by submission | Aug 9, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
“We beat it!” Those were the words my lawyer had said to me right after sentencing. “It” was the death penalty. “Son, you shouldn’t have done this in Texas,” he’d said to me the first time we met. “This” referred to killing a man.
It happened in the middle of July. It was one of the hottest summers on record. There had been a power failure at the office. Power wouldn’t be restored until the following day. Nobody was too broken up about going home early, least of all me. It was about half past one when I pulled into my subdivision. There was a car in my driveway. I immediately recognized it as belonging to Jimmy. Jimmy and I had been best friends since elementary school.
I’d felt that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as soon as I saw the car, but I tried to ignore it. Jimmy had come by to see me, I told myself. Probably been here all of two minutes. Wait another minute and he’ll come right back out that front door. Of course, I knew what I would find when I went in the house.
This is where it starts to get blurry. It was a really long time ago, after all. I remember catching Jimmy and my wife in the act. I remember a lot of yelling. I remember the gunshot. I remember the cops cuffing me. The blood on the bed. My wife shaking uncontrollably.
The prosecutor had tried to get the death penalty. Maybe I deserved it. But I had a good lawyer. Maybe too good. He got me life without the possibility of parole. I was 45 years old when I was convicted. I had high blood pressure and high cholesterol and I’d smoked a pack-and-a-half of cigarettes a day since I was 17. My dad had died of a heart attack at 51. A life sentence didn’t seem all that bad.
I’d been in prison for about ten years when the Nanotech Revolution happened. Everything started advancing really quick. Robots, spaceships, all that science fiction stuff the movies and comic books predicted that never happened all became commonplace in just a few years. And everything became really cheap. “Self-replicating molecular assemblers,” they called ’em. Like tiny little robots that could build almost anything from dirt, water, and sunshine. Medicine got real advanced, too.
First they cured diabetes. Didn’t just come up with a better way to treat it, they really cured it. Heart disease, colon cancer, Alzheimer disease. One by one, nanotech cured all man’s ailments. Eventually, they announced they’d found a cure for aging itself. “Cell repair nanobots” and “telomeres” and a bunch of other stuff I never understood. And because all this nanotech medicine was so cheap, everybody was able to get it.
Including prisoners.
I’ve tried to commit suicide four times. They monitor me ’round the clock now. “They” being the machine guards, of course. Guarding prisoners is one of those jobs humans (and transhumans) won’t do.
Nations have risen and fallen around the prison. The Greater American Federated States is the name of the country that Texas belongs to at the moment.
I’ve been locked up for 485 years. They keep saying they’re gonna pass legislation to free us. Or to let us die. They’ve been saying that for almost 300 years. I wish to God that prosecutor had done his job right and got me the death penalty.
by Julian Miles | Aug 8, 2012 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It’s been ten years since the Humanis Confederacy swept the Roekuld from the Spiral Arm in a rebellion that no-one thought mankind capable of. In six months we undid the defeats and treacheries of fifty years. Victory was absolute and mercy forgotten.
We. Sadly. My blood is tinged with green and I can read thoughts within eight metres. I am a Rho-Ka-Mismeja, elite of the Absalon Rage, premiere commando of the Roekuld. I trained for five years to join humanity. Underwent six months of irreversible surgery, losing a half metre in height and a digit from each appendage. But the ‘man’ who joined the harvest labourers in Barron, a small town on the frontier world of Fettya, had the rugged features and hefty build that marked the nomads of the mountain ranges. My willingness to work and drink got me accepted, and after the winter I moved to Dellaban, the capital city. Command knew there was something major being planned. I had barely been accepted into the resistance when that something became the end of my race.
I spent a year as a homeless drunk, risking the minimal chance of detection. Only a small group of humans pursued the ‘shadow company’. The rest thought that we only existed in wartime myth. A year later I had become a vagrant when my remaining comrades commandeered an armoured freighter to strike at the heart of the Confederacy. I saw their final broadcast, all vengeful fury and bared teeth. They were blasted to dust and humanity celebrated the end of the Roekuld. I was alone, yet never regretted being too drunk to answer the final call to join them.
Three years later I returned to Barron, welcomed back like a prodigal son. Two years after that I had become the town smithy, with a profitable sideline in unusual jewellery: unusual because it used designs from my disintegrated homeland.
Early one dawning I was staggering home when a thought hit me: “You smell like a hebegraf.”
I spun round too fast and fell in a heap, opening my eyes to see a pair of grey eyes framed in a mass of tawny hair. She raised a hand so I could see one of my bracelets on her wrist.
