The Drone and the Mechanic

A near-future retelling of the Lion and the Mouse fable.

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A whisper of sand against my cheek slips my mind from sleep to fugue, and after an instant of eternity, the crack and rumble of a bunker buster tears me into full consciousness. My eyes clamp open and I see the wall of my room cast in fire light. More distant explosions loose grains of plaster from the ceiling.

My heart jumps out of my body and drags me through yesterday's clothes. I run to grab my toolbox – red, heavy, metal – and ignore everything else in the room. No need for last memories of a house that I might never see again.

The air raid sirens just now start to cry, and guns yell into the sky.

I slam open the door and run down the shadowed hall, reaching the stairs. Two stomps down and another salvo of bombs hit the city. Three more steps after that and I hear Father calling, “Ibrahim! Ibrahim!” When I see him in the living room, I run into his arms so he can squeeze me and make sure that I am not a ghost.

I say into his forehead, “Where are mother and Safia?”

We pull away from each other, but our hands stay on our shoulders.

“They are getting their things, then we are going to somewhere safer. Maybe with the Al'Qassens, their home is at the outskirts.”

Thunder comes from above, then below. A vase falls off the table and cracks against the ground and the ceiling light to swings. Safia starts to cry in her bedroom, and mother trying to sooth her.

“There is no safer place in Tehran now! We need to leave the city!”

He nods slow, then fast.

“You're right. We need to go. The fighting will only get worse. Get the car started, I will,” he stops as we hear some kind of deep whine far down the street.

“I will carry your tools! Get the car started!”

I don't want to let go, but I don't want to waste time. I run to the door, sliding the car key off the television set and into my hand on the way out the door.

Great fires and clouds of smoke swell out from behind the silhouettes of distant buildings. There's another crack from the sky just before the ground quakes... But there's not an explosion.

I start running past our customers' cars in the parking lot and towards ours, parked next to the street. Forcing myself not to slow down, I duck beside the car as the thuds step closer, past our neighbor's house, before it stops right next to our car. Where once there was glare of flame past the shadow of the car, I now see only more shadow.

Hard, coarse yelling echoes in the neighborhood, and electric motors groan on the other side of the car. My heart tries to pull me down and keep me in hidden, but my mind wants to see. I lift my head over the roof and see machine guns turn and point at me, red laser lights trace my face, and a massive angled armored hulk crouch low on four column-like legs. On top of its sloped body is a tank's gun.

I had seen the pictures before. A robotic drone tank.

The machine guns twist around just before an explosion rocks the other side of the machine. It stops itself from lurching towards me, and the guns erupt in bullets, brass, and barrel flash. Its big gun swivels around and stops. The cannon's roar turns into ringing pain and I'm bathed in fleeing dust.

I get in the car and drive in front of the house. The next sounds that reach my ears are my fathers instructions to take us to Zaviyeh, my mother thanking Allah that I'm alive and with the car, and Safia crying as they all climb in.

We reach Uncle Fayid's home before the sun has a chance to rise. We rest, and afterward I borrow his binoculars to watch the smoke rise from the capital. Some of the cars escaping by the highway were ones that I once fixed.

The skies of the days that follow are filled with fast black darts dragging sonic booms behind them through the sky, and streaks that drop from orbit like backwards rockets.

Nobody sends soldiers to Zaviyeh – the only military buildings here are some ancient fort ruins that children fight over. That makes me look at my father funny when he says that the Americans are attacking, and that we need to leave again.

“How do you know?” I ask.“Their tanks are just outside! Hurry, we need to go!” he answers.

I grab the binoculars and close my eyes from the glare as I walk out the door, slowly opening them as I find the balcony stairs. At the top, I walk across the roof and past a table, finding my usual place to watch the horizon.

I find it in the East, its turret peeking over some shrubs and short trees belonging to a patch of green at the edge of town. I look closer and see its leg – bent, with sparks falling from it.

I run downstairs and open my toolbox, finding what I need: wire cutters, electrical tape, insulated gloves, and pliers. I shut it, grab it, and carry it with me as I run out of the house, towards the drone.

When I get close enough to notice the drone's machine guns tracking me, I stop thinking that this is a good idea. However, it's still an idea, and I slow down and hold up my hands.

