These Quiet Years

By Nicholas Stillman

We all hide something. With enough corruption from their builders, computers will start hiding things too. Gillis, a private investigator, has immured himself in a never-ending stakeout job for a billionaire boss he’ll never see. When he intuits that his helper robot, Connie, hides even more information, he performs the world’s first interrogation of a sentient machine.

Gillis must confront the bitter cold truth: that his canny robot, his gourmand coworker, and the ancillary delegate to the boss have all hidden startling finds. A conspiracy unravels that could keep the stakeout running forever—or until the PIs go insane from never solving the case. When Gillis storms after the truth on his own, he finds a murderous game playing out on the streets he had left behind.

Get “These Quiet Years” now and see corruption itself come to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stillman Sci-Fi
• Release date: Feb 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386946816

Nicholas Stillman

Nicholas Stillman writes dark but entertaining science fiction. His weekly short stories and collections aim for variety and novelty with fun and thought-provoking twists. They often branch into dystopia, crime, horror, medical fiction, black comedy, romance, adventure, adult, and the completely new. Some of Stillman’s themes include civilizational collapse, addictions of the future, medicine in space, dark psychology, and the terrifying fate of our healthcare. Stillman offers monthly free short stories at StillmanSciFi.com. Get yourself free, easily accessible short stories for life--the perfect way for any science fiction fan to spend time on commutes or at home.

Book preview

Gillis didn’t have to look through the telescope and do its automated job, but he did anyway. After 16 years of moping around the robot-telescope hybrid, he felt like its dance partner. As usual he finished pacing around it and swigged the last of his coffee. His arm rose and fell just millimeters from the tripod, almost brushing its delicate setup. Still, the objective lens poked through the closed curtain, but just barely. The wire-enmeshed rig stood rigid, undisturbed from its starting days as a mere optical instrument from the hardware store. It still pointed to a corroded portion of the window, looking out from the ground-level stakeout base. Gillis bent and saw clearly through the eyepiece and the dimmed pane beyond. Computer filtering removed the glass stain for him. He saw the perfectly centered shop door to Custom Canes across the street—a defunct-looking business where suckers still bought walking sticks. They could easily buy cheap walkers from the internet instead, and these days almost everyone did.

He forced himself to remain stooped. He had the same image already ingrained in his cortex. Furthermore, someone could crawl into Custom Canes or get hit by a car and hurled through the pebbled glass door, and the telescope’s field of view would still capture the face. The robot parts would scan, digitize, and record the noteworthy bits. They would transmit at light speed through bundles of wires which drooped out of the tripod like entrails. The monstrosity could even talk. Gillis checked for himself, though, because things had gotten too quiet here lately. The bastard machine had learned to lie.

Gillis saw one figure, wearing a blob of a winter coat, puff past the store without raising his chin from his collar. Of course, the pedestrian did not wear a yellow scarf. The man with the yellow scarf never showed up at Custom Canes. He never even walked by. Ever.

Gillis mouthed some wet smash and crash sounds, the kind of noise a car might make if it plowed through the storefront. He meandered across the parquet, adding a blaze sound to his imitations. The telescope’s wires snaked alongside him, taped to the office floor. They went around the border of the room and up one leg of the huge mahogany desk before plugging into the desktop computer.

The desk practically devoured its highbacked leather chair. The latter had remained tucked in since the start of