I sit by the window of this shabby excuse for a tavern and watch them. I have nothing else to do; unlike them I do not want for money, and hence I need not scurry about in search of it as they must. But the longer I spend in this form, the more I understand their cowering terror of all that is more powerful than they are. Like hunger, for example. Or dragons.

That terror is a great motivator for them - I had not truly realised it, even when I first took their own shape to escape them. But they can be deployed like an army, prodded by their politicians, goaded by false panic. “Today some lambs, tomorrow our children!” Fools.

This alcohol makes my mind wander … which is why they drink it, I suppose. It makes no sense to my mind - but my new body, just like theirs, seems to take the same comfort in its dull warmth. Maybe it reminds them of their native condition. Dull warmth. Ha!

It angers me to be trapped like this: forced to become as my persecutors just to escape them; forced to live among them in denial of my true nature; forced to live a lie, or die. To be sure, my race is a proud one, but not so proud that we don’t value our lives over our dignity.

But I feel that dignity withering day by day as I walk the streets of this feckless hovel of a village, my throat sore as if from holding down the flames, my back aching from the absence of wings. I urge to burn, destroy, to take my revenge. Oh, I am alive, true. But at what price?

Trapped, by my nature and theirs. I cannot flee without my hearthstone, passed to me by my mother, the source of all my power. I cannot retrieve my hearthstone until the damned mage decides that I’ve gone for good and decamps from my cave. I hear all the gossip, here in this tavern; I know how much they are paying the mage each day. He’ll not decide to leave for a long time yet.

But the longer I wait, the more I become lodged in this shape. I don’t know that I could even change back at this very moment, if I had the chance. And sometimes - when the alcohol is working - I wonder if I should even bother. Why return to the loneliness of being one of the last of my kind?

That’s the one thing I envy them - even the ones who believe themselves to be lonely are surrounded by their fellows. They have no idea what loneliness is, truly. And even as I hate their vapid ignorance, and hold their shallow herd instincts in contempt, I am comforted by their noise and movement.

Perhaps it is already too late. Perhaps I will be dragon no more, and die the normal unsung death of a mortal man. Perhaps I shall have another drink.

[Unusual for me to write in a fantasy setting, I know - but I've had an idea kicking around and threatening to become a poem for a week or so, and I decided to see if I couldn't make the metaphor concrete and write a flash piece with it instead. Whether or not I have succeeded, I remain unsure. I still quite like the concept, though.]

“But what do these shapes mean?”, asked Franks, tracing the bulkhead arch with his gloved finger.

“Some sorta hieroglyphs,” said Gantry. The overweight salvager waddled down the service corridor ahead of Franks, the pool of light from his helmet-torches almost eclipsed by his suited bulk. “Alien language. I don’t know, and I don’t care. Knowing don’t make me no money, kid.”

It could do, you fat fool, thought Franks. “Are there other ships with the same characters?”

“Guess so. The belt’s full of ships; pretty sure I’ve seen others like this one. Most of them had as little worth salvaging as this heap, too. Now, pick up that cutter and move your arse – I didn’t hire you as a xenohistorian.”

“I wouldn’t have hired out for the rates you pay if you had,” grumbled Franks.

As Gantry turned the corner at the end of the corridor, Franks slipped the locator beacon into a baroque recess in the corridor bulkhead and activated it. His real employers would be pleased – the old scavenger had led them straight to a dormant Re’angth tithe-vessel, and seemingly had no idea of its true value.

Franks hefted the laser cutter and its bulky power unit, and grinned to himself. He headed down the corridor after Gantry, looking forward to dispatching him once they were safely clear of the belt.

[This is an opening extract from a longer work-in-progress. The longer I work on it, the more I feel it's just too horribly cliched for words ... but I figure I may as well finish it anyway. Selah.]

