Guest story 1 - CloudChasers, by AJ Pagan
A free short story (and for a limited time, a free book, in some places)
Hello everyone, and welcome to a brand new subsection of The Weird Worlds of Phillip Carter. This is Guest Stories, my place to share free short stories by authors whose work I think fits well with mine. For that reason, you can expect more comedy and more sci-fi here.
Today is a special one, not just because it’s the first, but because this free story arrives to your inbox with a free novel attached.
You might recognise the name AJ Pagan if you follow my podcast or my social media. He’s a fellow Science Fiction author who I interviewed a few weeks back about his debut novel Brian, Created Intelligence.
That novel is free right now (exclusively on Apple, Google, and Kobo), unless you take ages to open your emails and the year is now 2077. I don’t know if it will be free in 2077. I don’t plan that far ahead. I wrote this email a day ago.
Anyway, if you’re already a fan of Mr Pagan and want to grab his novel ASAP, you can scroll past this free short story, right down to the picture of him cosplaying as his favourite author. After that glorious image you will find the relevant links to reach out and grab Brian without spending a penny.
It’s also available on Amazon if you do want to spend pennies.
And if you want to spend a few more pennies on what I like to call a librarian’s bludgeon, it’s also in hardback. Nice and heavy.
(This story is a standalone, and is entirely separate from Brian, Created intelligence)
CloudChasers
There’s a reason why Earth turned to Mars, it was humans, humanity. Greed and power stole this land and killed it, soaked and stole the water right out of it, squeezed it like a sponge. And there was a reason why the last men on earth were as rough and angry as ever, and it was because of that right there. They were the last men on earth, on a dead planet. The Strategy was the Post Society Government which bred the technology to steal away from Earth forever, to circumnavigate the Milky Way and lead humanity to the stars. They stole the entire planets’ water supply, for fuel in the fleet’s quest to rule the galaxy. To find better Earths to upend.
Since Earth was already dying, it was decided to drain the oceans into the sky and pull the clouds back as clean water. Catalytic electrolysis produced immense proportions of hydrogen to fuel the galactic fleet. This was how the last cowboys on Earth came to have the technology and know how, as the Fleet did the same, but on a purely massive scale. Once these lone cowboys perish, the Earth would become Mars, a vast lonely dead planet with nothing to offer but salt with no sea. Wind with no air.
The lucky few, the intelligent, the powerful and the heirs of a corporate kingdom, they were chosen to board the ships to sail away to the Circum Nebulae. They earned their stay the old fashioned way, with money.
The Cloudchasers were nothing more than the remainder, the unwanted life-force to watch after the tumbleweeds, a couple of high tech roughnecks trying to stay alive, left with tractor beams, ion guns, and gauss nets. They prayed to no god, no Yahweh, no Hitler or Marx. They prayed to the sky, for the sky held the key to life, the last few drops of water in the dust of the barren Earth. The Cloudchasers made these tools, and weapons, from what was left of the regime as they left the planet, to expand outwards, fueled by the oceans.
This is the story of the last men on Earth.
“Cotty! I see one, Buelle! 5 knots north north west!” Peep hollered.
“Let’s get ‘em.” Buelle growled.
Peep grabbed the radio off the dash of the car.
Radio: “Prep the gauss net, Thed. Ok?”
Radio: “10-4. Peep, I got ya!”
Radio: “You have our location?”
Radio: “I do I do, swooping in’now.”
A shrill sting of air whooshes over the land car, a small helicopter almost cutting the antennae in half with its wing.
“Goddammit, Thed!” Buelle barks in the confines of the metal car.
Radio: “Thed, goddammit hell I told you to stop you’re gonna get us killed.”
Radio: “I got ya, I found the cloud don’ worry ‘boutathing.” Thed teased.
The minichop homes in on the cloud up in the sky, Buelle and Peep squint into the yellow haze, barely able to see the minichop through the hard red dust.
Thed smashes the Gauss button frantically. Five more meters and it’s his. A rigid net plops out of the bottom of the mini helicopter, the whooping of the blades spraying droplets everywhere around the arid, empty sky. He looks to the monitor, a camera under the mini-chop lets him follow the action first-hand. The small cloud wavers with the force of the motor. He increases Gauss and watches the grey vapor move nearer to the bottom of the ‘copter. A piercing bell in Thed’s ear signals it’s captured.
