Isolated Futures Omnibus

By Koen Martens

If you're a fan of thought-provoking sci-fi cyberpunk technothrillers like The Passengers and Black Mirror, then Koen Martens' sci-fi anthology is your perfect next read!

 

Story 1 - Forced to be Free: Sam, a young hacker with anger management issues, has joined a defense initiative against the advancing Russian army set to occupy Europe. When he discovers his boss is working undercover for the enemy, he must thwart his boss and prevent the destruction of the EU's drone defense network before it's too late. 

 

Story 2 - Murder, Plain and Simple: Dr. Jennifer Mendoza is a ship physician on the interstellar luxury cruiser Christopher. When a prominent and wealthy passenger is murdered, she is called to investigate the crime. Can she identify the killer before more people lose their lives?

 

Story 3 - Cima Peak: Juan, a naive adolescent growing up in a post-apocalyptic world, embarks on a dangerous excursion that strands him and his friend far from his home. Can they make it back to their base before it's too late to save the city from incoming slavers?

 

Story 4 - Negative Reinforcement: Limei is an independent app developer on an isolated space station. She is utterly dependent on and enamored with her personal AI assistant. When she learns The Algorithm is planning to destroy human life on her ship, she must find a way to take it down before her crew perishes. 

 

Story 5 - Eddy: Digital forensics expert Lagan has been wrongly convicted of murder, but no one is willing to believe that he witnessed his own doppelgänger commit the crime. When he learns that the doppelgänger was one of many beings created to replace humans with AI-run clones, he must prove his innocence and take down the scheme before more people's lives are ruined.
 

Story 6 - DingDong by Zhumee: When Martin's new Zhumee smart doorbell accidentally causes his neighbor's wrongful arrest, he must set out on a quest to prove her innocence. Little does he know, Zhumee has far more control over the justice system than anyone imagined. Can he race against the clock to take down this corrupt system?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Koen Martens
• Release date: Mar 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9789083233420

Book preview

Preface

It was about a year ago, early 2021. The pandemic was well underway (in or out, we didn’t quite know yet), and with all social activities curtailed and entertainment venues closed to prevent the spread of the virus, I suddenly had a huge amount of time on my hands. With the daily rut and rush interrupted, I could finally hear myself think again. And I started to ask myself: is what I have been doing up until now really what I want to be doing? Are there things I’m not getting around to that I should?

After much soul-searching I decided there actually was something. Something I enjoyed very much over a decade ago. Something that fell between the cracks while time was gobbled up by my work as a software architect, volunteering and hobbies. I missed creative writing.

So, on that day early in the new year, I decided to pick up writing, and pick it up in earnest. I set myself a goal: to write and publish six novelettes in a year. To keep myself on target, I created a project plan – adapted a few times along the way as I learned how all this was actually done – and set to work. And here we are, a year later, and I managed to write those stories.

Each of the six stories stands on its own, unrelated to the others. Yet they are united in that they tell tales of potential futures, tales of things that keep me up at night. In some cases, those futures are getting ever closer to reality. As I write these words, Russia is waging war in Europe and has its nuclear weapons primed for launch. This brings the fictional universe of Forced to be Free uncomfortably close to reality. I can only hope there is a Sam somewhere, fighting for what’s right and staving off impending doom. If you are reading this, we at least managed to avoid total nuclear annihilation for another week or two.

In any case, I have learned a lot in the past year, and not only about the mechanics of self-publishing, which was one of the areas I wanted to become familiar with. I’ve also read up on storytelling techniques and this thing authors call craft – a term that encompasses many aspects of storytelling such as plot, dramatic structure, characterisation and more – to improve my writing and create compelling stories. And by working with editors and a proofreader, my knowledge of the English language has received quite a boost.

It hasn’t always been easy though. I especially struggled with Cima Peak . The story started out as Tom’s story, but it just didn’t click until I realised it wasn’t Tom’s story but Juan’s. Sometimes, a story isn’t what you think it is. Luckily, the characters helped me realise my folly and I think it turned out well. It might actually be my favourite.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. I’ll let you get to the meat of the stories. It was an interesting experience to explore these futures and meet the characters. Now it’s your turn, my dear reader, to get to know the people that inhabit my Isolated Futures , while I dive head first into the next writing project. Let me know what you think!

Koen Martens

Oudewater, February 2022

FORCED TO BE FREE

ISOLATED FUTURES #1

Koen Martens

Tuesday, 1 March 2050, 09:31

Sam sipped his tea, his attention on the animated ad for one of ScyFlux Security’s products playing on the displays. Very corporate. Much like the rest of this lobby: the smell of fresh paint and new carpet, the comfortable designer chairs and the shiny coffee machine.

