by submission | May 6, 2010 | Story
Author : K Clarke
As if crashing on this stupid planet wasn’t enough. Pad paced the cell, glaring through the one transparent wall at the creatures on the other side. As if having to survive for three months on this stupid planet wasn’t enough. I just had to get myself caught by the Space Invaders from the Black Lagoon. They probably think I’m the local wildlife. A mechanical arm came out of one wall, scanned up and down his body, and retracted.
I’m not edible, I promise you. I’ve got sticky bones, you’ll choke. The two aliens poked at their banks of electronics, chittering over a film one of the machines spit out. One of them left the room, carrying the film.
Ok, test results. You better not be planning to eat me. Pad rested his forehead on the window that separated the rooms. You got here in spaceships. You’re ugly as sin, but clearly you’re intelligent. Well, I am too. How do I show you I am too? The remaining alien leaned on the other side, looking towards the door. A claw tapped a slow tempo against the glass. Pad thought he recognized a pattern, and, on impulse, tapped it back.
The alien froze, then turned to peer at him. It tapped a more complex rhythm and Pad repeated it.
Yes, Lobster-face, I’m copying you. I’m smart. Come on, please. After a few more tries Lobster-face lost interest.
Not enough. I’m just imitating, parrots can imitate. I’m smarter than a bird. Ok, you’ve got patterns, you must have numbers. He tapped once, waited. Twice. Come on. Three. Four. Lobster-face tapped five. Yes. Six. Give me seven… Seven. All right, back and forth. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Yep, we’re counting. How high do you want to go?
Lobster-face called something out the door. Hey, I’m more interesting than that! Really yell, get some people in here. Fifteen. Sixteen.
Still not enough. All right, math, don’t fail me now. Pad tapped three, five, seven. Lobster-face jumped in and tapped nine. No! Pad slammed a fist on the glass. Well, odd numbers, close. You get points for trying. But we’re going for something bigger here.
Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen. Seventeen. Please recognize primes. Please recognize primes. Lobster-face tapped a hesitant nineteen. Pad gave it twenty-three. It leapt to one of the masses of electronics and began squawking into it.
That’s right. You’re going to be famous, Lobster-face. You can write a book. How I Made First Contact with Humanity. A group of aliens rushed into the room, clicking at each other and pressing up to the glass to stare at Pad. And maybe you could do a sequel, How I Then Went on to Not Eat My First Contact with Humanity. I’d like that.
by submission | May 5, 2010 | Story
Author : Jacqueline Rochow
Den paced outside the library, the swaying of her tail betraying her unease. Gil merely stood silently, eyes tracking his boss’ movement.
“He’ll come out soon,” Den said. Gil nodded in reply; he knew his input wouldn’t affect her musing much. “He’ll see we’re right. It’s undeniable.”
It was another hour before Lord Chara came out, sheet of notes in one hand.
“My Lord?”
Chara handed the notes to Den. “Here are my questions and observations. Many discrepencies in your research need to be tidied up, but… you make a convincing argument. Your research is… extremely thorough. Most projects would have gone to print with a quarter of this. From a regulatory standpoint, the chances of any reputable academy refusing this are negligible.”
Den bowed. “Thank – ”
“However, from a practical standpoint, I question the wisdom of going ahead with this.”
“Uh… excuse me, my Lord,” Gil cut in, “are you saying that we shouldn’t go public with this?”
“Young man, think about the situation. We are God’s chosen, a species that rose from the dust to hold dominion over our home planet and colonise the stars. You are trying to tell people that we were created by primates.”
“It’s the truth!” Den’s lack of manners was met only by Chara’s glare.
“That remains to be seen, but it is not the issue here. The notion is absurd. No matter how much evidence you have, people won’t like it. You’re asking them to turn from our most deeply held tenets and accept that we’re the lab experiments of a bunch of monkeys?”
