by submission | Dec 6, 2007 | Story
Author : Andy Bolt
The dripping residue of some poor bastard’s elbow explodes against my shoulder.
“Goo fight!†Jayav shouts, handfuls of dead man oozing through his fingers. My synthskin registers the contact with unstable biomaterial and sterilizes my left arm.
“You have serious problems,†I say. “Now, what do you think?â€
“That you’re no fun, Meggie.†Jay is chuckling as he builds a grotesque little snowman out of human flesh and liquefied innards.
“About the body.â€
“Oh.†He draws a little smile with his index finger. “Normal. Churn it and burn it.â€
“Agreed.â€
We stand. While Jay nudges his snowman’s head off with the toe of his boot, I drop a gene blender into the puddle. There is a momentary whirlpool effect, followed by a bubbling human stew, and finally, the scooper shoots clear with a sample and the afterburners reduce the whole mess to a few dried out protein strands.
“Your villainous disrespect for the dead has earned you the position of bad news barer,†I say as we turn and exit the bedroom.
“Your mother villainously disrespects the dead,†Jay replies, clicking over to symp-auto.
We meet the family in the hallway, and I try my best to look contrite as Jay’s pre-recorded condolences speech starts emanating from the microdigitizer in the back of his throat. My mind wanders as the MD starts to explain how decades of genetic modification and enhancement have completely destabilized the average person’s genome. The droning but natural-sounding voice then assures that the boost in the general quality of life has been worth the sacrifice. The wife asks about toxicity. It’s one of the more common questions, and one the MD is programmed to answer. It calmly tells her that the WHO is still looking into the details, but the protein remains have never been shown to be harmful. They’ve never been shown to be harmless, either, but the MD leaves that part out. The fact is no one knows what triggers a genetic meltdown. But every extant human has some altered DNA at this point, so we’re all potential victims of a seemingly random killer that strikes without warning. The MD leaves that part out, too. I nod sympathetically as Jay’s arms execute a series of pre-programmed shoulder pats.
“We’re all going to die,†Jay tells me, back in our bullet and zipping towards our next case in Osaka.
“You should add that to your condolences speech. That sets the right mood, I think.†I push my seat back and let my eyelids droop. It’ll take the bullet about ninety minutes to get to Japan from Winnipeg, and I could use some sleep.
“You laugh,†Jay continues, lighting up a pipe full of the new strain of combat marijuana. “But my buddy Jukks is on the research team. We’re all going to get this. Faster and faster, as it starts to spread. You can’t fix what’s broken if broken is what you are.†He stares at me, self-satisfied, his eyes the same reddish color as the artificially prolonged sunset we’re speeding into.
“We’re all going to die!†he giggles.
“Yeah,†I agree, drifting off.
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by submission | Dec 5, 2007 | Story
Author : Beth Mathison
The thin slice of the moon slipped past her window frame, into the night sky waiting for it.
There were people there on the moon, they told her, although some days she doubted their stories. Her parents told her many things – that human beings had built space ships to travel to distant stars. That there were rooms, buried deep underground, that held all sorts of miracle cures for diseases. They told her that at one time you could talk to another person across the planet in an instant, by picking up a piece of machinery. People used to live on the moon, they said, living together in tight groups called colonies. Her parent’s expressions turned sad, when they spoke of such things. Emily didn’t ask about them often.
She thought about it, though, especially at night. What the world had been like. At ten, she was old enough to know the difference between fairy tales and reality. That past, when the world supposedly sparkled with magical things, seemed too much like a fairy tale.
Emily lay on her bed, a down comforter tucked under her chin, and watched the sky through her bedroom window. Her mother allowed her to keep the thick shutters open every so often, when Emily had that trapped feeling. During the day, she loved the colors of winter, the sharp scent of curing meat as her father worked outside, helping her mother can fruits and vegetables from the hothouse to store in their pantry. At night, however, her thoughts turned to the long days ahead of them. Having to stay indoors in some days if the thermometer told them they’d get instant frostbite if they went outside. Rationing wood and food and everything else.
Her father had taken her to a city once. He said he wanted her to see what lay under the snow and ice. Standing at the edge of a cliff, holding his mitten-covered hand, he pointed out the lumps and dips in the landscape. People used to live there, he told her. In cities filled with people and animals and machines that moved.
Looking out her window, she wondered if a journey to the stars were as cold as the world. The blackness of space surrounding those people traveling to the moon, the earth falling behind them like a dream.
Snaking a hand out from underneath the covers, she pressed her palm against the frosty glass. She would close the window soon, as the night pressed in against her. But for now, she felt the cold filling her warm hand and imagined another girl, laying in her own bed on the moon. Pressing her hand against the cold window of glass, watching the earth slide past her window.
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by Duncan Shields | Dec 4, 2007 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The Ravaged Angel.
That’s what was painted in red nail polish on the nose of the three-person cryshuttle. It had docked on autopilot with good codes but wasn’t answering hails. The dock’s computer was talking to the shuttle’s compnav to ascertain where they’d come from and what their sitrep was when the hatches blew on the three ovals on the top of the Ravaged Angel’s hull.
It was a human ship, possibly an escape pod, but the decorations on the outside of the polished hull looked old and slightly archaic.
With a well-oiled creak, the vacuum pump kicked in and the ovals on the top of the ship swung up and back to reveal three capsule bays, each one holding a naked, blue, cryosleeping body.
The Ravaged Angel held three sleeping women.
The silence held for a few moments before noise amped up into procedure again and we got the three girls disembarked and taken to sick bay.
Cryosleep Restart was a fairly routine procedure but all the same, the doctor felt the need to ‘dust off’ some manuals from the backup banks. He also requested an emergency download from homeship for immediate protocol deniability with maximum instruction. Just to be sure.