“Your work made me cry. To see Lethdargil scrollwork again was something I never expected to do.”
I lay there as shock chased the hangover away. The smell emanating from me became all too clear. I smiled. “I remember hebegraf smelling better. Apologies, I thought myself alone.”
“I am Atanel of Palameen.”
Images of that vast, lush tropical delta spotted with small communities came to mind.
“Bushlarl of Lethdargil.”
She smiled. “The mountains bred another metalworker?”
“Family trade. Here I am Bush.”
“Atane.”
While I washed, she made breakfast and we spun to each other, the affinity of thought sharing healing us in places we had thought unreachable.
“I was wallowing when the last call came. I was the only one to refuse and had to waste half a year out of my mind so they could not find me. Then I wandered until I saw your bracelet. That was a year ago.”
She appeared in the doorway, mugs of steaming broth in hand and a faint smile on her face. “Shall I be your sister or first love?”
“First love, please. The drinking was only partly to forget. It also kept Barron’s marriageable women at bay.”
She laughed. I knew then that we could share, finding a refuge in each other’s mind while Barron became a comfortable place to slip unnoticed into extinction.
by Duncan Shields | Aug 7, 2012 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
They stood on level sixteen of the meat building, waiting for their order of sharkbeef.
This vat boutique specialized in hybrid delicacies and Kay was hosting a birthday dinner party tonight. The invites and accepts scrolled across her vision as she looked down at her son. The store prided itself on having curious antique items for the customers to handle while they waited. He was engrossed in something.
“What are these?” posted Adam. He was six years old today. “They look ancient. What were they used for? They look heavy enough to be weapons.” He turned it over in his hands while his pupils irised wide, scanning through several spectra and mags to see if there was something deceptively complex under the surface.
There wasn’t. He was looking at a book. He’d never seen one before. He had yottabytes of information in his cranial cavity just like everyone else but like his parents always said “It’s about asking, not having.” He had perfectly decent search engines installed but like most children, he just wasn’t that curious about the past.
“It’s a book.” Kay said. “It’s how humans used to record information when we stored it externally. Sort of like a baby internet. You remember that from your history downloads?”
“Yes.” Adam lied. He never paid attention to his school feeds. There were so many other cool things happening with his friend’s challenges in the socials. Pretty Renee from crosstag was finally paying attention to his scores.
“I know you haven’t.” she said with a sigh. She remembered being so curious at his age and wondered why he wasn’t. She took the book and opened it. The title had rubbed off but she recorded the first few lines into her eyes. The results fluttered through. No exact matches. Must have been a small publishing run with little to no success. Looked like a collection of poetry. She scanned it in to the general knowledge Linksys, tagging ownership and viewing rights to see if there were any challenges. There weren’t. It must have been quite obscure.
“It was a painfully laborious process and in real-world costs, entire forests were given over to these methods. Businesses made money off of them. Government sponsored storage facilities kept entire buildings full of them.” She searched. “Ah. Libraries, they were called. Like our file systems.”
Adam was already bored. He hated shopping with his mother.
She went on. “It’s a form of meditation in some of the enclaves to read them. Taking in information that slowly is like eating a great meal over the course of days. Flashing a book in seconds still gives you the same comprehension but it’s not the same. Actually reading, using your meat mind, well, some of them say they feel connected to our ancestors by reading this way.”
She had to admit to herself that it sounded boring. But she’d never tried it. She turned it over in her hands like a curious animal inspecting a possible trap.
The shopkeeper came over with the sharkbeef. “Here you go, Miss. Creds received. Ah, I see you’ve found something interesting.” He said, friendly eyebrows waggling at the book.
“Thank you Jake. How much for this, uh, book?” she asked.
“Take it.” Jake replied. “Bring it back if you don’t like it.”
Adam sighed theatrically. Kay tucked the book into her bag.
“Okay, let’s go, kiddo. Your birthday dinner awaits. Thanks, Jake!” she said.
Tonight she would read in the bath like her grandmothers did. She was looking forward to it.
by submission | Aug 6, 2012 | Story |
Author : Kevin Crisp
The judge gave Rick several choices, of which the young men’s wilderness therapy program on an uncolonized but certified habitable world seemed the most palatable. He learned to pitch an atmosphere tent, tie a tourniquet and find cover from acid rain. He was light years away from his pregnant ex-girlfriend and any means to procure nervous system stimulants.
Rick stuck a forked stick in a hole in the ground until he felt a soft resistance and twisted it. It tangled firmly in the fur of a plump, rat-like thing, which he pulled squawking out of its burrow. He hit it on the head with a convenient rock, deftly skinned and gutted it, packed it in mud and lay it on the coals to bake until the flesh was tender and free of parasites.