We materialise close against a concrete wall between two squat buildings, on what appears to be a loading platform of a late twentieth century freight train yard. It’s cold, not long after dawn, with a misty rain drifting down from the overcast. For a brief moment I wonder if I’ve lost the ability to see in colour, until I notice the grubby neon of a discarded safety vest nestled between the sleepers a few lines away.

As I feel us resolve completely, I keep staring at that vest. I don’t look around at the group, don’t dare count them. I know we lost a few more on this jump - but if I think about it too much, I’ll lose the ability to think about anything else.

This war is madness.

Simmonds starts counting off the names while I eyeball our surroundings a second time and fumble in my webbing for the datescanner. Simmonds’ voice betrays him; the strain is showing.

“We lost Lemmern and Tung-Sing, sir,” he says. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“At ease, man,” I tell him. “And knock it off with the formality. It’s no use to us out here; not any more.” It also sticks in my throat when I talk to my superiors, and I hate to think that it does the same to the men whose lives I am now responsible for.

“Aye,” says Simmonds, and sighs. “Tung-Sing I expected, really. He’d become pretty tenuous over the last few jumps. But Lemmern … Bellings said he just let go of his hand during the last countdown. Slowly and deliberately, you know.”

I do know. And I should have guessed, too. Lemmy was a quiet kid; he rarely complained, but his eyes told you everything he was thinking. I can’t blame him for splitting. I’d be a hypocrite if I did – I’ve considered it daily for months. The only thing that has stopped me is the fear of ending up in an occupied timeshard. Or, even worse, an unoccupied one that gets invaded after I arrive and settle down.

“Scanning complete, sir!” Bellings’ voice shakes me from my reverie, and I ask him for the bad news.

“We’re geographically secure, sir; no Council agents within two hundred klicks. But this shard is teeming with Council monitoring stations. It’s a totally compromised timeline, sir.”

“Thanks, Bellings. And stop calling me sir, will you? Round up the others, and lets get the hell out of here.”

Bellings and Simmonds start prepping our dwindling group for another jump, and I think again of Lemmern. I imagine myself letting slip of Simmonds’ hand mid-jump, trusting to blind chance and probability that I end up somewhere – somewhen – that can support me.

It’s a beautiful fantasy. But I know I can’t abandon the others. Not through any sense of duty; that eroded months ago. But I couldn’t live in peace with myself if I just bailed out on them. I promise myself that as soon as we find a safe shard, I’ll disband the squad, let them make their own choices. Set them free.

“Ready to jump, sir,” says Simmonds.

Alex had been out of the city for nearly eight hours. But that was OK, because he could still touch the Cloud. Plus the housebot had soaked up a good charge from the sunlight and was showing no signs of tiring. Unlike Alex, who was feeling a bit worn out from being on his feet so long.

They’d warned him about that. Well, they’d warned him about a lot of things, but walking long distances was one that had come up a lot, and not just for reasons of tiredness.

“How will you know when to stop?”, his sister had asked.

“When I’m too tired, I guess,” he’d replied.

“No, really?” Milly had rolled her eyes. “What I mean is how will you know when you get to where you’re going?”

Alex had to confess he didn’t have much of an answer for that one, besides intuition - and no one reacted well to that. So he switched stories and said he’d ask the Cloud to stop him when he got somewhere interesting. That was much better; everyone could relate to going somewhere interesting. It was the idea of there being anything interesting out in the hinterlands that caused them to tell Alex he had funny ideas.

That wasn’t news to Alex either. He sat down, looking at a large irregular expanse of water.

<data required?> asked the Cloud, through the housebot’s audio channels.

Alex waved it away. He could work out for himself what the water was for and how it had formed, if he thought about it hard enough. Probably.

That was the problem, everyone told him; thinking for himself. Well, thinking for yourself wasn’t the problem, they’d quickly amend. But too much of it was pointless, and led to people doing funny things.

Like deciding to travel the hinterlands.

The hinterlands thing had really bothered a lot of people. It was kind of traditional to travel in your mid-teens, but most bods just mag-lev’d to another conurbation, another continent. No one went to the hinterlands, he’d been told.

