by submission | Feb 8, 2010 | Story
Author : Bill Lombardi
Troy sat by his bedside. Watching.
Hours past and then Jon’s eyes slowly opened. “I’m thirsty.” His voice wavered, his strength beginning to ebb.
Troy poured him a glass of water and stood by him holding the straw. He took several sips. Coughed. Troy wiped his chin. Soon he was asleep again. Troy sat and waited.
When he awoke next he asked, “Is it day”?
“No. It is night.”
“Can you see the stars?”
Troy went to the balcony doors, drew the curtain and opened them. He looked up at the moonless sky. “There are many stars.”
“Can you see the Big Bear?”
“You mean the Great Bear. Yes.”
“I remember lying in the field out back at night naming as many constellations as we could.”
“And you were always incorrect.”
Jon laughed weakly which led to another bout of coughing. Troy moved to his side and helped him sit up until it passed and then he gently laid him back down.
“You’ll stay with me?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t know why I ask. We’ve been together for as long as I can remember.”
He placed a cool hand across Jon’s forehead and soon he was asleep again – and the ever present Troy sat and waited.
Several days passed and he never woke again.
They came and took him and Troy watched from the window as the vehicle pulled away. All of Jon’s things had been packed and removed. Only Troy was left. He looked around at the empty rooms and on the floor in a corner was an image. He picked it up. It was of the two of them when they had visited China. On the Great Wall. They both stood backs against a turret, blue sky above. Troy remembered that day. They had walked and seen as much as they could while the sun still shone. Taking images. Troy folded it and placed it in the pocket of his pants and then went to stand by the door. The service would be by soon to wipe his memory and shut him down. He looked around at the empty rooms again. And waited.
by submission | Feb 7, 2010 | Story
Author : Matthew Banks
“It thinks,” said the emaciated man, blinking up at the doctor with red-rimmed eyes. The doctor looked down at him for a moment, then turned to the display mounted on the wall. The multiscan of the man’s brain was mostly normal, except for the bright blob sprouting from the left hemisphere. The doctor turned to the man. He was mostly normal, too, except for the weeping ulcer on his chest. But as with all his other symptoms, the ulcer was abnormal, as demonstrated by the glossy white molars sprouting in a clump from its center. The doctor suppressed a disgusted sneer and turned back to the display.
“It probably does think,” she said, stroking her chin, “I don’t know what Dr. Glasseter told you, but it’s no brain tumor. It’s a pleurineoplasm.”
“A what?”
The doctor rolled her eyes. That was the problem with these longevity treatments: people got them without having any idea how they worked or what side-effects there might be. She frowned at the patient. “I think your brain is trying to grow an extra lobe.”
The man blinked. “Why?”
The doctor scowled, and the man recoiled. “Why? What do you think? It’s the Novos. How long have you been taking it?”
“A few years.”
The doctor shrugged. “Well, there you go, then. Your body is throwing off stem cells like crazy, and without any real regulation, sometimes they get confused. Didn’t they explain all of this to you after the surgery?”
The man self-consciously touched the scar beneath his armpit where a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic had pulled a fully-formed kidney out of the patient’s lung. The doctor wanted badly to shake her head at the man and laugh.
“Well…he said, looking down at the floor and swallowing loudly. He looked up with renewed confidence. “Just the price of immortality, I guess.”
This time, the doctor couldn’t help but laugh. The man squinted at her. When she regained her composure, she walked up to him and pointed at the toothy lesion on his chest.
“Immortality? You’re going to keep getting those. Dentate teratomas are the most common side-effect of Novos. How long do you think it’ll be before you get one in your brain? Or you get one in your heart that gets gingivitis and gives you a fatal blood infection? Mr. Greene, you’ve been suckered.”
He scratched at the lesion and picked aimlessly at its teeth. “I was running laps a week after the lung surgery. Whatever accidentally grows on or in me, I can have it removed and recover just fine.”
“No you can’t,” the doctor said. Her voice had grown solemn, and the patient stared at her, startled.
