John C. Wright's Journal

Merry Feast of Stephen! This is a story about a present to a child. It was first published in the anthology  Breach the Hull,  Marietta Publishing (2007). 

Peter Power Armor

by

John C Wright

Let me tell you a story about a girl named Bliss. I didn’t like her when I first met her, but all that is changed now.

I found the power-armor I used to wear as a child in the wall-space behind my parent’s attic, behind a door paneled to look like part of the wainscoting.  No dust disturbed this miniature clean-room; no looters had found it here, not in all the years.

The fact that smooth white light filled the room when the silent door opened filled me with a premonition.  I stepped inside and saw, (as I had not dared hope)  that an umbilicus connected the little suit to sockets in the wall.  The energy-box above the socket was stamped with three black triangles in a yellow circle.

Behind me, in the main attic space, I could hear the little brat named Bliss grunt a little high-pitched grunt as she picked up a crow-bar.  A moment later there was a shivering crash as she tossed it through one of the living stain-glassed dormer windows.  I remembered the day her mother had purchased those windows, grown one molecule at a time by a nano-mathematician artist. Those had been days of sunshine, and even the upper windows no one saw had been works of fine art, charged with life.

You see, Bliss was a naughty, silly girl. It is really not her fault. She was raised to be that way.

“Darling,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. “Don’t kill the windows.  They are special. They were bulletproof, once, back before their cohesion faded. They’re antiques, and cannot reproduce.  It makes them the last of their kind.”

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