The Seer - some short story extracts

Hi all

So not much channel news for you this week (as I knew there wouldn't be), so I thought I'd share some extracts from the anthology.

I've been working a lot this week on a massive 10'000 word story near the end of the book called "The Seer", which is set in a surreal tower block where a new resident discovers a timeline of events from the future - I've sort of got this timeline of future events showing up in multiple stories throughout the book and throwing events and entries out there that trigger stories as a way of tying it all together.

Anyway, I wanted to show you these extracts because they're timeline entries that are basically taken from my Class series and could kinda be seen as backstory - I've also included the Living flesh supercomputer in a dream sequence (extract included at the bottom)

(they're also quite nasty - I'm sorry)

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2032: Work is completed on a prototype device that can calculate the future called “The Seer”. You give the machine a subject, be it a person or a general topic of interest, and it gathers data and uses that data to predict exactly what will happen in said subject's future.

People can be given all sorts of information ranging from fool-proof careers advice to the development of new technology. The potential uses for such a machine are truly endless.

Its accuracy will be improved with future developments. The Seer’s inventor wishes for the machine to eventually be capable of reading people’s minds and factoring in their ambitions and innermost desires into its predictions.

Probably won’t happen for a while yet.

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2227: Schools in the USA begin using Seer systems in order to calculate and set the career paths for pupils from a young age. 

The machine can figure out who’s going to definitely end up being a film star or a famous musician, so teachers can quash the dreams of kids who haven’t got a cat’s hope in hell. Probably better to work on those toilet-cleaning skills, Laura, because that’s where you’re headed, I’m sorry.

2228: The machine’s greatest success comes when it discovers a five year-old child that’s going to turn out to be the next Hitler. He will end up being responsible for the deaths of six million children. 

It may be wrong, but The Seer’s accuracy ratings have been around 99.6% for nearly a century now. People tend to trust its readings.

Calls for the child’s execution are widespread. 

The child is tried, put on death row, and eventually administered a lethal injection. 

It’s kinder this way. For him, for everyone.

2233: Upon discovering pupils with violent futures, the children are now removed from their school and taken from their parents and boarded at a top security school for criminal children. 

Criminal school boards find it difficult to secure funding and staff in order to care for the soon-to-be criminal five year-olds. The public doesn’t want their hard-earned tax dollars going towards the doomed children, so standards of care are incredibly low.

2237: The government orders the schools for future criminals to instigate a programme of mass extermination. 

Six million children die as a result.

It is kinder this way.

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  *the main character reads these entries and has this dream sequence later in the story*

In his dream, Richard was a schoolboy. He was led into a shadowy room and sat opposite a twisted mass of machinery, at the centre of which was a single piercing yellow eye that was bearing down upon him.

“Sit, boy,” the machine commanded.

Richard did as he was instructed. 

A faceless teacher in a mortarboard and robes then stepped out of the darkness, pushing a tray of instruments. The teacher proceeded to lock Richard into the metal straps on the chair with his wrists facing up. The teacher then picked up a scalpel and slowly began to slice open Richard’s left wrist. There was no blood, no pain. The skin just slid open on the blade’s command. The teacher picked up a wire that Richard could see was hooked up to the hellish machinery opposite. The teacher plugged the wire into the gash in his wrist. The teacher then moved to the other side and did the same with his right wrist. The eye of the machine then began to flicker with images and indecipherable language. Richard could feel a clenching in his wrists as the machine locked into him and the wires began to burrow through his wrists of their own accord and grow and spread throughout his body.

“CALCULATING...CALCULATING...”