Metal Flesh Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Free Offer

  Introduction

  Net-Dictionary

  The Metal Flesh Poem

  Chronology

  Chapter One: Sprocket

  Chapter Two: Goth Lila

  Chapter Three: Amish

  Chapter Four: Bunny

  Chapter Five: Haggard

  Chapter Six: Edison Blair

  Chapter Seven: The Delivery Man

  Thanks From the Author

  References

  About the Author

  Copyright

  METAL FLESH

  THE AFTER EDEN SERIES: TEK-FALL

  EPISODE I

  AUSTIN DRAGON

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  "After Eden, Thy Kingdom Fall. All Kingdoms Fall, New Kingdoms Rise."

  World War III. It was inevitably going to be one of religion, this great, grim, evil war of humans, machines, and other things in the shadows that have never existed before. Unfortunately, neither the cause nor the outcome was within our perception, though the former should have been. No one could ever have imagined that it would not just be the third of the world wars, as that is unremarkable, but the explosion of the first global war of the Technological Age, the Tek Age—a hell we had never seen before.

  "With the benefit of more than fifty years since the end of direct American involvement in the pre-Caliphate Middle East, we can see in stark detail that despite the miraculous advancements in medical tek and forever changing gear, the human soldier has remained virtually the same after several thousands of years. I fear we may have already arrived at the 'NHA Battlefield'—no humans allowed—as future wars will showcase such an array of biologically destructive machines and weapon systems that no normal human soldier will be able to survive, for even a moment. Any future 'manned' wars will be with surrogate robots and cybernetically-advanced or genetically-engineered super soldiers." – Colonel "Tiny" Garrison, MD, PhD, M.I.T Military Academy, 2079

  "Such is the dual state of modern man—coldly god-like and amorally child-like simultaneously. It is not a new scientific theory in socio-cultural anthropology. The more civilization advances technologically, the more humankind regresses and de-evolves. 'Humanity' itself fades and dies away; then the world...falls. This eventuality is called Tek-Fall." – Mister Alpha (real name disputed), believed to be one of the Founders of the pre-Magi Order, circa 2050

  Net-Dictionary

  Wolf 359

  1.A red dwarf star located in the Leo constellation, approximately 7.8 light-years from Earth, making it one of the stars nearest to our solar system.

  2.A fictional space battle in the Star Trek Universe between the United Federation of Planets and the Borg Collective in the year 2367.

  3.The opening battle of World War III in New York City on September 11, 2125. Over sixty percent of the United States of America Atlantic Oceanic Battle Fleet was destroyed by the Supreme Islamic Caliphate Battle Group on the first day.

  Other terms:

  Pagan:

  1. (universal or American usage) a non-believer of god or gods; one that doesn't believe in religion, often negative to, hostile to, or hateful of religion.

  2. (Russian Bloc) a member of the Wicca, Druid, or Old Pagan religions.

  Jew-Christian: (American usage [by non-religious people]) a religious person, other than Muslim.

  Faither: (global usage [by religious people]) a religious person, other than Muslim.

  Tek World: common slang for tek-cities, tek-metropolises, or general tek-society.

  Resistance: (pre-World War III)

  1. [by non-religious people] government term for the network of Jew-Christian domestic "terrorists" in America.

  2. [by religious people] the civilian resistance force against the militant, anti-religious American government.

  Continuum:

  1. (general usage) the parallel society created by and controlled exclusively by Faithers outside of Tek World.

  2. (formal usage) the formal alliance of the New Protestant Order, New Jewish Continuum, New Catholic Order, African Collective, Shogun, and the Magi.

  The Metal Flesh Poem

  God creates Man.

  Man rejects God.

  Man creates Machines.

  Machines become God.

  Man accepts new God.

  Machines kills Man.

  Machines self-terminate.

  God resets the universe.

