METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire by Jay Lake & Ken Scholes

Author:Jay Lake & Ken Scholes [Lake, Jay & Scholes, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, science fiction, High Tech, Dystopian, Hard Science Fiction
Amazon: B00K7HLKLY
Publisher: WordFire Press
Published: 2014-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

Rock of Ages

i: Years of life bearing down on him like a slow rain of anvils

Reports of Bashar’s death were greatly exaggerated. Reports of his death had always been greatly exaggerated. Even here in the oh-so-elegant precincts of the J. Appleseed Foundation, his bastard corporate stepchild that had broken free decades ago to make its own way in the world.

Daddy was coming home one more time after decades of absence. And he had hard questions. It took a special kind of hate to think up something like the island plagues. That his own creation might be behind the greatest incipient atrocity in human history was too much to bear. He wanted answers.

This outer office was a first stop. Surrounded by antique paintings and an ancient carpet, it signaled wealth in the symbolic language of a bygone age.

“I’ve been working with J. Appleseed since before you were born,” Bashar said to the pert young man who stared at him in thin-lipped exasperation. Pale skinned, smelling of cologne and laundry detergent, the little bastard had damned near had himself starched, he was so white.

Bashar hadn’t set foot in these offices in over a decade, but he wasn’t going to let himself be stopped now. Just being here was risky as hell. Not being here was worse, given what he’d learned. “I’ve been working with you people since before Administrator Lang was born, for that matter. If I want to see the administrator, I’ll see the damned administrator.”

He leaned forward, knuckles planted on the milled Douglas fir of the assistant’s desk. Some artisan had collaged the slab with shredded bits of classic currency, so that Ben Franklin and Queen Elizabeth II stared owlishly out of ripped interruptions in the wood grain from beneath a thick layer of hand-applied lacquer. It smelled of age and wood and musty paper, those olfactory cues doubtless as carefully designed as the visual.

Bashar’s hands were as old as the rest of him, pushing toward his thirteenth decade of life. And if that wasn’t a miracle in and of itself, almost enough to make a theist out of him, he didn’t know what was. But at close to one hundred and twenty years of age, he simply wasn’t as scary as he used to be.

This young twit didn’t have the sense to be frightened anyway.

“You’re not on the cleared list, sir,” the assistant said, the first edge of nerves creeping into his voice. He glanced at a projected virteo datacloud, which was nothing more than a faint shimmer from Bashar’s perspective.

“Little boy, I wrote the damned cleared list. Back in the day. If I’m not on it now, someone will be breathing through their asshole by nightfall.”

By the sound of it, several burly men and women were clattering through the door of Administrator Lang’s outer office. Bashar turned, the twit’s very old fashioned and deliberately archaic papermail letter opener now in his hand. It didn’t even rise to the cutting standards of a dull-edged prison shiv, but would do for his current purposes.

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