Eyes on the road.

We’re six and a half hours into a nine-hour car trip. It’s about two in the morning. I’m dying for a coffee, and our last pee break was two hours back. There are four of us in the car.

As far as I know, I’m the last one left alive.

Keep your eyes on the road.

It took Michael first. It can’t have been pretty. At first, I thought he was just dicking around. He wouldn’t pass the Cheetos. I think he may have broken his own arm. There was certainly a lot of snapping. And a lot of screaming.

Eyes on the road, Steven.

Ted followed pretty quick after that. About thirty seconds after, actually. Nice guy, Ted. Plays the guitar. Played the guitar. He was quicker to go than Mike. Hopefully that means it was less painful, although honestly I can’t see how anything involving that quantity of yelling could be entirely painless.

Keep driving. Just keep driving.

Tyler lasted a good hour more. We thought it might have gone, when he wasn’t next. It was during his hour that we thought it might be... well, an it. I mean, sure, Michael and Ted might have spontaneously done... that... to themselves. But I think we both felt it. I’d call it- no, not malevolence. Curiosity. The kind of detached, unethical curiosity which you’d imagine a mad scientist to have.

Focus. Eyes on the road.

As for what actually happened to Tyler, I can only speculate. After that hour or so, he just stopped talking. I knew better than to hope he’d gone to sleep. I kept theorising. What was it? What did it want? Why was it making us do the things we did?

And why couldn’t I bring myself to look?

Just keep your eyes on the road.

And now there’s just us. Me, and it. I think we have an understanding. I take it to where it wants to go. And it kills me. As arrangements go, it’s not the best. But it’s let me in on a few things. Some really interesting statistics about deaths on roads. And why you should never put antifreeze in your radiator in case you get stranded somewhere. Or maybe that’s my delusional mind.

Drive, Steven.

So I keep on driving-

I don’t have a shape.

I don’t ha- wait, what?

Shapes are too slow.

It’s- no, hold on. That’s not what I was thinking. What’s-

I’m just a thought.

Who’s just a thought?

I’m the reason you’re still driving.

I’m the reason who’s still driving?

I’m the reason you can’t look back.

I’m the reason I can’t look back?

Or down at your hands.

Or down at- at my- Oh Jesus Christ. What did I- It’s in my head, it must be-

Eyes on the road, Steven. Eyes on the road.

Pyramids

The tour bus clanked slowly to a stop, squeezing in between two massive American-owned monstrosities, and disgorged us unceremoniously into the stinking Cairo heat. And by ‘stinking Cairo heat’, I mean both stinking and Cairo literally. The pyramids aren’t nearly as far away as you think they are. There’s practically a KFC right next door.

As we trek up towards the vague triangular outlines in the smog, our cut-rate tour guide launches unenthusiastically into his spiel.

“Everyone has a different theory about who built the pyramids-”

Oh god, here we go.

“-and why. Many people feel that the pyramids have some kind of spiritual connection. Indeed, this is exactly what the ancient Egyptians felt. To them, the pyramid was like a beacon, pointing the way to the heavens...”

You know, I’m pretty sure most of the supposed “science” of Egyptology is made up. Most likely, on the spot. Anything to keep the paying tourists happy. And it’s not like we’ve got any way of fact-checking them-

I’m jolted out of my internal monologue by my sister’s elbow.

“Ow.”

“Pay attention, Louie, we’ve paid for this.”

“It’s all a load of crap”, I hissed back.

My sister’s a total sucker for all that mystical crap. That’s the reason I’m here against my will. I’m a marine biologist. I’m into science and rationality and so on and so forth, but more importantly, I’d rather be scuba diving on the Red sea right now. But no.

“...and maybe even extraterrestrial involvement.”

An appropriately impressed ‘ooh’, came up from the crowd, as if they hadn’t heard the ‘aliens built it’ trotted out a hundred times before.

