operations log rotation: 02021/10/31 0000:00.000
LR CR ^C ^D ust be a fool or a coward. Was that the log rotation? Getting tired.
Looks like it’s Halloween now. Once more, for the record.
I’m crouching under a tree in a forest a few clicks from what the map calls Chester Morse Lake. Judging from the remains, this used to be a resort of some sort. Now it’s rather too close to the border, and has accumulated a a supurb collection of craters, none of which are large enough to hide me, and only serve to make the pitch black terrain even more treacherous.
Of course, to these eyes, there is no such thing as dark, and to an extent that is true. There is easily enough skyglow off of Seattle filtering through the canopy to light the scene, and everything glows by its own infrared light. But were I human again, the trees which seem so bright to my artificial retina would be more suited to charcoal on ink than the psychedelic neon scramble the edge enhancer makes of them.
I’ve been lurking here for the last five kiloseconds, idly tracking an UN “peacekeeper” dreadnought in high polar orbit. Questioning just how the constant threat of orbital bombardment can enforce peace is the kind of question that can earn you death from above.
I dare not check his orbit with the radar rangefinder for fear the backscatter off the trees would spook my quarry. Modern warfare has degenerated to a kind of high-tech ultimate-stakes hide and seek, behemoths of laminated diamond spiced with exotic metal salts slipping through the night; each of us carrying enough firepower to vaporize a city, with enough left over to splash a old-style carrier group. I pilot, or steer, or wear, a Type 37 Mark III Medium Main Battle Drone. The media insists on calling us “bugs”, which, though apt, is somewhat of a fallacy. Thanks to the hard limits imposed by the mammalian nervous system, we’re limited to four limbs.
He is out there, somewhere near. The transhumanists may complain about our monkey brain, but it is very well suited to the task of tracking four legged predators through forests. Intuition, like ducking, is the kind of thing that separates combat veterans from glowing craters.
But despite the yawning gulf opened up by technology between a tanker and a baseline human, we were all people, once. People who feared the long night enough to sell their minds, if not their souls, to the State.
They changed us, of course, thousands of tiny alterations to make the perfect death machine. I can remember, dimly, the manifold pleasures of eating, breathing, of living. But it holds no attraction to me now. Sometimes I wonder if I am still human, or perhaps just some delusional robo—
Ah ha.
0000:00.801 contact logged
52.7 meters away a section of forest is subtly misaligned. Organochrome (We tried to use an OLED stealth layer back on the Type 34, but it turns out that OLEDs produce polarized light. The feds put filters on all their drones, there were some highly publicized disasters, heads rolled, and we went back to messy old organochrome and filling out an environment impact statement every time a tanker got splashed.) active camouflage is God on wheels when you know exactly what you’re creeping up on, but it’s less than helpful when you only vaguely know where your opponent is. You can blur the projected image, but that makes you even more obvious up close, and fifty meters is very close indeed, for a remote. He sees me at the same moment, and everything starts moving very slowly.
0000:01.012
We both pop sensory overload canisters and our respective point defense systems roar into thunderous life. Then the canisters start detonating and the scene starts oscillating wildly as the image enhancers try to make up their mind. The Feds like their countermeasures heavy on the flares while the Cascadian Alliance (Long Live The King!) relies on old-fashioned high explosive. The flares light up the forest like the death throes of a star while the explosives just tear everything up and try to throw as much junk into the air as they can. Some of the bangshells get too close to flares and shatter their binding, burning the entire ten minute charge in three or four seconds.
The combined effect always reminds of bringing a little piece of Hell into life. The trees nearest to us shatter and burst into flame. The point defense system is still firing through it all, methodically shooting down anything that looks like it’s on an intercept course with short bursts of tungsten spheres.
The eye-searing glare gives me my first good look at the man I am about to kill. Organochrome eats light like napalm in old-growth timber, but the fine mist of high velocity shrapnel has eroded it somewhat, and I can almost make out detai—
It’s a strange enough sight that I surrender some control to the automatics while I study him. The upper hull is a bog standard M3298a7 missile carrier attachment, but mounted to a six limb drone. The Feds have always been big on neocortex augmentation, but a six-leg drone has always been a blue-sky research project, like Strong AI, or a cup of simulated coffee that can actually get the aroma right. Listing the benefits of an extra pair of limbs would make a weighty tome that began and ended with “it would make you faster”. Tankers regard speed in much the same way that Catholics view God, or atheists view being dicks. You can’t hit what you can’t track.
