The Shattered Man

By Daniel Jeffries

The Shattered Man
Four cutting edge science fiction short stories from the Age of Transcendence Saga

Fury of the Sun Gods - A military family is ripped apart by their choices and allegiances as China explodes in civil war. After Direct Democracy swept away the old Communist regime in a Jasmine Revolution seventy years earlier, China became the light of the world, everything America was in the 20th century. But when a depression brings the Communists storming back, fathers battle sons for the future of the county, with terrifying new weapons.

When Once We Dreamed - When the Sol Sys economy collapses, Leptic surgery seems to offer the unemployed new hope. The procedure eliminates the need for sleep and companies are hungry to hire people they can work all night. At first a young man relishes the extra time the miracle surgery brings, but his life quickly becomes a nightmare as his new job sets him on a collision course with displaced workers who hate and fear him.

The Illustrated Scriptures When a visionary prophet records his whole life on his internal nanonets, his memories becomes the VR bible for a new religion that threatens to sweep away the ancient religions of ink and wood pulp. Yet when a repressive government kills the prophet, a rag tag group of his posthuman followers mount a daring raid on a highly secure police facility to capture his final memories and complete their scriptures.

In the Cracks of the Machine - The robot revolution is here, but it’s not what we expected. Instead of friendly humanoid robots doing our dirty work for us, big corporations use cheap drones to sweep aside whole labor forces. Now one displaced worker sets out for revenge against the CEO of the world’s biggest robotics manufacturer, but when he gets there the man is nothing like what he expected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Jeffries
• Release date: Jan 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781370518760

Daniel Jeffries

Dan Jeffries is an author, engineer and serial entrepreneur. During his two decades as a consultant, he’s covered a broad range of tech from Linux to networks and virtualization. From time to time, he’s known to enjoy the finer aspects of drinking, smoking and screwing. He lives with his wife and two spirit animals in sunny southern California.

Book preview

The Shattered Man

Four Short Stories

Daniel Jeffries

Version 3.0.2013.12.21.GA.001

The Shattered Man

Four Science Fiction Short Stories

The Age of Transcendence Saga

Daniel Jeffries

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Daniel Jeffries

Version 3.0.2013.12.21.GA.001

Cover: Daniel Jeffries

Editor: Rich McDowell

Check out all my work at my author blog:

http://meuploads.com

Table of Contents

Fury of the Sun Gods

When Once We Dreamed

The Illustrated Scriptures

In the Cracks of the Machine

Timeline: Future History of the Universe

Fury of the Sun Gods

Age of Transcendence Saga: Short Story One

Version 2.0.2013.10.09.001.GOLD-MASTER

The Last Warlord

Twenty-Third of August

2182 Orthodox Western Calendar

4880 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Dog

Ruins of Shanghai, China

They were coming now, like a stampede of raging rhinoceros, their footsteps shaking the buildings and throwing great clouds of dust into the air.

Master General Jù-Lōng stood up slowly, his sharply arched Mandarin eyes shining.

"It’s over, flashed his son through the private nanonet bands. Give up, Bà Ba."

Lōng heard the words but couldn’t accept them yet. He stared at the holographic ghost of his oldest son, Míng-Hóa. Míng wore the bright red avenging angel officer’s uniform of the Western Direct Democracy of China.

"It’s over. You know it. You taught me everything you know."

"Not everything," flashed Lōng.

"Come out. There’s no one left. Your armies are gone. Everyone’s dead. You know what you have to do. They’ll kill you unless you surrender to me. Or worse."

"You’ll kill me."

"I won’t. But I’ll see you dead anyway for all you’ve done."

"I was wrong about you," flashed Lōng.

"And why’s that?" flashed Míng, sneering.

"I was proud of you, but there’s nothing to be proud of."

"Not proud of me? Not proud of me! And what do you got to be proud of, old man? Bitter fucking old man. Fucking stuck in the past. You’ve never been proud of anything in your life."

"No. Always proud, flashed Lōng. Just afraid to show it."

"Too late now."

"Yes. Too late. But not too late to tell you you’re half the man your brother was."

"Déshí? A fucking idiot. A fool. And you’re a fool. He died like all the other fools, fighting for your dead fucking ideas. Déshí got what he deserved and you will too. Enough talk. It’s over. We won. The new ways won. Your old ideas are dead, old man. You’re dead. You got half an hour to surrender or we’re coming in."

"Not dead yet."

Lōng cut the connection before his son could say anything else. With a stoic dignity, he put on his scarred, armored mask and helmet. His Sunzi armor buzzed on and expanded, tripling his size, turning him into a biomechanical giant.

His mask composed itself, knitting shut. The skull of the helmet arched back from his head, coming to a curved point, the top of it ridged like alien bones. Silver and black horns swept back from his temples like ravens’ wings. On the mask’s front the vicious red face of ancient Chinese war god Kuan Ti glared fiercely, his mouth stretched in a battle roar.