We pushed our way past the hordes of locals trying to flog miniature plastic pyramids and prints of dubious-looking animal-headed gods. I tightened the straps on my backpack a little. It’s got a few hundred bucks worth of sensing equipment in it. Geiger counters, electric field detectors. A stethoscope. I borrowed most of it from mates. The plan is that when my sister inevitably ‘feels a presence’, I switch on all the sensing equipment, and make her prove it.

What? She has her fun, I have mine.

We finally got past the scalpers and hit the queue for the pyramids proper. The guide starts on some trivia dump about how they’re being ‘conserved’ (also known as ‘rebuilt using concrete blocks’). I’d long since stopped paying attention. As much as I hated the mystic bullshit, The question was a sticky one. Why would you build a massive geometrical stone structure for one dead guy? The nihilist in me put it down to trying to keep the masses employed and the economy moving. Like economic stimulus, but in a desert, miles from anywhere.


We hit the front of the queue surprisingly quickly. If there’s one thing the locals really were efficient about, it was pumping people through their ancient ruins as quickly as they possibly could. My sister giggled excitedly as we made our way, stooped all the way over.

“Ooh, Louis. Can’t you feel it?”

“Nope. Not a thing,” I said, squeezing against a wall to let a German couple past on their way back up.

“Well, you should try being more open minded.”

“You should try just occasionally looking at the abundance of evidence in front of you.”

“I’ve got evidence! I can feel... something.” she finished lamely.

“Right. And Newton went on ‘feelings’, did he?”

We bickered like this the rest of the way down into the chamber. Here’s something they don’t tell you about the Pyramids: there’s absolutely squat down there. No writing on the wall, no carvings, no nothing. Just an empty room and a big-ass coffin. A coffin my sister was now lying in. This was my chance.

“I can feel the energy,” her voice echoed from across the room.

“Oh yeah? What kind of energy? Kinetic or potential?”

“Shut up.”

And then, at the back of my head, something clicked. Stupid brain, thinking in metaphors-

Then something clicked again.

Hold on a sec. That was an actual physical click. I unslung my bag from my shoulder and scuffled around, coming up with my borrowed antique of a geiger counter.

Click.

Huh.

I started waving it around the room. The closer I got to the giant sarcophagus, the stronger and more frequent the clicks. I did a quick survey of the room. The coffin was the only thing in here. On a hunch, I threw the counter into the coffin.

“Ouch! What the hell is this?” My sister stood up, holding the counter, which was now emitting a dull roar.

“You need to get out of there. Now.”

“What?”

“I mean. Um. I’m claustrophobic. Can we go?”

She sighed, and swung her leg over the side of the coffin. I breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever had been kept in that coffin was spitting out vast quantities of ionising radiation. I wanted out.

I headed back up the shaft as quickly as I damn well could, ignoring the sighs and eye rolls from behind me. My mind was fizzing as much as my geiger counter had a few minutes ago. What on earth could cause that sort of a reaction in an ancient monument? I was baffled, and more than a bit scared. I spent the rest of the site tour in a bit of a stupor, flicking back through the readings, over and over, wondering if they had been real, and if they were... why?

It wasn’t until we were back on the bus that it clicked. A metaphorical click this time. And the worst part was how much sense it made. A giant imposing structure. Hidden entrance. Thousands of tonnes of stone. In the middle of the desert.

Imposing. Secure. Shielded. Remote.

Which left me with an impossible question in response to my impossible conclusion:

Why the hell would the Ancient Egyptians have needed to store nuclear waste?

Sorry.

I've been a bit bogged down with assignments, and my first shift at a new job, and blah blah blah.

I therefore play this card:

With accompanying Sci-Fai-Ku:

As the last leaf falls

Ten thousand flaming needles

Leap towards the stars

See you next week. 

Rite of Passage

or; Maximillian J. Caliver, Reluctant Thief.

I slammed the vault door behind me, and stomped angrily though the passageway out of the bank. Charges, check. Fingerprints done. Security footage wiped. I casually flicked the switch on a remote detonator as I strode out of the building’s revolving door, and asked myself not for the first time how the hell I got myself into this line of work.

