never going to last long. The thought of running to her and springing her out of that club was so vivid and brash that you thought you needed time for it to dilute. Look where dilution and hesitation got you.

“Haven, I’m so sorry.”

She keeps her eyes closed, shaking her head.

“This had to happen.”

You stay next to her, silence soothing the wound of this truth. She’s charging quickly, bouncing back fast. Her exterior needs work, but you should start making your endgame plan before you do that.

The indie texts you’ve been reading from the Scavengers have given you an idea of one. You were always ready to get the hell out of Metropolis, the last two years more than ever, it’s why you live in squalor, your bounty hunting just a layover. Some say the Scavengers are full of shit, that there are no tunnels underground, but how do they keep getting in and out? You trust them.

There was always just one question holding you back.

You notice that Haven’s loading bar has stalled at 30%. You reconfigure the connection, twice, but it’s not the cord.

“You can’t charge past thirty,” you realize.

Haven opens her eyes. “It’s a setting. I got nerfed, all of us did, back at the club. Couldn’t let us get to thirty one, that might cause a strike! Fifteen years and counting. If someone with a Repair Control Panel for my series would ever undo it, I’d finally remember what it feels like not to lag all the time, but.”

You go to your work bench and pull yours out, compatible with her series and more.

Her posture tenses when she sees it.

“I don’t trust you.”

That hurts, but you understand. You’ve only known her for two years and she’s been in her current conscious for twenty seven. Being able to use a Panel on an Android gives you the ability to change a lot about them, possibly beyond repair. The human equivalent would be like giving a child the reigns to rearrange your nervous system, and hoping when they’re done that you don’t try moving a foot and end up swinging an arm.

Haven has been rearranged internally by her tech-illiterate owners more than you think you can stomach to know. But you know a lot about Androids.

You would never change anything that makes her essentially her.

“Hey,” you say, leaning in, tipping her cool chin up with two fingers. “It’s just me. Remember?”

You can see her flashing memories back through her lenses: small, blue-washed images flickering so fast that you can’t tell what they are exactly. You think you have an idea, though.

“Okay.” Haven stops the images. “Nothing but my power settings, clear?”

“Crystal.”

You edit them on your screen, removing the cap, and she immediately relaxes. 31%. Lift off.

“I’m gonna go into sleep mode,” she says, “it’ll speed up the process.”

“Okay.”

She enters the mode, letting go. Her head droops slightly, her arms go loose against her torso. You watch her, the signs that she’s still there in the quiet whir of her processors, the buzz of her portal around the charger.

Now that she’s not awake and actively tuned into you, the despair you’d been feeling beneath the adrenaline takes hold. This should’ve never been her life, she is worth so much more than the cards she was built with. You want to protect her more than you’ve ever wanted anything, rage against the society that’s tried to break her soul.

But she was right when he said you should let the enemy get away. Sometimes the best revenge isn’t retribution. Sometimes it’s letting go, taking everything you love and running from the fight.

When she wakes up, you will consult your sources, Indie Uprising and others, for the maps they’ve drawn of the underground tunnels. The Outer Valleys are dangerous and lethal in their own right, but at least outside the city’s walls, you’ll both be free.

Books in Review: The Sirens of Titan

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If you know me well, or if you’ve ever followed me on Twitter, you probably know who my favorite fiction author is. This week in April has been a meaningful celebration in remembrance of one Kurt Vonnegut, who passed on April 11, 2007. One of his favorite holidays, I think, was Earth Day. I credit him with being my biggest sole influence when it comes to Literary Fiction – how I have managed to make magical realism my game, but still carry an important message.

This article was written in 2013, edited in 2021.

My biggest issue when it comes to my fiction is that I over-write. Seems like the opposite of a problem for an aspiring novel-completer, right? I wish.

The ability to use as few words possible to say the most meaningful things possible is one that I greatly envy, hence the reason that I am consistently jealous of one Kurt Vonnegut, my favorite author. Most young people probably know him because they had to read Slaughterhouse Five in high school; I found out about him from having to read Cat’s Cradle in high school, and it was the only book I read that year besides Gatsby that didn’t put me to sleep faster than a Nyquil overdose.