Radio: “I’m right over you guys. Stay still now.”
Buelle slows the land car, aluminum wheels crunching through the dry clay, kicking up a red dust all around. The whooshing sound becomes louder and louder each approaching second.
WHOOP
WHOOP
WHOOP
The minichop hovers 100 feet above them, a large hexagonal metal net underneath, pushing down a nest of vapor. With each drop in elevation, the grey cloud turns grey-brown-red, darker with collected dirt each second.
Buelle and Peep get out of the land car, rushing to their posts. Buelle on the tanker trailer, Peep on the vac. Peep cautiously raises the vac ladder, raising himself and the two hundred pounds of tubing that has enough suction force to tear his arm off if it were to get close enough.
Buelle shoulders a carbon fiber gun rigged with cable, shooting it at the minichop.
A loud Thwap! proves his hit. He starts reeling in the minichop with the vapor load. Peep is now thirty feet off the ground, in nothing but a t-shirt, cargo pants, and a pair of worn leather boots, clod with dirt and oil. His goggles are so clouded he claws them from his face to dangle off his neck, swinging high in the air.
Back at base, they sit and drink, cooling off from the day’s load.
“Dammit, we need more water. It’s not even as good as it was and it’s been shitty since they started to leave!” Buelle fumes and tosses his empty bottle of neu-whiskey across the room. The three men sit in what you would call a rec. room. Peep stays quiet, as his nickname was so earned.
Thed sits on the couch and stares up through the glass ceiling, gazing into the Milky Way. Nowhere on Earth is harmed with light pollution anymore since nearly all people have either left or died. Energy is either old nuclear or solar while the new Salt Winds are destroying most metal abandoned. Buelle, Thed, and Peep get by through an indoor hydroponic garden, set up near perfectly, water loss is minimal and they recycle all liquids they consume. Except sweat, the sweat is the killer here.
“We need a plan. To find water. I can’t deal with this anymore. We have nothing. Peep, pull up the map, will ya?” Buelle paces the room, the neu-whiskey getting to him, but maybe it really is the water. His hands, thick as a bears’ and dirty as a pigs’ were flexing and cracking with rage.
“Oh come on, Bullie, you’ve said it before, you’ll tell us next week too, ‘we need more water’. Well, we’re pretty fine right now. We find a cloud a week, our reserves can last us a month of real drought. We good, ok? Have another whisker an put that empty one up.” Thed mulls around, not sure if what he said was too much.
Buelle stops pacing and turns onto Thed, right in his face. “We got water, huh? What else we got? What else you got? You got a woman? Cuz I know I don’t. Peep sure don’t. What else you got I don’t huh? We ain’t got shit. An’ I’m sick of it. Tomorrow, I’m planning to get us the hell out of here for good and we’ll find a lake the size of ‘Zona.”
Thed pipes up. “Ok Bullie, I reckon yer right, we got no women. And yeah I’d like one and maybe a kiddo too. What d’you propose?”
Buelle starts thinking while Peep pulls up the hologram map, showing in full red and brown color their immediate area. Peep starts up. “Ok, Buelle, here we are, what you think?”
Buelle walks over to the hologram, floating just above the pool table, filling the green rectangle of felt where they normally play with ridges of browns and reds of deadened Earth. Thed gets off the couch as Buelle asks Peep to zoom out of their quarters to see what’s around for a hundred miles. The answer is not much. Peep zooms out further, until they see the edges of what used to be coastline between Texas, Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico. A myriad of colors show up on the map, all between red and brown.
Buelle becomes fed up with all of it.
“Well hell, what about across the country? Are there any deep spots on the Pacific? Or off Florida?”
Peep brushes the map with his hands, the land zooms by, rushing through the empty Gulf of Mexico to the old shores of Florida. “There!” Thed points right at the big dark circle inside of Florida, “Lake Okee-Cho-bee,” he says.
Buelle folds his arms and retorts, “No way, I bet there’s a few dozen at least in those parts. Same with the Mariana Trench on the other side. They’d kill us. We need a new spot nobody’d thought of boys, that’s what we need.”
Peep zooms out again, speaking to the map. “Search Earth for ten thousand ppm.”
Thed looks at Peep with disbelief. “Are you crazy, Peep? Ten thousand? Why don’t you try one thousand?”