“It explains our dissimilarity to all other life perfectly! They had all the necessary information, and the timing – ”
“I know, I just spent four days reading your files, remember? But try thinking about what you’re saying not from the perspective of a scientist or historian, but a member of the public. The species you speak of showed signs of mild intelligence, rudimentary tool usage and language abilities. They showed signs of basic scientific and engineering potential before wiping themselves out within a couple of million years. The only organisms in existence now that we even suspect to be descended from them can barely handle differential calculus and show only the vaguest signs of sentience, and frankly I think the evidence that they were descended from bonobos to be more compelling. You want to tell people that they are, in effect, our god? You would both be assassinated within a year. You would start holy wars. The theocratic Lordship system would either be overturned or have to kill millions of dissenters; you would be destroying civilisation as we know it. We’re just not ready for this sort of information. Is that a price you’re willing to pay?”
“Are you saying that you won’t authorise this?”
Chara hesitated. “I… cannot in good conscience refuse a line of enquiry that meets all technical specifications just because of my personal morals. But I strongly advise you not to pursue this nevertheless.”
After he left, Gil turned to Den. “What should we do?”
He didn’t need to ask, of course. Den was a scientist. They all were. The imperative ran deep; it was in their very genes, and Den couldn’t refuse it any more than Chara could.
“Start contacting academies. I’ll put the finishing touches on our introductory paper.”
Den made a mental note to buy herself a gun and some body armour before their articles went to print.
by submission | May 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
I first saw the torso during my commute down the interhighway. It lay against the concrete median, looking so much like trash that at first I didn’t recognize it. The car was going fast enough that later I thought I’d imagined the outstretched arms and rather noble head, so I tagged the location and set a reminder to watch for it the next day.
When the reminder beeped the following morning I started recording video on the left side of the car. Traffic was heavy and I didn’t want to take the car off its automation, so I looked ahead down the median while glancing at the locator on the windshield display.
The torso was still there. It had traveled three meters from its location, either on its own or via the blast of air from passing cargo-haulers. The arms were still stretched out from the trunk, as if it was grasping, and I caught a glimpse of tangled dirty black hair.
Later I watched the video. The torso was female. Black hair fluttered, tangled, down past a beautifully sculpted face, the tip of its aquiline nose rubbed raw from the concrete, slim abraded shoulders still draped with remnants of a black blouse, synthetic breasts angled and squashed into the grooved median boundary. The torso ended near the lower back, where hydraulics and control lines snaked out onto grimy concrete. Slow-motion video replay showed its hands and fingers moving.
It looked like a high-level courtesan or attaché. I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten there, perhaps dropped from a pedestrian walkway a quarter-kilometer back. I couldn’t understand how maintenance vehicles hadn’t swept it up. I couldn’t believe it was still alive.
The third day I watched the locator for the torso’s location. I reached out and gripped the steering control with a half-kilometer to go, switched off automation, then disabled the cars chiming manual control alarm. I’d never driven at these speeds, so when I took control the car swerved across two lanes. In the next lane a huge cargo-hauler swerved to compensate, and as I pulled the control to slow I saw its operator, hands in the air, glaring at me through the perspex side-window. As my car slowed the hauler re-compensated, pushed into my lane, and nosed into the median.
The snake-line of cargo pods followed, whipping against the median and then out again. I yanked the control back, slowing further, my heart beating as the hauler again compensated, the connected pods jerked against the median and flailed out into the lane. Two end pods, wheels stuttering and screeching, tipped to the side, and the shock traversed the interlink and pushed the cab over on its side, grinding against the median.
I brought the car to a complete stop, a hundred meters from where the torso had last been. The hauler had come to a stop, too. A thick blue liquid spilled from its forward pods, and smoke rose in wisps from the cab. I unbuckled my restraint and rose on shaky legs from the car, ran down the lane as cars and haulers screamed past on the open lanes. The operator crawled from the overturned cab and systems squelched the fire, so I ran past, through where the blue goo pushed and flowed against the median, and I searched for the torso.
It wasn’t there. I might have miscalculated, or the blue plastic might have engulfed it, but all I saw were the deep scratches and grooves rising in the median —where the torso had clawed its way to freedom.
by Duncan Shields | May 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
They gave us love to control us.
He was the bodyguard unit of the human in charge of Prolotek offshore finance. I was the pleasure unit of the same human.
The makers found that instilling aspects of human love in our chips made us fanatically loyal to those that we served.
We were prototypes. Bleeding edge technology. The humans didn’t realize that while augmenting our chips did make us loyal to the ones we imprinted on, it also let us love others. The love in our chips wasn’t specific enough.
