Archive for the ‘Sara Genge’ Category
Secret Pocket
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
Warning: this story contains explicit violence towards a child. If the subject matter disturbs you, or if you just don’t feel like reading this kind of thing now, you should probably move on. Check out our archives: there’s lots of stories in there that you might like.
Limp crept into camp. He hoped to get good night’s sleep before having to face Chief. He thought of the nano in his secret pocket, enough to buy a house, and leaned on the branch he carried for balance. He’d been away for three days and he’d lost the crutch. His mother wouldn’t be happy.
“Patrice, is that you? Where have you been, you idiot boy?” Only his mother called him Patrice.
He tried to look as tired and bruised as he felt, but she came at him at full speed and slapped him before he could talk.
“You better have something for Chief, boy. He’s been looking for you everywhere and he’s not happy. What are you hiding? Where is it?”
Limp produced a couple of computer chips, a vial of penicillin and some nano. Finally, his mother was satisfied and stopped hitting him.
The boy got up and hopped to his tent, but was intercepted by Chief himself. Limp was prepared. He threw the rest of the nano at Chief’s feet. Chief looked doubtful. It was more than could be expected from three days of scavenging, but he kicked Limp a couple of times for good measure. Limp sighed and took the wad of compressed nano out of his secret pocket.
“That’ll teach you to keep things from me!” Chief threw Limp a worthless chit.
Limp washed the blood off his face and examined his body for broken bones. The lead residue under his skin protected him from the worst of the sun’s radiation, but it also gave him a molted color that kept most of the bruises from showing. He blessed the missionaries for geneering his ancestors to survive in the Waste.
He thought of the skid he’d stolen from one of them. It was worth more than all the nano in Chief’s coffers and he didn’t plan on handing it over to him. It had taken two days of digging, but Limp had made sure it was buried deep.
This story is part of the Children of the Waste series. You can check out a longer story set in the same world at http://www.strangehorizons.com/2007/20070115/godtouched-f.shtml
We Come In Peace
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Rat scuttled between metal legs, used to the robots getting in the way. Ever since they’d taken over and killed all the humans, they acted superior. Pretty uppity for man-made creatures, Rat thought.
Rat was unconcerned. Rat was a creature of God and his children’s children would still be here long after the robots industrialized themselves into extinction. Same thing had happened to the dinosaurs and humans, after all. The only thing that bothered Rat was that robots didn’t keep organic food around. He was positively famished. Life was better in the good old days when humans ruled the Earth.
Rat jumped over a couple metal toes, sniffing and searching for food, but stopped when he heard the robots talking.
“I hear there are some humans left up in the mountains,” the grey robot said.
“That’s stupid. We nuked ’em all. They can’t live with radiation,” the green one answered.
“Ah, but don’t they evolve? Let me see… I’m sure I had a file on evolution somewhere.”
“Dude, seriously. You’ve gotta learn to classify your chips…”
The conversation trailed off, but Rat sat, thinking. Humans meant food.
For the first time, he regretted not being a cat or a dog, an animal that humans would find cute and take in, no questions asked. But Rat had evolved too and the radiation had helped. He was no longer like the stupid rats humans used to kill. If he could make himself useful, maybe the humans would let him stay with them.
Finding the explosives wasn’t hard; mixing and transporting them was. Rat enlisted all his friends and even a couple hamsters that were strolling by. Humans would dig the explosions, specially if they killed robots. Rat set the counters while his little army stole an old Blackberry from the Human Artifacts Museum.
“We are your Allies. We come in Peace,” he typed into the rat-sized screen. Now, he only needed to find the humans and show them the message. He hoped the humans hadn’t grown too stupid to understand that alliances were a give and take and that Rat and his friends expected to be paid. In food, preferably.
End