Oh yeah, that’s right. I didn’t.

--

Fourteen years earlier.

“Happy Birthday, Max!”

The whole family was there, even Nanna. I was excited. I mean, hey. Who wouldn’t be? Balloons, streamers, silly hats... the whole deal.

I hurriedly blew out the candles on my towering chocolate monstrosity of a cake, and grabbed for my first present.

“This one’s an extra special one, Max. It belonged to your great-grandfather”

So not a Transformer then. I kept tearing, a little less enthusiastically. Jeez, did this thing have a lot of paper. At the bottom of a small nest of the stuff rested a wooden case, about four inches long. I opened it carefully, and stared. Sixteen bright metal lockpicks stared back. I looked up quizzically at the assembled family members. They seemed to have got a lot more out of this than I had.

“Cool. Thanks”. I reached for the next present, only to feel my Nanna’s talon-like fingers grasp my wrist.

“‘Cool’? You get handed a thousand years of heritage and you say ‘cool’? Why, in my day-”

“Calm down, Esme. Nobody’s explained any of that to him yet”

“Noone- Noone’s explained? You are a shame to this family! You-”

Needless to say it all went downhill from there.

We stood around the kitchen bench ten minutes later, having sat Nanna on the sofa with a cup of tea, into which I’m sure she slipped any number of stronger concoctions of your own. My dad got down on his knees, and looked at me.

“Max, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

I knew this one.

“An accountant.”

Dad gave a wry smile. Last week it was a real-estate agent, or something equally asinine.

“What if there was something more exciting, which you could do with all of us?”

I looked confused. “What, like, start a cor-por-ay-shun?” That was my new favourite word. I’d learned it yesterday, though where exactly escapes me.

Dad looked at mum. This clearly wasn’t going to plan.

“Um, sure. A family corporation.”

I looked even more confused.

“Look, Maxie. You know how sometimes people expect you to do what your parents did, and what their parents did?”

“Yeah?”

He took a deep breath. “Well, the deCaliver family has one of those. We’re theives. We always have been. The lockpicks on the tenth birthday, the locked chest on the twelfth, the passageway on the fifteenth and the mask on the twentieth.” He recited it like a chant. “Come on, Max, you’ve seen your cousins do it all. Don’t you want to join in?”

Even as a ten year old, I picked up that I wasn’t really being offered a choice here, and that if I persisted with my current weekly dream of accountancy, there would be Consequences.

“Awright. Can we have cake already?”

--

That’s how I ended up here, I thought to myself as detonation charges blew the sides out of a skyscraper behind me. A ten-year-old who wanted cake, and a twelve-year-old being heckled that even his Nanna could pick locks faster than that, and a fifteen year old not knowing whether to rebel against his family or the rest of the world, and a twenty year old with no other life skills, sunk too deep in to do anything about it now.

I dusted explosive residue off my hands and threw the takings into the getaway car, driven my my cousin Stefan, the best getaway driver in the business, who would take them to my Uncle Nate, who could flog anything to anyone.

I got my cake. I kept my Nanna happy. I was upholding tradition. And I was making a killing doing it. And if that meant postponing my dreams of cost-analysis accountancy, well, so be it.

Radio Silence

Silence.


Then, a crackle of static, the whistles and pops of an unstoppable signal hitting an immovable jamming field.


Then a jingle-

“You’re listening to Radio Silence, the galaxy’s number one and number only pirate radio station. I’m your host, Disposable Dave, this is my co-host, Recyclable Rob-”
“Morning, Dave.”
“-and we are live on subwave station nineteen thousand!”

Somewhere deep in the Imperial capitol, an alert flashes across the screen.

