Goodbye to Romance I had been a Med student. I had pulled my way through the moon’s college by the strength of my own naked grey matter. I saw the rich kids with the neural implants accelerate past me and leave me in their genetically enhanced wake. My parents weren’t in a position to help, my father was always away mining in the belt, running back and forth in his 50 year old patchwork Inty. When I saw him at Family Eve each year he laughed about how his was the longest surviving ship in the belt and we laughed that no one would waste good ammo on shooting the heap of junk. Sure he’d been boarded, sure he’d lost crew, once he’d just not come back home for three years (which we don’t talk about), but he had stayed working to pay for us to have a home on the moon. A home in a safe place, with good schools so his only child could have a good start in life. After six years at college (three years after the slowest Implant kid) I finished the training that allowed me to get my foot on the medical ladder. I started off with a small firm who manufactured the hardware necessary for limb replacement and regrowth. Then I moved onto a medium sized firm off-moon. They received healthy funding direct from the Gallentine Army and specialized in Enhanced Replacement Technology. They were having problems meshing flesh and metal and ceramics and it was my task to iron the problems out. Which I did. Two years later I made the first step into what was to be my specialist field: Implants. While the technology behind implants had been around for many years, there was always a degree of degradation. The human body just doesn’t like lumps of metal and ceramic in it, never has. Drugs kept the rejection at bay for sure and regular check-ups meant that things were rarely dangerous but the whole thing was an embarrassment really. We could grow new bodies, we could fling ourselves across countless AU of space and yet we still couldn’t get flesh and metal to be friends with each other. Not good enough. The new firm I had joined was involved in the research to minimize this rejection and indeed as a final mission statement, to actively encourage the encroachment of machine into the neural pathways of the human nervous system. I did well. Well enough in fact that one Family Eve the company presented me with my own company funded Implant. It was the very first of the next generation of Implants that I myself had designed. I couldn’t very well say no putting the damn thing in my head after I had spent the last four years of my life telling, and indeed proving, it was safer than ever before could I? So it was that I left the relative slow lane of the Norms and joined the heady ranks of the Implanted. I got even better at my job; I got faster, more precise, less prone to lapses of concentration. I rose in the ranks until I reached the top in my field. What I remember most clearly about the night I met Gialle was the way her eyes sparkled. I was dimly aware that it was in vogue at the time for girls to have ‘Sparklers’ in their eyes on a night out but I had never seen it first hand before. Basically metal filaments were temporarily sunken into the iris of the eye so that every bit of light thrown into the eye had a chance of catching one of these filaments and sparkling back at you. The effect was astonishing. It was one of the rare occasions I had said yes to an invite to a client meet and greet dinner and ended up, by pure coincidence it seemed at the time, sitting next to Gialle. She was attentive, eager to listen as much as to talk and quick to laugh. The evening flew by and I found myself sitting with her amongst fewer and fewer people. As we talked and talked the dining hall continued to empty until finally one of the staff behind the bar asked us if we wouldn’t mind moving to the adjoining drinks room. Standing up from the table, she took my hand and started to lead me through to the other room, I actually shivered as she took my hand we both laughed and she made some odd joke about a grave that I didn’t really understand. I remember thinking how moist her hand was, like she’d been sweating hard, I remember thinking that it ought to be a bad thing, an unpleasant thing I should recoil from. That wasn’t the case though, it felt right and I grasped her hand more tightly, I could feel her thumb caressing, almost massaging, the back of my hand. As we sat on the bar stools our hands still didn’t break contact, we decided to have one more drink before calling it a night. As we sat waiting for the barman to mix us our drinks her eyes followed him and I had a chance to look Gaille up and down without being seen to do so. She was wearing a simple black dress with a high neckline, her arms were exposeAnd so it was that I came to work for the FFGC. It’s really not that bad. True, every few months at random Gaille is taken from me and I have to endure stronger and stronger withdrawals, just to serve as a reminder. Just so I’m not in any co

