He signed on with the exo-army as soon as he was eligible, just to get out of his house and get a legit funding source when welfs came sniffing around. The realbody recruiter looked tired when he left, but every warm body to plug into the expansion mattered, and so he got a smile and a handshake and a signature authenticated with a retinal scan and ( Read more... )

Grace was a hippie, and that's where the trouble all started. If asked, she would have said that she wasn't, but her parents had been (all four of them), and a certain amount of it had sunk in even after she chose to go to a college weighted heavily toward corporate and mil-gov use of sciences. Even after she took a government contract to pay off ( Read more... )

A resonant belch rattled the tent of the general, and all his subalterns flinched. They imagined they could smell Short Charlie's cologne. It was just their imaginations, of course--the general had made sure that Short Charlie was scrubbed thoroughly before he ate him raw. Short Charlie might have tried to swallow something to poison the general-- ( Read more... )

When you know where I come from, you'll run and scream. But now you sit there, smiling at me so sweetly that I pray you never find out. But I know that you will; they all figure it out, in the end. It may take years, or in one case, even decades (she was sweet, but not particularly bright, that one), but one day they start asking questions: Why ( Read more... )

The air smelled funny. That was the first thing she noticed when she stepped out onto the loading dock. She had remembered the scent as being like cinnamon bread, but instead all she smelled was the pungency of bodies that had not been sent through the mandatory deodorizer every day, regularly, and taken their pheromone suppressant pills. She'd ( Read more... )