“Hey! Machine!” I yell, in what English I know. Lasers touch my face again.

“Wait! I can fix you!” I turn my face away from it. “I can fix you, and then you leave! Good?”

An infinite minute later, it shuts its lasers off, and turns its guns away from me. It shifts its weight off of the damaged leg as I walk towards it. After I set my tools on the ground, I look over the damage.

A piece of shrapnel had embedded itself in part of the joint, damaging some of the power cables. Before that, it looked like it had taken some armor damage, weakening the frame and making it vulnerable. I use a crowbar to wedge out the shrapnel, then make a temporary repair for the cable. I put my tools away and step back from the drone.

“Try to walk now,” I say. Electricity hums into the mechanism, which the drone seems to flex with little problem. It shifts back over and steps with the leg. I can feel each step through the ground.

We back away from each other, before it turns south and I turn back towards my Uncle's home.  

Naked Dignity

I've seen the guy before in functionally similar functions. He stands at six foot eight, walks about with a gait shaped like an 'S', and has a narrow torso that still, somehow, manages to give him shoulders that could be described as broad.

And he's wearing a purple evening dress, with sparkly matching gloves covering hands twisting about themselves in a puppet show of modesty. And it works on him. for him. Dead gods.

He notices me – not sure if because he remembers who I am or just thinks the guy dressed in all white save for a ruddy brown fedora six decades beyond common fashionability just stepped up to the third floor hallway of the building, adjacent to the ball room set up for one such grand ball. The twenty plus other people drifting around the de facto foyer might as well have been absent for how well I blend in. For how well I intended to blend in.

I walk past him, tilt the brim with all the suave I'm attempting to cultivate and say, nice and flatteringly low, “looking lovely this evening.” He responds with an effeminate “thank you,” palms to his cheeks and twist of his body. I give him a thumbs up and walk past phantoms departing as I step inside the great omni-purpose chamber.

The room is lit as if the sun was cast through impure amber, dimmed and turned orange-yellow through a dozens of lamps held aloft. A red material that could be carpet lines the walls, away from which and forming a rectangular core are regiments of chairs sitting at attention, prepared to seat. Other guests, of all shapes and sizes and colors, dressed anywhere from casual to formal-for-the-other-sex, start to congeal into groups near the chairs and by tables set up in the back.

Tables that, upon closer inspection, hold aloft: chicken strips that are more breading than fowl; great brownie sheets speckled with white sugary powder that were divided into squares and further divided into triangles and my plate has ten of them and I am sitting down in the back row and my brownies have vanished, never to be seen again. As brownies.

The people outside had clearly multiplied by means of mitosis, as an order of magnitude more nonpaying patrons step into the sultry amber chamber of wonders and find their crimson seats. There is a din of conversation, all filed away in my mental space as things that do not concern me. I sit back, wait for the lights to dim, and spin the skull-decorated outer band of my two alloy ring.

The front we all face like eventual fate has a line of glittered red weights, each tethering metallic heart balloons. In the left corner of the ballroom are the big black mesh boxes of captive thunder, and on the platform situated amidst the cells stands the control panel of an acoustic organizer: The DJ's domain was present, apparent, and the man himself was attendant.

To the right was a, theme apropos, dark red free standing screen veiling untold, unfathomed mysteries.

The memory of the person who really stepped up to the stage is eclipsed by this: heralded, as if her arcane true name was spoken from the center of a ritual circle decked in phallic and yonic insignia, she walks out from the tall-stood veil, gusto-heeled to the center of the stage, drawn by the heavy bass fanfare.

Her name in this realm of the stage is Bunny Boom Boom, an onomatopoeia of impact on both mind and eye: stout, round, with eyes like scorch marks and wearing the smoke billowing from a tire fire, condensed into a wrap-around something. Her hair is blonde and bulbous and up.

She grabs the microphone, shakes her head back, opens painted red lips and speaks in so high pitched a voice that, between it and the electronic distortion accrued over the microphone and stereo system, becomes all but unintelligible. It's a squawking, a squeaking: defective language that conveys only the tone and energy swelling her.