Goodbye to Romance I had been a Med student. I had pulled my way through the moon’s college by the strength of my own naked grey matter. I saw the rich kids with the neural implants accelerate past me and leave me in their genetically enhanced wake. My parents weren’t in a position to help, my father was always away mining in the belt, running back and forth in his 50 year old patchwork Inty. When I saw him at Family Eve each year he laughed about how his was the longest surviving ship in the belt and we laughed that no one would waste good ammo on shooting the heap of junk. Sure he’d been boarded, sure he’d lost crew, once he’d just not come back home for three years (which we don’t talk about), but he had stayed working to pay for us to have a home on the moon. A home in a safe place, with good schools so his only child could have a good start in life. After six years at college (three years after the slowest Implant kid) I finished the training that allowed me to get my foot on the medical ladder. I started off with a small firm who manufactured the hardware necessary for limb replacement and regrowth. Then I moved onto a medium sized firm off-moon. They received healthy funding direct from the Gallentine Army and specialized in Enhanced Replacement Technology. They were having problems meshing flesh and metal and ceramics and it was my task to iron the problems out. Which I did. Two years later I made the first step into what was to be my specialist field: Implants. While the technology behind implants had been around for many years, there was always a degree of degradation. The human body just doesn’t like lumps of metal and ceramic in it, never has. Drugs kept the rejection at bay for sure and regular check-ups meant that things were rarely dangerous but the whole thing was an embarrassment really. We could grow new bodies, we could fling ourselves across countless AU of space and yet we still couldn’t get flesh and metal to be friends with each other. Not good enough. The new firm I had joined was involved in the research to minimize this rejection and indeed as a final mission statement, to actively encourage the encroachment of machine into the neural pathways of the human nervous system. I did well. Well enough in fact that one Family Eve the company presented me with my own company funded Implant. It was the very first of the next generation of Implants that I myself had designed. I couldn’t very well say no putting the damn thing in my head after I had spent the last four years of my life telling, and indeed proving, it was safer than ever before could I? So it was that I left the relative slow lane of the Norms and joined the heady ranks of the Implanted. I got even better at my job; I got faster, more precise, less prone to lapses of concentration. I rose in the ranks until I reached the top in my field. What I remember most clearly about the night I met Gialle was the way her eyes sparkled. I was dimly aware that it was in vogue at the time for girls to have ‘Sparklers’ in their eyes on a night out but I had never seen it first hand before. Basically metal filaments were temporarily sunken into the iris of the eye so that every bit of light thrown into the eye had a chance of catching one of these filaments and sparkling back at you. The effect was astonishing. It was one of the rare occasions I had said yes to an invite to a client meet and greet dinner and ended up, by pure coincidence it seemed at the time, sitting next to Gialle. She was attentive, eager to listen as much as to talk and quick to laugh. The evening flew by and I found myself sitting with her amongst fewer and fewer people. As we talked and talked the dining hall continued to empty until finally one of the staff behind the bar asked us if we wouldn’t mind moving to the adjoining drinks room. Standing up from the table, she took my hand and started to lead me through to the other room, I actually shivered as she took my hand we both laughed and she made some odd joke about a grave that I didn’t really understand. I remember thinking how moist her hand was, like she’d been sweating hard, I remember thinking that it ought to be a bad thing, an unpleasant thing I should recoil from. That wasn’t the case though, it felt right and I grasped her hand more tightly, I could feel her thumb caressing, almost massaging, the back of my hand. As we sat on the bar stools our hands still didn’t break contact, we decided to have one more drink before calling it a night. As we sat waiting for the barman to mix us our drinks her eyes followed him and I had a chance to look Gaille up and down without being seen to do so. She was wearing a simple black dress with a high neckline, her arms were exposeAnd so it was that I came to work for the FFGC. It’s really not that bad. True, every few months at random Gaille is taken from me and I have to endure stronger and stronger withdrawals, just to serve as a reminder. Just so I’m not in any co