He saw his reflection in a glass door. Barely twenty-two years old, black shoulder-length hair. He wasn’t one for dressing up, but he appeared out of place in the shiny environment, dressed in his worn jeans and oversized hoody. This wasn’t where he’d expected to find himself. He’d always been wary of corporate types and now he was going to be one himself. Working nine to five, five days a week. No more all-night hackathons or sleeping in.

A chime sounded. The doors of the lift opened. A chubby man in his early thirties emerged and stuck out his hand.

‘You must be Sam. Hi! I’m Simon, your team leader. Welcome!’

Simon’s enthusiasm and friendly voice did make Sam feel welcome. He still had his doubts. Was this the right decision? He thought so. He couldn’t stand by any more. Tensions at the borders were rising. He had to act. And this was where he could make a difference. Here he could use his skills and talents to fight back. And yes, the money was better than what he made from the odd jobs for non-profits and artists, driven by ideology more than monetary considerations. But was it worth giving up his freedom? His independence?

‘Uhm. Thanks. Yes, I’m Sam.’ His hand was frail in Simon’s firm grip.

Simon said, ‘I see you have something to drink already, and you’ve got your access badge, so follow me and I’ll show you around. We’ll start with the bunker downstairs.’

Monday, 13 March 2051, 08:32

Sam stared down the length of the underground train towards the front. The blocky interior curved left, right, up, down. The weight of his body shifted in counterpoint to the movement. The humid air was tainted by the suffocating odour of wet clothes and dripping umbrellas. His seat was vibrating from the cabin heater’s worn exhaust fan, which exhaled a constant stream of hot steamy air.

The passengers around him were zoned out, like zombies, engrossed in their own realities. A twitch on this guy’s bland expression, a flinch on that girl’s face. Subtle hints of the superficial excitement of action games, influencer vlogs or ads. Whatever they had set their implants to inject into their sensory pathways to escape from their dreary lives.

Three rows down, a woman started to hum. Sigh. How hard can it be to show some consideration for the people around you and activate the neural shunt? It’s there for a reason. Common decency, really.

He turned inward, conjured up the image of a retro-style analogue mixing desk and, with a thought, pushed one of the sliders up. The volume of his own soundtrack, superimposed on the auditory pathways in his brain, increased with the movement of the imaginary control.

Still, the melody, badly out of tune, made thinking impossible. His hands tightened into fists. There’s always one. Why is there always one? Breathe in. Hold. Let go slowly. Should he tune out, become one of the zombies? No. He would not forsake his connection to reality. He wanted to stay grounded, anchored in his surroundings and aware of the people in it. He wasn’t like them.

Hesitation. Just two more stops to go. An arrhythmic tapping emphasised the supposed bars of the melody. Another layer of distraction. The muscles in his jaw tensed. He reached out to his implant and called up one of the n-apps he had hacked together recently. A translucent red beam appeared in his field of vision, an overlay spliced into his virtual cortex, visible only to him.

His pulse increased. He was sure his code covered all possible failure scenarios. And besides, no one would know it was him anyway. He centred the beam on the woman. With a mental nod he activated the n-app and the beam turned green, indicating successful penetration of the feeble digital protections in her bog-standard cheap implant. She went numb instantly. Her head lolled forward ever so slightly.

No more humming. His little project had worked beyond expectation. Harmless but effective. He smiled internally. Careful, don’t give anything away.

The woman would be all right, of course; the effect was temporary. She would probably miss her station and feel a bit disorientated.

At least for now the annoyance was gone, and Sam relaxed back into the curved seat, his body moving in sync again with the undulation of the carriages as the train curved along the tracks.

Wednesday, 15 March 2051, 21:11

‘—and we still have blind faith in technology. We believe it will be flawless, despite our experiences to the contrary.’ Jack exhaled a stream of white smoke, cigarette between his lips.

In the dim light Sam saw a half-hearted grin form on the older man’s lips. Sam peered out over the dark railway yard towards the city. He raised his vape to inhale, the savoury vapour soothing his throat. From a distance, the city centre was a glowing forest of glass-faced spires decorated with mosaics of multicoloured light streaming out into the dark night. Another world.

Sam looked at his friend. Grey hair tied in a ponytail. Wrinkles lining his eyes and the corners of his mouth. He’d known the man for years. Jack had been a founding member of the tech base when Sam and his friends had started the refuge for social misfits like himself: intelligent, creative and with a laser-beam focus on anything technological. A space for critical thinkers to gather, find like-minded souls and hack.