Everyone else seems to understand her just fine. She twists her hand, beckons hither and squeals a command that elicits three people, each carrying a chair, to the stage.

When the thrumming, leaden bass laden music rolls through the stage, madame Boom Boom gives each of the chair bringers and now sitters a lap-dance. I have to stand up from my seat to see over the crowd and confirm this.

I now realize in totality what I am witnessing: students, with their tuition supplemented by either federally-funded student loans, grants, or public scholarships, being given a clothes-on lap-dance by a bloated transvestite. Federally-funded student loans and grants and scholarships payed for in no small part by the self professed Born Again to Christ, who had infused their cult with American nationalism, and who persist in the tenet of faith concerning the evil and inhumanity of all who are not married to one member of the opposite sex and only employing sexual relation for the purpose of creating one more writhing screaming pink wriggly human larvae.

My idle mental probe into scenario persists and deepens as a Pappy Chulo – a senorita hombre banger in black and beard and bling and whose song and dance picked up where Bunny Boom Boom's ended – kisses and straddles the legs of the unfair non-maidens, all under a synthesized chorus that could only arise out of the Mexico-United States border culture and the nonobservance of law and decency.

I wonder who among those ladies are indeed fair maidens. I wonder if the girl who had her cheek pressed upon by lips orbited by xeno-hormonal stubble had sat through dinner-table sermons and casual proclamations of damnation. I ponder if, out of all the born ladies here, it was the girl that had her leg decorated with F-T-M ganger that had her tuition paid for by a reverend or preacher of one of the uncountable free-market temples that outnumber fast-food restaurants.

Is the price of many ones salvations funding this brazen demonstration of sin most high, yet harmless?

Chulo's show slows then goes, and Bunny Boom Boom returns once more to talk without being heard. At least, not be heard by me. And not seen either – I had just realized that there was roughly ten rows of bodies standing between me and the stage, and not a decent seat accessible amidst them.

I very well can't abide by this most mundane of outrages. I get up, crouch low, and walk down the isle to the front of said isle. There I sit down, kick my feet out, and enjoy a front-row view.

And not a single soul beside or behind cares. Their attention is firmly pulled towards

Bunny Boom Boom wraps up her pattern-setting bout of audience interaction, now wrapped in a pink leotard and a teal sash around the waist. Replacing her presence are a skirted trio with parasols and monochromatic dress. They march to evenly spaced stops in front of the crowd and wait for digital-turned-analog notes and rhythm.

It starts slow. The music reverberates and builds in volume as their patterned umbrellas start to revolve and rotate about them. Left to right: one green, one red, one yellow; and all are synchronized. The central red fabric panel breaks harmony and goes up and down when the others go side to side, and maneuvers horizontally when the others go vertical. Every few beats kick the angles of motion to new degrees.

The dancers themselves orbit erratically, guided by some huckster's invisible hand. It's forgone where the balls are – this is now a game of tricky motion for its own sake, set to the rhythm poured into the floor.

The pattern-breaker with the red parasol and checkerboard tights walks right up to me and I now know precisely how a quantum physicist feels: my very act of observation now modifies the behavior of the so observed subject. She sweeps fabric blossom in front of me, pulls it back up and gyrates into where it once was. I give a salute with my ringed index finger, copper skulls winking light.

This skit remains classified as a thing amongst all, and thus ends. Madame Boom Boom solidifies the pattern: she walks about the stage, screeches at audience members in what I am assuming is dialog, then surrenders the floor to the next performer on the list. I think I made something out about pets that time. I definitely hear “are we ready for this?” as she abandons his feminine vocal facade if only for that single line.

The next dancer chases the lyrics, chanting with chorus to 'turn me loose'. The black dress permits her right leg to obey the command ahead of the performance itself. Her movements carry a sort of alloy ecstasy and solidified confidence that rumbles through the floor and bounces off the walls. She walks right up to me. I feel my skin burn, eyes sting in that as of yet unnamed brilliance as I notice the song change: “Dontcha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” Despite the palpable levels of queer in the room, it's played straight. There is neither snicker nor heckle. Just a damp idea rising from the crevices of my mind, not yet rising to conscious thought.

