by submission | Aug 31, 2008 | Story
Author : W. Kevin Christian
A monotone, bureaucratic female voice shot through the hearing centers of Felicity’s brain: “Free-form imagination, courtesy of The Sensation Station. Free-form imagination, courtesy of The Sensation Station.” On and on it went until the computer had fully mapped the physical structure of her brain. Suddenly Felicity was walking through a wheat field where she grew up. The moon was full and orange. Hundreds of shooting stars rocketed across the night sky. One came down and slowly cruised by Felicity’s head, its tail leaving a trail of floating diamonds, glittering like fireworks.
The last and greatest vehicle of human creativity was a manually controlled artificial reality on the only entertainment device anyone cared about: The Sensation Station. All other entertainment had become obsolete seven years earlier.
In free-form imagination, what one thought became one’s reality. The possibilities were endless. Not even God himself knew the limits of the unbridled infinity of human creativity channeled through The Sensation Station. Of course most people just used it to have sex in a hot tub with movie star A. But Felicity was different.
Before The Sensation Station, Felicity had been a real book worm. She loved to escape to the vivid worlds she could manifest in her mind. She painted, too. She made sad, silly and fantastic paintings, full of vibrant, burning colors.
Felicity’s first artificial pleasure was imagining herself as the coldest she had ever been, naked and alone on the North Pole. She waited until she could bear it no more and then dumped herself into a hot shower. Felicity had saved the first five seconds of that shower and put it on repeat for hours. The computer daydreams were indescribable pleasure. Divine. Perfect. Satisfying. They had cost Felicity her job.
And her family, kids, home, and car. Right now she was sitting next to a dumpster behind a Denny’s where she had found an unguarded electrical socket to plug in. Her rail thin frame sat hunched against a filth-covered fence. She was dying. Two golf-ball-sized electrodes were attached to her temples with wires running down to a wallet-sized receiver that lay limply in her half-open palm. Drool ran down her chin. Blood trickled out her ears.
Something the creators of The Sensation Station had never anticipated was the ability of the technology to intensify consciousness. Felicity’s imagination was expanding at a frightening rate. Where once she had been satisfied to focus and repeat one good sensation, Felicity now combined hundreds, thousands, millions – the ecstasy of gods. There was no limit.
Felicity set her imagination for the heart of the universe. If God didn’t exist, she was about to create him. She flew up into the sky, into space, out of the solar system. Her perspective increased to a galactic level. The whole universe unfolded at the limitless command of her creativity. Somewhere inside she knew—she had always known—what it was to be a star, an ocean, a banker, a pulsar, a honey bee, a fry cook, a sonic boom, a mountain, a crying baby, a falling leaf, a cloud, a proton, an orgasm, a primal scream. Matter ended. Energy became infinite. Time was reformed. Somewhere in some fold of some reality a force of ten billion supernovas was released. A new universe was born.
by submission | Aug 30, 2008 | Story
Author : JT Heyman
You, who read this, remember us.
When the Senneela arrived, there was panic, at first. People forgot that. I mean, what would you expect when an eight foot saurian biped in silvery vacuum armor suddenly appears in the middle of the United Nations Security Council? The panic lasted for months.
Then the Senneela ambassador broadcast her apology to the nations of the world, offering a gift to show their remorse. They offered the cure to everything … every disease. Viral, bacterial, parasitic, it didn’t matter. The Senneela Cure changed human physiology so that disease was instantly defeated by the human’s own immune system. They even offered genetic resequencers to eliminate the genetically transmitted diseases.
There was a side effect, the ambassador warned. It would quadruple the human lifespan and change it. Childhood would be accelerated, the children achieving physical maturity in less than twelve years. And the detrimental effects of old age would be pushed off until after the person reached three hundred years, after which they would deteriorate rapidly, usually dying within two years. The world’s leaders laughed and said it was something we could live with.
The damned Senneela knew.
With their newfound immortality, people cashed out their retirement plans and the rest of the economy collapsed. As the population ballooned, resources dwindled. Mobs roamed the countryside like locusts, searching for food. Countries which were already overpopulated began spilling over into their neighbors’ lands. Armed vigilantes guarded the borders of the wealthier nations, killing illegal immigrants on sight.