If he was another general purpose drone, I would be toast, but all he’s got is a couple thousand long range missiles. A modern nanomissile fires a short burst, then flies the rest of the way to target on a ballistic path. Their own cryogenic fuel cools them pretty effectively, but nothing can hide the infrared flare while their engines are firing. Antimissle combat can be tricky, but I’m right in the ideal range, far away enough that the PD systems can shoot them down, but within their stealthing radius.
The roar of the big anti-armor rockets mingle oddly with the chatter of the point defense guns. He’s really giving it everything he’s got. I’m circling around, dodging between the big cedars, stalling for time while EMC charges. The side imaging array shows the little smart missiles punching thumb sized holes through wood and smashing into the odd glacier boulder only a couple meters behind me.
0000:04.998
Incredible that you could be bored in the middle of a firefight. But everything moves like frozen molasses cut with equal parts concrete at 200 times, (As in, two hundred times the objective speed of thought of a baseline human. For every second such a hypothetical person experiences, I live close to two minutes, at two hundred times objective speed.) so you’ve got plenty of time to think. One of the topics is sexism. I always think of my opponents as men, perhaps because I’m male. But my outdated imperialistic chauvinistic viewpoint is backed up by the statistics. For some reason, women don’t want their brains ripped apart by trillions of microscopic robots while on their deathbed so they can defend their splinter republic in some sort of horribly warped idea of an afterlife. Weird.
Capacitors! They’re too noisy to keep energized, and take forever to charge once you break cover. He keeps crowding me, knowing that if I get too close I won’t be able to shoot down the rockets fast enough, and if I get too far away I won’t be able to see them.
I fire a burst through another wave of missiles, and the shells break up but don’t fragment. I frantically sweep the x-ray maser through the cloud, but I cut it too fine and the stuff splashes across my bow glacis.
0000:12.996
Blind! The nano-obscurant’s blocking what little light I had, and is now trying to burn through the hull. The reactive armor tiles fire automatically, and the FSAP guns actually stop firing for a moment as the cloud of debris exploding off my forward hull manages to knock down some of the closer missiles. A blast of liquid oxygen washes off the optics, and I see a tree rising up at me just in time to dodge around it.
I hear that beautiful affirmative ding from the HUD, and the charge completion indicator lights up. A simulated muscle contracts, and a tiny amount of current trickles into the SCR cascade resulting in a flood of power into the superconducting coil array.
Fifty kilograms of nanotube-diamond composite screams down the length of the cannon, leaving a row of quenched superconductor rings behind it. The vacuum iris slams open and the inrush of air meets the kinetic kill vehicle and loses in an ear-piercing scream of shattered molecules.
The KKV leaves a broad violet bar of ionized air behind as it slices through the glacis of the Fed. The meticulously aligned layers of tungsten carbide and aggregated diamond nanorods are supposed to flex under a blow, and degrade gracefully under intolerable strain, but at this range they offer no resistance at all, and the bolt shears through them like a guillotine through jello. Somehow it manages to shatter somewhere deep in his guts, and the fragments spray out the back in a white hot fan of vaporized diamond grit, each shard burning a hole through, like buckshot through rusty tin.
Catastrophic shit is going on inside his hull, and there’s a continuous shower of hypersonic shrapnel flying through the gaping crater in his rear armor, leaving oddly precise diamond-shaped shock waves in the boiling cloud of plasma.
The solid WHAM of displaced air is drowned out by the catastrophic failure of his battery. It’s much slower than the snap bang fury of of the KKV, and I can leisurely observe the shell vaporizing from the inside out. The armor layer lasts as long as a snowflake dropping into molten lead, and then the explosion is a perfectly spherical expanding globe of incandescent white, picking me up and smashing me through a hundred foot redwood.
0000:16.891
The geiger counter screams in protest as hyper-energetic subatomic particles sleet through me like shrapnel through daisies and my mind becomes slow and fuzzy as multiply redundant pr#ocessors fail ent%husiastic)ally un!der the loa$Nd s*bEB M8+’/
9j9f’’’‘db}/001
909o:99.901
0009:39.001
0009:39.001
I wake up. Everything facing the explosion has been polished down to the laminate, the ablative shield and organochrome layer having boiled off a few milliseconds after the battery went.
