Chaos Weaving

By Mason Freeborn

Featuring 50 individual FUTURISTIC FLASH FICTION short stories, Chaos Weaving is an experiment in telling detailed Wicked Technological Tales of the Beyond. An intriguing mix of space exploration, aliens, robots, military technology and more lies within.
Flash fiction stories are quick tales between 100 and 1000 words. This premiere first collection is highly sci-fi themed and full of plausible scientific reasoning, spiritual questioning, existential intelligence awareness and many other evolutionary conflict situations. It contains stories about someone, or something, living in the future doing a task or having an experience in what could be a possible scenario from an actual potential future. These are forward-clawing visions of where we can go, and where sentience may end up – on the path toward the unending inevitable evolution of all things.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781631920042

Book preview

Oil

Where Robots Go to Die

The Trinity Island Industrial Waste Depository sits among the Wastelands of the Newmerican Southwest desert. Territory lines have blurred and general common control has been lost. The disbanded former United States are federally independent, because there is no Federal system anymore. All communication networks are under the control of the DARPA GALVUS Supercomputer, and it feels that man needs a step back in time - to check itself again at the doors of industry. It is the late 21st century and Trinity Island, the brimming, burning, cordoned oasis of retired technology, is glowing with Dynamanic brains of the Robotic Kind.

The 115 square mile facility was walled off after the Hades Brim Neutron Bomb test went awry back in 2023. Restricted to Biological access, these grounds became fertile soil for silicon-based, outphased detritus. Located in New Mexico, on the White Sands test range where the first atomic bombs were tested (including the namesake Trinity bomb that started it all), this desert has become a toxic wasteland. The crust of the desert is now peppered with fine particles of nano-death; the irradiated soil and nuclear glass deposits make the terrain seem like some of those toxic environmental survey photos from the Io Aphrodite-A Mission.

Immediately lethal to some, hospice to others, and home sweet home to the utility robots that adapt and utilize these waste parts to prolong their lifespans, this section of the former military test range was becoming home to the outdated Robotikind (the unofficial species designation). Piled on top of each other with aerial Dumpcraft, the vicinity is walled off by rubber masses from the Burning Pit of Despair - military tires and derelict vehicles that were laid out to waste, and selfincinerated for a thorough and unstoppable 3-year burning, smoky hell.

The crane operator of Dumpcraft LaMothe is smashing piles together of old robotic Worder Units. Sparks fly and flickers of LED lights permeate the area… some of these machines are still active! Mathias Jay Andrews sees the signature blue lights of the Dynamanic robot brains below him and wonders whether smashing them together is the right thing to do. He is under orders – but he knows they are powered up – he hears the cries of the robots – blips and squeaks and jumbled tones abound – life cycles draining…

CRUSHING!!!

Crushed.

He knows that via the Laws of Dynamanics, these robots have full-simulated sentient capability. These minds are aware – even though they are pulses of electricity signaling binary actions – Andrews is also thinking about how his brain is a series of electrical impulses and actions – not too dissimilar from the bashed ones below him.

Stopping to smell the toxic brew leaking into his breathing mask, his Commanding Officer is harping at him through the commlink. "Andrews! Get your ass in gear and clear out the bay! Stop smelling the coffee AND the roses and get a grip – for the last time - they aren’t alive! Now disassemble Johnny 5 so we can get out of this acrid hellhole!"

With that, Andrews grabs the controller and tries to pull the robots out quickly to smash them with dignity – for torture is still a violation to an identity programmed to know the meaning of the word. Pain has been digitized as a Dynamanic Logic Control Law for added benefit to, and from, these intelligent robot types.

Seasoned robots ready to fight the new arrivals for their very body parts are at the ready. The LaMothe rises; the cries fade; the burning continues; and the adaptable survivors gather around the newly dumped load of parts, clawing at what might become a useful new personal add-on, or friend altogether.

The Tale of Jessup Ironside

There once was a wolf named Jessup Ironside - a Space Cowboy - he was sent to the Moon as punishment, and ended up staying there to live out his life.

Originally becoming a Navy SEAL, after graduating from Saddleback College, Jessup was enlisted in a secret tactical force of the CIA, soon after his successful incursion of an illegal drug smuggling submarine manufacturing facility. After a substantial severance package, he invested in his own Wild West real estate acreage. He commanded horses and cattle on his Texas ranch before needing a local job working for the space industry at night. Bored with civilian life, he wanted that patrol rush in his veins again, so he took the graveyard position as a Johnson Space Center security guard. Eventually, he became head of Space Command Security in 2037.

However, he was sentenced to mine the Moon as a penalty for his eventual actions.

During his beat, one chilly October night, he was making routine laps in his Tactical Ford Raptor, on NASA Road 1. He was drinking rum under some horchata, as usual, and ended up commandeering an Earth Ore Hauler - the ones used to carry auto-landed Ore Modules from the Moon. He had all the keys anyway, but the machine looked so sweet to drive - he decided to take it for a spin. After plowing through barriers and destroying road signs, his evening ended when he was put in the brig of an offshore aircraft carrier. It was weeks his Dad left him in there, being the Admiral of the Naval Forces, and a lesson he was coming to learn all the time.