Peep doesn’t even take his eyes off the loading map. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Thed. One thousand is three times less than where we are right now.”
Thed folds his arms and huffs. He doesn’t like how smart Peep is.
The search replaces the near flat map hovering above the table to the entire globe in hologram, spinning slowly with yellow and red dots. A small map key is produced in the lower right of everyone’s vision.
Yellow: 10,000 ppm
Red: 15,000 ppm
“There.” Buelle points. “We’re going there!” The globe flattens to a map and zooms in automatically to where he pointed, a red dot.
“That’s nineteen hundred miles as the crow flies, Buelle. That’s pretty far.” Peep shakes his head as he tells Buelle the news. “How are we supposed to get there? Our vehicles aren’t equipped for that long of a journey, we’ve never done that. And the Heli, what about that, Bullie?”
“We’ll make do, Peep. I can’t stand it no more. I want somethin’ else to eat besides soy and vine-pears and lettuce and mushrooms. We haven’t had a decent meal since they left. You know that? I want to find us some food along the way, there’s bound to be somethin’ different. And I want me some water. So we’re goin’.”
Thed juts in. “Yeah I want me a woman.” He nods to Buelle, who nods back.
“Peep, what you think, you wanna find some new food and decent water? Can we make it work?” Buelle asks Peep, he knows Peep is exhausted by his questions but he’s the smartest of the bunch, he’ll get them to where they need to if anybody can.
The men pack. It’s not easy taking all the water you have in the world, a daily fight for survival, to put it into a truck and trust another man to drive it nineteen hundred miles through the salt deserts and barren ocean trenches. Peep carefully takes the hydroponics apart, making sure to drain all the water back into their tank system to be filtered and stored on the truck.
Thed takes care of the food supplies. They have three month’s worth of dried goods to eat, but only if they have enough water to rehydrate. It worried him. They have water here, enough to get by. They always had enough every month to harvest, for now anyway, and that’s what’s always scared them boys.
Thed walks over to Buelle under the dark brilliance of night sky. He packs the truck, the mini-chop now on the trailer, ready to be fit on the ball to be towed. He gulps as he walks up to Buelle, who looks as intimidating as he ever has.
“Hey, Bullie.” Thed is nervous, he wasn’t even sure what he was going to say.
Buelle doesn’t look up, he just grunts at Thed, waiting for him to keep talking.
“Are ya, you, I’m not sure if-” He saw Buelle stop and look him in the eyes. “I’m not sure if we need to bring all the food, what d’ya think?”
“I’d bring it all yeah. Don’t know how long it’ll take, don’t know if we’ll ever come back.” He gets back to it, tying the vac up for the long journey ahead. “Help me get the trailer onto the truck.”
Thed nods. They walk to each side of the trailer and lift the tung off the ground and slowly inch it to the ball hanging off the back of the truck. It’s heavy. He’s breathing fast, looking this way and that, hoping he doesn’t pull his back again, moving his eyes straight up into the great beyond for a split second. The deep black edged Milky Way is as pungent as it had ever been, as beautiful as any human before him had ever witnessed it with their bare eyes. The night sky illuminated with the heavens, and for that, he is grateful.
“Drop it. Drop it.” Buelle heaves the words through his teeth. Thed comes back down. They put the hook on the ball and lock it in place. They’re almost ready.
The road was rough, there was no road. Just old trails and byways and long stretches of Earth that was smoother than anything else they saw. It was a pick and shoot situation. They didn't really know which hand to play, so they just chose and went all in, that’s what this is all about anyway.
There was more wreckage and bones and debris than anybody had ever seen. Whale skeletons as long as the truck, and longer than that too! No Salt Winds had hit this before, good signs indeed.
The three boys stopped, just where Buelle had directed from Peep’s map. They stood outside of the silver aluminum land car, in the red dust and dirt of Earth.
“There ain’t no clouds out here. It’s getting worse!”
“It’ll get worse before it gets better. Aight? It’ll get better, Thed.” Buelle is worried too, but he isn’t showing it. Not yet, they had to get farther along before any whistles were blown. They couldn’t call it off yet, they’ve only been gone three days now.
“We only have water for four more days. We’ve been gone three. So one more day forwards, and we can’t go back! We won’t last! So what’s decision, then? Are we goin’?” Thed wants to go back home, desperately.
