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    Lies We Will Tell Ourselves
    Lies We Will Tell Ourselves
    Lies We Will Tell Ourselves
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    Lies We Will Tell Ourselves

    By Andrew Knighton

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    About this ebook

    “I have no objection to truth,” I said, “but I enjoy untruths too, they’re the building blocks of human culture. Actors pretending to be kings, singers faking heartbreak or elation, novelists inventing heroes in their heads to escape the mindless dullards around them. Reality is a vast sea of tedium interrupted by brief flashes of the repugnant – why would anyone chain themselves to that?”

    *

    A spin doctor forced to deal with aliens who loathe lies.

    A squad of soldiers torn apart by the fiction in their midst.

    A hunting submarine with its dead captain strapped to the prow, the crew promising that one day they'll revive him.

    We all tell lies to get through the day, some of them to ourselves, some to other people. Now read the extraordinary lies of the future in these nine short science fiction stories.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAndrew Knighton
    Release dateFeb 12, 2018
    ISBN9781386261582
    Lies We Will Tell Ourselves
    Author

    Andrew Knighton

    Andrew Knighton is a freelance writer and an author of science fiction, fantasy, and steampunk stories. He lives in Yorkshire with his cat, his computer, and a big pile of books.

    Read more from Andrew Knighton

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      Book preview

      Lies We Will Tell Ourselves - Andrew Knighton

      HOW WE FALL

      The air was electric with her presence. Sergeant Grund's exposed hands and face tingled with it and it sparked like tiny blue flares from the frayed remnants of his parachute harness. She sat on an upturned crate, legs curled up beneath her, a simple white dress falling to the floor like something from a classical painting, her wings folded in behind leaving a halo of silvery feathers  around the perfect curls of her brown hair. She was slim as a spring flower, but her presence filled the abandoned factory.

      There was a click. A few meters away from the girl, Brok sat lean and dark, disassembling and reassembling his rifle, wiping down parts, counting bullets, blowing imagined dust from the crevices of the firing mechanism, coldly indifferent as small blue sparks flew from the pieces. His pistol lay ready at his side. Grund shifted his weight, the crate creaking beneath him. Sure enough, Brok’s hand whipped out for the gun.

      'Jesus, sarge, no need to scare me.'

      Grund snorted. Nothing scared Brok except missing a pay cheque, but you couldn’t knock the guy’s reflexes, and that counted for more than his motives.

      Grund walked over to the broken outlet pipe that sank like a well into the concrete floor. His footsteps echoed back to him as he approached, pausing to peer into the still darkness beyond the pipe’s jagged edge. Fragments of green scum floated across the surface of oil-tinged water.

      'He ain't coming back,' Brok said, examining a clip of hollow points.

      'Maybe,' Grund said. 'We said an hour.'

      Brok glanced at his watch. 'Two minutes. Then he ain't coming back.'

      The girl raised her head, looked at Grund with a soulful stare that stirred more than his heart.

      'He will be back,' she said. 'I have seen it.'

      'Course you have, love,' Grund said, trying not to sound too harsh. The girl was a wild card, an unexpected element in a mission already running into trouble. He wanted to keep her calm while he worked out what she was, why she was here.

      He strode over to the wall, checked the explosive charges along its edge.

      'You think they know what this place was?' he asked.

      Brok shrugged. 'I don’t care, and the mechs can’t.'

      There was a slosh and a hand appeared over the broken edge of the pipe. Grund strode over and grabbed Private Levit's arm, pulling him up onto dry ground. Levit stood, dripping water thick with dirt and chemicals, took the breather from his mouth and the goggles from his eyes. Even covered in filth and camo fatigues he looked the part of a soldier, with the strong, wholesome build of a young man raised on rugby and long hill walks. In any other war, any other combat zone, Levit would have been wearing stars and ordering the rest of them around. But things were different in The Grid. Everything was different.

      'There is a way,’ he said, his accent clear as cut crystal. 'Nearly a mile south east, the pipe comes out onto a reservoir. No mechs around that I could see. From there we'd have a clear run to the extraction site.'

      He put the goggles and breather down. He'd barely even looked at Grund as he gave his report, and now he walked over to the girl, concern radiating from his chiselled face.

      'How are you?' he asked, crouching in front of her.

      She smiled, a smile like sunshine and heaven's blessing. 'I'm well,' she said. 'And you, my brave boy?' She reached out a hand, stroked his dirty face, and he beamed.

      Brok muttered something filthy and chambered a round.

      'What did you say?' Levit asked. There was steel beneath his manners.

      Grund checked his holster was open. This was the moment he'd been waiting for, the moment he'd feared.

      'I said she's a crazy bitch, and so are you.' Brok rose. He'd put the gun down, but his hand was on his knife. It was the sort of sturdy, sharp instrument of pain Grund had seen on the belts of hundreds of ex-mercs, a memento of their old days, prizing gems from temples and gold teeth from prisoners. There was no doubting the purity of Brok's motives.

      Levit glared at Brok. 'Take it back,' he demanded.

      'You crazy?' Brok said. 'You think that’s a real angel? She's nothing from heaven, just a bundle of cosmetic genetic tricks, a head full of over-priced drugs and hands that have never done a day’s work.'

      'I know where the angels come from,' Levit said. 'But God moves in mysterious ways. Father Ishmael teaches that the angels are as much his creation as if he had cast them from clay with his own two hands. Just because they can be explained doesn't mean they aren't a miracle, or that their message isn't real.'

      'You believe this, sarge?' Brok flicked a derisory gesture at Levit.

      Grund was all too ready to believe. Not in angels or messages from above, but in the influence of Father Ishmael Jones and the Church of the Rising Time. Trust an ex-Jesuit to turn an upper class fashion into a middle class cult.

      'I'm not judging,' he said. 'What matters is what we do now.'

      Levit glared at

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