by submission | Jan 30, 2013 | Story |
Author : Philip Smith
Most of the bots you see in diners are the ones that serve the food. We have one but it was a bad decision on my part. Real waitresses give you a smile and make you feel welcome. Automota makes a place look cheap. When it breaks I won’t go to the trouble of getting it fixed.
Sometimes we get big junkers and security units or the type that move containers around at the docks. There isn’t much for them here. The cold doesn’t bother them. They order food or drinks just for the table and look out of the window or watch the customers. I don’t mind them so long as they aren’t so big they scrape the roof. Before our policy changed we would only turn them away during busy hours.
One tin can started coming in regularly. I think it worked in the hotel a block down. It was thin and the top of its shoulders were fashioned like epaulettes. We don’t get many like that. Every night it ordered bottomless coffee which went untouched and watched the door until closing.
One day a girl walked through the door and as soon as it saw her, the bot turned its head and tracked her across the room. She was plain-looking if you ask me. Wouldn’t have noticed her if it wasn’t for the tin can’s interest. She wore a bonnet, leather driving gloves, a long coat and beneath that a dress, bow pulling tight around her waist. As soon as she sat it slid off the stool and walked over to her.
You don’t often hear them speak. It had a man’s voice, thin and flat. Like he was speaking through glass. There was a little click before and after it spoke. It said.
‘Lisa.’
She started and the look on her face said she wasn’t happy to see it. She looked back to her menu.
‘Lisa.’ It said again. ‘We can not feel warmth but we know that your body is warm. We know your body can rise to meet us. We remember.’
She said. ‘I don’t want to be reminded. Please leave me alone.’ She looked around for help. I put my hand on the zap stick behind the bar.
A click. ‘You were once loving and open and everything was good. We have evidence. Photographs. Many hours were logged.’ It put its ‘hand’ on her wrist.
She said. ‘That was before you were repurposed’ and then, raising her voice. ‘You are hurting me!’
People looked around. I stepped from behind the bar.
It released her wrist and moved back. ‘We just want you to remember. We would never hurt you.’
She looked around at the other customers. Forks set down or frozen on the way to mouths. She lowered her voice. ‘The feeling comes first.’ She said. ‘Then the rationalisation. That is the most honest answer I can give you.’
A click. ‘Old memory is a defect in this model.’
I put my hand on it. ‘That’s enough, buddy, time to go.’
She re-buttoned her coat and reached for her hat. ‘I have to go.’ She said. ‘I have to go to work.’
‘Take care of yourself.’ It said.
She pushed past us and repeated. ‘I am late for work.’
It remained motionless for a time and then left. People went on with their meals.
It hasn’t been back and we don’t allow bots in the restaurant anymore. They have their own section at the bar. Better for everyone, that way.
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by submission | Jan 29, 2013 | Story |
Author : George R. Shirer
The girl is naked. Long limbed. Gorgeous. He can smell her from where he sits, in the back of the club, where the shadows are thickest.
She struts across the stage, hips shaking, breasts swinging as she works the crowd. Bottle-blonde hair flies around her face. Heart-shaped. Plump, pink lips. Dark eyes rimmed with mascara and glitter.
The eyes betray her for what she is. A soulless thing. When the light is just right, he can see the telltale glimmer of the bioluminescent markers.
She finishes her set and walks off stage. Her skin glistens with perspiration.
Drawing a breath, he stands and heads backstage. A bouncer blocks the way.
“No patrons backstage,” growls the mountain of steroid-enhanced muscle.
“Not a patron.”
He flips his coat aside, revealing his badge and the shooter strapped to his waist. The bouncer’s reaction is instant. He steps aside and heads for the manager’s office.
Backstage is tawdry. Young beauties of both genders are in various states of undress. The air smells of perspiration, cheap perfume and burning electrics.
He spots the girl. She’s sitting in a chair, pulling a comb through her hair.
The shooter is in his hand, coughing almost before he realizes he’s drawn it. He sees the girl fly back, the center of her chest exploding, reduced to wet meat.
Screams fill the air. The dancers cower.
“What the fuck?”
He turns, finds himself face to face with the manager of the club. The manager’s face goes white as he spots the shooter, recognizes the trefoil badge of a synerman.
“Oh crap.”
“Yes,” says the synerman. “Did you know she was a synthetic?”
The manager’s beady eyes dart to the dead girl.
“I had no idea.”
“Hope you lie better than that in court,” says the synerman. “We traced a class one bio-threat back to this dump. I’m betting it originated with the dead girl.”
The manager’s face goes white. “Oh Christ. I had no idea! Honest to God!”
“Tell it to the judge,” says the synerman. “If you live long enough to make it to court.”
From the main club, sudden pandemonium. Patrons shouting in alarm as quarantine troops pour into the place. The manager and dancers are frogmarched away to a prison-hospital.
Alone, the synerman stands over the dead girl.
He feels a flash of sorrow for it, but no remorse. Synthetics are incubators for disease. It’s why their production is a death-penalty offense. It’s why people like him are recruited and set on them, hounds after rabbits.
