The Exile

As he watched the neon exhaust of the ruined jetbike recede into the darkness, dragging its mutilated, half-deceased occupant, Grendel knew the halcyon days were over. He turned and walked into his cave. He entered the river that burbled near its mouth, evaded  the defense system of electronic moray eels and fire barracudas—he was never sure if it was to defend against intruders or to keep him contained—before emerging onto the pebbled shore of a looming cavern kilometres away. Dripping, he approached Mother’s monstrous bulk. Her resinous hide crawled with cables and boulder sized transistors. She was all he knew, her organic contours a constant in his half-remembered memories. The cooling system hummed in the chill darkness, efficiently venting the waste heat into the desert bordering the foothills. It wasn’t always desert there. He shivered, stroking her gently throbbing surface. He had suckled at her breast for so long, wires running from his mouth, his twitching eyes vacant with tears of  luminous quantum foam.  She was warm to the touch. Grendel took his hand away. It was time to go out into the world once more.

They came, a single police unit at first. He disposed of them easily, and enjoyed the sight of their burning cruiser trace the dawn before its miniature nuclear reactor disintegrated in a flash of white heat.

They sent more, this time a special weapons and tactics unit. Nobody survived and their armored hovercraft, being more resilient than the average vehicle, simply smoldered at the end of long furrows of raped earth.

The military deployed next, in tanks and Human Enhancement suits. The tanks lumbered up to the mouth of Grendel’s cave and sent salvo after salvo of armor piercing rounds. The HE-men leaped ahead and tunneled into the rock with their magnificent transmorgifying suits. Some affected drills, others made great spades of their hands and dug through the granite. Grendel grinned at the challenge, but was sorely disappointed. He appreciated the exercise, anyways; his long dormant muscles needed stretching, limbering. He danced amid the bullets, an acrobat, ballerina, and contortist. Saliva ran in gobs from his adrenaline laced laugh. A tank erupted, punctured by one of the suits. He crashed two HE-men together and watched their ruptured nanotechnology consume each other. He tossed  a suit easily into a neighboring mountain, watching in pleasure the ensuing landslide. Grendel surveyed the ruins and wondered how far it would go.

Jets. Scores of them erupting from the sky like a mad horde of hornets. The space around them crackled with pinpricks of light that elongated into long trailers of blistered atmosphere.  Slipstream missiles. Grendel felt wounded. They were using outdated technology on him. He shrugged, waiting for imminent impact before launching into the air. He skipped and hopped on the slender bodies of the missiles, flinging himself to the next just before they burst into scorched sky. He zig-zagged his way onto the jet of the nearest convenience, hurtling for hundreds of meters in freefall before sinking his hands into its titanium armor. The canopy, torn from its place, shot past, the pilot’s insect-like helmet reflecting his outstretched hands and Grendel’s laughing visage.

As the skies rained with ruin, Grendel’s jet hit mach 5 and entered the European Commonwealth. The jet was outfitted with the latest nuclear fuel cell and ammo teleportation technology, giving him virtually unlimited mobility and firepower. He was still laughing when he left Europe burning and set his sights on China. He was having too much fun. Grendel’s self-imposed exile was over and the world would weep for it.

The Great Escape

Like fluttering feathers on the back of a strange beast, white-knuckled men and women and children in all sorts of tattered, bright-colored clothing hung on for dear life. Throbbing with archaic machinery that spewed curlicues of black, rank smoke from the undercarriage, the pitted and rusted bus howled down the bustling pedestrian lanes of Tachyon Boulevard through a gaggle of construction laborers, housekeepers, compost professionals, wiretappers, juvenile delinquents, garbage deliverymen, document shredders, newsread reporters, heavy-lidded THC specialists, steam technicians, bacterial engineers, teleprompter typists, clamoring tofu dog vendors,  wicked cardsharp hustlers, retrofitted geriatrics with guttering valves, soul buskers, prowling blue badges, streetcorner winos, rickshaw operators, integument artists, SPAZ salesmen, holo skin sensations, disaffected yiffer gangs, Banger Street Boys, the cracked legend Metro Transit emblazoned on the grille in flickering blue neon that sent cool sparks haloing along its dented side onto the faces and arms and legs of these people half-heartedly leaping out of the way, to briefly illuminate their shadowed features. The bus bucked and weaved between cars and pedestrians under glass cracked, brick crumbling edifices of a more majestic past, rushed past irregular intervals of bent and broken lamp posts guttering dead pools of halogen, through an tide of waste that swirled and eddied in its wake. Empty road stretched ahead: the Corridor. Its engines groaned, and it roared on, almost mythical, a metallic dragon rising across the ferrocrete way, dribbling spumes of smoke shot with blue lightning.

In his high tower the watchman looked up blearily from the skin glossies that kept him within sanity’s breast during these shifts, and saw the monstrosity. He sighed, took a rag and wiped his hand, then sat up in his creaky crèche. He cracked his knuckles. There were always a couple every week. Poor souls. Nothing going for them in the tenements, or they caught cabin fever. There was no magic bullet; outside, they all died sooner or later. Grunting, he reached towards the switch that operated the first gate and, waiting, looked at the brutal ferrocrete wall that separated the city from the outside. Some wit had spray painted, in stylized letters, HERE BE DRAGONS. True enough though, he mused, crushing the switch.

The gate groaned open and the bus shot through. Someone lost his grip, rolling in a tide of rubbish thrown to pile up against the gate by the incessant North wind and scrambled to his feet, slipping frantically. He seemed to be screaming, the watchman thought as he squinted through scratched plexiglass. Probably was. The figure threw himself through as the gate juddered closed. A pulp of blood. The watchman imagined a sickening crunch, shrugged. This was routine. He activated the second gate, closed it, then the third.

Once anyone exited the city there was no coming back. They became voluntary exiles. Anyone or anything remaining within the second and third gates would be purged by modified jet engines. Sometimes whole caravans got trapped inside, and stinking smoke would linger in the air for days. The watchman jabbed the switch that activated the torches and turned to gaze at the city; he didn’t like to watch the burn. It was almost dark. Torchlight and gas stoves wavered a man made constellation that stretched to the horizon. The stars were faint angels in the sky. Roasted chicken and boiled vegetables taunted his nostrils. He had a craving for cold goat milk. Faint singing, boisterous, wafted in with the occasional zephyr.

Sighing, he returned his attention to the glossies and soon was snoring.