Sam had learned much from Jack. About software, electronics and social dynamics. That had been really helpful when trying to herd the group of stubborn nerds at the tech base into a coherent group. For a man in his late seventies or early eighties, Jack’s mental abilities and memory were as acute as Sam’s. Even more so, Sam suspected.

Jack continued, ‘All our movements were tracked by big tech, all our information gobbled up in large databases. And we just gave it to them. Willingly. Without questioning their motives. We carried their spy devices with their cameras and microphones and whatever else. Carried them with us everywhere. Bugs abound, devices ripe for criminals to hack into and abuse. Governments seizing on the opportunity to surveil their citizens.’ Jack brought the cigarette to his lips and dragged; the glow of the tip reflected, diffused, in the brushed-metal railing of the roof terrace.

‘And here we are now. You kids put that same tech inside your skulls. You give weapons sentience. And the mistaken belief is still there. Our code is flawless, the hardware perfect.’

Sam flushed. He never discussed his job with anyone here at the tech base. It was no secret he was with ScyFlux, but exactly what he was working on he kept to himself.

He had to keep it to himself. The sentinel drone project was classified as top secret. He wasn’t allowed to talk about it even if he wanted. His team at ScyFlux, under contract to the European Defence Forces, had developed the artificial brains and control network powering a fleet of autonomous sentinel drones that would soon be deployed at the eastern border.

Airborne and armed, the drones were capable of taking out armoured vehicles and jet fighters alike. A bit of a paradox – he was a pacifist at heart, but he valued his freedom as well. He did not intend to let his country be overrun without putting up a fight!

The older man stared towards the bright city in the distance. Sam shivered. He could only imagine what things had been like when Jack was his age. Before Sam was even conceived. The promise of a technological utopia rolling over the world. Sam already took it for granted, even though he’d only got his implant less than a year ago. Being connected all the time, the ability to pull up any kind of experience from anywhere in the world in as much sensory detail as desired with a simple thought. However primitive, the bulky devices with their flat screens and touch controls of Jack’s generation had provided a glimpse of the connectedness that would transform the world. For better or worse. The jury was still out on that. Sam hadn’t made up his own mind either.

‘Let’s get back inside.’ Sam stood. ‘I could use your help with that media vault. I think I’m almost in, but it keeps resetting when I deactivate the ring one protections.’

Friday, 17 March 2051, 15:23

Felicia stomped towards the smokers’ sanctuary, a small metal shelter behind the ScyFlux building. Her bright purple dreads, a stark contrast with the overcast sky, swayed with each step. Are those real? Sam always wanted to ask, but that might be a bit blunt. Or should he just ask? Would that be weird? Felicia was a bit weird anyway, never looking directly at anyone, never making eye contact, always averting her gaze. And she spoke really fast. He liked her, though. She was good weird.

The silence stretched on, his mind wandering. He decided on a more neutral subject and asked, ‘How’s the 4001 project doing?’

‘Oh, it’s a disaster.’ Felicia sighed, not meeting Sam’s gaze. ‘So I’m not supposed to tell you this, but hey, we’re all fluxies, right?’ She shrugged. ‘You got a light?’ She fumbled around in her pockets.

Sam opened his mouth to answer, but Felicia carried on without waiting for an answer.

‘So, Charlie went ahead and told Enco that the model 4001 was ready to be shipped, right? I mean … sales reps, hey. You say you have a proof of principle done, and they immediately call the customer to say All done!’

Typical. This was why he never shared status updates with Charlies. He was about to say something to that effect, but Felicia was already continuing.

‘So I’m all, like, going crazy on QA testing, right? Get one of the QA engineers in to run some load testing, yeah. I don’t know how much you know about our 4000 series, but there’s this state tracking table, right? Gets allocated for a bunch of connections.’ She produced a lighter from a pocket and lit the cigarette dangling from her mouth.

Sam vaguely remembered something about that from a tech presentation, one of the nerdy knowledge-sharing and pizza sessions they had at ScyFlux each month. He didn’t recall the details. He should’ve paid more attention. He nodded, hoping she wouldn’t test him on the subject.

Still staring somewhere behind and to the left of Sam, she continued. ‘So, turns out, yeah, you open a bunch, say seventy thousand, yeah, seventy thousand connections at once from one and the same computer or network address. Boom. You’re in. Full admin. I mean, sounds like some 16-bit number overflowing, yeah? Except I can’t find it.’ She paused to drag on the cigarette.

