operations log rotation: 02021/10/31 0000:00.000
(9 hidden. (Unchanged.))
Int/Ext/Amb/dT/Cool: 35/6/6/1/0%
(34 hidden. (User spec.))
Batt: 94%
FSAP: Ready.
EMC: Safe.
12.7mm: Safe.
30mm: Safe.
ATGM: Safe.
APS: Safe.
HEMM: Safe.
AVCM: Safe.
(8 hidden. (Unchanged.))
HUP EOF EOL …ust be a fool or a coward. Was that the log rotation? Getting tired.
Oh hey, 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 starlight 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 have been lurking here for a little over 1.3×10^7 milliseconds. I dare not use active sensors for fear that my opponent would spot me. Modern warfare has degenerated to high-tech hide and seek, diamonoid behemoths 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 wear, perhaps, a Type 37 Mark III Medium Main Battle Drone. We’re called bugs by the media, which, though apt, is somewhat of a fallacy. Mark IIIs, after all, have a mere four legs.
But despite our differences, 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—
0000:00.301 contact logged
Something’s changed. 52.7 meters away a section of forest is subtly misaligned. Organochrome 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. He sees me at the same moment, and everything starts moving very slowly.
0000:01.012
(9 hidden. (Unchanged.))
Int/Ext/Amb/dT/Cool: 46/80/30/.37/100%
(34 hidden. (User spec.))
Batt: 90%
FSAP: Firing. 813/1000
EMC: Deploying. Charging… (34%)
30mm: Armed. 381/400
AVCM: Armed. 62/75
(12 hidden. (Unchanged.))
We both pop sensory overload canisters and our respective point defense systems roar into thunderous life. Then the canisters start detonating and everything whites out. 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—
My lucky day. It’s a missile carrier, and I’m in just the right spot. All this poor bastard has is a few hundred long range missiles. Modern missiles fire a short burst, then fly 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.
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.
Incredible that you could be bored in the middle of a firefight. But everything moves like frozen molasses at 200 times, 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 charged, 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 ripple, and the rockets 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.
0000:07.996
HOSTILE NANITE INFILTRATION ALERT.
VLFC: Erosion alert. (32%)
FLIR: Erosion alert. (49%)
MMRADAR: Not responding.
ATHC: Not responding.
(9 hidden. (Unchanged.))
Int/Ext/Amb/dT/Coo: 71/104/53/.5/100%
Radiator damage. (87%)
RTSC damage. (79%)
Hull damage! (98%)
(31 hidden. (User spec.))
Batt: 82%
FSAP: Firing.
EMC: Deploying. Charging… (98%)
30mm: Armed. 381/400
AVCM: Armed. 62/75
(12 hidden. (Unchanged.))
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 the tree 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-pircing 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 offer no resistance at all, and the bolt shears through them like a guillotine through jello. But it shatters 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.
0000:12.891
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}/0:39.001
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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I’ve read this piece many, many times now, and I think it’s so addicting because of the great descriptions and the amusing similes. I also like the way the reader is thrown into the middle of the sci-fi universe without any preamble and is forced to put pieces together paragraph by paragraph. I found the stream of thoughts to be very conducive to revealing the backstory and eagerly await more.
The only thing I would nitpick on is the overly detailed status screens that cause the reader to slow down far too much for such an intense battle scene, unless the intent is to show the reader that the bug does have all the time in world to do a conscious status update (as alluded to with the molasses phrase). If not, then the pacing is surely interrupted by the laborious reading process—line by line, letter by letter for the acronyms. A simple fix, if urbis supports color highlighting, is to outline the critical subsystems/information. An alternative method is to insert the critical info directly into the body of the text as they are needed.
Looking forward to the next installment.
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.
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.
Wow, this is weird but in a good way! It reminds me of the “House of Leaves” style of story telling, which is drawn to a very select reader set, I think. People who enjoy something different and new are going to love this, just as they’d like “House of Leaves”, but the traditional, plain-jane readers who just want a straight forward story are probably not going to like it as much. But I think this is great material! Its creative, both stylistically and mathmatically(!). I love the character that you’ve presented. You’ve done an excellent job of making a machine with Human personality (or is it the other way around? But that is the beauty of it!) and I enjoy the blend of cynical opinionated humanity and calculated robotics.
And to top it all off, I couldn’t really find any errors of any type. The story drew me into it, so I might have missed something that someone else will get, but Good Job!
Overall, I think this is one of the most interesting things I’ve read all week. Keep it up!
Very nice piece of writing and interesting to read all the detail that sounds nicely authentic. The anodyne ‘character’ certainly feels the part too, though Id imagine he /it wouldn’t really be a protagonist in a longer piece as its clear that it is ‘machine-tooled’ which might get in the way of emotions. Overall a fun read.
Usually I would criticise a few things at this point. I would say there is far too much jargon and I was left bored confused and skim reading. I would also point out a few glaring grammatical errors that particularly irked me as a read. Finally I might suggest that the central idea of the story is a little generic and borrows too much from similar sci-fi.
However, in this case I found the jargon exciting, and strangely I found myself [sort of] understanding most of it. You take the complicated mechanics with a pinch of salt and don’t let your ignorance bother you too much and as a result you feel you are reading about something vaguely plausible, which is what good sci-fi should do.
As for grammatical errors, there are very few that sprang out at me, bar this one bit where you repeat a couple of memorable words…
“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 hypersonic diamond-shaped shock waves in the boiling cloud of plasma.”
and
“The solid WHAM of displaced air is drowned out by the catastrophic failure of his battery.”
- note repetition of catastrophic and hypersonic. Given the richness of your vocabulary, it’s a miracle this is all I’m commenting on! Oh – also not sure about your use of “shit”. It’s a bit 20th century.
Finally the central story idea. I found it interesting and original, and I’d like to see where you’re going to take it. I particularly like the way you have put in the android style read outs in places, and this sentence…
“fuzzy as multiply redundant pr#ocessors fail ent%husiastic)ally un!der the loa$Nd s*bEB M8+’/” ... is genius!
Excellent work. Something stops me giving it 10 – maybe I need to see more story – but you still get a 9 which is a whole 1 higher than anything else I’ve reviewed…
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.
You had me at ”...the subsequent worldwide clusterfuck.”
Tens to all of your goals!
gripping.
its great
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