I stumble to four feet and gaze at the fresh crater at the center of a growing forest fire.
I check my position on the map and start cantering east. There’s work left to do tonight.
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Questions/Suggestions Occurring to Me As I Read:
(key: Qp3p5 means question page 3 paragraph 5, S means suggestions)
Qp1p4: What do the “remains” look like? Why is it too close to the border? Has the border changed? Why a “superb” collection of craters? “Pitch black” – overcast?
Sp1p5: “were I human again” – this sentence is confusing and long; try breaking the ideas into shorter declarations.
Qp1p7: “Battle Drone” – the word “drone” implies that it’s an autonomous device – is the narrator a cyborg pilot or an AI program based on a human brain?
Qp2p6: Who is the narrator addressing? The explanatory paragraphs and the voice suggests that the audience isn’t a supervisor or anyone who would be familiar with the jargon or milieu.
Sp2p6: At this point, I really want to know what the Type 37 looks like, from the outside. Maybe back where the narration mentions the media calling them “bugs” would be good to throw in a few words about the size, physical appearance, resemblance to insects, etc.
Qp3p7: What does a “bog standard M3298a7 missile carrier attachment” look like? A big box? A long, hexagonal tube? A single adjective would help visualize this.
Sp3p7: drop this sentence: “The Feds have always been big on neocortex augmentation…” It distracts from the ongoing action and adds nothing to the story. The rest of the paragraph, as commentary, is also what one of my professors used to call “indigestible lumps of exposition.” In other words, hard for the reader to swallow.
Qp4p1: “A modern nanomissile would…” What is actually going on in the scene? Describe that first before the narration deviates into counter-factuals and possibilities. You could say, “All he’s got are long range missiles…” and go from there, instead of all the other stuff that isn’t happening.
Qp4p2: “stalling for time while EMC charges” – do you mean ECM (Electronic Counter-Measures)? Or EMP, for Electro-Magnetic Pulse?
Sp4p3: If the narrator is bored, then the reader is, too. What’s at stake, here? Is it just another day on the job? (people don’t want to hear about something routine, no matter how exotic the routine is) Make this confrontation something exceptional to the narrator – not his typical combat encounter; otherwise it’s not a story, just a job description.
Qp5p1:”Capacitors!” Huh? Noisy? What are they for? Related to EMC?
Sp5p2: “shells break up but don’t fragment” – “fragment” and “break up” are synonymous – I think you mean that the shells aren’t exploding on their own as they’re supposed to (detonate?), but it takes me too long to understand this, the way it’s written.
Qp5p3: “nano-obscurant” do you mean, “dust”? Or maybe “dirt?”
Qp5p4: Why does a heads-up-display “ding”? Why does the narrator have ears? I can’t figure out if this is a human inside a tank-like cockpit, a human plugged into a machine with some sort of neural interface, or a disembodied mind, integrated into the machine. The sensations experienced by the narrator must be consistent with whatever he is.
Sp5p4: KKV, SCR, HUD – keep in mind the audience has no idea what these acronyms mean. Either define them, or say something else that’s clearer to the average reader.
Qp6p2: Are they in a redwood forest? This drastically changes how I’ve been imagining the scene. (mention redwoods earlier, and give us a sense of scale in comparison to the narrator’s machine-thing).
Questions in General:
Q: Why does the narrator defend a political system as archaic as monarchy? What does the overall political climate of the world look like?
Q: Why is this ground combat necessary? What is the narrator’s mission? Is he defending something or invading territory? How come the orbiting satellite dreadnought doesn’t do anything? In other words, what is at stake?
Q: How does this chapter work into the rest of the story?
Q: Who is this narrator? Does he have a name? What did he do before becoming what he is?
Things that worked well:
– the action was dramatic (present tense executed well)
– the technology/science is solidly and believable presented
Suggestions for rewrite:
1. Limit the exposition to the absolutely necessary. For instance, the rumination on the meaning of gender was distracting. Stuff like that can go into other chapters, when it becomes meaningful to the story. Using scene and story to explain things rather than exposition may take longer, but it holds the reader’s attention.
2. Don’t use techie-sounding words when an ordinary one will do. For instance, calling something a “chemical-propellant kinetic mass driver” doesn’t make it anything more than a gun. Tricky names for things just makes the text harder to read, not more authoritative or intelligent-sounding.