Shawn, his assigned “buddy”, sat down on the rock beside him. “OK, your turn, the doc’s on the screen for you.”
Rick trudged between several tents and campfires to the therapy tent and sat in the folding chair in front of the over-sized two-way video monitor that made the tent feel cramped and claustrophobic. The jitter in the image and the echo in the sound reminded Rick just how much space separated him from his therapist.
“Ricky, my man! How ya’ doing?” the young doc said with overbearing enthusiasm. “How ya’ settling in?”
“Well, I feel more like a kid at summer camp than a juvenile delinquent undergoing state-mandated therapy.”
There was a pause during which the image was frozen. “And how’s your buddy working out?”
“Shawn? He’s okay. He snores. Say, doc, what’s the plan here?”
Pause. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, when do we get started with the therapy business? It’s been three weeks already, and we still haven’t–”
“I know, and you’ve already come a long ways! You’re learning to be self-sufficient, and you’re building confidence and making healthy friendships–”
“But shouldn’t I be lying on a couch and talking about my cold mother and my relationship problems and my anti-social acting out?”
Pause. “Absolutely! Talking is very important. What’s on your mind?”
“I — I don’t know. Shouldn’t you ask questions or something? I mean, that’s what all the other shrinks did.”
Pause. “And did that help?”
“No, but–”
Outside the tent, the camp rocked as a sonic boom split the air. Rick was familiar enough with the sound at this point to know that a supply rocket had just broken through the atmosphere and was streaking across the alien sky in a blazing arc of fire. Outside the tent, the other boys were hastily digging out their field glasses and compasses and estimating where the next week’s supplies would land.
“Sounds like we’re breaking camp again, doc.”
Pause. “Is that rocket landing already? Seems early; sorry we got cut short. We’ll touch base next week. I wanna hear all about that mother of yours, okay?”
Rick walked back over to the campfire and checked his dinner. “Looks like two days marches due east,” Shawn said watching the rocket.
“They really keep us on the move, don’t they?” Rick dragged the mud-caked rat-like thing off the coals with a stick, and began chipping away the baked mud with a knife. The meat looked tender and moist, but the smell was characteristically sour. “Shawn, are you getting better here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are you feeling — I don’t know — less depressed, angry, whatever since you got here?”
“Yeah, I think so. Don’t you?”
“Think things’ll be any different back at home?” The rat-like thing tasted better than it smelled.
by submission | Aug 5, 2012 | Story |
Author : Aldous Mercer
It was a deathbed recantation. The Astronaut lay, sunken and frail amidst his bedclothes, as they set up their equipment. There was a window on the other side of the bed, framing a portion of the nearby mountain range.
“Beautiful view you’ve got,” said the man from NASA. “Peaceful.” Remote.
“We’re ready, sir,” said a technician.
Everyone took their places, duly time-stamped their notepads.
“I was mistaken,” began the Astronaut, age-mottled skin stretched tight over his hands as he gestured. “It was a late-stage booster shell. Couldn’t have been anything else.”
“That’s what you were told when you reported it,” said the NASA official, stern and somewhat smug.
The Astronaut nodded. “I’m sorry, Administrator, for all the embarrassment I caused the Agency. Convinced myself—wanted to convince you all.”
“Why?” Not publicity—the agency’s heroes had too much of that as it was.
The Astronaut was silent for a while. When he continued, his voice was quiet. “I saw auroras dropping like curtains of fire beneath my feet. A sunset, and a sunrise, every 90 minutes. More stars, Administrator, more stars than any human being has ever seen before. I touched the outer edges of what humanity found possible, and I found… that I couldn’t go further. I desperately wanted to believe that there was something more out there. That the threshold of our reach was not limited…”
When it was clear he wouldn’t say anything more—his water-pale gaze was fixed on some faraway memory—they gathered up their equipment and their papers, and respectfully let themselves out. The doors were left unlocked for the nursing service’s nightly visit.
The Astronaut lay on his bed till the long rays of the sun were angled low enough that they brushed the tops of the mountains in his window. Not the Ozarks, but they would do. The Astronaut nodded to himself.
“This will do.”
He expelled a breath. But before he could take another, his dulled—trained—hearing picked up the blue-shifting Doppler screech of an approaching ballistic. Confused, the Astronaut scrabbled weakly at the bed-sheet—the sound of a plane in a nosedive where there shouldn’t be a plane—automatically calculating descent rates, vectors.
