Sci-Fi Example

This is a piece I wrote a while ago, part of an ongoing project in a science fiction world. The idea is for a grand saga that spans several eras of human civilization, from a single planetary society, to a multiplanet society, and then to a fractured mosaic of multiple planetary cultures. This is the introduction of a character who lives in the Corporate world of a future where unchecked monopolies have made life grim for worlds too far for the average Earth citizen to care.

Shin breathed deeply through his nose, drawing in the thick aroma of flash-boiled dark beans and steamed milk, and tried to imagine that he was sitting at a street cafe in Paris.  It was not hard to imagine this thing, for he was sitting at a crude metal table which, with his eyes closed, could be made of cast iron, and sitting upon an equally crude chair which he could similarly imagine as the weatherproof seat of a Parisian cafe, out in the air beside a street cafe that could have been inspired by the venerated Parisian staples.  The road beside him could have been a terrestrial road, it was made of gray, crumbling concrete with lines painted to denote the lanes of traffic.  The buildings around him could have been from the newer parisian arrondissements, as they were squat and low storeyed, made from concrete and glass, with signs and advertisements clinging to them like bad wrapping paper.  The coffee in his cup could have been a cheap synthetic roast, sold for a mere half euro.  The cup itself was of white ceramic, and could have been found in any of a hundred restaurant supply shops across the city.  

However, he could not quite convince his mind.  For one, the air he pulled in along with the steam from his mug was decidedly not Parisian air.  The distinctive tang of river water was gone, and the telltale ozone scent of the active air scrubbers was totally absent.  Terrestrial air in most places was still slightly tinged with that acrid odor of the carbon scrubbers, and though the atmosphere had been largely reformed in Shin’s youth, it was still not fully cleansed of the scars of the industrial revolution, nor the atomic age.  Living there, you didn’t really notice it much, until you got to a place like this.  A place where the atmosphere had never tasted a hint of complex hydrocarbons, and was still well protected by a natural blanket of atmospheric filtration.  But beyond the clean-ness of the air, the texture of it was different.  The difference was hard to describe, it was partly the pressure: the earth’s air was thick and heavy, while the air of this place was much thinner, as though he was sitting at the highest point in Denver, but even that was not quite right.  For another, the oxygen content was higher, so the air almost tasted more energetic, more tempestuous.  

Beyond the flavor and texture of the air, there were the more obvious signs.  The twin, hanging moons, obstructing together nearly fifteen percent of the total sky, vying for pride of place with the sun, which was slightly more orange than Sol, and seemed slightly larger.  It was the difference between a nickel and a dime in the sky, but still the difference was noticeable.  Disconcerting.  And the blue of the sky itself was not the robin’s egg of Earth’s sky at noon time, but a deeper, more royal color.  It gave the sense that time was fleeting, even though the days here were twenty five percent longer than earth’s paltry 24 hours.  

The most obviously extraterrestrial thing about this cafe was probably its view.  Though he was in the center of a town street, he had a perfect view down the road and out of the town.  The buildings rapidly fell away only a few blocks in the distance, and he could see a wide swath of wilderness in brilliant color, stretching for miles on end, up and over distant hills, to brush against the walls of snow-capped mountains.  Somewhere in the middle distance, the road wound beyond a hill into a sheltered valley, and from that sheltered valley a spacecraft was being launched into low orbit, trailing solid propellant and invisible magnetic field-waves as it tore through the verdant atmosphere and rocketed into space. 

Then, of course, there were the people.  All around him the people of this place bustled much as their distant cousins and relations would on earth, except that these people looked as though they had been alternatively plucked from either a 21st century period piece, or a current action blockbuster.  

Union Marines strode the streets in their deep gray fatigues, while men and women of the Union Navy laughed and drank with the sleeves of their deep blue jumpsuits cuffed up to their elbows.  Freighter crews wore drab coveralls, smoked cheap and essentially synthetic cigarettes, and toted their atmospheric gear in well-mended bags that had seen countless orbits and berths.  The Local Constabulary wore plasti-pressed bodyarmor, buckled around the middriff and gleaming like some dark knight of yesterday’s lore.  Tourists, even, walked about in strange fashion, playing with light made physical, talking to phantoms, and reading invisible maps, trying to find their way to the local sights, what sights there were, before their layover was up.  

