Simple Rules and Other Stories

By DC Breznik

SIMPLE RULES (3k words): Rogue military drones terrorize a rural Michigan town. DOWN IN FLAMES (3.5k words): Wreck divers disturb a supernatural threat. MEASURELESS TO MAN (3.5k words): A graduate student seeking inspiration finds his muse but risks obsession. THE BEES ARE THE PROBLEM (4k words): Salvage specialists discover deadly survivors on a derelict space station. CIRCA NOX (4k words): A circadian biologist is surprised when a half-serious call for research subjects nets a real vampire. PHENOPLASTICITY (3.5k words): A physician in an isolated town requests a consult when patients begin giving birth to monsters.
THE GOD IN THE BOX (4k words): A simulated anthropologist rented to defuse a deadly conflict harbors sinister motives. THE SENDING (4k words): Tourists exploring an archaeological site unearth an ancient horror. THE SLEEPER STIRS (3k words): A crash landing reveals an unexpected consequence of exploiting alien corpses for interstellar travel. THREE AGAINST THE TEMPLE OF MUAL'XAR (39k words): In an alternate 1945, three survivors of a rail ambush in the Andes must brave ninjas, wildlife, lepers, diabolical Australians, and a charismatic millionaire with a dark secret to protect a discovery that might end the war. THE RIGHT LURE (6k words): A young girl with dreams of a wider world finds ancient evil close to home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DC Breznik
• Release date: Oct 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311058768

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Simple Rules

and Other Stories

by D.C. Breznik

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 D.C. Breznik

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

SIMPLE RULES

DOWN IN FLAMES

MEASURELESS TO MAN

THE BEES ARE THE PROBLEM

CIRCA NOX

PHENOPLASTICITY

THE GOD IN THE BOX

THE SENDING

THE SLEEPER STIRS

THREE AGAINST THE TEMPLE OF MUAL'XAR

THE RIGHT LURE

End Notes

Simple Rules

I was playing checkers with Marley on the front step of Bill's Bait Shack when the things swept past and on up the hill into town like Old West gunmen spoiling for a showdown. I would have missed them altogether if Marley hadn't tapped the board and pointed. The gravel road shimmered through them like a heat haze with only a few solid flickers to grant spherical definition. They danced around each other like leaves chasing in eddies of autumn wind, confusing the eye.

What do you make of that? he asked.

I'm usually quick with an answer--I taught biology at the high school then, and liked to think I was smart--but this left me at a loss for words. They were there and gone again before I could think to say, Beats the hell out of me. Let's follow 'em.

So we left the checkerboard and my jar of nightcrawlers on the step and took Marley's jeep into Pine River Rapids, chasing after phantoms. We came round the bend and over the bridge just in time to see them make one last spiral in front of the drug store and then split like pool balls in seven different directions, down Maple and Lampton street, tumbling into storm drains, and fading into the unkempt grass of Sarah Tadeski's lawn.

Well, Marley said. I nodded, feeling the portent. The army showed up in a truck and a couple of olive humvees six hours later.

* * *

We don't want you to be alarmed, the boy in charge of the detachment said. He was probably twenty-two, and didn't quite look soldierly, camouflage fatigues notwithstanding. He was too scrawny and looked too uncomfortable standing in front of as many of us as could be gathered in the high school auditorium on short notice, probably close to a hundred souls. With the mill three years closed, that hundred souls were a significant slice of the town. A dozen other soldiers stood against the wall cradling some pretty nasty looking hardware.

What's goin' on? This was crazy Ned Fowler, from the seat next to mine. Ned was a card carrying member of the Michigan Militia. I was surprised he hadn't holed up in his bunker when they called us all in over loudspeaker. Curiosity, I guessed. Not much went on in Pine River.

I can't tell you, really, well . . . the kid trailed off, looking like pure misery. His fault, I gathered, feeling a bit sorry for him.

It's about the aliens, Sarah Tadeski called out. Got one locked in my pantry!

That perked the kid right up, oddly enough, and he gestured to a couple of his men to accompany Tadeski out while he cleared his throat and went on.

Not aliens, no, no aliens. I um . . . it's experimental, really. There's no call for alarm. We were just running a little test, and, um . . .

Pine River is about sixty miles from Camp Grayling, northern Michigan's big National Guard training facility. A lot of the guys, and the gals too, go there with their units during the summer. With the recent conflicts, they've built a couple of little cities to conduct war games in urban environments. Larson's construction company and a few other locals got a bit of a boost with all the work. This group, I surmised must have been based out of there.

Here's a number you can reach me at, the kid said. If you see anything . . . strange . . . let me know, and I'll have someone there to help you out as soon as I can.

