Glow by Tim Jordan

Author:Tim Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857668875
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Jett saw the gun go off. The tiny ignition within the trumpet tube of the goshgun, a flash of hypersonic debris coming at his face, rammed through the intervening void by the gargantuan gas expansion.

He experienced a singular, frozen moment of shock. Yellow’s sagging face, eyes cold and unmoving. Words started forming on his tagger:

Evasive maneuvers–

And then his world of sound, light and embodiment blew away into fragments, sparkled briefly and then vanished into darkness.

He heard a voice, “Marco?”

Polo

And there she was, pink face, rosy cheeks, grinning at him through splashes of water. “You cheated. You peeped!”

“I never did.” His voice was childish, a boy’s voice modulated with glee and laughter.

The game faded, changed, and turned into a new game. She was older now, a different look in her eyes, calculating but still playful. She wrapped the blindfold over his eyes, and again… darkness! He felt something hard and plastic push into his hand. A clicker, he snapped it between his finger and thumb and the sharp crack echoed back at him. “Come find me,” she hissed into his ear and he felt her warmth vanish. Lost in an unfamiliar place. Click! Click!… He strained to decipher the echoes and an image of the room imagined itself into existence around him.

The static-noise of awareness cohered into his Inner-I screen. Flickering and tormented, it reached for information, struggling to connect body with mind and senses.

I have an Inner-I.

I spoke but heard no words. I don’t have a mouth, ears, eyes, but I must have a head.

Four seconds, his Inner-I clock read from the moment he’d grabbed at Yellow. The dangerous little cyborg was still out there. And with a goshgun! If he’d been able to fire, then surely, he would have? Then there was that other tank, and the other guards – Thorne’s Empire of thugs and criminals.

His vision turned red with damage markers. Maybe he was hiding. His body had a distributed intelligence built into its fabric. An octopus brain, somebody once called it. A nascent survival mechanism that would seek shelter, safety, in any way its rudimentary mind could conceive if his higher mental functions were disabled.

Estimated mass loss: Four Kilos.

Proprioception coming online… missing trunk connections–

Unspecified orientation–

Fullerene fluid loss – critical!

Self-sealing arterial override. Attempting to prevent bleed out–

“Marco?”

Polo.

Click… click…

Jett forged a simple Inner-I algorithm, setting patches of fullerene skin vibrating. Other patches he configured as sensors and routed the incoming auditory information back to the AI inside his Inner-I where it attempted to filter sounds and piece together the returns of his makeshift sonar.

“That’s just fucking fantastic!”

Yellow’s voice?

Primary appendages – damaged but functional.

Orientation online.

Auxiliary appendages: Functional and reconnected.

He span arms, legs, feet and hands, and eased from a pool of tentacles into a squatting biped. Groping in the darkness, he tried finding his head. Nothing, just shoulders, slick with fluid. There; hanging down his back, still attached by the ultrathin emergency cables that anchored his crystal skull to the fibrous, polymorphic part of his body. He felt his Inner-I

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