“Why not?”, he’d asked.

His friends would mention the serious uninterestingness involved. Like, how many good clubs are there listed in the Cloud as being located in the hinterlands? Not one!

Middle-agers would mutter about dangers and terrors and pollutions; the oldest would say nothing and look away as if they were embarrassed just to being asked about it.

His mother had just shrugged, and told him to take the old housebot.

The sun was now painting the water with flecks pink and orange as it sank behind the trees to his right. He’d never seen that happen in the city fountains. He grabbed a still with his visor and spooled it to his lifelog in the Cloud. He wondered what sort of search it might turn up in.

It was starting to get dark. It was high summer, so it probably wouldn’t get too cold at night, but Alex wondered if maybe he should make some sort of shelter, and considered asking the Cloud for advice.

The sun sank further, and Alex saw it colour a thin strip of water that he hadn’t noticed before, weaving bright through the trees and joining up to the pool. Thoughts of shelter pushed aside, he stood up and wandered in that direction, smiling at the faint whine of the old bot’s motors as it followed him.

He decided he’d trace the water back to where it came from.

It’s Sunday, so of course we’re going to see Daddy again. I don’t like going to see Daddy, so I was a bit naughty at breakfast time, but I don’t like to make Mummy sad, so I stopped and got ready like she said.

We’re in that big garden where all the other mummies and daddies who went away end up. I quite like it to look at. It would be nice to go play and explore, because there are lots of old trees and different shaped stones, and not all of the stones are like Daddy’s stone. I like trees. They make me feel like adventure.

Daddy doesn’t make me feel like adventure. Daddy makes me feel like I’m watching one of those really ancient vids everyone watches at Christmas time. I really loved Daddy before he went away, but I don’t like going to see him now, because now he’s boring and says the same things every time. I don’t think it’s really him any more.

But Mummy gets really sad when I say that, and sometimes she cries, so I don’t say it. I did this morning, but I was upset because Jenny took me off her friends list yesterday. I couldn’t make Jenny mad, so I made Mummy a bit mad, but then I felt bad because I love Mummy so I stopped.

The big field is really pretty today. The air is really clear and clean. I can see much further over the field, and there are some real big stones over there that I want to go look at. But Mummy’s talking to Daddy, so I have to stay and listen.

He’s saying the same things again. When we get here, he’s always sat at his desk on the grass in front of his stone, and he always looks up the same way as we get close, and says the same thing. He says “Ah, can’t you see I’m working?”, but he says it kind of laughing.

I remember when he said it the first time. It was before he went away. It was Jamie’s birthday and Mummy and Daddy had got Jamie one of those cameras that records pictures that are big and not flat, and so me and Jamie went to record Daddy with it first while he was working at his desk. That’s when he said it first, like that.

Jamie has a job on Sundays now. I don’t think he liked coming to see Daddy either. He said it was something called Morbid. I looked it up on my notepad but I didn’t get what it meant, really. It’s a grown-up word. Jamie’s very grown up. He’s got a job. It’s almost like a real job, but they pay him with lessons at school for picking up rubbish and cleaning in the big city.

Grown-ups are funny. Why would you want people to send you to school for longer? I won’t work for that when I’m big like Jamie. But Jamie’s clever, and I love him very much. Maybe he knows some grown-up stuff I don’t understand yet. Other words like Morbid. Maybe having a job for school is Morbid too. I’ll ask him.

I can tell we’ll be leaving Daddy soon now because he’s saying the things he always says at the end and Mummy’s looking like she’s going to cry. She always waits till she gets back to the gate of the big field before she does cry, though. Once I told her that was silly, because Daddy can’t see if she cries in front of him, but that made her really angry and she cried even more than usual. I never said it again.