None of us had seen a woman for our entire lives, you see. Neither had our grandfathers.
This must have been a capsule from one of the fabled ‘golden seed’ whoreships that had traveled from colony to colony hundreds of years ago.
It was too late to keep it a secret. As the bay commander, it was my duty to report what had happened to the captain and relay his decision on how to proceed.
I had no idea how I’d react in the presence of a woman. Something about the way I swear I could actually smell them from all the way across the cargo-lock floor while standing behind thick glass told me I should stay away from sick bay until I was fully ready for the briefing.
Three colours of hair haunted my dreams that night.
They’d be awake in eight hours. I wished there were flowers somewhere on board that I could bring them to make them feel safe.
I’m sure all sixteen thousand of us felt the same way. I’m sure at this very moment, every last person on the ship who wasn’t in the bay was downloading and reviewing those three pod-doors swinging up and back.
It was going to be a different ship in the morning.
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by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 3, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Jacob sat as he always did, cross legged on the coffee table in the middle of the room, making himself the center of attention.
“You really have to get over us and move on, you know that don’t you?” His voice carried to the corners of the room and back to its only other occupant, enveloping her in the warmth of his familiar tones.
“I’m not ready to give up. I know we can make this work,” her voice seemed small and fragile by comparison, “we just need more time.”
“What you’re holding onto isn’t real, it’s just a memory. You’ve got to get past this Holly, you’ve got to live your own life without me.”
The woman blinked back tears, tucking her knees to her chin and burrowed deeper into the corner of the couch.
“It’s not fair, Jacob. I can’t give up, you can’t give up either.”
Jacob shook his head, smoothing back the stray stands of hair that refused to stay tucked behind his ears. “I’m afraid I had to give up a long time ago, and I’m sorry, but we’ve talked about this Holly, you have to let go.”
Holly glared, her eyes burning through the space where he sat. “You said you’d stay with me forever Jacob, was that a lie? You left me with all this money and this house full of memories but it’s not you Jacob, it’s not you and it’s not enough.”
Jacob laced his fingers behind his head, pulling his elbows in and straining as he lowered his eyes to the floor. “I left you money so you could live your life, not to watch you waste it waiting for me.” His stoic expression faltered slightly, revealing its undercurrent of pain, his eyes swollen with imminent tears. “I always knew this was a one way trip for me Holly, you knew that too. You can imprint the essence of the flesh on the machine, but you can’t reconstitute that essence back into flesh. You’ll be long gone before that’s possible; do you want to live out what’s left of your life waiting for a miracle?”
“When the time comes, I’ll imprint too, then we can wait together in there until they can bring us both back.” Holly’s eyes streamed now, her body wracked with sobs.
“Holly, sweetheart, this isn’t all of me. You know that. The computer has enough memories and thoughts to make a convincing persona, but I’m just a projection, a shell. I’m not the man you lost. He’s gone. You and I both know that he wouldn’t have wanted you to stay here wasting away like this, and if you can’t move on with me here, then I’m going to have to purge myself from this system.”
“You wouldn’t. No. Please, Jacob, don’t leave me. Not like this. It is you in there, I know it. I feel it.”
“I’m just a program, Holly. If you can’t let me go, then I have no choice.”
“No, Jacob, a machine would never kill itself for me. If you were a machine, you wouldn’t care, but you do care, don’t you? I know you’ll never leave me Jacob. Tell me you’ll never leave me.”
As the afternoon sun stirred dust up through the cloud of light that was Jacob, she could see rainbows glistening on his wet cheeks.
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by submission | Dec 2, 2007 | Story
Author : Laura Bradford
He chased her even as her ship touched the stars.
At night he gazed through the glass of his telescope, feeling tiny compared to the evening sky, but his days were all routine: get up, go to work, watch the flying cars crisscross and block his chance to catch the faintest patch of gold in the sky. The streets of the city felt empty, even if a thousand people passed by him every day.
He waited in her favorite café, ignoring the news reports flashing on the screen behind the counter. The world continued on without her–how could it, and how could it not? Now he could only count the remaining days until she returned. She had blasted away in her golden ship during the first snow of October, as he stood in a sea of snowflakes for one last goodbye. How she loved the winter, always dressing in a hat and scarf to laugh at the face of frost and chill. What was happening now to amuse her in the dark and swirling expanse of space?
To distract himself he kept busy, tinkering on gadgets or mapping the stars. She would have taken him if she could, he knew that, but his land-locked heart couldn’t survive the journey. Besides, he had a job, clients, commitments. The world had roped him in while she sprang free, not even halted by gravity. So he waited, one fixed point in a shuffling world.
One day nearing spring, a crackly message sounded on his inter-stellar radio, bringing a sentence that gave him an unsafe amount of hope and longing: “I wish you could see the sunset on Mars.â€
So she’d be home soon. He collected every scrap of paper he could find and added detail to his navigational charts: color, texture, a red planet, a path with a yellow dot reaching home. A tiny hologram of the ship spun over his desk, and he sighed and slipped a sky-blue map beneath it, the ship’s shadow quivering over the surface of the world.
Her ship touched down as the last of the snows melted, and the first buds twinkled under half-frozen dew. The hatch opened and there stood his pilot, all honey-colored hair and blue eyes.
“You won’t believe what I’ve found,†she said. “The contributions this mission made to science–â€
He swept her in his arms and kissed her. “I’ve missed you.â€
She smiled. “I brought a photo. Now you can see it.â€
It showed a dusty red sky with light filtering through, the sunset on Mars: an image he had guessed at in his dreams, a souvenir from space. He hugged her and said, “It’s lovely, Zoe, but how long are you staying?â€
“Forever.†But even as she said it, she raised her eyes to the sky.
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