by Sam Clough | Sep 5, 2008 | Story
Author : Sam Clough, Staff Writer
“Elass, check your drones. I think they’re goofing off.”
“Thanks, Laurie. They’re on target now.”
The fleet was deep in the ‘gravel’ region of the asteroid belt. Elass was dragging in the larger chunks for processing, Laurie was filtering the gravel, looking for chunks of dirty ice and pure metals. Red was sitting ten clicks out, on overwatch. When the fleet had set up shop, they’d deployed a small field-generator to hold the proceeds of their rockmunching. It was maybe two-thirds full of chunks of ice and mineral-rich rocks.
Red was bored. Whilst the miners were at least actively involved in their task, all Red had to do was watch the stash and look for intruders. The company stipulated that there had to be at least one combat craft with every mining op, after the spate of Free Rhean attacks had taken out maybe half the fleet. That was two years before Red had signed up: ‘overwatch’ had sounded so exciting at the time. He’d escorted dozens of mining operations now, mostly with Elass and Laurie, but sometimes with other pairs.
“Ejecting slag, watch yourselves.” Laurie transmitted.
With a little puff of dust, a chunk of compacted wasterock fired out from the midsection of Laurie’s vessel, the ‘Grave Robber’. The projectile held coherence for twenty kilometres or so, then slowly disintegrated into dust. There were a half-dozen plumes of finely-divided dust diffusing ‘above’ the plane of the belt.
Red watched the projectile as it broke up.
The dust moved oddly. Like something was pushing through it.
Stealth!
With motions born of long practice in virtuals, Red started actively pinging the area and accelerated towards the dust-cloud and the covert ops pilot that had just made such a silly mistake. His sensors were betraying him, the dust interfering with the absolute ranging. Half a dozen half-contacts were lurking in the dust plumes. Red warmed up the missile launcher, and powered onwards.
Elass cursed as one of his drones stopped responding. Cheap links occasionally meant that they went dead in space, and needed to be jumpstarted. Hopefully, that’s all it was – sometimes, their proximity sensors just refused to work, and they ended up smeared all over the outside of a rock. Lousy good-for-nothing corporation refused to pay for decent equipment, then acted all surprised when you came back with half your complement acting up. His rambling train of thought was interrupted by the beeping of the ‘communication request’ alert above his head. It was the hauler – the box-with-engines that dragged the ice and rock back to a an orbital refinery.
He keyed the local area radio.
“…’sup?” The voice coming through the radio was unfamiliar, not the usual hauler pilot.
“Not much. You’re early, though. Squeeze your auth key to me and I’ll unlock the field.”
“Who do you think I am?”
“The hauler.”
“Moron.” The not-hauler approached the the storage field. The entire front of the bulky craft folded. It smoothly enveloped the storage field like a snake choking down an egg. Laurie hit the all-fleet-alert. Elass panicked, and pushed every thruster he had to max. They flared, and burnt out. Communications from Elass were a garbled mess of swear of words before Laurie broke the line.
The thief twisted his ship into an escape vector. A dozen missiles streaked from launchers mounted onto his outer hull. They automatically locked in on the hapless miners.
Red grimaced, and muttered to himself.
“I’m so fired for this.”
by submission | Sep 4, 2008 | Story
Author : Rayne Adams
I stole a lightspeed cruiser today. Went flying.
Found Ancient Egypt.
You learn in school that time and space are the same interchangeable abstract, but no one really believes it. You walk three steps, you move forward in space and in time, but if you walk backward, you don’t go back in time. Do you? I didn’t think so.
I had to get as far away as possible—I’d stolen a very expensive, very advanced piece of machinery. I set the lightspeed engine to 2400, more than five hundred lightyears higher than is considered safe. I followed protocol—closed the airlock, strapped myself in, and inhaled the gas that would keep me in a stasis state during my trip. No one has ever traveled lightspeed while they were conscious.
I don’t know if the gas in that particular cruiser was bad, or if I just hadn’t taken it the right way, but I woke up long before I should have, nowhere near the end of my journey.
I wasn’t in space. At least, not any space I’d ever seen before. Space is black, so black it’s sickening to look at after awhile. But this was color, swirling lights and blinding color. Sounds too, which don’t belong in space. The cruiser was gone, and I seemed to be as well. I couldn’t move my arms or turn my head, I was just consciousness floating somewhere in this vast, fluctuating whirlpool.
