Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #13 April 2015 | Page 98

Everyone remembers where they were that day.
Actually, that’s a lie. Things had got so bad that the
Attacks kind of blended in with all the other Bad Stuff
that was going on at the time - cities swallowed up by
the sea, nuclear power stations going bang, the endless wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, the
ongoing economic crisis, the famine in Greece... it all
blended in together. But still, the co-ordinated terrorist
massacres were definitely a high watermark in horror,
even for these days.
They’d simultaneously activated sleeper cells in capital cities around the world and ordered them to simply
wander around killing as many people as possible.
Their bodies had been rigged to blow on capture - a
combination of C4, toxic chemicals and radioactive
sources from smoke detectors and old watches and
stuff. The idea being to cause maximum terror, of
course.
It worked. What really got to us in what is laughably
referred to as the 1intelligence community1 was just
how wired the attackers were - both in the sense of
being on drugs and in the sense of being completely
wired for sound, video, even infra-red.
They’d been wearing commercially available headup displays equipped with cameras and hands free
phones; as with military issue combat monocles the
displays were based on, their controllers had fed them
constant updates, alerts, mapping information, thermographs... like a video game.
That’s what it’s called in the trade – ‘gamification’.

They turned the massacres into a game, a really fucking warped one where you only get one life and the
worse the things you do, the more points you get.
Oh, and did I mention the drug dispensers? I did allude to them earlier. Basically, they were hopped up on
a cocktail of methamphetamine, SSRIs, steroids and
benzodiazapines. But that wasn’t the weirdest thing
about the attackers.
The weird but was that they’d been fitted with IV
cannulae, like you get in hospital, and connected up to
computerized drug dispensers with vital signs telemetry fed through a separate phone line.
Like I said, wired. Seriously so.
We think the drugs worked on a reward-response
basis; that was some serious operant conditioning right
there. Kill someone, get a hit. The more innocent the
victim, the bigger the hit.
Claims of responsibility were oblique enough, but
essentially, we knew it was the Terrorists. They’d held
onto their rump religious state and even expanded
outposts of it into rural Russia and the Americas, cut
deals with local drug lords, computer hackers and fuck
knows who else.
They had sympathisers everywhere, including numerous local governments and media outlets, and they
were owning us - hard.
And then this happened. As usual, their spin machine
went into overdrive even before the last shots had been

PAGE 97