I had been a Med student. I had pulled my way through the moon’s college by the strength of my own naked grey matter. I saw the rich kids with the neural implants accelerate past me and leave me in their genetically enhanced wake. My parents weren’t in a position to help, my father was always away mining in the belt, running back and forth in his 50 year old patchwork Inty. When I saw him at Family Eve each year he laughed about how his was the longest surviving ship in the belt and we laughed that no one would waste good ammo on shooting the heap of junk. Sure he’d been boarded, sure he’d lost crew, once he’d just not come back home for three years (which we don’t talk about), but he had stayed working to pay for us to have a home on the moon. A home in a safe place, with good schools so his only child could have a good start in life. After six years at college (three years after the slowest Implant kid) I finished the training that allowed me to get my foot on the medical ladder. I started off with a small firm who manufactured the hardware necessary for limb replacement and regrowth. Then I moved onto a medium sized firm off-moon. They received healthy funding direct from the Gallentine Army and specialized in Enhanced Replacement Technology. They were having problems meshing flesh and metal and ceramics and it was my task to iron the problems out. Which I did. Two years later I made the first step into what was to be my specialist field: Implants. While the technology behind implants had been around for many years, there was always a degree of degradation. The human body just doesn’t like lumps of metal and ceramic in it, never has. Drugs kept the rejection at bay for sure and regular check-ups meant that things were rarely dangerous but the whole thing was an embarrassment really. We could grow new bodies, we could fling ourselves across countless AU of space and yet we still couldn’t get flesh and metal to be friends with each other. Not good enough. The new firm I had joined was involved in the research to minimize this rejection and indeed as a final mission statement, to actively encourage the encroachment of machine into the neural pathways of the human nervous system. I did well. Well enough in fact that one Family Eve the company presented me with my own company funded Implant. It was the very first of the next generation of Implants that I myself had designed. I couldn’t very well say no putting the damn thing in my head after I had spent the last four years of my life telling, and indeed proving, it was safer than ever before could I? So it was that I left the relative slow lane of the Norms and joined the heady ranks of the Implanted. I got even better at my job; I got faster, more precise, less prone to lapses of concentration. I rose in the ranks until I reached the top in my field. What I remember most clearly about the night I met Gialle was the way her eyes sparkled. I was dimly aware that it was in vogue at the time for girls to have ‘Sparklers’ in their eyes on a night out but I had never seen it first hand before. Basically metal filaments were temporarily sunken into the iris of the eye so that every bit of light thrown into the eye had a chance of catching one of these filaments and sparkling back at you. The effect was astonishing. It was one of the rare occasions I had said yes to an invite to a client meet and greet dinner and ended up, by pure coincidence it seemed at the time, sitting next to Gialle. She was attentive, eager to listen as much as to talk and quick to laugh. The evening flew by and I found myself sitting with her amongst fewer and fewer people. As we talked and talked the dining hall continued to empty until finally one of the staff behind the bar asked us if we wouldn’t mind moving to the adjoining drinks room. Standing up from the table, she took my hand and started to lead me through to the other room, I actually shivered as she took my hand we both laughed and she made some odd joke about a grave that I didn’t really understand. I remember thinking how moist her hand was, like she’d been sweating hard, I remember thinking that it ought to be a bad thing, an unpleasant thing I should recoil from. That wasn’t the case though, it felt right and I grasped her hand more tightly, I could feel her thumb caressing, almost massaging, the back of my hand. As we sat on the bar stools our hands still didn’t break contact, we decided to have one more drink before calling it a night. As we sat waiting for the barman to mix us our drinks her eyes followed him and I had a chance to look Gaille up and down without being seen to do so. She was wearing a simple black dress with a high neckline, her arms were exposeAnd so it was that I came to work for the FFGC. It’s really not that bad. True, every few months at random Gaille is taken from me and I have to endure stronger and stronger withdrawals, just to serve as a reminder. Just so I’m not in any confusion as to who