I became aware that whatever was around me was growing very warm. This didn’t concern me—after they entered the academy, all Spacers had their epidermis upgraded to be able to withstand great heat and pressure. It was still very uncomfortable, but at least that meant my body was back.
When I swam into consciousness, I was lying on my back in something soft and pleasantly warm, not scalding. There were people standing over me, staring down and talking, arguing. Their words jumbled together as the translator in my brain wavered between several different languages. They weren’t speaking a tongue it recognized, so it had to spend a few moments cross-referencing.
It didn’t take too long.
“—Fell from the sky! How could she not be of the gods?”
“She doesn’t look like one of us.”
“Is she even alive? Gods do not die.”
“I’m not dead,” I said, sitting up, my mouth flawlessly forming the words of this strange new language.
The three people standing over me jumped back, frightened, until one of the men offered me a hand up. I was completely naked (my clothes hadn’t survived the heat) but one of my rescuers was a woman, and her loose white robe only covered one breast, so I decided not to worry too much.
“Where am I?” I asked, though I didn’t really need the answer. The white sand, wide, blue river, and clean, breathable air was enough evidence in itself.
“Welcome to the land of Kemat, great Isis.” One of the men said it, and they all bowed their heads.
“Thanks, I—.” I cleared my throat. “What did you just call me?”
“Isis,” the woman said, eyes still cast to the sand. “Goddess of the Nile. Every year you shed tears for your dead husband and the river floods.”
“I’m not a goddess,” I said, but they weren’t listening.
by Duncan Shields | Sep 3, 2008 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
The test drill had gone horribly wrong.
The bipedal meat structure wasn’t breathing. Emergency!
There were specific instructions tattooed on the outside of the biological’s skin for repair procedures.
The yellow and black rectangles and hazard symbols on the shaved skull meant that no one except accredited programmed hardcases could operate on him there.
There was no time. The sensors in my fingertips read the sound vibrations coming from the cage of bone where most of his internals were kept warm and functional in their liquid bags.
No sound was coming out. According to manuals I’d read in these flight plan procedures, biologicals had to be brought back online within minutes or the shutdown would be permanent.
There were pictograms of the major organs tattooed on the outside of the body of the bio. Procedures with lightning bolts were stained there with dotted lines pointing to places to apply trodes and places to avoid stressing.
There were a lot of markings all over the body. It was complicated. I could feel my processor heating up.
It was hard to believe that beings so fragile had accomplished so much before the takeover. It was even harder still to think that we still needed their ability to deal with worst-case scenarios and lateral idea production.
I re-routed half of my battery power into the ship and funneled it to my fingertips.
The biological in my grasp danced at the end of my fingertips like a string puppet being shaken by an angry god. I stopped the charge. The meat was smoking a little bit.
Did I use too much energy?
I heard the biological’s main liquid oxygen pump and bellows start up for six beats before settling into arrhythmia again.
I looked at the tattoos. There were no shock hazard warnings around where I had my hands. The outer skin of was still intact. The seconds ticked away. I charged it again.
Again it stiffened and twitched like a kite in a high wind. I dropped the charge to zero and listened. Silence. I listened closer.
I was focused entirely on it when it screamed and drew in breath again. I jumped back from it in alarm, my pads clanking on the metal of the deck.
It quickly rolled over and convulsed. Protein supplements spilled out of its main airway and food passage. Slowly, it got up to a sitting position. Its breathing and pump rate slowed.
It looked down at the sensor-shaped burn marks dotting its main torso and then up into my lenses. I could not read the expression there.
“How long was I out?” it asked me.
“Three minutes seventeen seconds. The insulator was worn through when you grabbed the controls. It shall be repaired. You need to get back to your containment pod and rest.” I replied through my speaker, resonating the air to create disruptions that the biological could pick up with the receivers on either side of its main sensor array.
“Yes.” Said the bio, and went off to bed. He’d be put back in deep sleep and woken up for another emergency or another drill when needed.