He braced for impact.
Light bloomed, outside his window, scattering incoherently onto his upturned face, the creases of the sheet, the window-sill. But there was no impact. When the light faded, the Astronaut saw the burnished metallic lines of a cylinder—about 75 feet in length, impossibly wider than it was long—hovering a foot above the newly-laid sod in the backyard.
Then he heard the footsteps coming towards the bedroom.
—-
The Visitor, upon entering, found the Astronaut on the bed, wheezing with silent laughter.
“I swore, up and down, I’d never seen…” the Astronaut gestured towards the window. “Not a UFO nut. Not anymore.”
The Visitor’s head tilted to a side in amusement. “We are not gods, Commander, to require belief in order to justify our existence.” When the Astronaut shook his head, the visitor hesitated, then stepped forward. “My name is—”
“Could you speak up please?”
The Visitor raised his voice. “I wished to congratulate you on your iconic flight,” he said. “One test-pilot to another.”
The Astronaut squinted in the Visitor’s direction. “You were there.”
“In a ship,” said the Visitor. “Beside yours. We passed each other, in the eternal night.”
“A long time ago,” grunted the Astronaut. “Why are you here now?” A slight odor—half-absolved bitterness—clung to his last word.
The Visitor smiled. “I don’t suppose you could call it an abduction, per se. More like…an invitation…”
—
Author’s Note: “The threshold of our reach is written in neither support nor skepticism but love: of certain astronaut-stories that have a tendency to embarrass the agency.”
by submission | Aug 4, 2012 | Story |
Author : Chris Capps
She’s a shrewd old lady. She knows things. When she gave the Parch brothers the treasure map, she said the journey would be dangerous. She even asked them if they had twelve shooters and – more importantly – knew how to use them. When they assured her they had killed before, she nodded and handed it over.
The treasure itself was a relic of our planet’s past, back when the interstellar mining syndicate owned the rights to the massive thorium deposits wedged deep in the canyons. It had been this simple isotope that had justified years of terraforming and careful city building. And when it dried up, so did the supply runs. When that went, so did most of the decent people and a great many roughnecks like the Parch brothers had landed in what was left hoping to gain some windfall from the planet’s past.
And then there were the urban areas. Even folk fixing to end it all didn’t go to the cities.
Unfortunately for the Parch brothers, the treasure map led them directly to an abandoned greenhouse complex in a little town called Good Night Sunshine, named in its heyday because of the massive ore drilling complex one town over that stretched up nearly a half mile into the sky. The sun rarely peeked over into the town proper. Needless to say, the greenhouses had been retrofitted with indoor lights.
They set up camp in the artificial wilderness of one of the buildings.
They had already run into their share of bandits, so when the doors to the greenhouse opened and the Parch brothers saw a trio of rough looking thugs springing to get in at them, pistols in hand, it was a simple enough flash of lights before the victor was declared. The Parch brothers had added three more to their kill count.
The older of the two, Buck, walked over to the bodies to see if they had anything on them – no doubt stolen off of the decent folk. Buck hollered at his brother holding a closed fist around ninety-eight dollars in gold bullion. Not a bad claim, but pocket change compared to the wealth that awaited them if they found the treasure. While Buck was searching the bodies, the younger brother Ed said he wasn’t interested – said he had only “the big one” on his mind.
When Ed awoke, he found himself alone with the sound of rain pelting the glass windows all around him in the perpetual artificial sunlight of the greenhouse. When he went outside he found Buck’s footprints imprinted in the mud filling up with water leading back the way they came.
When he found Buck, he was outside the old lady’s house, gun in hand and murder in his eyes. He said he had found a familiar looking map on the bandits leading dangerously close to the trail they were on. He had a few questions for the old lady.
Ed, being the younger, smelled the rank of lies on his brother’s breath, and the two carried on from there yelling and spitting until someone -we don’t know who- raised a gun and they shot each other stone dead. I’d say that’s the closest anyone ever came to figuring the whole thing out.
The Parch brothers had ended each other, but I’ve got to hand it to them. Buck suspected something was amiss when he found that map. I can’t say I feel too bad, though. It takes a cold-hearted man to shoot his own brother.
She says she didn’t hear the gunshots. With the thunder carrying on that night the way it did I’m not surprised. She never even knew they’d come back for her until she found them both lying outside her front door. Maybe one of these days we’ll figure out what to do about the cities, but you know it’s a lot easier to walk around at night these days with all the rough and tumble folk out of the picture.
You see in this town we don’t hand out death warrants. We hand out treasure maps.
