Redneck

by | Apr 15, 2007 | Story

Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer

“What the hell you got there Jeb?”  The man spat into the dirt and jerked a thumb towards Jeb’s pickup truck.  A hairless mass of ribbed muscle was lashed across the hood, two thick legs splayed out over each of the fenders.

“What is it? Dead, that’s what it is Lou. Damn thing fell out of the sky, right in front of my truck.” Jeb pulled hard on his cigarette and blew smoke rings as he admired his prize.

“Right out of the sky eh? Sure Jeb, how many times did you have to swerve exactly before it landed right in front of your truck?”

Jeb grinned back. “Don’t know if the meat’s any good, but that ugly head’s gonna look mighty fine mounted on my living room wall.” He crouched down and grunted at the dent in his bumper. “Made a helluva mess of my truck though. You think we can pull that out Lou?”

His friend leaned down and pulled half heartedly at the mangled metal. “No way, that’s not going anywhere. Maybe get a new one from the wreckers.”

A violent rending sound followed by a dull thud brought both men to their feet.  The beast still appeared to be secured to the hood, but something was different.  Lou extended a finger and poked it tentatively.

“It’s just an empty shell Jeb. Where’d you put the insides?”

Jeb wasn’t listening. His eyes followed a trail of fluid as it oozed from the husk’s ruptured spine down to the dusty parking lot. A line of increasingly wider spaced spatter marks snaked away into the deepening shadows. “Four times.” He whispered to no one in particular, staring across the parking lot into the darkness. “I hit it four times before it stopped moving.”

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Failsafe

by | Apr 14, 2007 | Story

Author : TJMoore

Ron relaxed and watched the drifting stars.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Deep Space Hyper-drive Repair, that’s what he would call his book. Maybe he should record it into his suit for posterity. He’d already gone through the checklist and found the step that killed him. It was that last airlock hatch. If only he’d left that one open, he’d be warm and happy and having a bulb of McGurtry’s finest down at the crew’s lounge.

At the mouth of the anomaly (officially known as Hyper Fold Anomaly Alpha Epsilon Fie, or, unofficially known as Wormhole 27) the Hyper-Drive controller had indicated a grid failure. Being the tech on duty, Ron had gone through all the diagnostics and determined that the problem was most likely a broken or loose connector on the grid itself, outside the hull.

Do: Put the Hyper-Drive controller in stand-by.

The controller had actually done that when it signaled a failure. He’d checked the status personally.

Do: Disconnect the power coupler to the external grid.

Done that one too. But that was a soft switch, not a physical disconnect. The controller must open and close that switch electronically, as part of its diagnostic. Bummer.

Ron had gone through the safety checklist with the casual ease of a man who’d done that task a hundred times a week as part of his normal duties. Maybe he’d skipped a step? Not likely.

He’d donned his suit and his tool bag and gone extra-vehicular to repair the grid connector with the confidence of a well-trained and experienced tech. No shortcuts, no surprises. Extra-vehicular activity was always serious business.

Don’t: Exit the ship without proper notification to the officer of the deck.

He’d done that too, all by the book.

Wally Zimmerman had second watch and he’d given Ron the green light after carefully reviewing his sheet. Wally was a good man and not likely to overlook something or hurry through a procedure.

Ron had navigated up to the grid coupler and located the corroded fitting in just a few minutes. It was a routine replacement and Ron had it fixed in a record twenty minutes. That was when it happened.

Ron wondered how many people in the history of mankind had said “Okay, try it now” as their last words. Ron had spoken those very words. What should have happened was that Wally would have run the Hyper-Drive controller diagnostic and come up with a green board. Ron would have returned to the hatch, logged in and the U.F.S. Gemini would have warped through the wormhole, instantaneously arriving on the outer edge of the Sombrero Galaxy, three weeks out from Hyper Fold Anomaly Beta Epsilon Gamma, which it had done.

The problem was, Ron was still hanging in space, holding his pliers, exactly where he was when he’d given his last command, his very last command.

Do: Leave at least one hatch interlock open while on EVA.