She walks back behind the veil, and the song trails along until Bunny Boom Boom picks it up with his man voice. “Dontcha wish your girlfriend was hung like me? Fat like me?” That requires, of course, that I have a girlfriend.

Ever.

Sexual and relational frustration aside, this intermission is shorter than the rest, and almost directly segues into the next song and dance.

By the star-forged obsidian crypts of Dead Gods, Bruce Willis has stepped onto the stage in yellow tights and with hair colored and shaped like a candle's flame. The song is “Like thunder, lightning,” or something, and the crash and boom strikes in tune with that Die Hard protagonist's hells on the floor. Force is pressed into and quakes out of each step, each rolling impact of drum and cymbal, recorded and synthesized. Actual simulated thunder hits every surface, and vibration presses into the marrow and that lurking concept splashes up into my frontal, conscious lobe.

I see what this is.

I see all the revulsion and protest cracked and broken on the floor. Every step breaks more pieces into finer and finer bits of repulsive dust. Expectation lies on the floor and rusts, and every motion skips over those ferric chains.

I see dignity emerging from indecency. I see pride stabbing prejudice in the back.

I see Bunny Boom Boom in her black bisected by teal gown staring at me, under dim amber lights with crowds on all but one side and red carpet walls beyond them. I hear her ask me, in her voice, under her scrutiny, “You goin' on a safari motherfucker?”

“Damn straight,” I say.

SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF OUR HOME WORLD

Sons and daughters
Of our home world,
See the stars There
Worlds unfurled,

Launch your space craft
Eyes up, not back,
Find our future
In the vast black,

Take with you our blood, our tears,
Our memories, our dreams, our fears,

Genius, hubris, human soul,
Fusion furnace held far shoal,

Sons and daughters
Our fate is set,
Climb down to the
Distant planet,

Bring Terra's life
Seed new Earth there
Cast new oceans
Breathe living air


Take with you our blood, our tears,
Our memories, our dreams, our fears,

Genius, hubris, human soul,
Ten thousand suns, we see our goal

Hear behind you joy, our cheer,
Remember Apollo, Sputnik, Mir,

Find our place out
In those far stars,
Past our footsteps
On Moon and Mars,


Take with you our blood, our tears,
Our memories, our dreams, our fears,

Some brave souls leave wounded Earth
Others stay to heal our hearth,

Brothers, sisters, sons and daughters
Forgive the sins of mothers, fathers,

Bring from Earth our legacy, kin,
So on far realms new life begin.

MISSING

I walked from sunset to sunrise in the post noon. Sol's rays of tough love stabbed and poked into my exposed flesh, warmed my head of hair that was needed-a-fucking-cut long. Sandals clapped on the asphalt walks that ran beside apartment blocks and the leaving-winter jaundiced lawns.

Most of the world was made visible through new and already scratched sunglasses. Muscles were wake-up weak and swung lazy. Some hand – not sure which, probably the wrong one – checked my pockets to make sure I didn't leave the mailbox key back in my apartment. My thumb rubbed against the dull teeth. I remembered that sometimes, I would lock myself out of my apartment.

I reached that little road intersection thing and stared down a car. It sagely chose to drive in a direction that was not where I was going to walk. The driver would have regretted that decision more than me.

Somehow. I didn't work out the details yet. Reserve your judgment.

I found the mailbox and the paper that broke the metal panel and hinge mosaic. On said paper was, in desperately huge, black bold font: “MISSING” followed by a picture, followed by “A------ A----------.”

And “14 YEARS OLD.”

And “LAST SEEN ON MARCH 19 2012 IF YOU HAVE SEEN HER, OR KNOW OF HER WHERE ABOUTS PLEASE CONTACT E-------- @ ###-###-####.”

Her black hair was wet but wavy from the neck to under her shoulders. She was looking straight into a held camera with eyes wide and set under broad but sleek brows. Her lips were concave up, her cheeks were round, taught with that nervous pride that says, 'you know, I think I'm actually fairly pretty.' Blossoming confidence, like a mushroom cloud rising over a city built out of billboards and fashion magazine ads starring cocaine courtesans and the un-eating.

I thought she was right.

I knew she would be found in a ditch flanking a highway, drained of her fluids and injected with someone else's. A very stupid someone else's.