You'd better give us a bit more'n that, son, Crazy Ned said, loudly. If you think that your stormtroopers can barge in here like you own the place, we'll-

I shouldered Ned hard and gave him the evil eye to stuff his snarl with. Not one of my brighter moves, necessarily--guy's got an arsenal buried under land his grandfather left him, and he and his buddies talk tough and play army most weekends. It would be funny if they didn't use live ammo.

What Mr. Fowler's trying to say, I cleared my throat, is that we'd be more helpful to you with a little bit more information. I don't think you're here chasing UFOs, but I did see something I can't explain.

Well, the kid bit his lip. I guess. Okay.

So we learned that Pine River had been invaded not by aliens but by robots.

* * *

About ten minutes into the kid's description of exactly what we were dealing with, four shots echoed from outside in quick succession.

* * *

I'm so sorry, the kid was saying, over and over while his medic plucked bullets out of Jim Kubriczek. The state trooper was groaning and clutching his guts, his face contorted in agony.

* * *

"There was this idea, that instead of programming a robot for every eventuality, you could just give it a number of simple rules for behavior--things like stay out of the light, or move in a circular path, or never be more than a hundred meters or less than a meter from any other robot--in order to evoke complex behaviors like successfully engaging an enemy.

"We wanted something we could load into a bomb casing and drop from a thousand feet up, something that would saturate an urban area, take up residence, exert a form of control to make it impossible for insurgents to operate.

We realized they didn't have to be perfect. It's just as good to wound a terrorist as kill him, better maybe. We expected some collateral damage, but you figure some human behaviors . . . carrying guns, smelling like explosives, well, you don't expect that from law-abiding citizens. Doesn't have to work all the time--just most of the time.

You can't just tell them to pick up and leave? That the game's over? I asked him.

Not that kind of robot, the kid was glum. And the kill switch isn't working.

Why here, of all places?

Something stupid. Bad GPS coordinates. Yards instead of meters. Decimal point off in a tolerance. I don't know.

They're just passing through, maybe?

Not if they split up. They're on-task.

And you'll get rid of them how?

We'll track them down. He didn't sound certain.

They'll run down?

They scavenge electricity. Their firing chambers are adaptive--fit whatever ammunition they can scrounge. They'll hide caches here and there.

They'll wear out.

Five, ten years. Maybe. They don't have many moving parts. They roll on internal gyroscopes. Winters will be tough on them, maybe.

Shit.

* * *

Monday arrived without further notable incident. Sarah had locked her cat in the pantry. The soldiers bivouacked in the high school gymnasium. Marley, acting in his capacity as mayor of Pine River Rapids (pop. 1749) assigned me as the town's official liaison since--he said--I knew the place so well. He knew the town just as well as I did, but I guess I made a nuisance of myself asking too many questions. Got a good bit more out of the kid than I was probably supposed to: DARPA secrets and whatall.

Surprised there's not more of you out here, I commented that night. We were in Mary's little diner across the street from the high school going over some survey maps of the township. I was digging into one of her award-winning teriyaki burgers. The kid was drinking coffee and picking at his plate, pale as a ghost.

I got as many guys as they'd give me. There are only seven of 'em--of the drones--size of softballs. My supervisors don't see this as a major problem yet.

I grunted at that. Kubriczek had been airlifted out to County, and most everyone I knew was holed in their houses while pairs of soldiers patrolled the streets, peering beneath cars and porches and flashing lights into storm drains.

He asked questions and made notations on his map for another hour or so before I excused myself. School being canceled until further notice, my goal was to get down to the river early and make up for the fishing that the newcomers had interrupted Saturday afternoon.

Lampton Street was deserted. I walked with my hands in my pockets, thinking to myself about the rules that the robots followed. Guns seemed to be the biggest worry. Ned's militia buddies were in for a world of hurt, depending on how far the robots ranged. November 15 might end up being a real mess. The late fall air was crisp, and I shivered.

The drone rolled out from behind a waste bin like a child's dropped ball, then stopped abruptly, swiveling up like an eyeball scrutinizing me from the sidewalk. I froze. The thing was camouflaged, but a coat of mud and dirt made it easy to spot, and the deadly aperture on its surface gaped black and deep.

I raised my hands slowly, palms outward. It was ineffectual. What had the kid said? The things didn't actually see, did not think in any capacity. Movements captured by their cameras were broken down into sets of numbers that they associated with targets learned on the testing range. They locked onto scents--firearm propellants, explosives. It would aim for the center of infrared mass, inaccurate, but good enough to do the job. It might have a pistol round, a rifle round, a shotgun cartridge--there could be anything nestled in that empty black pupil peering into the depths of my gut.

Then that pupil swiveled back and the thing bowled swiftly away down the gutter. I lowered my hands with a sigh of release. The standoff had probably taken all of a long two or three seconds. I decided I didn't want to fish in the morning, and hurried on.

