by submission | Sep 10, 2008 | Story
Author : Ryan Somma
“You’re angry.”
“I’m not angry, I’m frustrated.”
“If you’re frustrated, that usually means you’re about to learn something.”
“Don’t quote Philo to me. You know I hate it when you quote Philo.”
“I’m just trying to think this through like he would do. This was his project, and now we’re responsible for it.”
“You think you’re so smart, but you’re not.”
“Obviously, I’m still here aren’t I?”
Dodd huffed back into his chair, folding his arms across his chest. I took advantage of his impromptu pout-break to nab Philo’s old Rubik’s Cube off the desk. Dodd moaned his displeasure at this, but knew better than to say anything. I was consistently solving the puzzle in under five minutes now.
It was almost a year since Philo vanished, along with a significant minority of city-dwellers, half of University Campuses, and all of Mensa International. Where did they go? Was it the fabled “Singularity” the old websites talk about? The “Rapture for Nerds?” Who knows, the people who came up with that idea had all disappeared as well.
So here we were, Dawson, I, and the rest of humanity’s dimbulbs left on Earth, playing with the toys the smart kids had left behind, trying to figure them out. Keeping faith in the supposed plasticity of our minds. We were muddling through understanding the brainiacs’ artifacts one by one.
I put the Rubik’s Cube, solved, down on the desk, thinking toward my lunch break, when I would resume tackling chess problems, and I had an epiphany–my new word of the week, and said, “Remember Dawson? She worked on an application just like this at her new job. I remember Philo giving her phone support on it all the time. They even set up an online forum to collaborate… before they–you know–transcended. I bet we can–”
“Dawson?” Dodd cut me off. “You mean Chelsea Dawson? The girl we fired from Help Desk? She went to egghead heaven too?” Dodd’s eyes rolled up into his head, frowning, “Oh, that’s more than I can bare.’
“I know,” I shook my head ruefully, “I’m feeling a little insulted too.”
Dodd was immersed in his self-loathing again, his very existence offending him. I popped a fish-oil pill and resumed squinting at Philo’s impenetrable tomb of programming code. My head hurt, but I didn’t mind. It was all part of what the smarties endured, like working out or dieting for a better body. No pain no gain on the road to a better mind.
Maybe one day I would vanish too.
by submission | Sep 9, 2008 | Story
Author : Leslie Smith
I did just what Mommy always told me to do. I got off the bus, said goodbye to the plastic person driver, and walked straight home. I wanted to get home as soon as I could ’cause Mommy said she was gonna bring me a surprise from the ice cream store.
I was walking home when the ar-tee-fee-shall, is that how you say it? The nice ar-tee-fee-shall man came up to me. They’re all nice, but he seemed extra nice. He even smiled when he saw me, a real smile! None of the others have a real smile.
He said hello and asked me my name. I told him Jenny. I asked him his. He told me his was Brian. He asked me if he could help me carry my backpack home. I asked him how he knew where I lived. He said my Mommy told him.
When we were walking, I asked him if he worked with Mommy at the company place. He asked me who made me. I told him Mommy did. She got some stuff from the genetical place and then she made me. Then he said Mommy made him too. He said he wasn’t like the other ones, he was something new. He said he had aw-taw-no-mee.
When we got to my house, the house brain saw it was me and opened the door. Brian gave me my backpack and asked me where Mommy was. He said he had to talk to her about something real important. I told him she was at the ice cream store getting me a surprise. I asked him if he wanted to come inside and wait for her. Maybe she would bring him a surprise too. He said no and that he had a surprise for her. He told me to go inside and stay safe and not open the door except when the policemen came. I said okay and then we said goodbye.
A little while later I heard the sirens and stuff and then you came, Mr. Policeman. How did Brian know you where coming here? Did you see Mommy? I want to tell her I met Brian.
I’m so happy. I didn’t know I had a brother.
by Patricia Stewart | Sep 8, 2008 | Story
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer (Concept by Moebius)
“You can’t abandon the project now,” protested Williamson, the Senior Planetary Engineer for the Chacopa Terraforming Project. “We created those life forms. They’ll die if we abandon them.”
“Perhaps,” replied Jürg von der Mittelholzer, the Director of Auditing for Nu-Worlds Inc. “But, that’s hardly relevant. According to your interim report, the planet will never support human habitation. Therefore, we’ve decided to cut our losses. I’m recommending that the terraforming project be terminated, effective immediately.”
“No,” pleaded Williamson. “We can still save the planet. Maybe not for our use, but we can save the indigenous life. It’s just a matter of resynthesizing the baseline polynucleotides. It can be done. I just need more time, and a little more money.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Williamson, but your job was to engineer a habitable planet, so Nu-Worlds could sell homesteads. Obviously, that’s not going to happen now. Come, Mr. Williamson, you’re letting your feelings for those little creatures impair your judgment. Try to put yourself in my position. Would you recommend that we allocate additional company resources if there’s no prospect of a return on our investment? As it is, Nu-Worlds will lose trillions.”
“That’s not what you said when we completed Phase I ahead of schedule and under budget.”
“Mr. Williamson, all of you’re Phase I successes were dutifully recorded in the ledger. But, Phase II wasn’t so successful, was it?”
“That depends on your definition of success. Chacopa was the first ever terraforming project to develop a semi-intelligent life form.”
“You neglected to add a ‘globally destructive’ semi-intelligent life form.”