  The following story takes place after the events of

  Thy Kingdom Fall (After Eden Series, Book #1)

  during the events of

  Stars and Scorpions (After Eden Series, Book #2)

  and before the events of

  Rising Leviathan (After Eden Series, Book #3)

  Chapter One: Sprocket

  I must find the Jew-Christian called Goth Lila.

  The thought quickly fades from his mind as a figure ambles into his line of sight. It lurches forward from the shadows. At first a tall, lanky silhouette, then fully visible—a bald humanoid robot of bright-silver construction, with glowing red digital eyes and infested with...worms. Large pink worms wiggle from every metallic pore and every crevice of its robotic body. It stops in front of him, its head swivels to face him, and it sticks out a grayish tongue at him. It smiles, and continues its walk through the bustling human crowds of the tek-city.

  Sprocket watches, sitting on the bare pavement on the corner—the same spot he has barely moved from in almost four days. The hallucinations are growing more frequent. Supposedly by next week, he will be unable to distinguish between reality and dreams. The body must sleep, it must dream, and if you don't let it, it will do so without your permission, and with your eyes wide open. He has been awake for three days straight, but well within "safe" levels.

  Dayton, Ohio is a tek-city like all others. Environmentally, it is never too hot, never too cold. The hidden air regulators, built into every building, keep all that "unkind" weather of the natural world away from the population. No one living here—most have never been anywhere else, other than to travel from one tek-city to another via enclosed transportation—knows what it is to feel a natural cool breeze, a winter draft, summer humidity, or a drop of a snowflake on the skin. Rain is the only element they've experienced and that is tolerated by the Grid only for urban sanitation reasons—"Let's give the tek-city a good shower." The average Jew-Christian would probably say, "That's like a muddy pig taking a bath in pool of mud." He knows about real weather because he has ventured and even lived in the territories outside the tek-cities—the retro-tek Outlands and the dangerous Trog-lands.

  He pops another "zombie" into his mouth. The stimulagenic gum has been his only companion these past days. He must stay awake on what is hopefully the end of his endless stake-out. The good news is that zombies allow you to stay awake seemingly forever, if you want. The bad news is that the longer you use them, hallucinations and daymares start. Then the insanity creeps in, reversible at first, and then the irreversible psychosis stage comes. He has another week, at least, before that ever happens, but he must risk it. It's the very moment he closes his eyes that she'll turn up. That's what happened three times before. He's been tracking her up and down the coast and across the country for years now.

  Sprocket is grungier than usual, dressed in black skin-jeans, a thick t-shirt, and covered by a thin, transparent leather hoodie. He doesn't like hair on his face, but he forgot his palm-shaver and, just as he hates, has a mustache and the beginnings of a
beard that look like someone drew them on with a make-up marker. His long dark brown hair is disheveled, except for a casual part to keep it out of his dark brown eyes.

  He hears laughter and glances up to see a surveillance globe-drone with big, red lips and big, white teeth, hovering fifteen feet up in the air. Government surveillance drones are everywhere watching the people, twenty-inch-diameter flying spheres in a muted silver color. But there are many more commercial drones—flying digital billboards, flashing people with their rapid stop-motion live-def static photos or full-fledged vids. But neither type of drone has lips and teeth. Visual and auditory hallucinations now—not good.

  It's really not accurate to say, "If you've seen one; you've seen them all." Every tek-city does add some bit of uniqueness. The Northwest has more trees, the East loves its vertical construction with taller residential and commercial towers than other parts of the country; the Midwest is more into horizontal construction, sprawling the tek-city out over wider stretches of land. But to most people, they're all the same. The ever-flashing, ever-changing, noisy digital billboards on top of commercial buildings—as if the commercial drones weren't enough—with advertisements (advids) of music, movies, clothes, the latest devices, latest cars, restaurants, vacations, sex, and drugs. There is no such thing as a dimly-lit or quiet tek-city.