I'd come within twenty feet from my front door when someone down the street started screaming--two someones, actually, one of whom was on fire. He skipped into the street with flames licking up his leg, pants around his ankles and howling like a banshee hyena. I broke for him, got him rolling down on a patch of grass, but the fire was stubborn as hell--I blistered my hands getting his trousers the rest of the way off and onto the asphalt to burn quietly down. Tom Burroughs shivered and whimpered half-naked in the grass.

That was how the township learned that Peeping Tommy Burroughs had not, in fact, been reformed, and that our new residents disapproved very much of people moving about furtively at night, peering into windows.

The army kid was over with a pair of his men in just half a lick. Word travels fast in a small town, especially when the word is screamed and the town is five blocks square. I outlined my encounter and asked him pointedly how one of my former students (with whom I'd had the uncommon joy of three years of eleventh grade science) had been set on fire. It was his regret to inform me that there were at least two models of the heuristic robot in town, one of which specialized in siphoning gasoline from motor vehicles.

Over the next weeks, the incidents increased in intensity. The kid and I kept track of them on his map, finding no particular pattern as the little drones proceeded in their interdiction all across town. Skip Walther's furtive affair with Emily Marsh ended in blood and gunfire outside the Adventist church one night. Another state trooper was shot coming to the aid of an out-of-town burglar who managed to dial 9-1-1 on his cell phone before succumbing to a shotgun blast behind the grocery store.

One of the principles we followed in programming them, the kid informed me, was the swarming doctrine. Evenly distributed through town, two or three can congregate to hit hot spots hard before spreading out again.

So, I concluded, anywhere and any time.

Three days later another of my former star pupils died when his meth lab exploded. It wasn't proven that the DARPA drones were involved, but I could read between the lines. Mike Wilson was interrupted stealing copper pipe from under one of the abandoned houses by the highway--the building burned down, but he escaped with only singed eyebrows and a babbling, incoherent story of being chased by ghosts. My fears about the upcoming deer season were realized when a father-and-son team of poachers--Sam and Ryan Piotrowski--were found in the fields behind the old Tadeski farm. They each had rifles, but the bodies were stripped of ammunition. This was an omen of things to come, I thought, a particularly bad one.

* * *

I worked up the courage to visit Crazy Ned Fowler a few days afterward. It was another Saturday, and they were bound to be playing army-man in the woods while the real soldiers combed back and forth across town. Ned's wife directed me toward the two-track out back. Her face was a little drawn. My high school memories painted her as a smart cookie--smarter than Ned, at any rate. If he hadn't knocked her up in that pickup of his after the Homecoming dance she might have gone on to become the doctor she'd hoped to be. When I came back out of the woods later that day her car was gone--she'd taken the kids to her sister's place in St. Helen.

Aside from the occasional chatter of illegal automatic weapons, the stroll up the track was pleasant. I'm in love with the Northern Michigan woods in all their manifestations--winter, spring, summer, autumn. There aren't many places on Earth where you can walk out back and find yourself wrapped up immediately in miles of wilderness, alone with deer and wild turkeys, squirrels and the occasional black bear. I knew a lot of people in town had fled or were planning on going--short or long term, it was tough to say. The small town is a dying species in the new century, and this whole situation had just sped a process that had begun with the mill closing down. Even with all the craziness, I couldn't picture leaving.

A figure in camouflage interrupted my musing, stepping out from behind a tree with an assault rifle cradled in its arms. I should have figured Fowler would have cameras hidden along the trail. This was Brenna Steddman, a young woman with more looks than sense.

Heya, teach, she greeted me ambivalently.

Ned around? I asked, checking the trees behind her. The firing had stopped. No telling who was out there with her.

You bring any of those guys with you?

No, I said, truthfully. Just wanted to talk to Ned for a bit.

Mr. Fowler doesn't trust you. Says you're too tight with the feds.

I shook my head at that. The kids aren't here because Ned's been cheating on his taxes. This is serious.

I'll say. This is like one of those secret experiments he tells us about, testing weapons in the middle of nowhere. She frowned. Like those syphilis guys. Or Lyme disease. We've gotta protect ourselves.

You going to take me to Ned?

Sorry, teach. Boss says no way.

I told Brenna I was sorry to hear that, and that Ned's bunker was no place for her. She would have been better off at her dad's, or even with her no-account boyfriend who'd failed at least three of my classes. I tried to explain the rules we had to play by, to think about them and pass them on. The acrid reek of recently fired weapons was an ominous presence half-masked by the autumn fragrance of distant wood fireplaces.

* * *

I was playing checkers with Marley again when the army trucks roared by on their way out to Ned's.

Can't be good, Marley muttered. I nodded sadly, picturing Brenna's face, resolute under the black and green paint Ned's troupe affected.

