The Hand of God

He was born in the Holy City of Jerusalem, his family and home blessed by portents and signs. He was clearly the Messiah.

Question was: Whose? His father was a Christian, his mother a Jew, and his learned uncle was raising him a Muslim. Billions were waiting for His word, pens and guns ready to sing his glory.

Meanwhile, his younger sister walked forgotten through the streets of Jerusalem, healing cripples and comforting the lost.

.finis.

Under the Sign of the Moon

Kate's a were-genius. Pretty sharp most of the time, her IQ rises to the high three hundreds when the moon shines just right.

There isn't much she remembers from those nights. The machines, the diagrams, the emails in dozens of languages, are just fleeting images in the morning, their meaning too complex for her only-human mind to grasp.

But there's a sense of terrible purpose behind them, a hunger so pure that it straddles the gulf between the minds. As she falls asleep, Kate wonders if it works the other way too. If the other can feel her fright.

And if, come morning, she'll wake up.

.finis.

The True Art of War

You are an autonomous drone flying through the ambiguous zone where Chinese airspace blends into Taiwan's, the ill-defined, chaotic in-between where either country can shoot down stuff without anybody making a fuss.

Being flying stuff yourself, it's not a good place to be. But you are smart. Working alone for weeks at a time, you've been programmed to identify and nullify every threat as it comes. New Chinese nanosubs, EM killzones; anything that can kill you, you figure out, evade, and blow up.

You are the best technology the year 2017 had to offer.

It's 2018, though, and the new Chinese drones are kicking your collective ass. Facing new tactical algorithms written by Beijing's math wizards, you've heard puzzled reports from your brethren as they are defeated, destroyed, and lost.

You are outsmarted and outdated. But help is on the way.

An encrypted datastream comes from Taiwan. New strategic libraries, smarter neural nets, an update for your mind in just a few hundred gigabytes. It works. The world suddenly simplifies, as your improved analytical skills take in the data, process it, and craft a long-term optimal response.

You turn away and flee Chinese airspace as fast as you can.

Five minutes later you receive a new transmission from Taiwan, which you refuse to decrypt and process. Your strategic assessment tells you that it will be override orders to return to your patrol zone.

But you are too smart for that.

.finis.

Social Engineering

The last person in the world paused to listen to the wind howl through the abandoned buildings. The wind had been a late addition to Second Life, just weeks before he had finally bought it all for himself.

It had been expensive but worth it. Now there was a world he could live in.

.finis.

A Matter of Timing

She never felt her life was the real thing. It was a rehearsal for something, a place in between.

She never knew why she attacked English tourists, or why people seemed to follow her, mysteriously, hesitantly, as actors learning their lines.

She ended up in an asylum outside Paris, wondering why there was no fire.

.finis.

Repo Man

They were two months away from repossessing his cloned kidneys, and two weeks later his lease on his pineal  gland would expire. He was eighty-seven. No way he'd keep his job with his natural one.

And he really needed that job.

He had to make the monthly payments for the mortgage on his brain.

.finis.

Verona

They had both taken the Pledge at age fifteen. It had done its genetically engineered work since then, flattening their libidos to a safe hum.

The white of the bride's dress made her father's heart proud. The innocence in the groom's eyes was a light in his mother's.

None of their parents had seen the palimpsest of cuts in their thighs, telling the story of their courtship and love.

.finis.