Fade to Black Jack Chambers, former dot com millionaire and feared corporate raider, was scared and clueless. He had no memory of the past few hours. He didn’t remember anything at all before walking down a rough, gravel-strewn path through a dark, thickly-wooded area. The black of night contrasted sharply with the thin light of a full moon trying unsuccessfully (for the most part) to burst through the tangle of trees that surrounded and pressed down on him, forcing him to pause for a second to catch his breath. Resting his hands on his knees, he set his jaw and tensed up as if ready to pounce. Though his chest had tightened up and the hollow ball of nervous energy in his stomach threatened to overwhelm him, he would not let it. Years of hostile takeovers had taught him when someone had him in their sights, and he had that feeling now. The sounds of night were all around him, suffocating him, watching him. Judging him. He looked about as if there might be some sort of clue, something telling him where he was or what was going on. Desperation was closing in, threatening to swallow him whole, fight it though he did. He dug into his pockets, and his wallet was gone. Cell phone, too. Had he left them in the car? Where was his car? He shook his head as if that would help him recall. Figures, he thought, sighing. The simple fact is that when it comes right down to it, everyone is alone. The sudden caw of a crow lighting from the branches directly to his right startled him and he jumped; heart racing and eyes wide. In a fit of temper, he yelled “FUCK YOU” to no one in particular. He felt foolish right away and blushed, though there was no one to hear. Was there? He was being stupid, he knew. Ignoring the electric warnings of his mind, he lurched forward. “Can’t find out what’s going on standing here,” he said, so on down the path he went. Sweat began to drip slowly down his face as the sounds of the night began to slowly quiet to almost nothing. The dark forest closed in, and the first strains of panic eked out all over his body, threatening to overwhelm him. “Just keep walking,” he muttered to himself, “find a phone, call a cab, and figure it all out later.” Having a plan should have calmed him down, but if anything the deepening silence got louder and more insidious. No momentary loss of confidence, he feared he was losing his mind. C’mon Jack, what’s the plan? If he could just hold on a little bit longer… There was no guarantee of that. He had a sense of impending violent dread, as if something was pulling him onward in steady succession, neither hurried nor relaxed. He was definitely losing his nerve, what little ‘cool’ he had left. All sound was dead by this time, his footfalls hanging like corpses in the wind. He could see no good escape route, and he feared to slow down, lest his unseen pursuer pounce upon him unaware. The silence was deafening, by far the loudest sound he had ever heard. It was so quiet that he could hear the sound of his white gold Rolex; tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. He was losing what little grip he did have on sanity with every passing second. Shaking now, he began to realize that with every fiber of hissorry, but I don’t remember any of that, and I don’t remember you. I’m kind of foggy.” With real concern, Alfred said “I’m sorry to hear that, Master. Maybe if you lie down and relax for a bit, you might have an easier time remembering. Let me show you to your room, if you please.” “Yes,” he said, “maybe that would be best.” “Very good, Master,” said Alfred, “If you’ll follow me, it’s this way.” Alfred turned and proceeded to walk forward into the ornately decorated foyer. They came to a grand spiral staircase, winding upward as far as he could see. The carpeting was black with very intricate white and silver patters crisscrossing and intersecting at odd angles that seemed to make sense. A sense of real despair began to settle in on Jack, the numbness of his mind being near complete. That small corner of his mind still screamed at him, but he no longer paid any attention to it. A feeling of impending doom was settling in, and there was no course of action left to him except to follow Alfred up the stairs. As he followed, he began to notice that there were portraits; hundreds of them, maybe thousands lining the walls. There were dates under them, every one of them. More than that, all the people in them had the look of men and women resigned to where fate had taken them. Every square inch of space on the walls going up the endless staircase was covered with portraits. Fear started to spike, but he was unable to do anything but observe it. “Alfred?” “Yes, Master?” “What are these portraits? How many of them are there? There seem to be thousands!” “Millions, actually sir.” What? Surely not. The man was joking. Or mad. Visions of strange, lurid men committing unspeakable horrors filled his head, and his heart was threatening to beat right out of his chest. “Th—that’ssor