The other shoe dropped when Pakistan launched nuclear weapons at India, claiming that India was using its higher birth rate to force a claim to the long disputed Punjab region. The weapons never detonated. The Senneela teleported every nuclear weapon on the planet away … “to prevent accidents,” they said.
After all, an exterminated human race was of no use to them. They needed us.
More than three hundred million lined up on the day the massive Senneela transport ships first arrived. Earth’s billions followed. Some ended up as servants to Senneela nobles. Most ended up as foot soldiers in an interstellar war. There are darker rumors of the uses to which some of the human volunteers have been put. For many humans, though, they decided it would be better to be well fed slaves than to starve as free humans.
Eventually, there were perhaps three hundred million souls left on Earth. With the removal of the population pressures, very few humans lined up willingly.
The Senneela refused to take “No” for an answer. Already, the continents of Australia and the Americas have been emptied. The Senneela are moving westward across Asia. Within, at a guess, three years, they’ll reach us here in Rome, where some of the world’s last brilliant scientists have been working feverishly, if you’ll forgive the pun.
You see, we’ve managed to reverse engineer the genetic resequencer and use it on The Senneela Cure. A group of us have been deliberately infected with a particularly virulent strain of … well … let’s just say it’s something nasty for which humans are just carriers but which, to Senneela, is invariably and swiftly fatal. We’re going to go volunteer to serve the Senneela. I’m sure we’ll be killed once the Senneela realize what we are but, by then, it will be too late. With luck, they’ll never get the chance to finish depopulating the Earth.
The human race will live, grow stronger and maybe even have an interstellar empire when we’re done.
Morituri te salutamus.
You, who read this, remember us.
by submission | Aug 29, 2008 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
It was a crisp, clement evening. The air was fresh and new, and the gentle purple of the sky gave the scene a tranquil and poetic feel.
About five hundred people were gathered here, although similar groups were gathered all over the world, looking up at the sky and the far away stars. Despite the beauty of the night, there was a somber feel to events, as of serenity mingled with sorrow.
When the ceremony started, it did so gradually. The speaker did not rise on any prearranged signal, but instead did so on the feeling that the moment was right. A glance to the sky told him he had chosen correctly.
“We are gathered here in memory and in celebration. In memory of what happened one hundred and five years ago, and in celebration of what has been done since then. We are gathered ten years after the founding of our colony on this new world, to remember that which we lost.”
The crowd looked to him, and then to the sky, eyes focusing on a particular point.
“It took us ninety five years to get here, although to us it felt less than a week. The exodus took us past the light of our own departure, and for ten years we have been waiting for its arrival.”
All eyes were on the same spot. An astronomer could tell them it was a main sequence star, spectral classification G2V. They didn’t need to know this. They all knew what it was.
“Our mistakes cost us our world, and we have determined to do better here. Until tonight, we have worn this point of light as our mark of cain. From tonight, we will wear it as a reminder, a lesson learned.”
The point of light suddenly began to get brighter in the sky. Photons that had been travelling for more than a century suddenly arrived en masse and were captured by eyes that had leapfrogged the distance, overtaken the disaster they caused, and gathered here in memory.
“Friends, I give you the sun. Let’s do better this time.”
by submission | Aug 28, 2008 | Story
Author : Alla Hoffman
When he opened his eyes, it was a special kind of dark. The sky was a dull purple, and what light there was came from the ground beneath its stygian spread. He sat up stiffly in a sea of trash, a vast junkyard. Much of the scrap metal and rock glowed a sickly greenish color, and he didn’t want to think about why. Every part of him was aching, and the morning amnesia hadn’t fully faded. “The hell….” He stood, rubbing blearily at his eyes, and cursed when he realized his ankle couldn’t support his full weight. As he looked out across the abyssal dumping grounds, he put name to place, mainly because a dented sign creaked on a pole next to him. T. W. D. P. 13, Toxic Waste Disposal Planet 13. Recently made off-limits by the government, on grounds of contamination by hostile elements, the first time such a designation had been given to a trash planet. Then again, no one had ever created a self-maintaining, self-improving species of machines before. He’d known that was probably a bad idea, from the standpoint of personal safety.