I set about re-insulating the control interface for the ship. I felt guilty and embarrassed that my slip up had nearly caused the death of my biological backup.
by submission | Sep 2, 2008 | Story
Author : Ian Rennie
I met a girl the other night while hopping. It was in some bar somewhere, and she must have been a local, because she was fascinated by my bracelet. It must have been a relatively close hop, because she spoke english in an accent that wasn’t too weird, but I was drunk enough that the details didn’t register.
Hopping is a great way to have a no strings night of fun. If you can afford the bracelet you just dial up somewhere random and make the jump. You can set parameters if you like, so it will always pick out somewhere where your currency is valid or whatever, or you can freewheel. It has the advantage that whatever happens in that reality stays in that reality, the consequences don’t follow you home unless you’re really unfortunate and you catch a dose of something that doesn’t exist where you came from.
She had skin like coffee just as the cream goes in, a gradient from rich dark skin to the wonderful paleness of the palms of her hands. We drank something amazing that tasted like minty cinnamon but had the aftertaste of warm honey, and when we made love we both came until we screamed. As I fell asleep beside her I was more perfectly happy than I had ever been.
The morning came, as mornings have a habit of doing, and I woke up before her. I went through the pantomime everyone does the morning after, and pulled on shirt and shoes in the scratchy silence of a blistering headache. I was going to wake her with a kiss, maybe get a morning reminder of the night before, when my bracelet beeped. I had to be at work in five minutes, so I buttoned up what I could and sent myself home. Half a second after I hit send, I realized what I’ve done.
One of the reasons hopping is so popular is that it really is anonymous. When you dial random coordinates in the bracelet, it does exactly what it says. You get somewhere entirely random. And once you go, it forgets all about where you’ve been. When I left without a word that morning, I left entirely, with no way to go back. And it was only after I’d hit the button that I understood how much I wanted to go back.
I’ve been trying to find her ever since. Theoretically, there are an infinite number of realities out there, but I’ve been narrowing as well as my memory will let me. Each night I go to the same bar, or as close to it as I can get, and I watch the girls on the dancefloor, looking for the one with skin like coffee, eyes like sunrise. I thought I saw her a few nights ago, but when I spoke to this girl, she had no idea who I was.
One day I’ll see her again. Our eyes will meet and she’ll know me. We’ll share glasses of something that tastes like minty cinnamon, and in the morning I’ll hear my bracelet beep and I’ll turn it off and stay here forever.
One day.
by J.R. Blackwell | Sep 1, 2008 | Story
Author : J.R. Blackwell, Staff Writer
Unlike the rest of humanity, I had an intelligent designer. My designer had thought enough to make me compatible. I can attach myself to almost any machine; external computers, appliances and yes, even weapons. Today, I’ve attached myself to “Mercy” a weapon that fires high intensity focused beams of radiation. It’s patched into what I call my eyes, which aren’t exactly eyes but close enough. If I can see it, Mercy can hit it. She was expensive, but this is what I lived for after I was killed
A week after I died, along with twelve other children from the Happy Hands preschool, the preacher told my parents and a congregation of mourners that children have an infinite capacity to forgive. “In heaven, your children are looking down on us and they have forgiven those that harmed them, we must learn to be like them.”
But we never got to heaven. We were in cold storage while our case was being prosecuted, keeping the evidence fresh, keeping us on ice. It was fortunate the case went as long as it did, mistrials, retrials and death penalty appeals, because in the six years after, they were able to wake us up again in new, plastic bodies. They woke us up so that we could tell our story and go home to our parents.
When we went home, we were appliances, and even our testimony, the testimony of machines with human brains, didn’t stand up against the court. We were already considered dead, and if not dead, children, and if not children, insane. Some of us did go insane in the new bodies, unable to cope. Some families turned the support off.
I cannot imagine what that’s like, to be turned off, would it be like going to sleep. Slowly fading? Or would it be darkness and pain and disconnection all in the dark until death. Would we see shadows there? I cannot imagine it. I did not go insane. I lived to see my killer walk free.
I was supposed to be adjusting to my new life, but now, being part machine, I can remember with perfect clarity, I can see every moment of that day when the man broke into our classroom and started shooting. I can see it and I cannot forgive.
Children never forgive. We are innocent in our hatred. Pure. I remember everything. And I have no forgiveness. But I have Mercy, oh yes, I do have Mercy.