“And it looks like we’ve got our first caller: ‘Mary’, from the Vega system. Hello Mary?”
“Hi Dave! I’ve got some Imperial troop movements and a song request for you.”
“Excellent, Mary! What can I play for you?”
“Bohemian Rhapsody, by Queen.”
“Ah, a classic. Stay on the line, Mary, I’ll grab that data off you”

The alert crosses some kind of threshold, and, in an instant, every military installation within a hundred lightyears is activated.

“What a classic. Our next caller is ‘Al’, from orbit around Ares two. And you’ve got a joke for us, Al?”
“Yeah. Yeah, what do you get, uh, when you cross an Imperial trooper with a chicken?”
“I don’t know, Al. What do you get?”
“Nothing- they’re the same thing!”

Sixteen high gain antennae flick into triangulation mode. Within a second, they pinpoint the station, an abandoned nickel mining facility inside an asteroid.

“-So I burst through the door, with a bottle opener in my hand, and said ‘Hands up, or I shoot!’”
“Jeez! So what did he do?”
“He keeled right over with his hands behind his head and surrendered! Easiest thousand credits I ever made!”
“Awesome! Guys, phone in with your stories-”

The closest unit is the Himalaya, a J-class troop transport. Imperial command pings the onboard computer, rerouting it to the asteroid and starting the defrost on four dozen highly-trained commandos.

“-and that’s this week in civil disobedience.”
“Cheers, Beth!”
“You know, Dave, I never knew you could jury-rig a subspace rift anomaliser to explode using nothing but citrus fruit.”
“And, dear listeners, there’s one of those in every imperial stardrive.”
“In other news, grapefruit sales are through the roof-”

With a lunge like a predatory cat, the Himalaya springs out of stardrive, bearing straight for the asteroid. In the hold, forty-eight gauss rifles are loaded, forty-eight wrist-mounted deflectors are charged, and forty eight sets of combat boots tightened.

“Rob and I headed down to Altaria Prime to catch a demonstration a couple weeks back, Rob, what did you think?”
“Look, I tell you what Dave, there were a lot of beautiful women at those protests-”
“Rob. Seriously. Focus here.”
“Right, yeah. Massive turnout guys, and for all you guys who are still on unlisted prison planets, massive shout out, hang in there guys!”

The cutting beams fire up with a whir, and a boarding clamp latches on to the side of the asteroid. Within seconds the airlock is off, and imperial marines are methodically clearing every inch of the mining tunnels.

“Whoa, Dave, is that a proximity alarm?”
“Sure is, Rob! You know what that means, right?”
“Yup!”
“WAGER TIME?”
“WAGER TIME!”
“So, new listeners. Here’s how this works-”

Marines clear the next tunnel, and the next, boring deeper into the labyrinthine mines as surely as the mining droids which had stripped the rock of its valuable minerals.

“You guys text in how long you reckon it’ll take them to find us.”
“And, whoever’s closest, wins a Radio Silence merch bag.”
“Or, you know, they would if they existed.”

There’s one door left. There’s a signal from the squad leader, and a rushed countdown, and fifteen seconds of sustained gauss fire reduce the inch-thick plating to dust.

“Looks like time’s up, guys!”
“We’ll see you tomorrow morning- same time, different place-”
“This has been Recyclable Rob and Disposable Dave! ”
“Radio Silence, signing off.”

There’s one door left, and it splinters under military boots. Behind it, two, regular looking guys, with a stack of high-powered subwave radio equipment disk-shredding itself behind them.

“Looks like you got us.”
“Or not. Better luck next time, sucke-”

He’s reduced to dust before he can finish.


Silence.


A trillion kilometres away, there’s a hiss, followed by a slow gurgle. As the subwave emitters spin up, a coffee pot slowly starts to fill itself. Behind it, two stasis pods flash-defrost, and two hands simultaneously stretch and reach for the coffee pot.

“You know what Dave?”
“Yeah, Rob?”
“There’s nothing like that minty-fresh new-clone smell.”

Click.

“Good morning, Andromeda! This is Radio Silence, live from station nineteen thousand and one...”