Or she would be carrion in the hundreds of square kilometers of body disposal site that wrapped around every town in the Southwest. Coyotes, ants, vultures, ect. would strip her clean before Sol's angry stare got a non-existent god's eye view of her.

Or she OD'd in her kind-of sort-of friend's friend's trailer, with ooze out her nose and mouth and roaches nibbling on the whatever stuck under her fingernails. Her kind-of sort-of friend's friend's friends would be too busy compounding their own neural-chemical modifications to notice that her's had completely ceased.

My key disregards getting to know the mailbox and dives straight into intercourse. Just a turn to make it groan, open, and scream out a tree's worth of junk mail.

I got advertisements all over my hands, super gross. I sanitized myself by dumping it all in a garbage can.

She probably wouldn't even have needed chopping up if the body problem was countered with a municipal solution.

Overalls.

Consider for a moment a town. Consider a town with a four digit population, three stores, two schools, one auto mechanic, and zero people who are not white protestant straight good 'ol boys and hometown gals.

Consider that one auto mechanic. He wakes up in the morning like he has for the past 40 years. He takes a shower like he has for the past 33 years. He makes his own breakfast like he has for the past 30 years. He takes a drink (or ten) of whiskey like he has for the past 31 years. He ignores the dead cockroaches on his floor like he has for the past 36 years.

He takes a pair of once blue overalls off the back of his creaking wood dining room chair like he has for the past 24 years. He takes off his worn flannel bottoms and slips on the stained stiff, oil soaked, acid eaten, frayed edged, duct-tape patches, tool laden overalls. He pauses, then clasps the thrice mended fasteners over his shoulder and to his bib. The straps pull his shoulders down and try to push his crotch back into his body.

He takes another drink (or ten) of whiskey as he steps into his garage. He moves the cardboard away from the broken window to let light and pollen-laden air mix with the dense fumes surrounding the Sheriff's car.

He grabs a grime smeared bottle of bleach and a black rag. He opens the door to the rear seat of the car, then proceeds to scrub the crimson stains off the slick pleather upholstery. He applies too much force, slips, and his hand lands in an uncoagulated puddle soaking the carpet. It is then, at a low angle, that he notices a corner of white fabric tucked under the seat.

He adds one more red stain to his overalls with the press of his hand. He pulls out the piece of fabric and finds that it is a pair of women's underwear. A pair of underwear too small for a woman.

He takes another drink (or ten) before he throws the pair into an orange garbage can. He then finishes cleaning the Sheriff's car.

At lunch time, the Sheriff arrives at his house and inspects the car. He runs a finger over every surface of the interior and smiles when he lifts up the unstained digit. “Good work. Drinks are on me,” says the Sheriff as he pushes a fold of crisp bills into the overalls.

The Sheriff drives away, and the auto mechanic takes another drink (or ten) as the red hand prints and smears on his overalls dry. Like they have once every six or so months over the last ten years.

An Open Letter to Senator Jeff Bingaman (D NM)

Senator Bingaman,

Today, major websites across the internet are shutting themselves down. This is not only an act of protest against a pair of proposed bills - one each for the Senate and the House - but also to make salient what the internet would look like if either of those bills passed.

Those bills are the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (of which both you and Tom Udall are cosponsors).

I am writing you to tell you that not only will both of these bills be unable to perform their pretexts, but in fact can and will be used as de facto legal weapons against extant and future internet businesses, and one which will be most readily utilized by the wealthy and powerful against those less so.

Both bills can and will fail to stop piracy and other types of copyright infringement by foreign web sites due to publicly available and easily employable methods. These are not some hypothetical technical tricks. Indeed, they are used by millions of citizens in oppressive regimes to exercise their basic human rights in defiance of their totalitarian states.

Instead, all that either bill will accomplish is the total destruction of the new American economy, and the ossification of the old to the detriment of the enterprising American citizen.

Of course, such a claim sounds like hyperbole, but I will clarify and stress that such a prediction is by no means far fetched, but instead, a troubling potential reality.

