skonen_blades

The airport wasn’t packed this time of night. I scanned the thin crowd for my audition.

Bingo.

She had a gold filigree tattoo printed onto her upper arm near the shoulder, the kind of tattoo that went away in a year but twinkled brilliantly like Egyptian history as it faded. Her forearms carried the whorls and puckers of burn scars; acid or fire, he couldn’t tell.

There’s two ways to live here. Under the radar or straight peacocking. Red vinyl Mohawk implants made from old records, chrome knucks, eye enlargements, antlers, kangaroo blades, whatever. Bright and cheerful. High profile meant you needed to be able to back it up. If you were easily recognizable, you were easily trackable. ‘The most dangerous care the least’ was the theory. Of course, it could also just be bravado, someone playing ‘fake it ‘til they make it’ but that kind of stupid was its own kind of dangerous as well.

Me, I go under the radar. Regular suits, a little rumpled, and I look tired. My implants are all subdermal. I try to be as tourist as possible. Just on a layover, sir. I try to look a little scared all the time and I try to go quickly from place to place.

It’s just bait. Anyone sees me for a mark, they follow me into an alley and then they die. I get ninety per cent of my scavenge that way and save the best for myself. I do alright.

But I was just about to turn twenty-five in a part of the world where life expectancy was twenty-three for solos. I needed to get connected. I need join one of the big gangs and get paid in policy. Independence was good for the soul but it was getting harder. I was good enough to join one of the middle guilds but I wanted to shoot for one of the top eight. The Terminotaurs.

I’d been given a time and a location. This airport concourse at 9:30PM. Even though I was qualified, there was always an interview. There was always a deadly test.

And Gold Tattoo there was mine. Armband twinkling in the flat, fluorescent lights. Scanning the crowd for me and she still hadn’t found me. Showtime.

I stood up and checked my watch and scanned the departure boards nervously like I was worried my fictional flight might be delayed. I caught the eye of an airport attendant just behind Tattoo and waved at him. I jogged over to him clumsily in a way that would take me within an arm’s reach of Tattoo. If I played it super straight, she’d see me as background right up until it was too late.

It didn’t work. She saw through the act and recognized her target.

The gun barrels that fanned out of her wrists swept under her snarl in an arc that hosed down the whole crowd, me included, with a staccato engine thunderstorm of plastic shrapnel. Commuters dropped like cut-string puppets and everyone else became a scream and fled. The conflict shutters slammed down over kiosk windows. Within five seconds, we were alone with the bodies of a dozen downed travelers and a wide radius of cowering people taking whatever cover they could. We had seconds before security took us out.

My armour soaked up most of it but blood was definitely being guzzled out of me somewhere. I tongued my incisors and front tooth in the sequence that puffed open the glands in my neck. My bloodstream sang murder and time stopped.

I felt my muscles tear as I moved. There was a price to this speed. She finished her sweep left with both her arms pool-cue straight, stopped and elbowed her hands to point at the ceiling before setting her eyes on me and straightening her hands in my direction. The motion took a millisecond of jerking muscle but to me it was a ballet. Not slow motion but clear. She was excellent. No wasted movement. A real artist. I was flattered they’d sent someone so good.

As she brought her barrels down, I stayed ahead of the sweep and crouched until my hips and knees popped open and sideways. I skittered like a spider towards her as, wide-eyed, the vector of her guns stayed above me no matter how quickly she lowered them, like the direction of her lowering arms was a broom sweeping me towards her. I was like the shadow of a diving bird. I felt the projectiles shred the air in a stream above me, nearly parting my hair as I reached her ankles and minnowed between them in a corkscrew.

Her arms had guns and mine had blades. I flapped my arms out once and brought them in again as I spun torpedo-style under her and past her.

I cut off her feet.

The resulting awkwardness from her and her screams of defeat were hard to watch. She even attempted to balance on the bone stumps. I had cut them cleanly so for a second she almost managed it, taking one, two, three skittering clops before she slipped and thudded to the floor, elbow, knee, shoulder, rolling back towards me for another shot.

I was running ahead of her arc like a speed skater on the clean airport floor. I would try not to kill her. I looped around and her face twitched like a lizard to track me. Her arms were too heavy to go as fast as her neck and her frustration roiled off of her. I got to her head before she could focus her armaments on me.