(I didn’t used to be as into literature as I am now. 2021 me is surprised that 2013 me felt this way).

The main reason that Cat’s Cradle stuck with me was the fact that each chapter – there are 127 of them – is no longer than about five pages each. Sometimes chapters are even one page, or half a page, in comparison to my chapters that will go for 30 or 40 pages. Each sentence in that book, too, uses the simplest structure and vocabulary usage possible, canceling out the transcending myth that the bigger your words are, the better your writing is. In Vonnegut’s case I find that the simpler something is written, the more you’re supposed to get from it.

Getting through Cat’s Cradle the first time was no problem, as at its surface level, it offered easy-to-read, sci-fi entertainment at the very least. Understanding the deeper meaning of it, though, took several reads and pauses, as most of Vonnegut’s stuff does, at least for me.

That’s why I love him so much.

After re-reading Cat’s Cradle nine or ten times over the course of three years, I decided it was high time that I check out the rest of Vonnegut’s work. Shortly after finishing a collection of his short stories, I went to Barnes & Noble and randomly picked the first Vonnegut book that caught my eye.

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®

The Sirens of Titan caught my eye because the cover is neon green and purple, the most jarring color combination to my eyes besides orange and blue, which happens to be the coloration of the cover of Breakfast of Champions.

Like Cradle, the basic plot of Sirens is relatively simple in summary: a rich young man named Malachi Constant gets the future told to him by Winston Niles Rumfoord, a wealthy time traveler, and then proceeds to live out that future, but against his “free will.” Constant goes on a round trip journey through the universe, and some of the bumps on his path include: an invasion of Earth by Martians, a crash-landing on Mercury, a return to Earth in which he becomes the “savior” of a new world religion, and an eventual exile on one of Saturn’s moons.

And the best part about it? He came up with the idea for the entire book in one night.

That plot summary may make the book sound like it’s all over the place, but Vonnegut’s ability to write simply and straightforwardly makes it both the most compact and the most believable plotline I’ve ever read. He’s exceedingly able to make the extraordinary sound ordinary, and vice versa, and pack a meaningful punch with every sentence or line of dialogue he carefully placed in the story.

What the novel ends up being about, on a deeper level than just the plot, is the definition of human existence—which, Vonnegut reveals, is that the entire Earth exists solely to deliver a message sent by distant, Tralfamadorian aliens. When putting it that way—implying that none of us really have a choice in the purpose that we serve, and that that purpose could very well be completely ridiculous—humanity’s existence can seem pretty bleak and pointless. But that’s Vonnegut’s point, (that always seems to be his point), and he goes about making the point in a way that’s blunt and hilarious, while simultaneously dark and existential.

He means to poke fun at the seriousness humans place in all of the things that aren’t going to last, the things that are miniscule in comparison to the entirety of the universe, past, present and future. He means to ask us to ask ourselves if what we do and what we believe in even really matters.

That’s a tall order, but it’s one that we all have to face whether we like it or not.

In Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut questions the idea of free will, and how “free” it can actually be in such a pre-determined universe. He has several examples of mind control going on in the book; the structure of the Martian Army is especially intriguing, with its made-up conglomerate of generals who aren’t actually in charge of anything and don’t have any real power. They’re merely fake figureheads, put in place as a formality. The Martian soldiers are actually controlled by a buzzer that sends a shock wave through their brains if they develop thoughts that go against the regime—a buzzer that any common soldier could be holding at any given time, no matter their made-up rank.

It turns out that one of the commonest men of the bunch, Boaz, is one of the soldiers who holds a buzzer.

Kurt Vonnegut makes me relate to almost every single character of his almost instantly, even if I’ve only just been introduced to them, and even if they only appear on one page. Malachi, the protagonist of Sirens, is your standard “spoiled rich boy” who’s had everything handed to him, but hasn’t done anything with it. Relatable? Sort of; as of 2021, I have at least 500,000 words of fiction on my person, but haven’t done much with it yet.

Book Review: The Sirens of Titan
Alternate cover art

It’s always fascinating to watch Malachi Constant try to sidestep the inevitable future that Rumfoord tells him about. Pretty early on, Rumfoord dictates to him everything that is ever going to happen in his life, including the wildest bits about intergalactic time travel, and Malachi’s reaction to this news—getting drunk, sleeping around, blowing all his money, escaping reality—is the reaction that many of us have in our own lives when we are faced with the scary and inevitable.

