I just wrote this thing in my art thread, after watching a lot of stuff about Halo and Dust514 and EVE and a few other things. Essentially, this is gonna be high-tech/military sci-fi, following the story of a few people (If I ever get around to actually following up on this.) All things are © me, of course.
Just a few warnings: This story is going to contain violence and swearwords. I'd say that generally, these parts would be rated 14A, but a few parts, such as this first one, contain some thought-provoking imagery. Be warned.
Kjor's Ruminations
10 9 8Breathe
7 6 5
Breathe
4 3 2
1
Open eyes
Look out at the world
Sigh
Nothing is ever simple
Kjor looked in front of him, looked at the blob of EMPlasma sitting in the dirt. It glowed ever so faintly, glowed with an orange light, shining upon him and whatever else was in the dark wasteland.
The dirt and the dead.
Of course, Kjor wasn't dead, no more than EMPlasma was actually "plasma." But it would've been nice to be dead. No cares, responsibilities or worries. No weapons, no war, and no death.
No loss.
But here he was now, lying in the dirt, his right arm and leg missing, spinal cord liquefied one-third of the way up his back. Bits of EMPlasma stuck to his body like explosive marmalade, shell casings littered the landscape, grenade pins stuck into the earth like so many deadly tent pegs. He was the tent, war grounding him, keeping him from drifting away, but now he was a marmalade-bullet sandwich and like hell he'd let go.
Kjor was prepared to stay here forever.
His last thought was of his family as he slipped into nothingness.
Now he was with them.
The Social Contract
Sol looked at his screen in annoyance.
Code: Select all
^>{Disconnected From Server}<^
----------------
--< Reconnect? [Unavailable]
--< Debug
--< Terminate ProcessHis hacks always worked. He sighed and reached into the sub-zero unit beside his desk, pulling out a can of soda. He thawed it to just below two degrees and hit "Debug" on his display. Oh well, it's not like this is the first time I've been disconnected. I'm overreacting.
Sol reached down to a small box at his feet and pulled out a retractable cord. It looked kind of like a pair of earbuds, but they were flat, and odder still, they were, well, wired. He connected the small connectors to a pair of plugs hidden just behind his ears, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes.
This little machine was priceless, which was partly due to the fact that it was also very illegal. It was one of three similar boxes on his planet of Dars'l, one planet in four in his sector running these boxes, just one sector in seven which hosted them. This one was important though, because it was Sol's personal one, the one only he could access. The boxes ran servers, forming a cloud network which hosted a very famous and very illegal service.
Sol was in the business of storing thoughts.
The storage of thoughts, or "memory-memory," was originally an idea developed for medical purposes, later improved for military use. The idea was that by uploading a person's "mind-state," one could revive soldiers killed in action. Just pop them into a new body and send them off again! The humanitarian concerns raised about the program meant it was voluntary, but there were still millions of soldiers with stored mind-states at the ready.
Civilian access to the network was nonexistent, for obvious reasons, and M-M Servers were illegal to operate, but that didn't stop Sol. His network, "The Social Contract," was the most (in)famous, used by people all over known space, and it required only a small subscription fee to access. Users could unload the things they didn't want to remember, regain experiences and ideas they had stored, all as much as they needed.
Billions of mind-states existed on his network.
Billions of experiences, waiting to be used....
.... Or stolen.