Outside, the Celestial Fury hurricane raged, breaking the brutal humidity of the late Shanghai summer. In history books, its explosion over the coast would mark the end of the Chinese Civil War, a final cleansing that would wash away the horror and sadness of the past six years.

The Chinese United Direct Democracy had overthrown the People’s Republic of China seventy years earlier. China thrived. It was the first country with no leaders. Citizens decided everything through distributed voting. People said it would never work. Yet for nearly sixty-five years the economy roared along at a fevered pace. China became the light of the world.

A massive immigration boom and a tidal wave of foreign influences crushed the old ways. Lōng hated the death of so many traditions, the unrecognizable mess of the new world. Even as he stood in front of the ceremonial Prime Minister of the Direct Democracy, swearing his oath to defend the new republic, being pardoned for his fifty years served as Supreme Commander of the People’s Republic of China, he dreamed of putting on his old communist uniform and fighting again.

It didn’t take long.

The economy crashed hard and people wanted answers. After a few years they only wanted bread and water and a place to live. The communists started preaching again and soon they’d plunged China into a brutal and bloody civil war, with Lōng defecting and leading the communist armies.

On the mediaskin of his walls and floors, Lōng watched as hundreds of images danced: holographs of huge maps; cinema feeds; photos, all of them alive and moving. Lōng’s eyes lingered on the photos of the ruins, the buildings and houses everywhere crushed by precision bombs and orbital lasers. He saw trees stripped of their bark by blast waves. Thick coats of ash and dust covered the streets and yards. The heavy rain came down relentlessly. Everywhere his soldiers were fleeing clouds of invisible nano monsters and massive armored war goliaths. He blinked the mediawall off and the images faded.

Mĕi-Zhēn, his white and tan cat, meowed softly, looking up at him like a lost lover from the edge of his great mahogany desk. There wasn't time, but he made some for her. He lifted her up carefully with gloved hands that could crush steel like brittle leaves. Gently, he stroked her as she wrapped her tail around his arm and cooed.

Goodbye, little one. I never liked cats before you. You made me love them, said the old soldier.

He thought of his wife, Jing-Wei. He remembered when she’d brought the baby cat home, a stray, no bigger than her palm. He’d objected to it strongly. Yet grudgingly, slowly, the cat had grown on him, with her devilishness and her complete refusal to do anything he told her. Eventually, Lōng’s love of independent thinkers overcame his resistance, like water wearing down stone.

How many other things had his wife taught him to love in his stubbornness? Too many things, he thought. If I’d only listened more. How many things did I miss out on? So many. I’m a fool. He shook his head slowly. Too late now. It’ll have to be enough.

He smiled beneath the mask and placed Mĕi-Zhēn tenderly down on the table. She rolled over on her back and eyed him from between her paws.

No more time to play, he said, petting her tiny head with his monster fingers.

He fired up his armor, its seared wrist and shoulder cannons igniting, glowing with bright, barely restrained energy. Mĕi-Zhēn darted away to hide. The Supreme Commander of the Eastern Forces walked to the door, ready to face his death.

The Exodus

Seven Days Earlier

Morning

Sixteenth of August

2182 Orthodox Western Calendar

4880 Universal Chinese Calendar, Year of the Dog

Shanghai, China

Lōng ordered the exodus but that didn’t make it easier to watch his wife and youngest child leave him, to watch the frenzy of people rushing to get on hoverlifters and jumpers with only a few sacred possessions.

A woman hurried past him, carrying a battered box of old media-photos. One tumbled loose and the General could see the moving images of a much younger version of the woman dancing with a man in a sharply pressed military tunic. Lōng picked up the photo and handed it back. She thanked him briskly with a bow and hurried on.

He scanned the rest of the crowd. People everywhere cried. A woman struggled to contain her three boys, who were swiping at each other and wrestling on the grass. A man tried to shove his daughter’s toys into a wicker basket, while the girl clung to his leg.

Someone rushed by with a mirror and Lōng saw himself briefly. His skin looked pale and he’d never felt so brittle, so old. The light breeze toyed with his white beard. Moving flecks of light glittered in the hairs, the rising sun reflecting off the anti-nano spiders as they patrolled it. His red and white silk robe hung open, revealing the black and gold, gutwire stamped inner skinsuit of his Sunzi armor.

Lōng stood, shoulders slumped, and exhaled slowly. He looked at what remained of his army. They’d come from various scattered regiments who’d fallen back to the waterfront city of Shanghai. They looked like giants in their full battle gear. He once had so many proud regiments. Now they were decimated, many of them by the single quark bomb that obliterated 900 miles of the countryside along with the cities of Chengdu and Chongqing.

After years of fighting it had only taken the wrath of one bomb to nearly annihilate the Eastern Reformed Communist Army, Lōng’s army. He still marveled at the singular brilliance of the strike. He wondered if any army in history had ever struck such a cruel and definitive blow?

A woman walked by fanning herself with a media-magazine that displayed moving images and a screamer headline that said: WAR’S END FINALLY IN SIGHT, EASTERN TROOPS ROUTED, another that screamed WESTERN TROOPS SWEAR REVENGE ON REMAINING FORCES.