Well, that one was the kicker. Evidently, the controller had initiated its test, passed, checked the interlocks and safeties, powered up and, continuing with its previous instructions, processed the next step, which initiated the warp through the wormhole.

That last “Do” wasn’t in the checklist. Ron supposed there would be an edit to the procedure following this little mishap. He’d already logged his observations into his suit.

Unfortunately for Ron, wormholes were one-way streets. The Gemini couldn’t just warp back through this anomaly. Technically, it didn’t even exist on their end. Known wormholes were weeks or months apart and they would have to jump through at least three to get back here. Communications between ships was only possible when the ships where relatively close. It could be months before another ship used this wormhole. Ron had about twelve hours of air in his suit. Bummer.

He relaxed and watched the stars as he drifted.

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Weapons

by | Apr 13, 2007 | Story

Author : Duncan Shields , Featured Writer

In small German-occupied towns during WWII, if a local woman had a German soldier boyfriend during the occupation, she was hung when the war was over. People who had been seen talking to Germans and helping them had their heads shaved in the town square or some other public humiliation.

I’d always thought that this was the real horror of war. The war itself was bad for the soldiers but the moral dead end of what the average person had to do to survive left that person with almost no safe way out.

If you stood up to the occupiers, you were shot. If you were nice to the occupiers, your own people would hurt or even kill you once the invaders had lost the war and were gone. If the occupiers won in the end, you would be a second class citizen in a country you no longer recognized.

No one wins in a war except for the people who make the weapons.

This time, we were the weapons. Our manufacturers made a lot of money off of this war but it was over now and we’d been outlawed and banned and condemned. Our side lost. We’d been hunted down and executed. A few of us had been kept alive to serve the public’s need to see revenge.

For a nominal fee, you could beat or rape us. If you brought tools, you were charged before you used them based on the severity of damage that the tools would cause. For a higher fee, you could kill one of us. There were package deals involving all of the above.

There were fewer and fewer of us every day. Prices were going up.

If one burns the flag of the country or political movement that killed one’s family, it’s ultimately unsatisfying. If one captures a soldier of the enemy forces and tortures him to death, one is left satisfied but with a haunting black mark on one’s soul.

If one can take out one’s grief and anger on a thing that looks convincingly human but has no rights, new levels of satisfying sadism can be reached. By making weapons that looked human, our manufacturers accidentally guaranteed our brutalization.

We are helping people cope with loss. It can’t even be called genocide.

When the first few men were let in and what was left of my hair was pulled violently back, I liked to think about what would have happened if our side had won. I fantasized about the millions of us walking the streets with lives. I thought about our lives as weapons being a distant memory. I thought about going on dates, working at a job, being decommissioned, and having nothing to do on a Tuesday night. I thought about our existence being tolerated and maybe even accepted.

My head snaps violently to the right from the impact of a farmboy’s fist and I pray that someone has enough money in this small town to pay for execution.

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Unconventional Warfare

by | Apr 12, 2007 | Story

Author : Sarah Klein

General Elias Knox sat staring at the paperwork at his desk, utterly confounded. “Would you care to explain what happened, lieutenant?”

The lieutenant swallowed nervously, trying not to tremble noticeably. “Sir, we dropped the conventional bombs yesterday at 2100 hours. There was noticeable destruction of building structures, but we saw no casualties – not even wounds. No bodies. They didn’t even seem to be frightened.”

“This is ridiculous,” Knox snarled. “Damn aliens won’t die. We don’t even know enough about them to try to starve them out.”

The lieutenant swallowed again and kicked dust off the floor. “What do you propose we do, sir?”

General Knox had never been defeated. He was Earth’s best weapon – an absolute mastermind of military manners. He’d been in every type of climate, participated in every type of warfare, and used every weapon. But now that he was up against nonhuman enemies, he wasn’t as successful. In Earth’s first battle amongst the stars, the humans were losing. Badly.

He sat lost in thought for a moment, and then started angrily. “Drop the atomic,” he growled, spinning around in his seat. The lieutenant’s eyes popped wide open.

