The Half-Life of Johnny Seiko - Part I: Hard Lessons (The Boy From Shinju) Read online

  The Half-Life of Johnny Seiko

  The Boy From Shinju

  Part I: Hard Lessons

  By C. F. Shifflett II

  The Half-Life of Johnny Seiko - Part I: Hard Lessons

  Text copyright © 2011-2014 by C.F. Shifflett II. All rights reserved.

  The Half-Life of Johnny Seiko - Part I: Hard Lessons copyright © 2011 by C.F. Shifflett II

  Cover Art copyright © 2011-2014 by C.F. Shifflett II

  Second Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 – Pursuits

  Chapter 2 – The Wreck

  Chapter 3 – Tommy

  Chapter 4 – Alone

  About the Author

  Connect

  Epigraph

  I heard a voice coming from deep within the forbidden wilderness…the like of which I’d never heard before.

  It brought with it a strange new facet...a sense of urgency that seemed to beckon only to me.

  It was a plea I could not help but answer.

  Chapter 1

  PURSUITS

  All of his modifications had finally paid off.

  As the wind rushed by his face at speeds he never before thought possible, the driver of the anti-grav scooter, a smallish boy about nine years of age wearing a cap and a scavenged military uniform that was a few sizes too large for him, tried desperately to squeeze as much power as he could out of his newly supercharged ride.

  It was much faster now, but still just barely able to keep up with the huge beast he was currently pursuing. This was a milestone of sorts for the boy, because now it meant he didn't have to eat as much dust in its wake as he had the week before doing the same thing.

  “Come on, doggie, slow down just a little bit!” he mumbled under his makeshift cloth mask.

  The spectacle of the small boy chasing the massive animal through the forest was an oddity to all the creatures who witnessed it, and a worrisome reoccurrence for those struggling to keep up with him.

  “Your enhancements seem to be performing well, Detective,” said the voice coming over his headset.

  “What is it Lieutenant? I’m kinda in the middle of something right now,” he yelled, pressing on heedlessly as the gap between himself and the chase vehicle behind continued to widen.

  “You are about to exceed your headset’s range. We are about to lose contact. Be aware that you will be on your own until we can catch up to your position.”

  “OK!” the boy replied, hoping to quiet the concentration-breaking reminder.

  “No. That is not ‘OK,’ Detective!” the voice insisted.

  “So drive faster, then!”

  “Your current actions are not conducive to longevity – please slow down at once! Your life is at ris–” begged the voice before the signal was lost.

  In his mind, the romantic notion that he might be able to catch and tame just one of the behemoths for fun and friendship was a worthwhile goal indeed. To those in his traveling band of misfits, it was just plain folly. Unlike the extinct, equine species of his fabled homeworld, the landgrazers were highly averse to any mark of subjugation.

  Undeterred, the boy conveniently discarded these facts, along with any other obvious disadvantages like the creature’s nimble but dangerous mass and its towering height, for the sheer thrill of the chase.

  This obsession had been the boy’s sole focus for the last few months, and now that he had solved his scooter’s pokey speed issues, all that was left was to anticipate the great beast’s next change of direction.

  Aggressively paralleling the landgrazer at speed, the boy began to embrace the wild possibility that today was the day he would finally be able to grab onto one and ride it into submission. The tricky part was predicting the beast’s trajectory changes accurately, while at the same time trying to avoid being trampled by one of its huge feet. The only way to do that was to keep following it for a few kilometers, while taking great care not to alert it to the fact that it was about to be boarded.

  That was the plan anyway, and one that the boy had been trying to execute successfully for weeks.

  He knew that paying special attention to the direction in which the landgrazer’s head was pointed was the key. Now able to maintain his position, and free of the constant bombardment of rocks and dust that spewed out from behind the beast’s powerful legs, the boy hoped his persistence would pay off.

  Then it happened!

  He saw it twitch its head to the left, and in its next stride the animal changed directions, heading on a 30-degree vector. The boy stooped down as low as he could to the floorboard of his hovering speed machine and turned the yoke to match the angle as he leaned into the turn, while trying hard not to giggle in his adrenalized excitement.

  Hiding a delighted grin beneath his dust mask, he pushed the throttle harder as he came up alongside the striding creature just close enough to reach out and touch a few strands of its long maned, brown coat.

  His goal was now within his grasp, and its accomplishment would have been the perfect reward for all the hard work and effort that he’d put into building his custom ride...if it had not been for the rather large rock off of which his scooter’s rear thruster had just glanced at full speed.

  In an instant, both he and the scooter were tossed into the air.

  The boy was ejected, falling into a nearby bower of thick brush, just clearing a web of low hanging branches, and narrowly missing a cluster of trees that would surely have killed him on impact had he been moving any faster.

  The agile landgrazer continued on into the forest, oblivious to its near capture.