Both bills target websites that, succinctly, "commit, are designed to commit, enable, or facilitate copyright infringement," and make websites that can permit users to employ such mechanisms liable for user generated content. This criterion could not be more vague, and can include any website that has any mechanism for posting user-generated content, from the ability to host video files down to a simple comment submission system.

'Foreign' websites, or those that have a foreign domain name but can still reside in the United States, are, once identified as performing any of the above mentioned functions, legally bound to be censured by search engines and American ISP's. In addition, advertisement and payment websites and services are likewise bound to sever contact with them.

However, the definition of a 'foreign' website does nothing to account for the technical complexity of the internet. Their are countless instances of American websites bring hosted by foreign servers, or vice versa, or of American websites utilizing foreign domains either through necessity or creativity, and numerous other examples. Due to such complexities, American web sites, designed by Americans with which American citizens earn a living and maintain a business, can be argued in a court of law to be viable targets under these bills.

Thus, both bills can, and I have great confidence that they will, be abused as a means of shutting down effectively any modern website. An act so simple as the posting of song lyrics in the comment box of a web comic can lead to that website being shut down. A website, mind you, which has been the means by which it's owner and operator's independent, entrepreneurial, and creative livelihood has been maintained in the face of a disintegrating traditional economy.

In addition, such processes as described above can be employed as a weapon with which extant copyright holders with great litigious power can wage a war of legal attrition against potential competitors. Again, it would be simple for the existing and established power to purposefully and covertly insert their own copyrighted material into the competitor's web site, leading to it's shutdown, and the nascent competitor's financial exsanguination in the ensuing legal contests between it and the holder. This gives existing commercial entities the power to disable, if not outright destroy, it's competition not through superiority of product, service, or quality of work, but rather through the amount of legal power it already possesses.

In an economy reputed to be a champion of free enterprise, this can not stand.

Lastly, but in importance I rate primarily, is the potential these bills have to strangle freedom of speech and expression.

The utilization and development of the Internet has given rise to an unparalleled mechanism with which thoughts and ideas can be archived and communicated. I believe that, if not presently then in the near future, the internet is such a monumental event in the context of communication and human relation that it will be ranked second only to the invention of the written word itself in terms of importance and benefit to humanity.

It is a tool with which thought, feeling, sight, sound, and experience can be stored and transmitted to potentially any human being across our precious Earth, up to the speed of light. The internet, along with the harnessing of the power atom, is the most exalted human achievement in the last century. We are only now, with our first few cautious steps into these next hundred years, beginning to explore the potential the Internet has to unify our species and change the human condition.

At this point, the major nexuses of development are websites such as Wikipedia (a modern manifestation of the mythical Akashic Record), Youtube (a website and tool with which any human being can be an entertainer, newscaster, instructor, and anything else one could imagine), and Facebook (a social networking site devoted to facilitating and expanding social relation). The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is pioneering a new system of education that will give people all across the globe the opportunity to learn and master the skills necessary to invent and harness the technologies that will be the cornerstone of a prosperous future.

2011 has proven how such websites and countless others across the internet can be used as instruments of social change. Arab Spring, the cascading revolutions across the developing world that saw the overthrow of dictators and the liberation of millions, was enabled and coordinated with such aforementioned web sites. The Occupy Wall Street movement is one that has entwined cyberspace and realspace into a new mutation of social activism. The infamous hacker group Anonymous has used such sites as a platform for the enumeration of their political position and philosophical basis.

All of these websites, all that human possibility, can be utterly destroyed by those with power, who are threatened by the potential they posses. Their weapons are SOPA and PIPA, if not in themselves than in the dangerous precedents they establish in our government and legal system. Both bills are directed against web sites that enable the posting of user-generated content by exploiting the possibility of their abuse.

The entertainment industry - a conglomeration of Hollywood, record companies, and software distribution services - has lobbied millions of dollars into these two bills so that they can stomp out what they perceive to be direct threats to their market dominance. It is not foreign pirate sites that they purport to fear, but rather the mass of human beings who are just as if not more talented, inventive, original, ingenious, and numerous than they can ever hope to be.

Thus, they are presently endeavoring to strike against the two forces of a new, modern age that would see them cast down from their vaunted heights: freedom of information and freedom of entertainment, enabled by such great and wondrous devices in the vein of Wikipedia and Youtube.