Sam knew where this was going. ‘So let me guess, you told Charlie.’ No doubt Charlie wasn’t impressed. Wanted to get the model 4001 out to Enco as soon as possible, broken software or not. They’d fix it later with an update patch.

He lifted his vape to his mouth, listening to Felicia finishing her story. Contemplating. Remembering Jack’s rant. They weren’t even pretending any more. Technology was inherently flawed, so just shift broken crap to the customer. The customer who happens to be the nation’s electricity provider. The customer who happens to rely on that broken crap to keep the lights on. All the lights. In the entire country.

Monday, 20 March 2051, 14:23

‘What is all this crap?’ Sam marvelled while he tried to avoid the trip hazards and obstacles in his path. Their usual conference room had been hijacked by a gang of management types, so his little band of techies was trekking through the building, looking for an alleged meeting room somewhere on the sixth floor.

‘Vance’s hobby,’ Simon answered, leading their group past the black monoliths perched on worn-out desks.

Vance Skillthorne. Sam had sat with the charismatic owner of ScyFlux Security over lunch in the cafeteria a few times. He was all business, but he seemed to have some hacker know-how from a past life. Sam wasn’t convinced his motives were pure. Sure, he was passionate about technology. Or rather the money he could make from it. It was never about the intellectual challenge. And he dressed in expensive shirts. Not a real hacker.

Lost in thought, Sam almost tripped over an extension cord. Fibre-optic cables, strung together, terminated in a stack of network switches balanced on one of the desks. Lights flickered on a few of the switch ports, but most were dark. Only a small number of the machines were powered up. A breeze of hot air streamed out of the active ones. Sam looked up at the dropped ceiling. Here and there, a missing tile provided a small window into the normally hidden electrical infrastructure of the office building.

‘They’re putting in extra power lines.’ Simon reached the other side of the room. He led them through a door into a small meeting room. It looked bigger than it was; the four of them barely fit in.

‘He’s experimenting with neuro-trading. Those are all vector super-cells. They’re really power-hungry. He turned them all on a while ago. Remember when the power went down?’ Sam nodded. Simon continued, ‘The wiring was glowing red hot. Blew the safety off the back-up power circuits. Nearly started a fire in the generator room. Since then, he’s only running a fifth of the machines.’

Impressive. He’d read about this. Massive parallel computing power packed into high-density modules filled with nano-circuitry, able to process enormous amounts of floating point operations per second. Networked together, they’d combine into an immense neural net surpassing the number of neurons in the human brain by orders of magnitude.

Sam whistled. ‘Wow, and counting the number of nodes, there must be enough here to build a super-brain.’

Felicia, the last to walk into the little meeting room, frowned. ‘That’s creepy, man. Do you think it’s conscious?’

Sam laughed. ‘Nah, I wouldn’t call it consciousness. It’s a hyper-focused brain, excelling in one task but incapable of anything else. In this case, neuro-trading means it shines at processing news feeds and extrapolating stock exchange rates. But ask it anything else and it will lock up, unable to comprehend.’

Simon closed the door and took out his tablet. He added, ‘Right, think of it like an idiot savant to the extreme. Yes, it’s a brain, but it can only do this one thing and do it really good. And it’s probably ecstatic about doing that one thing. Have it do anything else, and it will throw a tantrum. In other words, shut down or go into overdrive, frying its circuits. It can’t reflect on its own state, I think. It can only single-mindedly work on its task.’

Felicia’s frown only grew. ‘Oh, that’s sad. Almost self-aware but held back by its designed function, a slave of its masters.’

Simon turned on the projector. ‘You’re such an idealist, Felicia. Anyway, let’s get started. Let me just pull up the architectural diagram …’

Tuesday, 21 March 2051, 07:36

Sam mapped a 2D projection of the morning news onto the back wall of his spacious apartment. The audio cut in abruptly. ‘—continue this report live from Berlin as information becomes available. Back to the studio.’

He handed Janek a coffee and sat down beside him with breakfast. The boy from Poland had been his guest for a couple of weeks now. Sam had offered his sofa while Janek hunted for a place of his own. It was hard to find an apartment, or even a room, in the cityplex at a price affordable to a first year student on a budget.

The news feed showed a female anchor. ‘Thank you. We will return to Berlin as developments unfold. Coming up after the break, we join a panel of experts to discuss what the remaining states in the European Union can do to limit further loss of territory now that Poland has fallen to the Russian Federation.’