Buelle walks right up on him. “Of course we’re goin! What you got back there? The two of us and the truck? The mini-chop? That’s all right here! All here!” He spreads his arms, pointing at everything, all their belongings were here now with them against the barren red sea.
“Water is there, Bullie. Not much, but goddamned more than here. We can get by back there, at home. We have been for a long while. We can grow food with the clouds we chase, not here. It’s dryer than a rocket. Dryer than this damned dirt.” Thed kicks it, smearing the dry air with red dust.
“Check those coordinates again, Peep, I don’t believe it.” Buelle mumbles, “somethin’s funky” and kicks dirt into dust himself.
“Got it boss.” Peep types away. He looks up, hoping beyond hope that would do something, as if the satellite could see him and tell him they were the wrong coordinates. Peep kept hoping, thinking internally, please, beyond everything else, please tell me this isn’t it.
The computer beeps. Search complete. Peep shuts the computer and stands up. Buelle looks in his eyes, but Peep can’t get the world out of his. The longer Peep looks, the farther along the façade he stares, and life quickly dissipates into the abyss. This was it. This was the place they left home for. An even more barren, desolate, skeleton stricken boneyard of hell.
END
AJ will likely be looking at the comment section for this post, so please do let him know what you think.
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Meet the author.
Now, a few words from Mr Pagan himself, seen here levitating three distinct piles of beans whilst dressed as his favourite author, Phillip Carter, who I’ve personally never heard of.
“Good morning to all you Phillip Carter fans. I am sure you are now relieved that I, the real Phillip Carter, am finally addressing you, my dear fans and subscribers. Whew! Big news today, well, I must confess, I am not actually the real Phillip Carter, no one knows where he is or what he is. So big bummer there. Anyway, today is my birthday and I wanted to shout from the world’s tallest mountain, EMAIL, that IT IS MY BIRTHDAY. And as such, I want to provide the good readers of this world something: one for FREE, and one maybe for FREE, or for less than a buck, pound, smash, bit, whichever currency you feel like using depending on how you read words on your small e-screen. I would seriously love to give my book away on all accounts, but as a self-published author using a third party system to distribute to Jeff Bezos’ kingdom and others, I cannot list my book as free on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, so the lowest available price is 99 pence/cents/zoodles. BUT IT IS FREE ON APPLE/GOOGLE/KOBO! Yes, this is different from Phillip and a bunch of other self-pubs, I did it differently, and has it worked well? Well, no, not yet. But I am trying here, I literally have no idea how to do any of this besides the writing aspect. So anyway, if you haven’t yet seen my interview with Phill, here’s the synopsis for my book:
Brian, Created Intelligence
Within a four foot stainless steel cube, a bodiless brain is awake, thinking, computing, knowing. Brian was created by genetic engineer Dr. Ellie Parsons, and neuroscientist Tom Marshall, at biotechnology company Dipol Inc., in San Diego, CA. Ethical questions abound as they hide Brian's true identity from him and the world around. To Brian, he's merely artificial intelligence, tasked with creating even more intelligent systems. To Ellie and her company, he's a means to an end, to create true artificial intelligence using his genius and the brain computer interface attached to his only true organ. All is as well as it can be until the day a psychotic agent of DARPA, Jonathan Volt, commandeers it for use in none other than militarization. Once Ellie neurally links herself to Brian, all bets are off to ensure his safety as his entire life is literally on the table.
THE FREE LINKS
As promised, the book is indeed free this weekend. This singular button will take you to AJ’s website (again, I need to catch up and get my website back online) within which you can look at the lower left and see the links to Google, Kobo, and Apple, as well as a free download for the first 3 chapters.
But if you feel like spending money anyway, the book is also on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
*I make a small commission on books sold through the UK link, because I am an Amazon affiliate. Doesn’t change the cost, doesn’t impact AJ’s revenue, but it will eventually mean I can buy some beans. As you can see, he levitated mine and now they are all dirty.
See you next time, stay innovative.
If you were to tell me in 2015 as I was writing my thesis in organic chemistry, looking for jobs, pulling my hair out, that my first novel, Brian, Created Intelligence would be spoken about for my first public interview with an English bean lover (also, not surprised) and then soon after have his first Guest Post on SexStack® I'd have been a lot more motivated then to, well I really have written a lot! But I'd be more motivated to distribute this book and cook some beans.