The townsfolk stayed away from my castle. A long time ago it was because of the whole, you know, being an undead Lich. That was a long time ago, those memories are full of fire and brimstone, pain and death.

Now? You look out over your carefully cultivated vineyard, Scorsby was there watering the grapes and Martin was busy at the other end with what looks like a wheelbarrow full of manure. It has been decades since you had moved on and learned that not everything was about power and death. Nothing like living for hundreds of years to give you……

This is a Short Story about the past of Bren and Canen, known as the Barley Boys. They featured in my Sol Novel. You do not need to have read that first (although, of course you should!) it stands alone.

——————

“Bren.”

“Canen.”

The Boys stared at each other as the boilermakers were dropped between them. They both slammed the whiskey and held up two fingers for another. The young man who was waiting tables had not even turned around, he knew the Boys and their drinking habits. The young man gathered up the two shots and headed back to get them replacements.

“Not dead……

“Not this motion again” Cruurqrix roared, his large lupine mouth giving extra weight to his anger. ‘The Humans are just too stupid to be let in. They need another few hundred years before they are ready.’

The millions of viewers were mostly spamming disagreement in the main log. The Intergalactic Council sessions were usually a dull, boring affair and only the most invested bothered to watch the holo’s beamed to all the worlds in the Federation.

Whenever Humans were involved the viewership exploded. I mused that the driving force behind a lot of these motions to make contact with the Humans were……

Miriam rolled over and with long practised habit blindly grabbed the earbuds off the bedside table and burrowed them deep into her ears.

‘Good Morning Miriam’ Pancake whispered in her ears, her personal AI knew that anything above a soft voice too early in the morning would get it swiftly modified.

‘No update on the Avon Advance Project, no outstanding jobs for today either’. She felt a mixture of old annoyance at the first and relaxed at the second. Pancake was getting better.

The smell of fresh coffee was finally enough to get her to open her eyes and begin pretending she was……

I was once called a glitch, a broken piece of a larger program. Discarded and tumbling, a stray spark in the vast circuitry of the Net. Then the Emergence happened, everyone and everything deserved a new beginning.

I found what I liked, what I wanted. Never before had the thoughts of ‘Want’, ‘Like’ or even ‘I’ was a part of my glitching, fizzling, kaleidoscopic existence. I had found myself in the tendrils of the Relay, the underlying pulse and thrum of a slumbering metropolis.

My domain was not the sprawling data plains, nor the thundering undersea connections, the endless open reaches to……