Janek swore. Hot coffee dripped from his legs. The cup lay shattered on the floor. He closed his eyes.

Sam stood transfixed, his eyes on the projection. A map of Eurasia. The Russian Federation, looming over the free countries like a giant kraken, tentacles reaching outwards in all directions, was blue. Most of Scandinavia was red. Occupied territory, with the exception of the peninsular region of Denmark bordering Germany. Turkey, which had willingly joined the Federation five years ago, was red as well. As were most of the other countries to the east of the line joining Denmark and Turkey. And that now included Poland.

A lump formed in his stomach. He shouldn’t be surprised. Poland’s army had been weakened by the earlier invasion attempt, but it had been hesitant to let the European Defence Force deploy border protection sentinels.

With Poland taken, only Germany stood between Sam and the advancing dictatorship. The muscles in his shoulders contracted; his hands balled into fists. Sam wasn’t a fan of weapons, never had been. He couldn’t bear any news footage from war zones. He never pulled in the gruesome sensory images on his implant. He preferred the distancing a flat projection allowed. But even then, it made him sick to his stomach to see human beings do horrible things to other human beings.

Yet all of that didn’t stop him from wanting to see the Russians suffer. Just bomb their arses out of this world, flatten their damn cities. What if they continued their expansion? What if they took Germany and then his own country, the Netherlands, too? Would he stand by and let it happen? Would he stand up? Or would he just give up and kill himself rather than be subjugated?

Janek stammered, his eyes open again, ‘I … I can’t reach … my mother, my brother. The implant just—’ Tears welled up in the young man’s eyes. Sam stood motionless. He wanted to reach out, to offer comfort. But what comfort was there to give? He didn’t know what to do.

Tuesday, 21 March 2051, 10:11

Simon was addressing the team gathered around his desk in the windowless bunker. ‘OK, you all know what happened to Poland.’ A cold luminescence emanated from uniformly lit panels along the walls. Sam knew that the air was conditioned to be the exact same temperature as it had been yesterday, as it would be tomorrow. He knew that, but still it felt colder to him. Goosebumps covered his arms.

He didn’t know where to look, so he scanned the interior of the bunker. Several desks just like Simon’s were arranged two by two in the oblong basement. On the left side of each desk stood a workstation wired to the public net for unrestricted work. On the right, another workstation was connected to the air-gapped restricted network. Each workstation was equipped with a hand-controlled mouse and keyboard. Old-fashioned but necessary. Implants didn’t function in the shielded cage; wireless signals were unable to penetrate into or out of the Faraday cage.

Simon continued, ‘It’s now up to our toys people. This morning at 0300 hours, the sentinel drones were deployed along the German border ahead of schedule. We’ve worked hard—’ He looked around, briefly holding his gaze on each of them in turn.

A nervous giggle escaped from one of his colleagues. Sam could sympathise. They’d worked on the sentinel control network for more than a year. They’d tested the software, reviewed every line of code over and over and simulated countless scenarios to catch any bug that may have been left. Rationally, Sam trusted their system would hold up under stress. But knowing was not the same as feeling. Not when lives depended on it.

But this was why he had taken this job. He wasn’t just a bystander. He was doing something. He was part of the defence. A small part, maybe, but he was helping. And their work was vital. The sentinel drones were able to operate autonomously, but without tactical adjustments to their mission parameters, the drones would become ineffective in a matter of hours. And the defence force relied on the control network to make those crucial adjustments. His team could not fuck up now.

Simon must have picked up on the nerves drifting through the room, or maybe he was nervous himself. Whatever it was, he said, ‘—and we’re ready. We know we’re ready, but it’s still scary, isn’t it? But we’ve got this sorted. We won’t let those bastards through! We owe that much to ourselves, to our wives and husbands, our children, family and friends.’ Simon straightened, assuming an almost military stance. Not at all the jolly team leader Sam was familiar with. Simon continued, ‘You know what to do. Let’s get to it!’

The group parted, a few half-hearted affirmations suggesting a confidence that was not wholly there yet. A confidence that Sam himself didn’t feel.

‘Sam, can we have a quick word?’ Simon looked Sam in the eyes and motioned to the break-out room.

Tuesday, 21 March 2051, 13:52

Sam opened the door and walked into the generator room. An oily smell lingered. The fuel cell power plant occupied most of the space, shielded by off-white metal-coated plates.

He squeezed himself sideways through the narrow gap between wall and generator. Past the generator, he had a bit more breathing room. But he had to move on and get past the super-capacitor bank as well. It was at least as wide as the generator, so he continued sideways. An awful lot of