In contrast, the local population wore heavy denim and spun cotton.  They wore boots of leather, real animal hide, rather than compressed plastics or extruded psuedo-fabrics.  Their faces and arms were lined and tanned from the sun, and they knew the burdens of hard work.  

And amid it all sat Daniel Shin, an adjuster for Kroger Interplanet.  He could feel his own otherness on his shoulders like a weight of steel.  His suit was cut in what must be an entirely alien fashion to the local people, made from hand shorn cashmere and dyed a rich navy that was perhaps one shade from black.  His tie was a rich crimson silk with a designer label. The designer shoes on his feet were made from real italian leather, but concealed a plastiflex crush-proof inner lining.  His hair was coiffed and styled in a timeless fashion, pristine and in place.   Shin was not the only person in a suit, there were several local buisnesspeople dressed similarly, but their fashions were disconnected.  Shin had bought his suits and shoes in Milan, an annual pilgrimage he made to a respected bespoke tailor, and the look was inspired by and informed by hundreds of years of contiguous evolution in fashion and design.  Local suits were inspired by the id of a suit, but were disconnected from the terrestrial fashion nexus.  The cuts were unique, the fabrics limited by local supply.  

The thing that set him the most apart, however, were his eyes.  Piercingly blue with white-gold lines tracing through the iris, his eyes were augmetic implants with capabilities above and beyond any organic eye.  Most of his implants and augmetics were less noticeable: spectrographic samplers in his jaws, with sensors in his nose and tongue, magnetic leads embedded in the pads of his fingers, and an omnicom implanted directly at the base of his skull.  These were all designed to be invisible, and the company had paid for the expensive no-scalpel nanosurgeries, so that he could pass without too much notice.  But his eyes always made people nervous.  

Especially in places like this one, where augmetics were rare and complicated, and thus associated the expensive surgical procedures with the wealthy offworlders.  The Other.  Those strange folk that rolled through town but never stayed.  The ones who impregnated their daughters, or killed their cows, or burned their farms and paid out fistfulls of insurance cash.  Whispers of earthborn and corpotrash and borgfreak followed these eyes.  

Chin sipped his latte, an ages-old drink that called back basal memories of an ancient time, and enjoyed the flavor of real milk.  In the back of his brain, that small space that he closely associated with the chipsets embedded in his first vertebra, he had a knowledge of the precise and delicate chemical composition of this drink: the quantities of lactose, caffeine, complex carbons, and the swirling organic cocktail of the local mineral water that infused the hard, roasted beans into a liquid solution.  

A young server, wearing a thin cotton top and denim shorts that revealed a host of extremely natural amenities, approached his table with a bright and bubbly gait that showed she had been born and raised on this world.  Her complexion was pale, her eyes bright, glossy, and large, and her hair a golden shade of white-yellow.  All of these things were byproducts of this environment: lesser gravity, a dimmer sun and less harmful radiation.  He guessed she was only two or three generations removed from the colony ship.  

“How’s the latte?” She asked cheerily, standing easily next to his table, cocking her hip out and resting a hand on it.  The pose further accentuated her youthful beauty, yet the things that drew Chin’s attention were not her curves and aspects, but her hands.  They didn’t seem to match her personality: the nails were unpainted, the fingers unadorned, the wrists bare and clear.  The skin was clean and scrubbed, but hard worn and calloused.  She had been born here, but this cafe was far from the first job in her young life.  Her fingers and palms bore deep callouses from farm labor, and there were scars up her arms, and pale ones on her legs.  Probably old working injuries.  Chin tilted his head back and peered casually up at her face.  His sensitive eyes rolled over her features: smooth jawline, slightly proud ears, glowing lips, a nose slightly crooked from an old break, face lined from laughing and the sun, and wide, wet, emeraldine eyes that sat under delicate golden brows.  