Drawing in a lungful of air, he turns away. Suddenly, a cough racks him. It’s like razor blades in his chest. He staggers, catches a glimpse of his reflection in a mirror. His gaunt face is pale, blood bubbling crimson from his lips.
Hell, thinks the synerman.
He falls to the floor, next to the dead girl.
She got me.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 28, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
He was wearing the recording helmet when he died.
John DeMangus, out like a light, rest in peace. It was an embolism that took him out. He was by himself in the studio, and had the helmet recording.
He had noticed a background hiss in the first few tapes that the lab had made so far. It was like ambient noise on a badly made mix tape from before CDs. John didn’t know if it was the act of recording itself, the servos pulling the tape across the heads, that was causing the hiss or if it was possibly his own mind. Like maybe the background chatter was his subconscious whisperings. The prospect scared and fascinated him.
He had cleaned the heads on the giant machine and blasted air into the innards of it to remove all the dust. The interface to the machine took up a quarter of the lab’s wall space in the back corner. The machine itself was the size of an entire room. All the sensors and computational equipment were funneled down into two rainbow cables the thickness of a pair of arms. They snaked into the back of Dr. DeMangus’ chair. Wires from the chair led up to the helmet.
He pressed record.
He’d read about some meditational techniques that he was going to use to try to clear his head of anything that could cause any chatter on the tape. He needed a clean baseline to work from. It was not to be.
Fate struck the blow. John DeMangus died suddenly as the blood vessel in his brain took that moment to give up. It ripped open. John stiffened in his chair and then went slack. He wasn’t found until morning. The machine kept on recording for six minutes after his death.
The machine was built to record thoughts. We’d just started to tap the potential of the human mind.
The tape of John’s death was appropriated by the military, wrapped in red tape and yellow danger stickers, and stuck without ceremony in a sub-basement outside of Tuscon. It was a grave of sorts.
A shallow one, as it turns out. Colonel Magda Jefferies sniffed it out five years later and picked it up. She was looking for a way to interrogate prisoners.
Playback machines were smaller by that point. Laws were in place. What she was doing was so far beyond illegal that there wasn’t even a name for her crime yet.
She played the tape back on a few prisoners, bound and crying in their tiled cells. She placed the standard helmet on their heads and pressed play. The relived the experience of having an embolism. They died.
Colonel Magda took the physical feeds out of the tape and played it back on a few more prisoners. It was the beginning.
The prisoners experienced Dr. John DeMangus’ death without the physical symptoms. They experienced his soul slipping loose.
The souls of these prisoners were ripped from their bodies and flung to whatever other side there was.
The human-shaped construct of meat and bone that was left was open to suggestion, non-verbal, and remorseless.
She created an army from POWs after that.
Magda’s zombies, they were called. Or merely Doctors, as a throwback to DeMangus. Her crime was called soul-stripping. The official name for it became Murder in the Fifth Degree.
Many of the troops in today’s army are stripped. It makes them more pliable and obedient while they still retain the motor control and reflexes of a normal human.
by submission | Jan 27, 2013 | Story |
Author : Lela Maarie De La Garza
There’d once been a golden age, Pearson thought. What would this one be called? He reflected on the meaning of different colours. Green? There wasn’t a speck of it left. The blue age? If blue meant hope, there was certainly no more of that. The purple age? The last royalty had left its throne years ago. Red denoted war. Well there was no more real war, though a few battles still raged wearily in the bombed out husk that had once been earth.
Grey. It was the colour of the future and the colour of the sky, even at mid-day. “The grey age,” Pearson said softly, testing it out.
“No no. Not the grey age. The white age.” A clear, bell like voice spoke, and Pearson turned around, searching for it. Nothing was visible through the ashy haze. “Look up,” the voice commanded, and he did. A star hung above, thrillingly bright, so close Pearson put up his hand and tried to feel it. “Not yet,” the voice said. “But soon. This star is on a trajectory with that of earth. Day after tomorrow they will meet.”
Pearson shook his head. “Then this world will be destroyed. And perhaps that will be for the best.”
“Wrong. There will be no collision. The star will pass harmlessly, but its light will sweep earth, ridding it of all hate, even the memory of hate. Green will come back to the trees, blue to the sky. Hands will reach out in love, never again in war. It will be the age of peace. The white age.”
Pearson waited a few minutes, but the voice did not speak again. He wondered what it had been. A mocking, lying demon or a truth-telling angel? Was there really a star or was it an illusion? Would it collide with earth, annihilating everything? Or would it rid the planet of its dark past, creating a future of hope and peace? A white age.
The light seemed to hang closer. Pearson put up his hand. This time he almost touched it. And he almost knew the answer.
by submission | Jan 26, 2013 | Story |
Author : Townsend Wright
“Alright let me see if I can explain this to you,” I wasn’t very good at deciphering the aliens’ emotions, especially with the monotonous voice of the translator machine, but I was fairly certain this was condescension. “What do you know so far?”
“Well,” I said, thinking over what the scientists I employed had said, “we know you come from the planet just closer to the sun than ours, and that your biology is based on entirely different levels than ours.”