He wondered how far they’d gotten in the 84 hours they’d been free. It had taken only 19 for them to make themselves known on the planets surface, 26 to be categorized as dangerous. It had taken the governing council another two days to find out who was responsible, but it had taken them only two hours to try and convict him. There had been talk of execution by various methods or imprisonment, but ultimately they decided on a more…unorthodox punishment. Their leniency had hinged on the fact he had created a species, not a weapon, to destroy this world. And after all, it was only a trash planet. Hardly a great loss to society. So they’d sent him to “live” with his own creations. If the radiation didn’t get him first.
He scrabbled around in the junk until he found a bent metal pole, and used it to pull himself up, stumping shakily forwards. He hadn’t yet figured out a plan for himself, but in the end it didn’t really matter. His big plan, the important one, was already inevitably in motion. The machines would begin to improve themselves, and god knew they weren’t short of materials, and soon they would construct weapons and flight. And spaceflight. And he hadn’t bothered to write hostility towards man into them, that was the beauty of it. They had only the biological imperative: survive, reproduce. Mankind would see to the hostility itself, as the robots spread and people became afraid. They would write their own end with their hostility and their fear. And their trash.
That’s what they were for, to provide the antidote to humanity. Ultimately, he hadn’t been supposed to survive either. He’d just wanted to watch. There were cliffs of wrecked ships in the distance, and he began making for them. They’d have a pretty good view. They were a good place to wait. He was glad he’d ended up here, in a way. He might not get to see the end, but he could watch the beginning. It seemed right that the next stage should start here, where humanity had started out so long ago, before it had gotten lost among the stars.
by submission | Aug 27, 2008 | Story
Author : Pavelle Wesser
When she first appeared to him in the dead of the eternal night, her tentacles undulated in bluish silver tints that reflected the twinkling lights of his ship. She slithered silently toward him while he was out performing an errand. Until he saw her, he had never questioned working in silence and alone. It was when she slid that first tentacle around his waist that he stared into the endless night and neglected his mission, turning to face her as she wrapped more tentacles around his body. Later, he could never remember how they became two beings writhing on the surface of sand so soft he could have sworn that it sifted through the pours of his skin.
It was then that her first tentacle pierced his flesh and entered his body. He stumbled back to the ship feeling ill, and threw up at some point during the eternal night. His initial malaise turned to raging desire by the time he was sent on his next errand. She appeared to him as he collected pitted rocks, her tentacles wrapping themselves around him, requiring nothing of him other than that he willingly surrender to the sensation of slime slithering over his skin. This time, when they connected, electrical currents charged through his body. They were mild at first, but escalated, causing his teeth to chatter and his hair to stand on end.
“How can you do that to me?” But she did not answer, just as she never spoke.
It was then that another of her tentacles pierced his flesh, wrapping itself around his internal organs, squeezing, squeezing, until he felt so ill that he didn’t have to wait until later in the eternal night to throw up. He would have been sick for days, had time been measured in anything other than the phases of the multiple moons that hovered overhead. He lay in his cot suffering fevers, chills and muscle cramps, wondering how she could possibly leave her tentacles inside of him. Didn’t she want them back? How could she live without them? How could he live with them?
They sent him on another mission, this time to collect the weeds that grew in the eternal night. His body shook as he donned his spacesuit, for now he was afraid. It wasn’t long before she appeared, slinking noiselessly, her tentacles extended toward him. A cold, sick chill descended.
“Look,” he said, “I think we need to call this off.”
A tentacle slid down his throat, and he realized the choice had never been his to make. He thought he might gag but as her other tentacles caressed his body, he experienced thrills of pleasure that escalated until he felt as though he were an electrical conduit through which an overload of energy was being transmitted. When she had done with him, he understood that just as the night was eternal, she herself would never end. He turned to face her.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he said.
Another tentacle wrapped itself around his heart. Cold and icy, it squeezed the living breath out of him. Feeling the dying pump of his most sacred organ, he wheezed out his final words:
“Is this what you’ve wanted from me all along?”
She didn’t answer, just as she never had. And as her tentacle writhed and twisted about his heart, he thought of a home he’d never known, of a love that had never been true, and a spaceship that would soon depart, leaving him alone to die in the eternal night.