“Are you sure, sir? You do know-“

“I said drop the atomic! That’s an order! 0500 tomorrow morning.”

“Yes sir.”

The lieutenant nervously paced the floor. It was 0505 the next morning, and the atomic bomb had just been dropped on the planet’s busiest city. He tried to calm himself down before checking the monitoring screens. The other day’s bombing had still shaken him – not the destruction it had unleashed, but the absence of it. He may have been young, but he was used to seeing bodies sprawled across pavement and pools of blood. The unaffected bodies of the aliens scared him more than any blood-caked, distorted human corpse ever had.

At 0510 Knox sat down in one of the seats facing several of the monitoring screens. The lieutenant saw him out of the corner of his eye and watched him carefully, but he did nothing. A couple minutes later, he steeled himself and walked to look over the silent general’s shoulder. What he saw pushed him far past the brink of panic.

“My God. We’re doomed.”

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Calling All Volunteers

by | Apr 11, 2007 | Story

Author : J. S. Kachelries

I couldn’t get to NASA’s Office of Human Capital Management fast enough. The e-flyer said they were looking for 1000 healthy individuals, between the ages of 21 and 32, that would be willing to participate in the first manned colonization mission to a planet in the Scorpii system. According to the flyer, they didn’t need trained astronauts for this mission; they were looking for a variety of skilled artisans to “provide the underlying foundation for a permanent autonomous human habitation.” Hell, I was a certified Class 6, Grade IX Senior Maintenance Technician. You can’t colonize a new planet without somebody who can keep things runnin’.

I found a vacant “Employment Opportunity” kiosk and tapped in my Citizen ID number, then entered the job classification code from the e-flyer. “Greetings, mister Swartz,” said the sultry female voice of the Mark-III human-friendly interface. “Please enter the required information into Sections A1 through E22, and then proceed to the Ames Advanced Medical Laboratory for astrobiological DNA screening, psych evaluation, and a fertility testing.”

“Roger that,” I replied, as I enthusiastically opened Section A (Personal Information). It was an easy enough start. First name, middle initial, last name, etc., etc. Then I got to question A31, “Enter your financial assets, liabilities, and list of your dependents.” I glanced down at the kiosk ID tag; JANE-3261956. “Excuse me, ah, Jane. Why is this information needed?”

“Sir, you are applying for a one-way mission to a distant solar system. We need to make sure that you’re not attempting to avoid your financial obligations on Earth. There will also be questions concerning any outstanding warrants and subpoenas. You can’t flee the law either. In addition, you must answer questions about your family’s mental and physical history, drug/alcohol usage, sexual orientation, etc.”

“Well, that all makes sense, I guess. “ Two hours later I completed Section A and opened Section B. “Say Jane, how am I supposed to know if I am allergic to ethyl-something-or-other? I don’t even know what that stuff is.”

“Ethylene-trisodium-glycol-phosphate. It’s a biological stabilizer. We use it to replace all of the freezable liquids in your body. For example, your blood, cerebrospinal fluids, pleural effusion, semen…”

“Whoa. What was that?”

“Sir, you are traveling to a system that is 45.75 light years away. At maximum velocity, it will take the ship 587 years to arrive. You do know that this is a ‘Sleeper Starship’? Your body will be frozen in liquid helium in suspended animation for the duration of the trip. If you have any water in your body, it will expand when it freezes, and you’ll split open like a hotdog in a microwave.”

“Oh, I thought you had warp drive, or something. Is this freezing thing safe?”

“Relatively speaking. It’s safer than most other life extension protocols.”

“’Relatively speaking,’ huh. What does that mean?”

“Well, to be perfectly frank, you have about a 50% probability of viable revival. That’s why NASA is requesting 1000 volunteers. In order to maintain the overall genetic variability of the colony, a minimum of 250 mating pairs is required.”

“Fifty percent? That sucks. Forget it.” I quickly pressed ‘Exit application, do not save.’

“Listen, Jane, can I go anywhere else without becoming a Popsicle?”

“Yes, sir. I recommend the tropics.”

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