Jack Chambers, former dot com millionaire and feared corporate raider, was scared and clueless. He had no memory of the past few hours. He didn’t remember anything at all before walking down a rough, gravel-strewn path through a dark, thickly-wooded area. The black of night contrasted sharply with the thin light of a full moon trying unsuccessfully (for the most part) to burst through the tangle of trees that surrounded and pressed down on him, forcing him to pause for a second to catch his breath. Resting his hands on his knees, he set his jaw and tensed up as if ready to pounce. Though his chest had tightened up and the hollow ball of nervous energy in his stomach threatened to overwhelm him, he would not let it. Years of hostile takeovers had taught him when someone had him in their sights, and he had that feeling now. The sounds of night were all around him, suffocating him, watching him. Judging him. He looked about as if there might be some sort of clue, something telling him where he was or what was going on. Desperation was closing in, threatening to swallow him whole, fight it though he did. He dug into his pockets, and his wallet was gone. Cell phone, too. Had he left them in the car? Where was his car? He shook his head as if that would help him recall. Figures, he thought, sighing. The simple fact is that when it comes right down to it, everyone is alone. The sudden caw of a crow lighting from the branches directly to his right startled him and he jumped; heart racing and eyes wide. In a fit of temper, he yelled “FUCK YOU” to no one in particular. He felt foolish right away and blushed, though there was no one to hear. Was there? He was being stupid, he knew. Ignoring the electric warnings of his mind, he lurched forward. “Can’t find out what’s going on standing here,” he said, so on down the path he went. Sweat began to drip slowly down his face as the sounds of the night began to slowly quiet to almost nothing. The dark forest closed in, and the first strains of panic eked out all over his body, threatening to overwhelm him. “Just keep walking,” he muttered to himself, “find a phone, call a cab, and figure it all out later.” Having a plan should have calmed him down, but if anything the deepening silence got louder and more insidious. No momentary loss of confidence, he feared he was losing his mind. C’mon Jack, what’s the plan? If he could just hold on a little bit longer… There was no guarantee of that. He had a sense of impending violent dread, as if something was pulling him onward in steady succession, neither hurried nor relaxed. He was definitely losing his nerve, what little ‘cool’ he had left. All sound was dead by this time, his footfalls hanging like corpses in the wind. He could see no good escape route, and he feared to slow down, lest his unseen pursuer pounce upon him unaware. The silence was deafening, by far the loudest sound he had ever heard. It was so quiet that he could hear the sound of his white gold Rolex; tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. He was losing what little grip he did have on sanity with every passing second. Shaking now, he began to realize that with every fiber of hissorry, but I don’t remember any of that, and I don’t remember you. I’m kind of foggy.” With real concern, Alfred said “I’m sorry to hear that, Master. Maybe if you lie down and relax for a bit, you might have an easier time remembering. Let me show you to your room, if you please.” “Yes,” he said, “maybe that would be best.” “Very good, Master,” said Alfred, “If you’ll follow me, it’s this way.” Alfred turned and proceeded to walk forward into the ornately decorated foyer. They came to a grand spiral staircase, winding upward as far as he could see. The carpeting was black with very intricate white and silver patters crisscrossing and intersecting at odd angles that seemed to make sense. A sense of real despair began to settle in on Jack, the numbness of his mind being near complete. That small corner of his mind still screamed at him, but he no longer paid any attention to it. A feeling of impending doom was settling in, and there was no course of action left to him except to follow Alfred up the stairs. As he followed, he began to notice that there were portraits; hundreds of them, maybe thousands lining the walls. There were dates under them, every one of them. More than that, all the people in them had the look of men and women resigned to where fate had taken them. Every square inch of space on the walls going up the endless staircase was covered with portraits. Fear started to spike, but he was unable to do anything but observe it. “Alfred?” “Yes, Master?” “What are these portraits? How many of them are there? There seem to be thousands!” “Millions, actually sir.” What? Surely not. The man was joking. Or mad. Visions of strange, lurid men committing unspeakable horrors filled his head, and his heart was threatening to beat right out of his chest. “Th—that’s quite a lot, Al