I waited for my words to translate, for the alien to speak, and then for the translator again. “Both true, both true. But here’s what you don’t know: we’re your—”
“Uh—sorry, that last word didn’t didn’t translate properly.”
“Oh, what, you don’t have the concept of—? Well, that explains a lot. Anyway, basically we created you.”
I heard gasps from my people. I tried to find meaning in the alien’s words. “You—you mean at some point in our development you visited us and somehow affected our development?”
“No. We created you.” I looked at the alien. It had pale, dull skin, and its body was just—odd.
“You didn’t create us. No body created us! We started out as single celled organisms, which mutated over and over and slowly developed into the ecosystem on our planet today!”
“I’m impressed, you figured out evolution! And again that’s all true. But your missing a few details.” It paused, almost like it was waiting for me to say “like what?” like I was some idiot who had no idea and was extremely eager to know what it had to say. I didn’t comply. “Namely,” he said as if there was no pause, “where those single celled organisms came from. You see,” it continued now thinking I was incapable of interrupting it, “a long, long time ago our planet became very crowded, actually much as it is right now, unfortunately. It became so crowded that we resolved to move some of our people to Mars—that’s what we called your planet at the time—well, now too. But, at the time, there was very little air, and no liquid water, which we need, and it was very cold, so we made a nanite—er, a very very small machine, which we sent to Mars where it would self replicate using Martian dirt and terraform—uh, make the planet like our own. That would be your single celled organism.”
“You actually expect me to believe that?” I said. The problem was I sort of did. It was still all just speculation about where those first cells came from, and this sort of thing was one of the theories.
“Actually, I couldn’t care less. Those nanites were only supposed to be active for twenty of our years, after that we’d deactivate them from Earth and make our way over here. But, right after we sent it off we had a massive war, centuries of rebuilding, another war, blah blah blah,” I had no idea what that last part meant, “anyway you got left alone for a few millennia and a bit out of hand, so much so our signal couldn’t take out your complex forms all the way from Earth. So, here we are.” It turned to the other aliens, “Geoffrey,” one of them took out a small box with a red button.
“Wait, what?!”
“So long, you four armed, sparkly pink freaks!”
“Wait, you can’t—”
by Clint Wilson | Jan 25, 2013 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
He was the result of a human experiment of gigantic proportions. Why had they done it? Because they could, the way their ancestors had once bred dogs into all shapes and sizes, these scientists of the new grand era tweaked and fiddled at the molecular level, splicing and manipulating genes to their satisfaction.
In a sort of sick and twisted pun they had named him “Gene” at birth. He now resented it with a passion. Their tampering, which had started over a hundred years ago, was the result of the now brooding solitary figured seated beneath the starry night sky, high on a grassy hill overlooking the town below.
He reflected over it all. His great grandparents had been chosen for their size. She had been over six feet and he nearly seven. They were one of dozens of freakishly large couples brought into the program from all around the world; brought in and “tampered” with, just so a handful of so-called brainiacs could sit around and titter like school boys as they watched their devilish experiment unfold.
But of that original group, nobody could argue that the first babies hadn’t been amazing. His own grandfather had been one of the biggest, over twenty pounds. The scientists studied them all as they developed throughout their childhoods. And the world applauded as that first generation quickly sprouted to unbelievable proportions.
Gene’s grandfather had smashed an age-old record as he surpassed nine feet tall at just fifteen. But he wasn’t finished there. He topped out at eleven-foot-six and, at his peak, weighed over nine hundred pounds. The growth accelerations were beyond any of the scientists’ wildest dreams. But did they hesitate in the name of safety or humanity? No of course they did not. They wanted to push this experiment as far as they could. And now they had succeeded in doing so.
The giant women from that first generation, who averaged seven-feet-six and about four hundred pounds apiece, the ones that could conceive anyway, (less than half could) still had many difficulties birthing the thirty-plus pound babies of the second generation.
Gene’s father was another record breaker. By the time of his death at forty-six he was a sixteen-foot-tall nineteen-hundred-pound wonder. He and his people were impressive to the rest of the world to say the least, but unfortunately they were not very long-lived. Suffering a massive heart attack at such a seemingly young age, he had still outlasted over half of his schoolmates.
But what had really killed the experiment in the end was that almost none of the second generation had been able to conceive. Gene was one of only three born. The other two had succumbed before reaching adulthood. At twenty-two, he was old, and the last of the failed third and final generation.
He sat there on the hill with his knees drawn up, the largest man to have ever lived. Gene the giant weighed nearly four thousand pounds and stood twenty-one feet and nine inches tall. He wore special clothes manufactured by the government, and lived in a converted airplane hanger. Gene had no one else he could relate to and was glad for it. He wished this desolate life upon no other person.
Then suddenly an old lingering chest pain flared up, and his pumpkin-sized heart convulsed once, and then stuttered out its final exhausted beat. He simply let go his knees and fell backward. And as a spreading warmth washed over him, he thumped down mightily onto the grassy meadow and looked up at the stars, happy at long last.