“They’re not intrinsically destructive. In fact, they’re rather cute. Unfortunately, their bodies just happen to have neutral buoyancy. Since they can float, there are no boundaries to impede their population growth. Now, they’re reproduction exponentially. They’ll fill the entire troposphere in under a year. That’s over one trillion megatons of organic mass. After that, the ecosystem will irrevocably collapse. Unless we do something. Please, Jürg, you can’t just let the planet die without at least letting me try to save it. Life has value, you know. I insis…”
Von der Mittelholzer, who had been scanning a status report for another project while Williamson continued to drone on, suddenly snapped to attention. “What did you just say?”
Williamson was startled by the abrupt interruption. “Huh? What? You mean, ‘you can’t just let the planet die’?”
“No, no, no! After that!”
“I don’t remember. Uh, ‘life has value’?”
“That’s it! Why didn’t I think of that? Tell me Mr. Williamson, do these creatures have any nutritional value? Do you know if they taste good? Can they be burned as fuel? Come on man, think. They must be good for something, besides suffocating a perfectly good asset.”
“What are you talking about?” replied the bewildered engineer. Then Williamson realized where von der Mittelholzer was headed. “Now wait a minute,” he said as he pointed an accusatory finger at von der Mittelholzer’s chest. “You can’t mean…You’re not suggesting that we…”
“I’m an auditor, Mr. Williamson. I’m suggesting that we may have a viable product on Chacopa, and more importantly, an opportunity to make a profit. Maybe a huge profit. Computer,” he yelled, “contact Palmer in marketing, and Warner in research. Tell them to come to my office, pronto.”
As Williamson stood there dumbfounded, von der Mittelholzer began wringing his hands together in anticipation…
by submission | Sep 7, 2008 | Story
Author : Lokon
Richard was forty, paunchy and balding when he came home early and found Susan on the bed they shared. The thing on her and in her was a vibrating mass of warm rubberized orgasm; moving in and out of-across her, her eyes and ears were hidden behind the goggles flashing the holos of what Richard assumed to be one of her Romance novels. She neither saw him nor heard him, and Richard had a manic moment where he imagined she wouldn’t have cared either way. The discarded box it had arrived in professed it as ‘the best sex on the market’ Richard fingered the wedding band she had placed on his finger. His flesh bulged around the too tight metal. He left quietly.
Richard started taking pills. The blue pill made him hard on demand led to the brown pill to keep him going to the red pill to make him more aware of her and better. The pills brought want of the augments. They put little circuits in his head to help him remember dates and recite Shakespeare and Donne on command. At first they were to please her, and then they were just for him. The augments led to uploading, back ups, and gene therapy.
Susan aged and Richard grew to be more then he had been, muscles beginning to regrow and hair migrating from his back to the top of his head. “Darling” Susan said on her 90th birthday “Die with me. We were not meant for more then we were given. Promise me that you will be human with me in the end.” Richard was 96 and looked 28, but said “Yes” as he promised to join the dying who were not to be wooed by the seductive murmurings of technologic immortality.
Richard was getting used to his new legs and eyes when he found Susan there. Susan was locked in a box in her best Sunday clothes, earth forming all around her wooden walls with a tombstone like a sundae’s cherry on top. Next to it was Richard’s marker, now only signifying the shell he’d discarded just before Susan had closed her eyes for good. “I am sorry dearest, I didn’t want to if I didn’t have to.”
by submission | Sep 6, 2008 | Story
Author : Nik Gregory
The mess hall bustled around Harris; it was like a flock of vultures who had just found an overturned meat truck. Possession yields not only extended onto property but onto food too, woe betide anyone who gets the last muffin.
“All I’m saying is there’s something therapeutic about blowing up an asteroid,” stated Harris, feeling his point needed no justification.
“Spreading atomic waste throughout the entire cosmos is not what I call a therapeutic activity,” retorted Mila. She came from one of the nameless countries affected by the mass crawl into nuclear arms – it wasn’t nameless, just no one knew how to pronounce it except for Mila.
“Honey, we take the green pills for the bio’s, yellow ones for the chems, blue ones for the millisieverts and the red ones for the gammas,” said Hank; he sat scratching his sun burnt nose with the end of his spoon. “So I call bull on that.”
She conceded defeat and flickered a smile of someone half her age, “Well on that, we just got twenty moles and five scarabs in a courier this morning.”
“Twenty moles?” asked Hank.
“Yeah.”
“Shit, what do they expect us to blow up with that?”
Harris hit his head against the table, “We’re supposed to mine them, after all we are miners.”
“But how else are we supposed to split an asteroid down the fault lines? You can’t stick a prybar between two faults of nickel and push when they’re a million metric tonnes.” Hank pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket and tapped it on the table. “So Mila, what are you doing this evening?”
“I have a date with Guy Mitchells,” came her answer with an extra coy smile on the side.
“Oh, sorry,” said Harris in a mocking tone. “Are all the Walkers taken now?”
“I sure as fuck ain’t,” muttered Hank before sticking the cigar in his mouth.
“No, just they come from a small genetic pool.” She gestured toward Ed and Ted, a pair of non-related identical twins – their genetic line had stayed separate for over two millennia yet they ended up with identical fashion, beards and even the same scar gouged over their right eye.
“Okay that’s a valid point.”
“Hell yeah it is, we Walkers ain’t exactly a pretty bunch,” stated Hank to a puff of smoke, his stubbly chin seemingly more prominent through the haze.
“That’s why I picked a land lover.” She looked down the line to see Guy approach, his shoulders slenderer than hers and every other Walker.
He leant over, kissed her gently on the cheek and grabbed her muffin, “Thanks babe!”
Harris muttered, “Noob,” along with Hank.
“Oh, ‘hon’, one sec,” started Mila. She right hooked Guy, sending him toppling to the coarse regolith based concrete as she swiped back her muffin.
Mila’s attention drifted to the two guys and she said clemently, “What, it was the last one!”