PIPA and SOPA are bullets loaded into a legal gun and aimed at the hearts of those incredible machines of social evolution. They are the knives with which the industry aims to stab in the back the democratic principles that the Internet could very well realize, and have up to this point seemed distant and hypothetical.

By supporting and voting for either bill, you are confirming your and your government's stance: that the few, wealthy, and powerful possess more of a right to liberty and prosperity than the many and meager.

Your signature will be words written that speak volumes on how a person with a new idea has no claim to prosperity, and only those with old ideas - given power by those old ideas, who are terrified of the new - are more deserving of the boons of existence.

Of course, this is all high minded and idealistic. I will lower myself to your level and speak to your lizard brain, the part of your subconscious that concerns itself with eating, killing, fucking, and not dying.

Your support of this bill is just one more reason for the mass of increasingly irate citizens, battered by the current economic depression, left bleeding by increasingly regressive social policies, to hate you.

They will hate you, Senator Jeff Bingaman, for giving the powerful one more weapon with which they can take away the means to improve the less powerful's lot in life, and make their life worth living. They will hate you, they will hate the powerful that you lower your pen for, and they will hate the government you operate in.

And hate is a powerful thing, Senator. Hate is a fire that burns cold, burns long, and burns deep. Hate can feed a person as much as any food, warm them as much as any fire, and numb the wrath of the sun. Hate will ease the pain of bullets, abate the terror of war, and justify the taking of any quantity of quality of life.

But the one thing that Hate does not quench is thirst. That can only be sated with blood, Senator.

Good day.

Song Shuffle Story: Comin' For Your Tank

Another flash fiction prompt from Chuck Wendig ( http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/01/06/flash-fiction-challenge-song-shuffle-stories/ )

The song that was selected by my playlist was "Comin For Your Tank" by Miracle of Sound ( http://miracleofsound.bandcamp.com/track/comin-for-your-tank ).

-----------------

Fireteam Echo's radio pleas were redundant – we saw the machine gunner that nailed them into cover behind a bus stop, across the road, in the second floor of the terminal. Hostile brass and shattered glass were all but a giant reticule painted over the nest.

We, Corporals Ross, Barlotti, and Yours Truly, got in the spirit of defenestration day and crashed into the building through the windows behind a Singapore Air counter. Easy enough in MPA-03, you don't need to worry about being sliced up in a powered exoskeleton.

Stairs are just a little bit more tricky. You need to be damn sure to put your center of 'g' over your toes, or you'll fall ass backwards. It's doable, but too fucking slow when the squishier part of your squad is in ironsights below.

“Fireteams Echo, Foxtrot, be advised: hostile armor inbound, grid updated,” the eyes and mouth in the sky told our ears. We stopped and checked the grid overlay – everything we didn't know but wanted to illustrated in graphics blue.

It, an MBT designated 'dragon,' was grinding through asphalt along the perpendicular edge of the building. A glance brought everyone in a BDU to the same page – hammer and anvil. The nest was holding Echo down, and the tank was going to curbstomp them when it rounded the corner of the terminal.

Of course, I had to say “nope” as loudly and as clearly as fucking possible so that the tank crew could hear it. A gauss rifle was a whisper against front and side, so...

It could be a scream against deck armor, though.

Words weren't needed, just a point at trigger happy and my two most oft inebriated of comrades were off to end his party. I broke off and ran to the tank's edge of the building as the capacitors along my arm whined into charge.

Instructors drill it into your skull hard on how the MPA-03 is just a piece of equipment. It does not turn you into a superhero, or God, on that they are clear. On being 'A' god, something Hellenic, they're not so elaborative I fear.

I felt a lot like Zeus when I dropped out of the sky, through clouds of reactive armor shrapnel, on to the top of that alloy hulk. More when I aim and fired in that ozone haze: once, lightning, thunder and the ring of tortured armor; twice, plating ripped asunder, to the crew a promised hell; thrice, a supersonic roar through metal and cannon shell.

Actinic arcs stormed off the gauss rifle's frame as fire and fracture brewed in that can. I pulled the barrel up, away, and drew flame through the molten scores of that newly dead titan.