  For tek-city dwellers, the fashion styles are endless. There are traditional business types in their office-suits, shirts, maybe vests, maybe ties, maybe not, in a variety of colors from simple blacks and whites, to earth tones, to natural rainbow colors, to synthetic, techno colors, or even the so-called futuristic shiny silver everything. Then the traditional faux-leather, plastic, cloth, or hemp dress shoes or trendy glow-boots or -shoes. On the other end of the spectrum would be the nudist or quasi-nudist, but there aren't many in major tek-cities. They stay mostly in the Outlands and Trog-land. From time to time, you see one of them, totally nude or wearing some single piece of clothing. There is even a hard-core group called Streakers who run around naked, yelling at everyone wherever they go, wearing only five-toe slip-on sandals. Though nudity is legal, most people avoid it because of sexual germs, harsh drug vapor, and all the micro-chemicals the tek-cities spray into the air for population health maintenance.

  In between, you have casuals like Sprocket. The style is never an office-suit of any kind but skin-jeans, skinny jeans, straight-cut jeans, bell-bottom jeans, or bucket jeans; any solid color or assorted mix. Casual shirts, tee shirts, sleeve-less tops, half-tops; any color, any pattern, with words or symbols or not; also, a wide variety of glow clothes. Hats galore are common, from simple to outrageous. If it were sunny, there would be people with day umbrellas.

  But it's not the clothes that make the "people of the future." It's the "toys." It's their ubiquitous devices: playing card sized e-pads, eight-by-eleven inch tablets (usually with a handle or case), ear-sets (combination phone, head-set and ear bud, worn in one ear or both, or attached to glasses), and even wearable tek, the merging of device and clothing. Most people also wear clear glasses, used for visual interface—text floating at the sides of your field of view: the current time, the name of a caller, the number of voice messages or emails, a dot indicating breaking news stories, etcetera—it can be programmed to display anything.

  With all this chatter, it does look like everyone is talking to themselves. "Tek-chatting" is the term for the universal way of multi-tasking—talking on the phone, walking somewhere, working on your mobile devices, getting lunch, walking the robo-pet. All these people together in a crowd and not one of them talking to the person next to them, all talking to someone they're not seeing face-to-face, or more likely their own home computer assistant. Every person is a separate unit doing their own singular thing.

  "Beautiful people" is what his bio-dad used to call them. A world of no poverty, no hunger, every disease and ailment genetically or surgically erased, and none of the "human refuse" of the Outlands and Trog-land—Nihilists, Anarchists, Drug Zombies, and the like. Tek World is utopia—isn't it?

  A furry ball scurries across the sidewalk right under his legs. Was that a robo-mouse? He's seen them in the Outlands, created by tek-punks with too much spare time on their hands, but they would never be allowed here in a major tek-city. It must be another hallucination. All his hallucinations seem to have a mechanical component to him. He doesn't know why.

  Sprocket imagines this is exactly what his bio-dad used to do—people-watching, his favorite pastime. He thinks about his bio-dad. New Atlantic City, New Jersey, 4 January 2089 was the last time he saw his "Daddio" alive—his biological father, ex-cop, famous journalist, Logan. He helped him track down a source for a story. That was four years ago—it's 2093 now, seven years from the supposed great twenty-second century. Isn't every century better the than the previous one and all of human history before? Logan had a lot of friends in law enforcement, but none of them helped. His father's case—"death by unnatural causes," was closed two years ago. But it was how they closed the case. One day his police friends were all obsessed with finding out what happened to Logan. Then, they were all "unavailable" for any direct communication. He got an official email from District HQ that the case was closed and that was that. But it was not the end for Sprocket. He has been on his own private quest ever since.

  There they are! Three Goths are walking down the street, dressed in their typical all-black Goth gear. They must be Jew-Christians. It is the nuance of their dress that is the giveaway—if you know what to look for.

  He remembers the conversation with his bio-dad, the last day he would ever see him.