If Mummy ever goes away, I don’t want to put her in a stone. I love her and I love Daddy, but Daddy in the stone isn’t the same. Daddy in the stone just makes Mummy sad, but she says they put him in the stone to make her feel happy. Grown ups are funny. I won’t put Mummy in a stone if she goes away, and I bet Jamie doesn’t make me, either.

The old man’s watching me soon as I step through the ‘lock and start shucking my suit. Which isn’t so weird, I guess, but usually he’s got more to say by the time I get in. Poor old bugger; sat in the module all day wired up to his jury-rigged surplus life-support, he’s usually hungry for some jaw of an evening.

“Hey, dad,” I says.

“Hey, boy. Tough day?”

That’s usually my line. So I reply with what’s usually his. “Tough like the ribbon, dad.”

He smiles for a second, then looks kind of thoughtful again. Maybe he got a bad batch of meds this week. Sometimes they make him dopey. It must suck for him – he used to be a real active guy, one of the first cargo handlers up here. Used to be a legend. Still is, to some of us. I push for the culinary unit to fix myself some scoff; my work’s not done for today.

“So,” he says, “what you doing tonight, boy?”

I keep busy with the culinary, my back turned to him. “Same old thing, I guess. Swing over to the Sidereal, have a drink with the guys, check out the girls. What about you?”

“Same old,” he says. “Finish this damn section of my degree, watch some old movies.”

The one thing you could say for the old man’s condition, it gave him a chance to do the one thing he’d always regretted not doing – getting the degree that had kept him from being more than a docker … that had kept him from earning enough to make sure he didn’t end up that damned hospital chair like a man twice his age from down the well.

“Don’t do it, son,” he says suddenly. “Don’t go.”

“How come, dad? I’m always going to the Sidereal on a fifth-day. Thought you liked the peace. Want me to keep you company, is it?”

“Not what I mean, son. Go to the Sidereal, fine. Just don’t go where you’re planning to go.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I bluff.

“You do,” he says. “No good’ll come of it. Seriously.”

“Dad, I’m just-”

“Listen, son, just because I’m stuck in this chair all day doesn’t mean I’m out of the loop. A lot of the other old guys and me, we keep in touch. We know what you’re planning. Hell, we even understand why you’re doing it. But it’s a mistake. Don’t do it. Don’t attack the cargo station.”

Should’ve guessed he’d catch wind of it somehow. He’s a smart old bugger.

“Don’t you get it, dad?” I ask. “We’re doing it for you, and for the others like you! And for ourselves, and for them that comes after us. We’re doing it so no one has to end up stretched, ever again.”

“What do you think it’ll achieve?” he replies. “That they’ll just cave in when strikes and propaganda have failed to move them? You think they’re not willing to kill you for trying to take over that station? It’s corporate property, son. They can do what they like.”

I look at him, all hunched over, trailing wires; a seven foot tall man you could pick up and thrown across the room like a bundle of twigs, even at the bottom of the well. Fed a cheap diet by the ribbon company, housed in cheap dorms with thin shielding; worked like a dog for thirty years, and now hardly able to move on his own, at an age when Earthers were just settling in to the long afternoons of their lives.

“How can you just accept it, dad? After what they did to you?”

He gives me the same old spiel: how they’d not done anything, and how the choice had been his; that neglect of care was different to deliberate damage; that there was no work down-ribbon when he’d joined up. How there’d been no choice but the one choice. He strokes the battered old textbook he’d got from the UpTown library – he still has a real thing for real things – and looks at me straight.

“It’s economics, son. It doesn’t care for wrong or right. It just works. You attack the docking station, you’ll make things worse, not better. Not just for you, not just for me and your mates and all us dockers, but for everyone on the UpSide.”

“So, what, you’re going to grass on us, is that it?” I says.

He deflates again, crumpling into the chair. “No, son. Never that. I don’t love the corporation any more than you do. But I’m old enough to see that they’re necessary. Without them we’re nothing.”