“Excellent,” Chin said, not breaking eye contact. If she was startled by his eyes, or the intensity of his gaze, she didn’t show it, just smiled a bit wider and met his gaze levelly.  “Thank you.”

“Great!” She said, her smile spreading across her whole face. “Can I get you anything else?”

“Not today, I’m afraid.”  Chin said, setting his empty cup down on its saucer, “I have an appointment in a few minutes.”  

“Too bad, not too many cultured folk come through asking for breve cafe latte’s,” she said, eyes twinkling, “most people just want a black coffee, or a plain tea.  Couple of the touristy folk come through wanting thick sugary things.” She produced a small slate from a back pocket and handed it over. It was warm from its proximity to her skin.  

As shin lay his thumb onto the slate to pay for his beverage, his sixth sense began to scream at him.  

GUNMEN.  FOUR.  MILITARY AGE.  ARMED.  ENGAGING IN 5…

Without hesitation Shin stood, the metal chair beneath him skittering into the street.  In the same fluid motion he stiffened his fingers in a precise pattern hand placed them squarely, firmly, between the server’s breasts, the heel of his hand and the tip of his middle finger bracing against her sternum.  The simple touch sent her staggering back half a pace and slumping onto a metal chair.  

Not pausing for a second, Shin pivoted on his heel and made a warding gesture with his left hand.  Field projectors kicked to life with a sub-audible whirr and a static pop.  In the same motion, his right hand slid up his thigh and under his jacket, the magnetic grip points in the pads of his fingers snapping into place on the grip of a sidearm snugged in a hidden holster.  

The first shots rang out and went wide.  The sound profile told him they were antiquated powder weapons, but the sonic disruptions and field blooms told him they had been magnetically assisted.  

Shin completed his turn with his sidearm drawn and in a braced half crouch.  His augmetic eyes highlighted four confirmed armed targets and six potential threats in the street.  

Each of the four threats wore heavy body armor, micro mesh face masks to hide their identities, and matching drab fatigues and boots.  They held antiquated rifles that spat aluminum casings onto the street in staccato bursts.  Overlaying the carbon fiber barrels of the weapons were crudely made gauss rings, with bulky hardline computers flash- taped to the magazine receivers.  The computers were, unfortunately, stripped of all antennae, and hard wired, proofed from his intrusion software.  

A single shot impacted Shin’s projectile field and ricocheted into the concrete, sending up a puff of dust and stone chips.  Three more went wide, and he heard a keening howl in the distant background: collateral.  

Shin’s first shot tore through a micro mesh mask and sent one of the threats toppling to the ground, a spray of skull fragments and grey matter viscera blown back up the street a quarter block.  The round overpenetrated, but impacted harmlessly against a building wall.  

Two more rifle rounds bounced off of Shin’s shield, one into a glass window, the other back into the shin of one of the threats, shattering bones.

That second man collapsed screaming as Shin put two rounds into a third threat’s chest.  Blood shot from the wounds and through the micromesh mask as the target collapsed, feeble fingers clutching at the gaping hole where it’s heart used to be.  

The fourth turned to run. Shin’s third round impacted at the base of the skull, a pink mist puffed out the other side.  

Shin advanced and kicked the rifle away from the last living attacker, aiming his foot precisely to disable the gauss rings and bend the magazine catch.  The threat was gripping its leg and hissing in pain, hemorrhaging blood  into the road.  

Without a breath’s pause, Shin slid the compact back into its holster and slid smoothly into a crouch.  Without a word, he delivered a precise rabbit punch to the gunman’s forehead, knocking him out cold, then stripped the man’s belt from his waist and tied a crude but effective tourniquet about his lower thigh.  The gunman had zip ties in his vest, so Shin absconded with them and bound the attacker by the wrists.  

Lastly, he pulled the micromesh from the attacker’s face, the silvery-gray material sliding away like silk, but clinging like cotton fresh from a tumble dry.  In the static, the assailant’s gray-black hair stuck up comically, a contrast to the worn and lined features, full of dark tans and badly healed scars.  