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t have the brain growth removed. Thanks to the Novos, it’s already forged connections with pretty much every anatomical structure. That’s why you’re hearing the voices, that’s how you can tell it thinks: you’re hearing the neoplasm’s thoughts. If we tried to remove it, we’d probably take most of your brain with it. I project you’ve got about two months before you’ve got too much brain to fit in your skull and you slip into a coma and die.”
The patient looked up at her. He scratched his toothy lesion and blinked wetly.
by submission | Feb 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Richard “Zig” Zagorski
Amanda awoke from a deep slumber and saw that her alarm clock would be going off in ten minutes. Not pressing enough to climb out of bed to turn it off just yet, but unfortunately also too little time left to fall back asleep.
However it only took a moment or so for her to realize that today was the day. The day she’d be finally free of her mood ring. Suddenly the morning seemed full of promises she had rarely dared to dream of for fear her ring would betray her. Shout out that she was not on an even keel. Medications to bring her back into ordained normality would follow if the ring reported such emotions becoming commonplace.
She had already been using unlawful ware the past few months to occasionally fudge the logs her ring kept. Logs which would be dutifully uploaded by her ring for expert systems and her parents to review each time she entered the warm embrace of the home network. Uploaded each time she passed a contraband detector at PS 34 for analysis by the school’s psychological systems and even a therapist to review if the records justified flagging by the so-called expert systems.
Altering the logs was a crime warranting a grounding at home and one leading to detention and mandatory group therapy at school. It was worth it though. To hide the “dangerous” pulses of wonder, anger, lust and angst that not even a generation ago would have been considered normal for a girl her age and, more importantly, be something she’d be able to keep to herself and maybe a well hid journal. Finally she’d be secure in her own mind and emotions.
Those occasioned bouts of rebelliousness and the feelings they engendered would soon be more easily had. Watching illicit films like “The Breakfast Club”, reading passed around beat up copies of novels considered too stimulating for kids and teens or listening to the ancient (21 or older only, please!) crooning of Jim Morrison – “Oh tell me where your freedom lies…”
After third period Chemistry hers would lie in a new mood ring. One with altered circuitry and hacked software.
A week ago she had let Harold run a scanner over her ring. He said piece of cake and he’d have her new ring ready in seven days.
If it was so simple she wondered why it should cost her $400 in horded allowance and baby sitting money…but can one put a price on her own freedom?
The few people she dared to raise the subject with all said Harold had the know-how and, more importantly, the connections to get an illicit replacement for her. One encoded to give off the same secret handshakes as her real one and to camouflage all extremes of emotion with bland ordinariness.
Today her ring, which would scream out in vivid red, yellow and violet if she dared be herself and which dutifully tattled on her with seemingly greater enthusiasm than her little sister, would be replaced. The new ring would glow gentle hues, but stay mainly dead, dull, safe, complacent grey. The log files would show brief, low spikes of emotions. A nice, safe, boring, well adjusted teenage girl. Just what every parent wanted and every expert said was the standard to be strived for. Square pegs must be made round!
Today freedom of thought and freedom of experience would be hers. All wrapped up in illusionary grey.
by Duncan Shields | Feb 5, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I got pretty good at morse code after a while.
My co-pilot had a beak. The only way we could figure out how to communicate was if he clicked his beak at me in morse code. He was a pretty impatient dude so he did it really fast. He was wired to the eyeballs with Hexamex for the course changes that might be needed. Being that sped up and prepared for a possibility that might not happen isn’t any kind of fun. Makes a person a little high strung.
The only time he was verbose was when he was making up curses. He didn’t get the abstract notions of my human swear words but he understood actions and verbs so it was fun to hear him be creative when he was telling me off.
One memorable time he told me that my mother enjoyed having sex with hyenas because at least when they laughed at her, she didn’t have to take it as an insult. He also insinuated that my hyena father was where I got my annoying laugh, my short legs, and my hunger for dead animal meat. His race was herbivorous.
He was an Aereacoltra, a flying bird man. He would still be a flying bird man except for the fact that his wings were torn off as part of a prison sentence. He lost an eye in that prison as well during a scuffle over living quarters. Now he’s just a dude with a beak and an eyepatch.
