L-Own
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About this ebook
Aidan Brooke knows the dangers of the cyberdrug L-Own. Too bad Beth doesn't. Now Aidan faces a race against time to stop her hurting herself. Or someone else.
A short story sci-fi thriller from the author of "Crimson Birds of Small Miracles" and "Cat Leaps".
Sean Monaghan
Award-winning author, Sean Monaghan has published more than one hundred stories in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and in New Zealand, where he makes his home. A regular contributor to Asimov’s, his story “Crimson Birds of Small Miracles”, set in the art world of Shilinka Switalla, won both the Sir Julius Vogel Award, and the Asimov’s Readers Poll Award, for best short story. He is a past winner of the Jim Baen Memorial Award, and the Amazing Stories Award. Sean writes from a nook in a corner of his 110 year old home, usually listening to eighties music. Award-winning author, Sean Monaghan has published more than one hundred stories in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and in New Zealand, where he makes his home. A regular contributor to Asimov’s, his story “Crimson Birds of Small Miracles”, set in the art world of Shilinka Switalla, won both the Sir Julius Vogel Award, and the Asimov’s Readers Poll Award, for best short story. He is a past winner of the Jim Baen Memorial Award, and the Amazing Stories Award. Sean writes from a nook in a corner of his 110 year old home, usually listening to eighties music.
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L-Own - Sean Monaghan
CHAPTER ONE
Aidan Brooke knelt into the moist, peaty soil, pushing aside a stiff damaged frond of fern. The cool damp soaked through the knees of his denims. No big deal. He’d already acquired scratches on his face and arms, and tears in his t-shirt as he searched.
Plenty of time for clean-up later. He could buzz his microapartment on his way to work. Take a sonic clean while the cycler laundered and repaired his outfit. Fifteen minutes, tops.
Overhead a jackdaw cawed, the sound like something industrial. Some piece of metal equipment pushed to breaking point. A flash of wings as the bird took to the air, darting away through the forest.
The fast-growth pines trembled in the light breeze. Four or so years back, when Aidan was just out of high school, this area had all been clear-cut.
Cut and scraped to ground level. The soil churned and kneaded as the noisy felling machine surged along, back and forth, reaping the crop of full-grown trees.
All except for the one sliver of just a few acres. Old growth forest of larch and elm and some hardy slow pines. Some rocky outcrop or other geological feature made it easier for the machines to just drive around as they planted or cut.
And now here was a new forest. Trees halfway to maturity. Fast-growth pines. All in neat, evenly spaced lines. One every four or five meters. Aidan had even seen the original planting, when a three-story high lemon-yellow pine-cat had rolled through the valley. Just about the time wildflowers in crimsons and golds were starting to turn the hillsides into meadows.
The pine-cat’s puffy tires had carried it along, while thick armatures cut holes in the soil and inserted seedlings. Tens of thousands of acres replanted that way.
Now the wildflowers were gone, their delicious scent replaced with a heady mix of pine sap and needles, and that rich loamy earth.
To Aidan’s right, striding along as if she owned the whole forest, Jessica Birch pushed aside ferns too. Jessica was a couple of years his senior. Twenty-four. It still startled Aidan that someone older would want to hang with him. Perhaps that was just a part of being adult. Of course it was.
Jessica wore some kind of dark green overalls, cinched at the waist, and Korfu hiking boots. She