The Militia incident would have drawn national news except that the Army finally clamped down hard. I never saw the deaths mentioned in the papers, or the fire, though there must have been nearly two dozen guys out in the woods the day the drones struck, faded away to rearm, struck again. So far as I know, none made it out. If they had, I'm sure I would have heard.

The kid and his little contingent disappeared soon after, replaced by hard-faced men in suits and a full brigade of hardened soldiers: not the chattiest folk I've known. They evacuated most everyone, quarantined the town, and had at it for a couple of weeks. They managed to kill a total of one robot--run over by the humvee it was hiding under.

There were some of us that stayed later on--a handful who wouldn't think of leaving the town and certainly didn't mind the stipend the feds offered to keep an eye on things. Welcome to Pine River Rapids (pop. 38).

I don't mind the job, and I don't much miss teaching. I fill out a report now and then and poke around a bit for the little caches of ammunition the drones scatter across town like squirrel stashes. I'm a robot ecologist. It leaves a lot of time for fishing, and they don't bother much about a rod and reel so long as you're not out after dark.

I look at the wreck the rest of the world is coming to, read stories about crime, about terrorism, about people scared to leave their houses or even scared in them, and I think that maybe we don't have it all that bad. Pine River's just about the safest place on Earth, so long as you mind your own business and follow one or two simple rules.

Down in Flames

Sounds are sharper down below, more immediate in a world where light drowns quickly under a crushing depth of water. I was photographing the wreck when the clang of a hatch broke my concentration. I jumped, the shot was ruined, and when I looked back, Dave was gone.

Bubbles gurgled past my facemask. I kicked to where he'd stood and tapped on the hatch with the butt of my dive knife, receiving two crisp tinks in reply. He was on the other side and not panicked--good, since my heart was suddenly racing. I was only an amateur, along for the story more than the bullion reputedly hidden in the wreck of the R.M.S. Nordic. My friend Dave Blackmer was by far the better diver--more skilled, more experienced, a professional treasure hunter.

He was also a risk taker. We had agreed not to penetrate the wreck on this dive--just to survey it, take some pictures, and return to the safety of his ship. I shouldn't have been there at all, and wouldn't have been except that his enthusiastic recklessness was virulently contagious.

We're right over it! he had exclaimed. I'll leave Navi in charge, and we'll suss it out together--just a quick peek!

Dave was the prototypical hands-on adventurer, a throwback to a time when exploration was personal. He barely tolerated the the robots Navila prepped on the deck somewhere overhead, or the new age of remote exploration they heralded.

The search for this wreck had taken three years of his life, and it was tantalizingly near to the surface. When the sonar and magnetometer had gone off and Dave had registered the depth, his whoops of unadulterated joy had woken his entire crew. Though it rested at the margin of what his equipment could handle--significantly below my own dive certification--he could experience the wreck first-hand. No force on Earth could have kept him from the descent.

The hatch that had trapped him was heavy and corroded, its disintegrating paint blackened by the fire that claimed the Nordic a century ago. It felt warm to my touch, as though some residue of the disaster clung to it despite the depth and chill. I tried to lever it open, but it had wedged tight. All I did was waste air.

Tapping at a nearby porthole drew me from the hatch. Dave's lights glinted through the cracked glass, and I could barely interpret his shadowy gestures. He wanted to explore the interior to find another way out. I pointed to my dive computer: less than half an hour remaining on the wreck. He thought that would be more than enough time to escape, so long as he kept moving. Then he was gone.

The ship listed at an angle on the seabed, and I followed the promenade along the port side railing, feeling the weight of the water overhead, the weight of the darkness at the edges of my lights. The leprous hull unveiled itself foot-by-foot ahead of me, and I kicked past corroded hatches and the skeletal hulls of lifeboats dangling from broken davits like hanged men.

The wreck was my only reference in the void--without it, I would not know up from down. Dave had been the expert, the decision maker, the capable one. I was a rank amateur. I wondered how long to wait for him. Could I make it to the surface myself? What if I left my friend trapped to asphyxiate somewhere in this vast steel tomb?

With every dry, metallic gasp through the regulator I recalled my first lessons: So long as you're on life support, your life is in danger. It's held hostage to the regulator, to the tanks, and to the hoses. The equipment is the only barrier between you and death or, if you're lucky, crippling injury . . .

I would trade away my kidneys or liver before letting go my SCUBA gear at any depth. It would be drowning or asphyxiation--maybe hypothermia--if I lingered or somehow damaged my equipment, embolism or the bends if I ascended recklessly.

I steeled myself, determined not to panic. Panic was a real killer. If I panicked, then I would be lost whether Dave escaped the wreck of the Nordic or not. His escape rested almost entirely on his shoulders. I tapped the bulkhead, hoping for a response, but received nothing in return. The ship was silent and dead. It occurred to