skonen_blades

It's morning.
The meat trains move through the traffic on their way to work
The caved-in heads and thousand yard stares of commuters
As they repetitively groundhog day their way
through their unexpectedly disappointing lives.
The thrill of all the edges has been rubbed off by the friction of time's river.
And the accidental polish from millions of hands of tourists.
The embodiment of beliefs eroded by exposure.
People that are tired of walking compelled by simple biology to keep on walking.
Personal rainclouds of being misunderstood following each person
The older the house, the more that it's haunted.
None of us are buoyant in this rain-soaked darkness.
But instead of filling up with water, we are emptying.
Bleeding out with no replenishing.
Ebbing away to transparency.
The clothes existing more than the people.
Scarecrows that the crows don't even notice anymore
Snakes that shed skin only to find that there's suddenly nothing underneath.
Half-lifing away
Until the final transition to the great unknown
is less of a giant leap
and more of a small step.



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The strike hadn’t been effective. They didn’t care about us.

The geothermal shafts went down and down into the earth’s core. Machines took the bulk of the drilling but humans were always needed for cheap grunt work. We were expendable but we dealt with surprises better than the machines.

There’s a feeling that heat-miner gets, for instance, just before a pocket is going to catch. It’s intuition that can’t be matched by a computer.

We’ve been bioengineered to withstand the heat at these depths. Our skin is made of overlapping shingles, heat baffles to dissipate the scalding temperatures. Our bodies are dry inside like sponges and our blood is like molasses. We’re still basically human but we are a breed apart.

It makes it easier to demonize us and treat us badly. We all entered into this nightmare with the idea of high pay.

It turns out that geothermal energy isn’t as cost effective as they led us to believe.

Right now, me and a few of the workers that have been on strike for three weeks are crammed into an elevator.

Curled into a ball on the floor of the elevator is a human supervisor. He’s bleeding and groaning, regaining consciousness. There’s a sock in his mouth and he’s tied up. All of our shoes are pointed towards him. We’re looking down at him with a mixture of fear and anger.

The strike hasn’t been effective. We’ve taken a hostage.

We’ve crossed the line. There’s no doubt that we’ll be fired if not killed for this but hopefully it will bring our plight to the news.

The elevator descends to subsection 126. This is as far as we can legally take a baseline human. We don’t find the heat here very hot but for the human, it’s like being in a pizza oven set to warm, survivable but highly uncomfortable.

At this depth, he can survive for two days. He'll need some supervised re-hydration in a hospital afterwards and probably a new pair of lungs.

We don't feel the heat but we're worried. Our red eyes meet each other’s nervously and our shingles shift and flutter, waffling away the heat. Our slowly beating hearts feel sympathy with the moaning creature on the hot floor of the elevator but we can’t stop now.

We left a note upstairs that for every hour that goes by that our demands are ignored, we will descend another level.

I estimate that we can probably go eight or nine levels before the human’s clothes combust. We have a fire extinguisher here for that.

Another six levels after that, and he’ll be ash.

The radio in our elevator is working but so far, nothing.

I hope they get in touch with us soon.



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It started, as these things always do, with a kiss.

Advice is useless to the young. That is their curse and their strength. They have no idea that some of the things that they attempt are impossible. That’s why an alarmingly high percentage of them succeed.

Like Jonas Brigand, sitting in a cheap metal chair in a prison cube waiting room, starting at his watch, currently waiting for his girlfriend to get out of prison.

“Times are tough in the colonies” goes the song. Young men and women were subject to the same set of laws as the adults. With the ability to breed came responsibility. It was too harsh a world to even consider doing it otherwise.

Once society had been set up, once the terraforming tents were a memory and the world was green, the new generations would be fat and slow on the world that the hardpack settlers like Jonas Brigand and his girlfriend had made for them.

The scars on his hands stared mutely back at him. He was fourteen. His girl, Jayley Cordsmith, was sixteen. Her body was just as strong and scarred as his.

She was pulling six days for drunk and disorderly. Six days of pay gone. She have to work a month of doubles to get that back. She’d do it, too.

Jonas had the beginnings of a manbeard. His flat nose was the result of beatings from the ones that reared him and a life of never backing down.

Jayley had the short dreads of a hullpatcher and was missing a pinky on her left hand. Jonas thought of her working with her hammer belt in the hot sun. She’d be seventeen in Quadrember but he’d be sixteen two months earlier. For two months, they’d be the same age.

For two months, their drinking, mating, and eating privileges would be equal. They’d both have one ‘drop the charges’ card each to use as they saw fit. They could do anything that didn’t result in a loss of life or the damage of company property.

Jonas usually punched a supervisor. It was a popular choice.

Now Jonas wasn’t sure there would be any more cards or privileges for Jayley at all.

Jayley had decided that she was unhappy with the system and stopped going to work. They’d thrown her in the clink almost immediately.

Strike was a forbidden action. It couldn’t be tolerated. There were always one or two people that started the talk once the project neared completion but that was a decade off. Besides, Jayley loved to work.

The door at the end of the hall clicked and hissed. The hatchratchet spun and the door creaked open.

Jayley ran through. Jonas stood up and caught her in his arms.

She was missing a tooth and she had a black eye but her eyes shimmered with the usual angry light.

“We have to take them down, Jonas. We have to make this place ours.” She said.

They hadn’t even come close to breaking her.

Then she kissed him.









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