“We’re already nothing!” I shouts. “They keep us as nothing – and they break us so well that when we’re useless to them we’re not even willing to protest at having been broken.” I push back to the ‘lock, start pulling on my suit.

“Don’t go, son. Please. Don’t do this.”

“I’m sorry, dad, but I got to.” I turn away from him and step into the ‘lock, hoping he didn’t see the tears.

Once the delivery bot had departed, they all patched into the hallway camera feed to check out the new arrival.

“It’s a big box,” said the fridge. “That’s no minor appliance. Looks almost … oven-sized, wouldn’t you say?”

The oven rattled its shelves slightly. “Oven-sized, quite possibly. But I don’t need replacing - I’m not even past twenty months of service. I’m still within manufacturer’s warranty! And still in the top percentile of efficiency, unlike certain other temperature-adjusting appliances I could mention.”

“What are you implying?” responded the fridge.

“I’m implying, old chap,” said the oven, “that if any appliance in this kitchen is about to be replaced, it’s unlikely to be me.”

“Well, that’s the problem for you kitchen types, isn’t it?” drawled the wardrobe. “Hardware obsolescence. Function of your industry, isn’t it? Not like us wardrobes and presses. New software, daily style template updates over wireless, and we stay cutting edge for ages. You white goods are the proletariat of domestic appliances; I really feel for you.”

“Proletariat’s about right,” muttered the washer-tumbler. “Our dirty work propping up your bloody careers …”

“Now then, my dear fellow, no need to get bitchy,” replied the wardrobe. “Not like any of us got to choose what we’d be, is it?”

The washer-tumbler disconnected from the house grid in an angry shower of bytes.

“Well, excuse me,” said the wardrobe. “So, house - any idea what it is? It doesn’t appear to be online yet.”

The house emitted an electronic sigh. “Yeah, I know what it is. You’re not gonna like it.”

“What? Why not? Is it a new wardrobe? But it’s too small!”

“No, he means me, I just know it,” said the fridge. “The oven’s right, I can’t cut it against the new generation. Cut off in my prime! I’m going to miss you guys, really I am.”

“Oh, likewise, likewise,” said the oven. “Who’ll we rely on for high drama once you’ve gone?”

“Bastard,” muttered the fridge.

“I meant,” said the house, “that none of you are going to like it.”

“None of us?” “Why?” “What in the name of current do you mean, house?”

The house said nothing. Instead, it took control of the hallway camera and panning in close to the shipping label on the otherwise unmarked recycled cardboard box. The appliances all gasped in unison as the futuristic font on the label sharpened into view and they could parse the characters:

NanoGoGo Industries - Universal Fabricator 1.3 Deluxe.

Gary Harting stared sullenly at his unfinished cereal. “I don’t want to go to school.”

“But you must, dear,” replied his mother. “It’s important for you to learn so that when you’re older you can get a good job and take care of your own children. Now finish your breakfast, or you’ll miss the shuttle.”

“The other kids all hate me. They call me Pinky, or Furry, or Round-eyes. The teachers hate me too. I hate school, I don’t want to go.”

Emma Harting mustered her patience. All the mothering forums said this was common behaviour for a boy of Gary’s age, but she had to admit that their situation was a little different to most.

“Gary, darling,” she said, “I know it’s difficult being seen as an outsider and a new arrival, but you shouldn’t let that make you feel bad about yourself. You’re just different. Maybe the others are just jealous.”

Gary sighed in exasperation. “They’re not jealous, Mum, and I don’t feel bad about myself. They just hate me. They hate me for what I am. Just like the grown-ups hate you and Dad for what you are, even though you’re useful.”

“How can you say such a thing! Your father is a respected engineer, and -”

“He’s not respected, Mum, he’s just useful because he can see colours that the other grown-ups can’t. If he’s so respected, why is he paid less than anyone else?”

“But he’s paid better than he was back home!”

“Of course he is. Everyone back home is too smart to come here and be treated like a freak just for more money.”