The threat neutralized, Shin left the man in the street and scanned for the collateral hit he had heard early in the engagement.  A woman was lying on the ground in a pool of crimson, her abdomen ruptured by one of the rifle rounds.  His implants predicted a large volumetric blood loss.  Shin strode quickly over and removed a flat canister from one of his jacket pockets, a spare nanocyte generator used to administer first aid.  He sprayed the wound site with the invisible nanomachines and instructed them to stop the hemorrhage.  Though the machines were potent tools, he didn’t have enough outside of his own nanocyte amps to do much more than that.  Hopefully, the emergency aid his implants had summoned would arrive quickly enough to administer more comprehensive care.  

“You,” Shin snapped, pointing to a gawking tourist, “put pressure on this wound until help arrives.” Shin then turned and walked back to his stunned server, her eyes wild with terror, hands clutched in front of the spot on her chest where he had pushed her.  

Wordlessly, Shin knelt beside her and took one of her wrists, feeling her pulse.  His other hand went to her neck.  She was panicking, understandably, and probably in shock.  

“Did I hurt you?” Shin asked, in a flat, even tone.

“N..no.. I don’t th...think so?” She said it like a question, her voice quavering, her free fingers rubbing gently at the spot.  He had been firm, but there shouldn’t have been enough force to bruise, though her skin was utterly pale and bruising would’ve been a simple thing.  

“I apologize for this, but with your height, if you had been standing you could have caught a stray round.”  

“I… you saved my… who were… why did they…?” She seemed to stammer out eight questions at one time, all jumbled together.  

“I saved my own skin,” he said, answering her questions in turn, “all I did for you was give you a statistically better chance of survival. I expect those are mercenaries, or bandits, or maybe revolutionaries. They came for me because I’m clearly a Corp agent,” Shin smiled at this, “but people like that,” he gestured at the corpses and the wounded shooter, “typically assume the suit is empty.”  

“So they were trying to kill you?”

“Oh I doubt it.  They were firing accelerated ceramic coated slugs, lethal for your average human but they knew I had implants, so I expect they were trying to trigger a Crash, then drag me off so they could ransom me to the Corp.” he said it like an assumption, but he knew it for a fact.

“Crash?” The shock was wearing off, so he kept her talking and engaged. 

“I have biomedical implants that can detect and react to trauma.  If the trauma hits a certain number of failure points, the systems are typically programmed to trigger a kind of stasis, a medical coma, and a panic signal that alerts a recovery team.  People like this typically have ways of muting the trauma signal, and holding the agent for ransom.”

“But, you weren’t what they were expecting?”

“No, they were expecting a soft target.” Something flashed through her eyes, and he saw recognition in them. 

“That was the point, wasn’t it? You were bait?”

“Yes,” he said, simply.  “This group has been puling this stunt for a number of years now, mostly effectively.  Typically its cheaper to pay the ransom than dispatch someone like me.”

“You’re here because of that explosion last year.” It wasn’t a question. 

“Someone in this organization saw an opportunity and, unfortunately, missed. Money and time matter very little to my superiors, but life and death are a touchy subject.  The passenger on that shuttle was a regional executive, the nephew of someone important back on Earth.  That kind of death changes the equation for the company.” A dropship pinged his omni, one minute out.

“So you’re here for blood?” 

“No, I’m here to fix the problem and ensure nobody else’s nephew gets blown up.” He met her eyes levelly.  She had dropped the act, and her posture had changed.  “That doesn’t need to be bloody.”

“Unless they make it bloody?” Shin pointed at the bleeding woman on the ground.  She looked, and some compassion returned to her face.  When she looked back at him, though, it was all hard lines and steely eyes. The dropship crested a hill behind him, and she clearly heard it coming.  

“This is the only warning they get,” Shin said, voice level. “If they want to talk, I’ll listen.” He pinged his contact information to her slate. “Private channel, bypass them.” he gestured over his shoulder to the rapidly approaching gunship. “But they’ll be able to track those  guys, and he’s gonna break.”

“Clock is ticking, I got it.” She stood, as the roar of the jump jets began to deafen the area.  “I’ll relay the message.” The disdain in her voice was palpable. He let her slip back through the cafe, and turned to face the blastjets of the descending gunship.