He told me that an antigravity harness is nothing compared to banking and wheeling in a silent sky on a huge pair of wings. That’s the longest thing he told me other than the cursing.
His name was a series of chirps and whistles but I ended up just calling him Stan. Sometimes he hummed to himself as he scanned the instruments for possible pursuit. He sounded like he was gargling marbles but it was oddly musical and whispery.
The irony of the fact that he was a pilot who used to be able to fly wasn’t lost on him. In fact, he took off one of my fingers with that beak of his when I pointed it out.
What’s freaking me out now is that he’s locked himself in his quarters and he hasn’t come out for six days. There’s only so much I can do by myself at the controls before I need some down time. The autopilot’s an emergency measure and we really can’t take the risk of having no one at the wheel, not in this asteroid-laden sector.
“Stan! Get out here! Now!” I pounded and yelled at his door.
Softly, I could hear scrabbling behind the door and then the clicking of the lock. The door swooshed open and there was Stan. He looked exhausted.
“What the hell, Stan? What’s going on! It’s been six days!” I screamed at him.
Stan stepped to the side. Behind him were four eggs. Stan looked at me apologetically.
‘Quadruplets’, he clicked at me with his beak. ‘I guess the condom must have broke at that last space port’
Open-mouthed, I looked from Stan to the eggs and back to Stan again. We weren’t due to dock for another eight months. Stan looked ashamed.
“So should I start calling you Stella instead of Stan?” I asked.
It’s hard to tell when someone with a beak is smiling.
by submission | Feb 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Cesium
Each clutching the other’s hand, they waited atop the Green Building.
They weren’t supposed to be here. No one was. But the tallest building in Cambridge, Massachusetts would soon depart the soil on which it had stood for so long, and they couldn’t have missed the chance to be here. To watch the final stage of Daedalus, from the inside.
Some enterprising soul had planted a replica of an Apollo Lunar Module on the roof behind them, likening to the old Saturn Vs the twenty-one-story concrete box on which it perched. A flag hung above it, unmoving in the still air. The motionless silence unnerved her. There should be wind. There should be people walking far below, talking of subjects she would never understand. Yet there was nothing. Beyond the sheath that now enclosed the building, she could see the labyrinthine tracery of streets that filled Cambridge to the north, the cars in their orderly caravans sliding efficiently from place to place, while the sun crept down to the horizon and the fiery clouds above glowed orange and violet.
But within, the Green Building, neatly packaged for transport, rested in preparation for its own journey.
Around them, a huge tract of land adjacent to the Charles lay vacant, fallow dirt under long shadows. It had of course long since gone to the highest bidder, a Dubai company planning to raise an arcology on the site. But that had to wait until Daedalus finished. Until it cleared away this, the last remnant of old MIT.
It was just MIT now, as it had been for decades, since its focus had shifted offworld and “Massachusetts” had become inaccurate (and also, if the rumor was to be believed, so it could sue the pants off MarsTech). For almost as long the original campus, here in Cambridge, had been suffering from declining admissions and increasing irrelevance. Yet its reputation remained untarnished, and history still lived in its bones. So now, as the wealth of the outer system was starting to pour back to the mother planet, the children of MIT, the architects and the chemists and the astroengineers, had returned to lift these old halls into the future. Just because they could.
And that was Daedalus.
Giant engines above had raised the buildings of MIT one by one out of Earth’s gravity well. An unprecedented feat, it had taken years and drawn the awe and fascination of the world. Enclosed in protective organic sheaths, miracles of bioengineering, the buildings floating like soap bubbles among the stars had joined the construction of New Boston, a gigantic space station with artificial gravity. Not all had emerged unscathed, of course, but that most survived had given them courage enough to stand here on this night, looking out over the city spread below them.
There was a slight tremor beneath their feet; the near-transparent sheath rippled noticeably. Cables, pillars and struts holding the building in place adjusted automatically. Her hand tightened its grip on his. It was time.
“Boston is lovely at night,” he said, slowly. “But you have to see it from above–”
They leapt toward the sky.