There was a moment, then, when I think she considered surrendering. I had my blade to her head and she had not brought up her guns to shoot. Time hung still like dust in a sunbeam.

“I-“ I started and she twitched her arms up. I flexed my forearms and everything above the line of her nose blended. Her arms splayed out Jesus-wide with metallic thumps and that was the end of her time with the Terminotaurs.

And the beginning of mine.

Getting away from airport security was part two of the test. But that is a story for another time.



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I notice these are getting longer. I guess that's good.

There's a book out where this artist takes kids drawings and does them up proper style with the ability of his craft. He has this cool foreword:

It started simply at the Jersey shore in 1998. While I played in the water, my six year old niece, Jessica, an avid drawer herself, snatched my sketchbook from my towel and filled it with strange creatures. As she went off to play, I marveled at how each creature stood without the benefit of a skeleton, and how the shoulder of a beautiful woman could be attached to her jawbone. Kids just don't worry about proportions or judgmental criticism - they just draw - and that's the reason they surpass adults in creativity.

The problem is was that few of my students respected abstract expressionism. Basically, if they were going to draw comic books, they'd need to make up figures, buildings, vehicles, and landscapes - but also elements like mystical dimensions, explosions, mutations and things unseen, all of which require abstract design. When drawing the insides of a demon's belly or the outer reaches of the subatomic microverse, there aren't any reference photos.

Awesome.

Check the book here.

It’s all about the transformation.
I remember entering the room. I was eighteen, cold, naked except for the paper underwear, bred for this and still nervous. I suppose terrified is more like it. Even after the rigorous physical training I was still very skinny. My breathing came in quick gasps as I struggled not to cross my arms or shiver. I came to a stop and stood at attention in the middle of the circular metal trapdoor grill under the light. I was barefoot. My head was shaved. My identification tattoos and punishment wires were out there for all to see. Gooseflesh ran over me and I could see the little puffs of my breath. Primed and ready. They drugs they had given me this morning to ease the transition were working. I felt more alert and attentive than ever. I felt curious about the future, eager to take part and slightly dreamy. I also felt a little itchy.
A blue light scanned up, over and through me.
I saw some indicators come up on some panels in the darkness. Just like in the instructional videos.
I’d been confirmed and we were a go.
I wish I could say I felt the moist eyes of my family and friends staring out hopefully from the observation enclosure. This was a proud day for most people. Most families gave one kid up to the SAPCorps. If you gave a child to the SAPCorps, it meant more birthing privileges.
SAPCorps was also the country’s orphanage. In some cases, it was also the juvenile detention center. I could still remember the day when I found out that this wasn’t a hospital and that my parents and sister were gone. That was ten years before. The doctor who had told me also remembered, I think, going by the scar on his face that he didn’t bother to get removed and the fact that he had requested to pull the lever for me on this occasion.
He looked down at me. Doctor Fines. My stepfather, for lack of a better word.
He twitched a smile at me. We were being monitored but other than that, it was just the two of us. I stood in the middle of the trapdoor. Our relationship had always been antagonistic but defined and limited. I don’t think anyone on the outside world would have referred to him as paternal but he was the closest I had.
“David.” He said. He nodded at me.
“Sir.” I replied. I stared straight ahead, willing him to get this underway.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Absolutely sir. Let’s do it.” I replied. I trembled a little.
“Here we go. I hope that…well. Here we go.” He said and flexed his hand on the handle.
He yanked back.
The trapdoor opened and I fell down the well into the liquid.
It’s all about the transformation.

I look down at my skin and see the moonlight reflect off its purple brick like surface. I see the little octagons that my pores have become breathing in the night air. It’s good that they do seeing as I don’t have a mouth anymore. I was a lucky one. My transformation turned out to be beneficial to the military. I’m dwarfstar dense with my human intelligence retained. Nothing manmade can really stand in my way and most conventional projectile weapons can't harm me. I don’t seem to have internal organs. My arms are huge and my legs are thick and short. I still have eyes but they’re hyper sensitive and covered up with military visiongogs. It’s been this way for years now.

I’m standing in the rain in the night time graveyard beside the grave of Dr. Fines. He died two days ago. I can’t define what I’m feeling. We’d talked every now and then but his death was sudden and I didn’t find out immediately. He was my last tie to my humanity. The last person who could remember who I was ‘before’.

I turn and walk away into the night and back to base.



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