The heat wave’s intensity cranked up, rocketing the temperature to 35 C by early morning. The small breeze barely helped. Western bombs had knocked out the city’s micro-climate generators, leaving everyone to swelter.

Worse, in the last week intelligence agents had picked up frightening coded communications urging the total annihilation of Lōng's army, punishment for having started the war.

Lōng knew the voice talking on the captured comms: Míng, his oldest son, commander of the Direct Democracy’s Special Forces.

"Kill them all. All of them. What are roaches good for? They live on garbage. They carry disease. You step on roaches. You burn them out of the walls."

"What if they surrender?" said an unidentified voice.

"Step on them anyway."

His son had always been ruthless. To think that Lōng once considered it a virtue. He shook his head as he thought about it. He’d set his son up as the head of the task force that hunted former communist leaders in the years after the communist fall. To maintain cover, he had little choice. When he could, Lōng fed his friends tips so they could escape, but the task force proved brutally effective. Míng personally started the black prison system that exposed so many more renegade leaders. The reports said he liked língchí, the death of a thousand cuts, perhaps the darkest technique ever conceived by the ancient Chinese torture artists. Slowly, slowly, he cut off little pieces of his victims with fission blades over the course of days or weeks, as they screamed out into the night.

What does it say about me that he turned out this way?

A young woman in a bright red dress, her dark black hair tangled, pushed past, crying. Her glittering eyes reminding him of secret videos they'd found of Western forces rampaging through towns, killing and raping. The wisp cameras had caught it all, microscopic spies that sucked up every second of the massacre and psychological torture.

He told his backbrain to call up the videos again, not wanting to see them, but having to see them, so he'd never forget. Video appeared like a flame in the corner of his eye, and he watched another young woman in a red dress.

Get her down. Get that bitch down, said a gnarled soldier with brown and yellow teeth too big for his mouth, his face horribly close to the invisible camera, so that Lōng could see the snot drizzling from his nose.

"Hold her, tight. Damn she's squirming like an eel. Cau fah hai. Shut up, bitch. Shut the fuck up."

Another skinny and awkward soldier had the girl by the throat. Her red dress was up around her stomach, her hair wild and wet and her eyes bulging like a skewered fish. The rain came down in hard slashes, spraying mud on them as the first soldier yanked down his pants.

"We got to breed communism out of these ba po," said the first soldier, wiping his nose and hacking.

After they’d raped her, they sliced her open with fission knives and left her to die in the mud. The wisp zoomed in on her face as she choked, sputtering blood, her hands around her throat, her eyes huge and filled with an animal’s panic. He’d remembered that same look in the eyes of deer as they lay dying from his arrows. As a young man he’d hunted often with his father before war killed his taste for it.

Lōng blinked the images closed.

This is what democracy brought us? People are all the same, no matter how noble they think they are.

Father, shouted a young boy’s voice.

Lōng turned to see his youngest son, Xìng-Fú, breaking away from his mother and racing towards him.

"Are you ready, xiǎo hǔzǐ? said his father, scooping the five-year-old up. Got your monkey?"

The boy pointed to a hovering nannydrone, which was carrying a wicker basket of his things. Lōng could see the tail of his boy’s favorite plush toy, a cartoon monkey. The animatronic tail curled over the side and swung rhythmically.

Momma says you not coming with us, said the boy, his eyes big and worried.

Lōng held the child with one powerful arm and brushed the dark hair from his eyes.

"Are not coming with us," said Lōng.

"Momma says you are not coming with us," he said.

Good. That’s right. I’ll meet you later.

But I don’t wanna go without you, said the boy.

You have to. You can’t stay here.

But when are you coming?

Lōng wanted to say soon but he hated to lie.

Bà Ba will come as soon as he can, said Déshí, his middle son. He was a tall boy, less handsome that his older brother Míng, but thicker and stronger, a brawler. Here, ma, let me help with that. He took one of his mother’s bags with his heavy hands.

Go with Nanny, said his wife to their youngest.

Go on. I’ll come say goodbye before you go, said Lōng, putting the boy down. A siren pierced the sky. Déshí, get him to the hover. They need to get moving.

Yes, sir, said Déshí.

Lōng pressed his lips together in a slight grimace.

Déshí took the boy’s hand. The nannydrone took his other hand with one of her six. Lōng watched his most helpful son go, softly shaking his head. More sirens ripped the air.

Why do you hate him? said his wife, frowning.

I don’t hate him.

You don’t love him though. He’s just simple. And you hate simple. He’s never done anything wrong. He’s always been there for us.

I know, said Lōng, rubbing the back of his neck.

Are you sure?

Yes.

Because he doesn’t know it. He doesn’t understand.

I said yes, didn’t I?

But you don’t mean yes.

The hovers started beeping, a final warning. They were cutting it close.

Enough. We don’t have time for this.

The women and children needed to go now, but still Lōng lingered with his wife.

He looked over Jing-Wei's high-cheek-boned, oval face, its lines etched in fire