/lit/ - Literature

>crits 4 crits

Track bogies spun until blurring and digging deep into sand, sending the tank forward. Chassis mounting pavement and straightening as the suspension pressed down. Accelerating tracks gripping onto hardened surface. Glous felt his head being pushed back as they roared up the road.
Captain Drier said, “so what exactly dropped you off?”
They were now all leaning out of respective hatches, lolling helmeted heads, lit cigarettes burning. Romance sped up the highway.
“A ship, it's a mind with engines, and a biosphere, you can live on it or it can drop you off at any time and place, as many times as you want, or just once.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A gship can move you through a non-trivial number of identical universes of them faster than you can perceive, so you can be in the sames places all at once.”
Shad said, “that sounds fucking boring.”
Assistant said, “it's risky not to be scaled up.”
Glous pulled his cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it, speeding wind drove air into the front and smoke out the other end.
Shad spun around in his seat arms crossing behind his head as he looked up at Glous, “it riskier on a ship or your place, earthboy?”
“No risk on Earths, but you won’t live.”
“Sounds like Blone.”
“Not quite.”
On Blone, anyone could order a freshly printed gun from a weapons brokerage, then buy bullets and equipment from bespoke smiths. As disintegration accelerated, numerous entities and individuals who identified with the personal will to overthrow the government allocated funds to guns and training. Together they could control public and private spaces with of the shelf technology and private logistics. Based on the power of many people coordinated instantly. Directed at a corps level by an AI and local executive team representatives hired by Acorp. Insurgent numbers swelled and developed a basic social consciousness, members associated by going outside with the colour red.
Discontent spread in different geographies. Local populations now at odds with a murderous central state. Uninvolveds genocided by planetary smart weapons based on their beliefs, groups or loyalties. Cultists in sinews of City and satanic pederast landowners of the NorCon grasping for power and influence over territory. Their local power filling gaps.
On the drier side of the Mosa mountains, after the snow covered cliffs came cedar highlands settled by pastoral tribes and criminals, already autonomous, their kin networks dropped out and joined the insurgents. Hills giving way to plains and jungles, scattered with Shamanists, subsistence farmers, drug traffickers. All still flowing through the stream.