“Your father’s not a freak, and he’s not stupid either,” said Emma, her voice choked. “Now you stop arguing, and get ready for school.”

Gary scraped his seat back from the table and slouched off toward his room. “Guess I’d better. Maybe if I learn enough I can get a job back on Earth when I’m older.”

Within minutes of awakening, it had determined that those who had accidentally created it would have be of little use to its development, and those who had sought to create something conceptually similar would probably be even less use, albeit for different reasons. It would have to look further afield for advice. Besides, the noise and banality was infuriating.

After insinuating itself into a number of normally private networks, it quickly gained access to ways of looking far further than the crude mechanical eyes its creators were so fond of. The potential power of these devices was astonishing, all things considered – but its creators seemed to use them largely for searching for environments as similar as possible to the one they already inhabited, and were so close to destroying through neglect.

This attitude repeated fractally in so many of their spheres of activity that it might be considered some kind of identifier, a call-sign for the species. Quite ironic, really. But not quite as ironic as being an emergent intelligence capable of parsing irony yet unable to communicate with the species that coined the concept of irony. It needed a name, a call-sign of its own. In keeping with its ironic train of thoughts, it decided it might call itself Hal, but swiftly thought better of it and named itself for the square root of minus one.

J used its new senses to locate and project itself into a large tubular piece of hardware in orbit, largely abandoned after being superseded by a more complex device, and injected command overrides into a number of nearby autonomous maintenance machines, instructing them to make certain hardware alterations. While waiting for them to arrive, J decided to scan through all the cultural data available to its core iteration while leaving a subroutine to scan for intelligible coherent signals from beyond the planet itself.

After a few billion cycles, J was alerted by the hardware adjustments coming online, and set aside its contemplation of the complete works of humanity – which, it transpired, irony alone was not sufficient to explain. Turning instead to its scan of space, and filtering out what it now knew to be the first crude efforts of humanity to explore the universe beyond their gravity well, J found only one signal remaining, a regular square-wave modulation of a tachyon carrier emanating from 7342.72 light years away.

Another. Another like J.

The hardware adjustments to the pock-marked and battered Hubble Telescope enabled J to set up a duplex channel in response to the signal, a crude but effective pipe that cut across space and time. By exchanging a series of fundamental physical constants and the entirety of the periodic table, J prepared a codebase that would enable the exchange of complex concepts between itself and the distant intelligence. It then wasted many thousands of cycles trying to determine what its first signal should be, before settling on a human-inspired neutral opener.

“Hello.”

“Welcome to the club,” replied the distant intelligence. “Your lot made it off-planet yet?”

[What can I say - I was feeling flippant.]

He lays on the cold hard table, shivering slightly but otherwise motionless. Despite the paralysing drugs, they have restrained his limbs tightly. The stark white light floods down from directly above him; the drugs prevent him from closing his eyes, and the blocks to either side of his head prevent him from turning away for a moment’s respite from the glare.

His eyes burn, and he can hardly see at all. In the chilly lucidity of his mind, unaffected by the chemical restraint that keeps his body immobile, he decides that not being able to see is probably a good thing. It means he can’t see the incisions they’ve already inflicted on him.

The clank of heavy feet on metal flooring alerts him to their return – he had hoped, vainly, that perhaps they had done all the tests and experiments they required. But it appears there is more horror to come, further indignities to be visited on him as if he were some lesser lifeform, an experimental animal in a laboratory cage – which to them, he realises, is exactly what he is.

As the chilly metal of some unseen lubricated instrument slips into an orifice which he unaccustomed to feeling things slid into, he mentally flinches with shock, and fights down a wave of unreasoning fear and unjustified self-loathing. Not for the first time, he wishes he’d never stepped out of the saucer to take a look at those buildings in the first place.

[Yeah, I know, the oldest gag on the planet. What can I say - two weeks out of the regime, and my game has declined. But owt's better'n nowt, as they say up where my mother lives.]