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  • FUTURES

The Cloud Heart

A new lease of life.
By
  1. Jeremy Szal

    1. Jeremy Szal is the author of many short stories and the space-opera novel Stormblood, coming from Gollancz in June 2020. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Get in touch at jeremyszal.com or @jeremyszal

Artistic image of a pair of hands being swamped by black discs

Illustration by Jacey

I lie shivering on the sand while the nanoCloud eats my body. I don’t feel any pain — my neuralware sees to that, but my body continues to twitch out of muscular reflex, like anybody razed with particle rounds would. The Swarm descends like a black, metallic cloud. More liquid than mass. Slowly gulping me down — bones, muscles, tendons, blood, every atom, every drop of sweat. The moans and cries of other soldiers, slowly consumed by their own Clouds, carries across the smoke and sand. Enemy gunfire crackles in the distance.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00856-1

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