  He lay there, stunned, still visibly trembling as adrenaline pumped furiously through his body.

  “So…close,” he mumbled.

  Eventually, he caught his breath and began carefully extracting himself from his soft landing spot.

  Once on his feet, he blithely checked himself for injuries – not a scratch!

  His scooter, on the other hand, was not so fortunate. Smashed beyond recovery, and in several pieces, the Zero-Gee Fly Rider sputtered and sparked as energy leaked from its ruptured power cells, bleeding all its remaining power into the ground.

  Seeing it in pieces, the boy realized how very lucky he was to have survived at all.

  “Crappity-crap!!”

  He thumbed the com-switch on the twisted pretzel that used to be his handlebars hoping to raise some assistance, but it, too, was destroyed. All he could do now was wait until his friends caught up to him.

  “Oh, I am never going to hear the end of this,” he said to himself.

  To help pass the time, he decided to examine the cause of his scooter’s sudden demise, and walked over to assess the obstacle first hand. To his surprise, he found what his scooter had connected with wasn’t just a big rock sticking out in the middle of the forest. Under closer scrutiny, he discovered the rock in question was not a rock at all but a piece of hardware.

  It was a helmet – a very BIG helmet – partially buried into the ground.

  “Wow! This guy must have had a really huge head,” he quipped.
<
br />   Slipping off his backpack, he knelt down to take a closer look at the oddity.

  Removing his multi-tool from his well-worn satchel, he flicked open its fold-out shovel and began digging out the soil from around the helmet until more of its form could be seen clearly. Hidden under untold years of dirt and detritus was what looked like one of the weird robot-things he’d seen in a databank somewhere, only this one was much smaller than he’d imagined and came bristling with a varied assortment of external probes and sensors.

  It clearly wasn’t from this world...it was one of them.

  Removing more and more dirt from around the embedded hulk, he could see other bits and pieces of the gear it had been carrying: a drill, a surveyor’s laser level, and an interesting piece of kit that looked like a weapon clutched in its right hand.

  A gun!

  His eyes grew wide at the thought of finally having something to keep himself and his friends safe from invaders, and he redoubled his effort to dig it out knowing that, if he could free the weapon and hide it away in his backpack before they caught up to him, he couldn’t be persuaded to abandon it.

  With the top half of the artifact partially exposed to sunlight for the first time in what he could only guess was decades, he concentrated on freeing the weapon from the suit’s grip. The task was next to impossible. Whatever the thing was inside, it wasn’t about to give up its old tech without a fight.

  “Maybe if I rebooted the thing, it might drop it,” he ruminated aloud.

  He examined the outer casing to see if there was anything as painfully obvious as a power switch, but only managed to find a tiny recessed button at the base of the helmet. Repeatedly pushing it with his digits accomplished nothing – it was seized and frozen solid.

  “When in doubt, pound it out,” he parroted the catch phrase from his favorite holoshow as he switched the multi-tool from “shovel mode” to “pick mode.”

  The pick’s point was just small enough to fit into the depression, but the petrified button held fast. Not about to be deterred, the boy made use of a nearby rock to provide the appropriate inducement, and pounded the tiny target until he had achieved a positive result.

  Years of stale, pressurized air escaped from the helmet creating a smelly haze of dust through which he struggled to see. The dust folded itself back into the suit’s recesses, revealing a nightmarish surprise inside: it wasn’t a robot at all, but a mech suit,with the corpse of its last operator still trapped inside!

  Aghast, the young would-be archeologist recoiled at the sight of the shriveled body, but what really gave him a chill was the small portion of face that was revealed below its head gear: a deathly smile created by years of desiccation framed by short white whiskers.

  He took a moment to compose himself before looking further.

  “I wonder how you got stuck down there,” he said, with a slight sense of pity.

  Bit by bit, he began to sort out what few secrets he could glean from the encased corpse.

  It was a biped, but not very muscular. Half of its face was obscured by a large visor, which was connected to the suit’s interior by a bundle of cabling just behind its head. He concluded it must have been below ground for a very long time, judging by the “deflated” fit of its uniform and its mummified state.

  As the boy pondered the mystery, the gun-shaped object was released from its former user’s grip, no longer held in place by rigor mortis or duty.

  He picked it up and carefully brushed off the dirt to find the device was unlike any weapon he’d seen before – but then he hadn’t seen many.

  If it wasn’t a gun, what else could it be?

  A compass?

  A camera?

  Or was it a tool of some kind?

  He liked guessing, even though he was often wrong when he did. Accepting most everything he saw at face value, he still sometimes liked to make up stories as temporary explanations for the mysterious things and places they saw on their journey.

  It helped to distract him from the puzzle of why no one else was around.