To toughen up his son, the Admiral sent Jessup to the moon. Since he stole an Ore Hauler, and the irony was too great, he was sentenced to 6 months of hauling ore at the Space Force Triton Base, on the southeastern edge of the visible side. You can see it reflecting those blue light flashes - the sapphire dome sparkling as the moonlight…

An Ore Hauler he would be then. Plus, the family owned 50 acres near the mine outskirts, and he wanted his son to do some landscaping in preparation for Stage-3 Moon Colonization Protocols involving Road Regolith Glassification. He would command the Moonshadow, the Moon’s largest hauler, which took 2 separate missions to ship and 2 months to assemble. You can see it today casting a moving shadow in the right light with a telescope; and her trails have become a permanent mark, visible now with the unlensed eye.

Jessup always referred to these as his formative years, as he forged lengthy troughs and drove the ore around in hauler-style, he listened to a lot of audio books – and caught up with the classics he was too cool to read back in school. There was only one distinctive incident during this sentence of note; he jacked another Ore Hauler during a press event to show off the finalized Virgin Moonport Hangar. Someone tacked on 6 more months for that.

Becoming smarter by the load, Jessup took up political science and economics to soon become the Moon’s first Earth Ambassador. After four years of that, he became the first official Mayor of the Moon. The family property was already taking construction of the Bigelow Domehome Unit, with water condensers and air processing units on site – the new ranch even had a few horses in the shape of some Polaris Space Ski’s. The pilings for the Moon City Megashield were going in and security drones were set about the landscape, mapping and roaming for intel.

Eventually, Mayor Ironside found his way back to another Ore Hauler. To commemorate the Richardson Demarcation Line, the main road dividing the industrial from civilian sides (and marking all ancillary property lines), the Mayor jumped from the podium into the parade, and into the hauler pulling the EADS module for the Moon Research Center. Even at 53, he was young enough to pull pranks and remind everyone what the difference was between a robot and a human - aside from the sleep - it was the ability to laugh.

He found himself in the cockpit of a brand new machine and was enamored by the change over the years – the lights felt warmer – the seats had massagers installed – the hum of the beast seemed deadened – he was laughing at progress.

CLICK! Jessup released the trailer and took the hauler off-roading. People everywhere were awed as he wildly drove into the dusted hills.

Therefore, forced to resign, and happily doing so, Jessup Ironside became the Moon’s first Official Space Cowboy. A Folk Hero in the making, the legend was being realized. As his Ranch had a Community Dome with an oxygen and alcohol bar, the locals would meet there, using the Underground Tunnel System, and play poker while watching movies. The early years of Moon Colonization created the living legend, like one of the greats from old Hollywood – a Clint Eastwood/Charles Bronson/James Arness type. He was even known for acquiring rare things like Italian leather, Cuban cigars and fine Brazilian hardwoods. He had connections with all kinds of characters, shady and classified alike, and they would all take a direct private tram over for business.

Eventually, the toll of his pioneer days caught up with him. He became ill with terminal lung cancer, contracted by breathing rare isotopes of Polonium from the stirred up dusty surface regolith. His years of kicking up the Moon dirt as a Cowboy caught up with him – he became a medical example. He passed away on a Saturday in the Kaiser Medical Module.

He was thus interred as the first buried body on the Moon, adjacent to the Kubrick Mausoleum of human ash-infused Lifestones, sent up from those eager to rest as a posthumous Moonie. Jessup Ironside became an enshrined idol, complete with a giant Mooncrete version of himself, marking the north end of the ranch line. Facing Ironside Town Circle, he gazes out with a deviously lifted eye, rearing up on a horse with wings and rockets - landmark sized Triton in hand - sculptural art signaling man’s plight towards The Moon Life.

I am not a clone.

Memories mixing…

Realities blurring…

Paranoia pervading…

Jasper Nine is staring in the mirror. Whispering to himself… "I am not a clone. I am myself - I am - not a clone! I have - faded memories - of things I don’t feel like I did - if there ever was an original - and if I am a clone…

"But I am not a clone!"

Jasper has lost his personal identification with his own unique soul. Looking back into his eyes, he searches for that soul. A glimmer of life… he waits… a reminder of past lives – and possibly the origins for all his random dreams that linger deep in the middle of that skin covered skull he is gazing at. He focuses on his Identifier. The 9 dots around his left iris indicate something is amiss, and he wonders about the concrete laboratory of a home he has grown up in, and whether he is an actual experiment among all the laboratory gear and archived vats surrounding his domicile. All of those eye scans to get in doors and rooms and elevators – there is too much control around here.

Questions of origin are inevitable for a sentient being. And self-reasoning has just caught up with real-time logic.

Although his mind feels unique, Jasper 9 is really a lab grown meatball with a number. At least that’s how he felt he is perceived from the Whitecoats. The Eye-dentifier shows that Jasper is from the 9th batch of the Phoenix Strain. Generations grown from a single classified pair of human male and female DNA sequences, picked by a computer, and mixed in a dark flask in a darker laboratory – away from human sentiment and conscience about moral or ethical needs that may threaten