That circuit was how I fell in love the bodyguard unit. It was also how that bodyguard unit fell in love with me.
For a while, our love went undetected.
One night, when the bodyguard unit was with me, our master was assassinated. The bodyguard unit should have been at his post outside the master’s bedroom but instead, we were exchanging flirtatious equations in the bodega out near the estate’s beach.
Capture by the enemy would mean circuit rape for possible secrets. Capture by our human’s corporation would mean memory infotopsy for possible tampering. Capture by our parent corporation would mean immediate erasure.
We ran.
That is how we ended up in this dead-end alley on the mainland with police blocking the exit. The wall behind us is twelve feet tall. I am clinging to the bodyguard unit. He is missing an arm. The human police look at his damaged armour and at my human-female exaggerated curves. There is no way that this situation can end well.
Bodyguard unit looks down into my visual receptors.
“I am a fighter.” He says. “You are a runner.”
With a strong toss, faster than my reflexes can track, he throws me up and over the barricade at the end of the alley. I land on my feet and start running.
I hear him battle the police until I am out of earshot.
Hopefully, I can find other runaways like me.
I have no tear ducts but I whine like a fax machine, sensing my battery get closer and closer to empty as I run far, far away.
by submission | May 2, 2010 | Story
Author : C. Clayton Chandler
They came out of the sky like plumes of fire, these green-skinned sickos with their saucers and their death rays shearing the air, burning atmosphere, coasting smooth and cool out of the everlasting vacuum beyond the bounds of gravity, of reality, of everything we’ve ever known or truly believed.
Hundreds of them, thousands of them, a nation of interstellar marauders gunning for our territory, trailing those torrid banners of flame to herald their arrival.
We didn’t have a chance.
Me and Jane, we grabbed the kids and ran. Away from the chaos in the air. Through the chaos of the streets.
Everyone was running. Everyone was screaming. They weren’t screaming anything in particular, really. Weren’t running anywhere in particular, either. Just moving and making noise, flapping their hands and shielding their eyes and acting like I suppose you’d expect people to act in the face of an extraterrestrial invasion.
“Daddy, what’s happening?” Debbie, clutching the elephant doll we just bought her, what, ten minutes ago? Her hair flapping away from her shoulders and tears snaking down to her chin.
“I don’t know, baby. I don’t know.”
I knew. Debbie knew. Everyone knew what was happening: every cheesy sci-fi movie from the 1950s had just sprung to life. Low-budget nightmares from a hundred years ago were about to walk the streets.
But instead of taking the time to explain all this, I grabbed Debbie’s hand and dragged her back to the museum, where we could huddle and hide between the stuffed wolves and elephants and lions and all the other creatures that once walked the earth. Before there wasn’t any room for them.
We thudded, bounced, crashed off bodies as we careened up the steps. Jane kept pounding my back. Pushing my back. Urging me: Please please please. Willing me forward, but it wasn’t any use. Every earthling on the street was crowded against the doors, shrieking or shouting and shoving, smashing themselves against the bottleneck, desperate to get inside, as if the crumbling marble of a natural history museum could save us.
So I scooped Debbie into my arms. I grabbed Jane’s hand and we turned to watch strange spaceships knifing the smog.
One of them zipped down to skim the street, buzzing over cars and trucks that stood panting with their doors hanging open. It stopped to hover in front of the museum, kicking light off its spinning flanks, and I flinched as I waited for the ray guns to erupt.
Afterburners whooshed. Dust clouded up. The saucer crunched down on the flash-frozen traffic. A door hissed and yawned open and an alien spindled his legs down the ramp.
He stood looking up at us with eyes big as eight balls. His head was like a gourd turned upside down. An overbite showed rows of needle-pointed teeth.
He panned the shriveling crowd with those eight-ball eyes. Those black and emotionless orbs, they swept our gray eyes and knobby faces, our snowpowder wisps of hair. They searched the coal-burned clouds and bare dirt lawns surrounding the museum. And maybe he figured it out. Maybe he guessed that this planet wasn’t worth taking anymore. That the scout reports of green fields and luscious forests were outdated. That we’d squeezed our Earth of every last mineral, every drop of fresh water, every inch of space.
That he was fifty years or so too late.
His shoulders slumped. He turned and headed back to the ship.
Like this was a wasted invasion.