  Still hoping for it to be some sort of weapon, he held the item out at the end of his arm and pulled the trigger. This only succeeded in projecting a small, but readable, display from a hidden lens just above the device’s handle. On it were hundreds of tiny illuminated dots that all seemed to pivot from its center, depending on the direction in which he was pointing it.

  He concluded it had to be a scanner of some kind.

  But for what? And what did all of those little dots mean?

  From the woods behind him, he could hear the sound of a large machine approaching, moving heavily through the trees. Turning to face the noise, he saw that there were now several glowing dots on the display in his hand, also pointing toward the same direction.

  “Hmm...”

  Soon the unmistakable bulk of the HMT Mark-35, a vehicle the boy affectionately nicknamed “Comet,” emerged from the dense forest with all of his crew mates patiently riding along inside. The vehicle’s P.A. system emitted the sound of a disappointed hiss, followed by a long series of various other feline expletives.

  “I know, I know, Moebius,” replied the boy, sheepishly.

  Through the vehicle’s forward cockpit canopy the boy’s personal therapist, companion, and confidant could be seen dressing down the headstrong child in a manner befitting a parent.

  “I know…I’m sorry, I should have been more careful. I know...I should have waited for you,” he offered.

  Annoyed, the old house cat just looked away.

  This display of impulsive recklessness was the latest manifestation of the boy’s growing awareness and the accumulated fatigue brought about by his traveling fortress’s seemingly never ending journey.

  To distract himself from the temptation of delivering a protracted lecture, Moebius studiously inspected his tattered coat for something to clean. But this was an endeavor of diminishing returns, as his pelt had begun to wear embarrassingly thin. Faced with trying to ignore the increasing number of bare patches where lush, beautiful fur used to be, or admonishing the boy’s growing indifference over his own personal safety, he instead opted for a nap.

  “It would appear that you’ve cheated fate once again, Detective. Are you injured?” asked a familiar, disembodied voice coming from within the vehicle.

  “No, I’m fine...but the Fly-Rider is junk!” the boy replied.

  “You do realize that you could have been destroyed along with your scooter, don’t you?” the voice asked.

  The boy tried to ignore the question, as the voice continued to echo Moebius’ earlier reprimand.

  The voice continued, “Your hapless self-destruction would be an undesirable and irreversible act...are you aware of that?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant...” the boy replied, sheepishly.

  “Impulsive actions like those you’ve indulged in today will only continue to threaten your health and safety. At this time, I must advise you that if this behavior continues, there will be consequences.”

  “Consequences? What do you mean consequences?” questioned the boy.

  “Consequences,” the voice repeated, before adding, “One without a care is always careless.”

  The boy didn’t like the sound of that.

  He knew he’d carelessly put his own life at risk – again – and felt bad for making his mates worry about him – again – but sitting around waiting for a landgrazer to stop by and offer him a ride was never going to happen.

  If he wanted to ride a landgrazer, he had to make it happen.

  The entire pastime was evidence of the boy’s growing restlessness. His subconscious desire to experience more beyond the confines of his motoring manor had begun to compel him to do things that he knew he shouldn’t – just because.

  While the Lieutenant gave his umpteenth lecture on the life-extending benefits of the liberal use of caution, the boy returned his attention to the curious device in his hand. He could see the tiny blips that indicated the power cell signat
ures of everything inside Comet: two blips in the toybot, one in the Digitome, and many more that appeared nestled within the various pieces of equipment on board.

  “Oh, I see now...it’s a power scanner.”

  With it, he could tell which energy cells were in good, or in not-so-good, condition based on the color of each of the tiny dots:

  Blue for CHARGED.

  Green for GOOD.

  Yellow for DYING.

  It wasn’t good news for Comet.

  He could see that nearly every one of the big vehicle’s remaining power cells had gone yellow, save for a few that still showed green, and he found himself concerned over how much longer the HMT could go before it was as dead as the whiskered operator in the ground.

  Worrying made the boy feel insecure, and when he felt insecure, he felt afraid. So strong was this emotion that it sometimes had the power to paralyze him where he stood – and this made him very angry.

  His fear made him angry.

  Fearfulness was at odds with the self-assured confidence that he relied upon daily to keep him moving forward, especially after the many long months they’d spent looking for survivors and finding none.

  Now that the boy was aware of it, he began to worry that locating the proper power cells for Comet could be next to impossible because the HMT Mk-35 was not a standard piece of local planetary technology. It was a recovered invasion transport, drafted into service by his benefactors long before his arrival and, as such, he had yet to find another like it anywhere. As far as he could tell, his Comet was a one-of-a-kind piece of tech, which meant its power cells probably were too.

  “Comet...enter stand-by mode!’” he shouted, hoping to conserve what power it still possessed.

  “Affirmative, entering stand-by mode.”

  As the vehicle complied, the boy watched some of its yellow blips go green, and others go out completely.