From everything tragic that happens to Malachi on, you feel for him, and watch in anticipated agony as his inevitable, unhappy ending comes closer and closer. The helplessness that you feel as you read is page-turning—you already know it’s going to happen, but watching how the hell it’s even going to manage to happen is most of the fun of trekking through the novel.

The character of Rumfoord, too, extracts your sympathy when you discover that he is trapped in what’s called the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, never allowed to materialize on any given planet but Titan for more than a few minutes. What Rumfoord ends up doing because of this fate, and because of his future-telling abilities, seems rather villainous—manipulating thousands in order to establish his church (The Church of the Utterly Indifferent ), maliciously withholding information from Malachi and his own wife in order to bring about his plan—but it also seems kind of warranted. He’s been granted such terrible knowledge, and he has no way to get rid of it or do anything about it—how unimportant he must feel as a human being. It begs the question: do any of us really want to know the real meaning of the universe? Or would knowing everything be too intense?

All of Vonnegut’s characters in Siren have such universal dilemmas: they don’t want to lose their innocence, they’re afraid of unknowns, of mysterious higher powers. Vonneget uses figures like Malachi, Rumfoord, Beatrice and Chrono to show that people are just pieces in a universe that controls itself.

It’s like Rumfoord says to his wife at some point, when she asks him why, if he can tell the future, doesn’t he just tell everyone everything that will ever happen?

“’All I can say is that my failure to warn you about the stock-market crash is as much a part of the natural order as Halley’s Comet—and it makes an equal amount of sense to rage against either one.’”

The book has been controversial, I gather, because of its anti-religious undertones, and what Vonnegut dubbed The Church of The Utterly Indifferent. The way that Vonnegut writes, however, doesn’t preach or imply that you should believe the anti-religious message of The Church. He simply places the reality of the situation out there for you—that none of us really knows what the universe will hand us—and you can interpret the situation however you want to. You can agree with the idea that the universe is controlled by a nameable God, or you can agree with the idea that the universe is chaotic, and the forces that control it are either mysterious or nonexistent. Whatever you believe, we’re all in the same boat anyway.

A character named Unk, a soldier in the Martian army, ends up getting his memory erased. He is confused, hurt, lost, and wishes that someone on Mars would tell him what he was really supposed to be doing with his life. Later on, Unk finds a letter addressed to him, and this letter is one of the funniest, truest, and most meaningful things I’ve ever read about human life.

While Unk reads the letter, full of personal anecdotes, hilarious insight, and useful points of advice, he becomes filled with these moments of great joy—finally, someone is telling him who he is and who he loves, and finally, he is having his memories restored. The letter warns him, however, of the dangers up ahead of him, that the Martian army is out to erase his memory over and over. It ends up telling him that he should escape, for his own good, and tells him about the family he needs to save.

For a while, he thinks that the author of the letter must be a friend of his, or someone objective who cares for him. But when he gets to the bottom of the letter, he finds that his own name, “Unk,” is the signature. He wrote the letter to himself before his memory was erased.

My favorite passage in the book reads:

“It was literature in its finest sense, since it made Unk courageous, watchful, and secretly free. It made him his own hero in very trying times.”

Writing to or for yourself can literally save your life. What a powerful message.

I remember having to put the book down after getting to this page. If I was a person who enjoyed crying, I probably would’ve cried about it. (Not really, but it did hit me on a pretty emotional level). As a writer myself, this line told me that if I ever feel like I’m starting to lose the voice of my inner author, or if I ever feel that the world around me is trying to erase my identity, I should write, because my writing will always voice who I really am inside, and returning to it will always remind me of my faith in myself.

If none of this has convinced you to read the book, do it for the fact that Vonnegut is famous for his slapstick comedy (seriously, Sirens is hilarious), and do it for the fact that when it comes to science fiction, this man is a pioneer.

This book taught me things about life that I never expected to gain from a story about time travel and Saturn’s moons. It only reinforced my love of Vonnegut, and showed me that the deepest of messages really can be written with the simplest of words.