Posted by gznork26 in Topicality, Writing.
Tags: battlefield, control, medical, military, subversive, terrorist
My writing owes a great deal to current events, because I frequently build them from an idea or a problem that’s brought out in the course of reporting on something in the news. But those ideas and problems return again and again, which is why blogging short stories is different from posting observations or commentary directly about whatever it was in the news. In this case, it’s a growing story about the misuse of drugs by the military in order to keep those in uniform on the job far longer than is wise, or even safe. The Los Angeles Times’s piece about a pilot taking excessive amounts of amphetamines to stay alert through a 19-hour flight, and then beating his friend up from the delayed delirium, directly relates to “Infantry Hack“, a story I wrote five years ago.
In that story, I postulated that soldiers would be fitted with uniforms that included battlefield medical assistance to help keep them alive until they could be transported to a field hospital. But military technology always has other uses, and that’s what I explored in that story. Give it a read.
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Posted by gznork26 in Fantasy & SF, Fiction, Short Stories.
Tags: Mars, Mars colonization, terrorist
“Accommodation”
by P. Orin Zack
(11/16/2009)
Mission Commander Sarah Ping glanced at the MarsLift transport capsule on the nav screen, and then resumed glaring at Insky. “You’re damn lucky the elevator was near enough to completion for us to use it this trip.”
“Why?” he asked defensively. “What’s the big deal? We could have just stuck to the mission profile. It’s not like this ship can’t land normally.”
“It’s a matter of trust,” Glencoe said quietly. As the colony’s new botanist, he was acutely aware of the importance of trust in such a hostile environment. “And none of us trust you.” (more…)
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Posted by gznork26 in Fiction, Humor, Politics, Short Stories.
Tags: epidemic, health insurance, PAC, subversive, terrorist
Sometimes, I scare myself. How about you?
“Patient Zero”
by P. Orin Zack
(10/21/2007)
“It’s still spreading, Kaia,” Dennis Furlin whispered breathlessly to the woman he edged past just before reaching his fourth-row seat.
Kaialia Loffia kept her eyes on the speaker, lest they disrupt the meeting, and whispered back, “Do they know why?”
“Not a clue. Only that it might have started somewhere in Appalachia. But at this point, the call centers serving most of the country are flooded. People are canceling their health insurance in droves.” (more…)
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Posted by gznork26 in Fantasy & SF, Fiction, Politics, Short Stories.
Tags: battlefield, control, medical, military, subversive, terrorist
With all the press about military tech they’re willing to admit to having, you have to wonder what all those black development projects are about…
Infantry Hack
by P. Orin Zack
(June 2003)
“If you don’t back off right now, I’ll tighten your LifeSkin tourniquet the rest of the way. You know I can do it!”
That’s Edgar Brannock screaming in my earbud. He’s been rocking back and forth behind that grimy warehouse window over there for the past ten minutes. See the glowing smudge in the infra-red overlay of my gunsight? Yeah. That’s him. For someone responsible for a major terror attack on New York, you’d think he’d be geek enough to know not to yell at a bugged window. (more…)
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