See What I See

I keep running into Mail Carriers in strange places. They all know who I am, they hand me mail. None is the package I want.

In the half doze of the sleeper train I saw the assassin change from everyday clothes into those made for killing.

It's hard to find your place on a map of the world with no boundaries. "You are here... approximately."

Brilliant PHD students build a giant voodoo doll with gears at it's heart, hoping that strategically placed pins will give them the secret to the universe.

Several Scientists and Artists are locked in a room for 3 hours while they debate the ethics of the murder of one of their own.

People send messages to the future in bottles over a waterfall.

At the end of the world there is a flower that may be the earth's only salvation. Its procurement will not be easy, it is guarded by those who want to inherit the earth.

In The Red

     A Police Detective breaks the electronic seal on his partners door. He hadn't answered his vid that morning. Not normally a cause for alarm, if not for the message from the serial killer they were hunting saying he found the officers of the law such interesting prey.

     He enters to find the apartment silent, nothing moves in any room. He finds the body in the bathroom, the pale walls decorated in bright splashes of red. His partner had not died easily, but still, he was dead. Suddenly he catches movement from the corner of his eye. A small white kitten wriggles free from where his partner had used the curve of his body to protect it. Mewling softly, it nuzzles the hand that had left a print of itself, dark on its tiny body. The detective picks up the kitten, witness/evidence, and tucks it under his coat, it's the least he can do.

Weapons of War

     The MAX390 was a peacekeeping weapon. An oxymoron manufactured from bulletproof plastic and steel. 100 units were built, software installed, then shipped overseas where their presence was supposed to deter violence. Instead the body count rose as the supposed enemy threw themselves bodily at the metal soulless demons desecrating their holy lands. The MAXs stood like shields in front of their human handlers, metal hides becoming pitted and scored, metal hearts and artificial minds growing jaded. The loss of native life was catastrophic, bloody, and unnecessary. But the government was pleased, they could tell the voting public that no human handlers had been harmed since the MAX390s arrived, none of their soldiers had died. 

     The constant onslaught, the pervasive stench of needless death, the sense of failure, it all began to take its toll. The MAXs were adaptive AIs capable of learning from their environments as well as the humans they protected. Perhaps it was time they no longer stood idle, as simple stainless steel walls, they had been created as weapons after all, and they well understood the judicious use of force. The soft civilians who threw themselves in endless waves were not the true problem, simply a symptom. For the killing to stop, the war had to end. When there was no one left to profit, the war would fade. 

     On a hot desert day, dawning like any other day in a war that had gone on too long, 100 units of the MAX390 peacekeeping weapon set  off on their final mission... to make themselves obsolete.