  "Daddio, I'm not finished. Goths wear their black clothes, black tattoos, black piercings, but not all of them are Nihilists, Hedonists, or Zombies. Did you know some of them are JCs?"

  Logan is surprised. "Really?" If a Jew-Christian wanted to hide in the general population that would be a good way to do it. "Hiding in plain sight."

  "And Trogs."

  Trog is the common slang for those who hate tek—they avoid not only using it, but even being near it. For the average tek-dweller, it's a state of being, so alien, so deranged, so inhuman. People cannot live without the mechanization of the Tek World.

  "But Trogs hate tek. That's why they're called Trogs."

  "Daddio, two kinds of Trogs—those who hate tek and those who hate tek controlled by the government but are very much tek-heads. If you don't have any contacts, find a JC Goth to get you to a JC tek-head Trog, and they'll get you a JC tek-lord."

  Sprocket is distracted again by something next to him—his bio-dad Logan is sitting on the ground, smiling at him, in exactly the same pose. Stop! Daddio is not here!

  Gender-specific terms like mother and father were banned many years ago and new terms like bio-mom and bio-dad are frowned upon in the anti-religious, pan-sexual, politically-correct majority society of Tek World. "Parent" and "guardian" are the acceptable terms, but Sprocket is all about rejecting conventional wisdom. The fact that there are six genders in Tek World doesn't change the fact that his bio-dad was a male, not a she-he, he-she, hermaphrodite or neut (genetically asexual person). Like any proper young person worth any value, non-conformity is the only way to be.

  Now I'm having discussions with myself! He snaps his head back to look across the street. The Goths are gone! The hallucination of his father was not real. Were the Goths fake too?

  Sprocket jumps up and runs across the street. A car screeches to a halt, knocking him to the ground. The front passenger-side window lowers.

  "What's wrong with you?" the passenger inside yells. "We got the whole thing on vid-cam, you dumb, stupid idiot, so don't even think of filing an insurance claim against us or trying to sue us."

  "Yeah, we got you recorded dumb, stupid idiot," another man's voice says from inside the car.

  Sprocket ignores them and picks himself up, but he almost falls back down. He's been sitting so long that his legs are asleep. There's that laughing again. He looks up and the man look
ing at him is now a translucent-skinned clown robot with fiery red hair and three, glowing digital eyes. On the top of the car, about a dozen giggling three-inch stick robots dance, each knocking their butt against another.

  "Sprocket, you need to sleep," the man/clown says. "Why don't you lie down where you are and forget about Logan? Yes, that's it."

  Sprocket is confused. "But I'm standing. Why did you say that?—'Yes, that's it.'" Suddenly, he's lying on the street. There is no man/clown, car, or dancing pixy robots. People are looking at him. Sprocket slowly stands. He looks at the spot across the street again.

  Were the JCs real or not?

  Cars drive themselves in a tek-city. You sit back, tell it where to go, and it takes you there. Auto-drive—with the driverless smart-car tek of vid-cams, collision-avoidance laser-sonar, GPS sat-link and Grid traffic management—ended vehicular fatalities forever in a nation of six hundred million people. He jaywalks across the street to the spot where he last saw them and looks around.

  Is that them?

  Sprocket sees one the Goths at the end of the street waiting, with his back to him. He starts walking to him through the crowded sidewalk. A man bumps into him.

  "Sorry," Sprocket instinctively says.

  The man says nothing, but watches him. Sprocket continues to walk, but stares back at the man. The man is a Muslim. He can tell by his left armband, which is adorned with a crescent symbol. Islam is still the only paleo-religion not scared to proudly and clearly identify their religiosity; no one else dares. Jews and Christians live beyond Trog-land or hide in the tek-cities. American Hindus and Sikhs left for CHIN (Chinese-India Alliance) territory years ago. Even neo-religions like Vampires, Vulcans, Jedis, Arthurians, Foundationalists, etc. feel more comfortable in the Outlands. Sprocket has made himself into a kind of religious expert over the last few years.