3. Develop a deeper context to the conflict that’s going on. Sure, this dude is a badass cyber-soldier in a badass, nanotech mecha (yeah, it’s a Japenese-anime-style “mecha” you’re talking about), but what makes this particular day, this particular centisecond so special? What’s at stake?
4. Make the battle more challenging for the narrator. After all, he’s trashed by the end of it, yet throughout he’s “bored” to the point of comparing it to situations that would make him “toast.” If there’s no real danger, then there’s nothing to evoke our sympathy.
5. Try to replace abstract description with concrete adjectives. For example, “boxy” gives me a clearer visualization than “ugly.”
6. Experiment with point of view and tense. Try 3rd person for a few pages, and see how that affects the pacing (not as much room for digression by the narrator).
Critique:
It’s apparent you have a fully-fleshed out idea in your head about this future world, but you need to get it across better to the audience. The technology and science aspect is well done, but don’t let ideas get in the way of story. The story itself is weak, despite your skill at depicting an exciting scene. As a short story, I give it a “5” since it’s missing about half of the elements needed to make it a story. As SciFi, I rate it a “6” – unlike many other beginning sci-fi readers, you sound like you know a thing or two about science & tech, which is a BIG help. However, there’s a lot of work to be done yet – fleshing out the world, the character, the context, the larger conflict. You’ve demonstrated that you should be more than capable of doing that, if you keep working at this.
Great job, I can’t wait to see more.
gripping.
its great
You had me at ”...the subsequent worldwide clusterfuck.”
Tens to all of your goals!
I like your writing style and it is very clear you have created a rather facinating world. The main problem I had was that as a reader I was immerced into a world I knew nothing about yet. Maybe if I had read the whole works from the beginning then I would have felt so lost but that is what happened. I believe there was some sort of confrontation going on and shooting between an android and something or someone else but I had a hard time following. Too much futuristic slang muddled what you were trying to accomplish. Overall I liked what you did but it was too confusing to be ready for publication in my opinion. Keep working on this and I think it could be great. You may want to think about an index describing meanings and objects in your story. Dune did this because of the elaborate world created. That way people can look up what you are talking about and get the relevance of the statements.
You might want to simplfy or explain all of the technical numbers and abbreviations you present throughout the chapter. Some readers that pick this up may have no clue as to what you’re talking about (like moi). It is almost TOO technical to put as a first chapter for example.
You have some sentences that could be shortened, but otherwise, this looks like a promising piece of science fiction.
Good luck.
That was wild: too much Technology and surrealism for me.. I was confused as to whether the narrator was man, machine or beast… or whether it was some VR game..
Once I reread it though – I liked the idea of the loss of self to the machine, and the new age of machine killing machine… which is essentially no different to man killing man…
The imagery and science is very good – I get the exact vision of how the enemy machine is blown to bits, and how the narrator tracks and considers his prey.
I have no idea what I just read, and I don’t give a f*k. It was frikkin’ awesome, whatever it was. But it could be better.
A lot of telling (“sometimes I wonder” – how about now?).
A few clumsy phrases (“there is no such thing as dark, and to an extent that is true” – well, it is, isn’t it? Or frozen molasses as 200 times – 200 times what?)
The present tense doesn’t lend itself to reminiscing about what war was once like, what the media has to say, or anything else unless there is a stream of consciousness; this is like a series of eddies of consciousness. When you mention “modern warfare,” you imply our narrator has studied military history.
The HUD display, which is good punctuation, is also distracting, and rather than explain it, I would recommend getting rid of it.
The action is vivid, but I did get lost wondering about the target of our protagonist – was it another bug or was it a ship or both or neither? A soldier “nickname” for the enemy – something derogatory and dehumanizing – might help. Especially if there is a lull in the fighting (weapons charging) that gives our narrator a chance to think about his opponent, himself, the war, and “editorialize” at a more appropriate point of the story. The bit about women comes out of nowhere, and could be linked to questions about the enemy’s mother/wife/etc while not giving away anything personal about narrator – which I didn’t miss.
When he finally gets a look at his target, give us some visual description of him: how many legs? Colors, markings, anything – one sentence would help.
Not much more was required; it was a slice of combat, and well done for that.
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