by Roi R. Czechvala | Dec 6, 2010 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Staff Writer
He pulled the collar of the leather duster tight around his neck. It offered little protection against the rain. It wasn’t rain. It was the unceasing, oily downpour of condensation dripping from the environment units of the dwellings of those who lived a thousand feet above the human flotsam below.
He had been someone once. A soldier. A warrior. Now he was down here, among the faceless, the invisible. Looking up, he could just make out the blimps drifting above the buildings, reflecting the distant sunlight. They housed the truly wealthy. Floating in the clear sunlight. A sun that never shone into the man made canyons.
“Hey Handsome, want some honey?” A whore, pupils dilated from designer drugs her government subsidized ’nites couldn’t keep up with, opened her blouse, revealing a pair of small, dry breasts. He walked on without a word.
“Fuck you asshole,” she shrieked.
He thumbed the cerasteele blade in his pocket and rolled his shoulders deeper into his coat. He hadn’t gone far when he heard the hooker again.
“Get your fucking hands off me… hey what the… hey… HEY.”
He turned to see three young punks clawing at her clothes. Ripping off her blouse. One grabbed her around the waist and with his other hand reached under her skirt, savagely ripping off her panties. “Who’s first,” he laughed. Pedestrians along the wet, grimy street shuffled blindly on.
In a few short strides he was on them before he realized what he was doing. His composite ceramic/steel knife materialized in his hands, its blade oscillating thousands of times a second. In an instant, two of the attackers were down. The blade passed effortlessly through their throats. They fell to the gutter before twin crimson fountains spouted from their necks.
The third got to his feet and backed away. “Hey, fuck you man. You want some of this,” he taunted, slapping his chest. He looked down just in time to see the hilt of a knife sprout from his sternum. He looked up and stared dully at the large man facing him. The blade in his chest disappeared as it was recoiled on an invisible molecular line, itself more dangerous than the blade. The kid sank to his knees and slowly slumped to the pavement.
He turned to face the prostitute. She sat on the sidewalk crying silently, pulling the remains of her blouse across herself trying to cover what only a moment before she had so brazenly revealed. He reached down and in a soft calm voice asked if she was okay.
“Yeah, yeah,” she stammered between sobs, “I think so.”
He removed his heavy cloak and draped it over her shoulders. In the same moment, he clicked his teeth and ordered a taxi with a subvoc command.
“I’m… I’m so sorry… what I did… what I said…,” her voice trailed off. She began to cry again.
He folded her in his arms. She leaned into him, her body wracked with sobs. Soon a cab drifted up and settled to the ground before them. Gently he helped her into the back seat and fixed her restraints. To the driver he said, “Take her… somewhere. Somewhere nice.” He shoved a wad of bills into her hands. Archaic perhaps, but still legal tender. With a soft hand he lifted her chin until her eyes met his. “Just because you live down here, doesn’t mean you have to become one of them.”
He closed the door and the taxi soared off into the night. He continued his walk. “I think Houston is playing tonight,” he said to himself.
by submission | Dec 5, 2010 | Story
Author : David Perry
He had figured it out at the all-too-young age of 26. At the time it was just a theory, a crazy idea – he wouldn’t even test it until 38. That day he put a loaded revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger six times. He took his discovery to the greatest minds the world had to offer and over the next fifty years he came to learn what it meant, how it worked. He wouldn’t find out what it meant for much, much longer.
“Everything is probability waves, right?” He began his lecture as usual. “There are an infinite number of possible dimensions with an infinite number of possible outcomes for every event. There are universes where all of our atoms spontaneously disassemble, where the Earth is made of tofu, and infinitely many universes in which none of us exist.” His heart raced, the demo approached. “The thing is, though, that we can’t perceive universes in which we don’t exist and, like most energy, we tend to take the path of least resistance. In other words, we tend to see the most likely set of events in the set.” He walked to the podium and retrieved his revolver. “This is a very real gun and it contains very real bullets. I invited a number of people from the audience to a nearby shooting range earlier to verify that it works.” Suddenly he placed the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. He felt nothing, but he knew that the universe had just shattered. The revolver made its usual satisfying “click” and much of the audience audibly gasped. “Welcome to a new universe. There are now countless universes in which I just killed myself in front of all of you, but you’re not in those universes – at least not the copies of you that I perceive. My consciousness, your consciousness, every consciousness cannot perceive a universe in which it does not exist, so when I kill myself in one universe I have no choice but to branch off into a less likely one. The gun always jams, the bullets are duds – something always goes wrong. This is my six hundred and twenty-third ‘suicide attempt.’ I’m telling you that you are all immortal.”
It was his 96th birthday and time was starting to catch up with him. His skin hung loosely over brittle bones and he began to wonder how far his theory stretched. He knew that eventually his chances of survival had to reach zero and there would be nowhere left for his consciousness to go. What then?
He was over seven hundred years old, though he long ago lost count. He could ask the computer if he really cared, but age had long ceased to be a factor in any meaningful way. There were side effects to this, things he hadn’t expected. He had watched his wife and friends wither and die, seen dozens of wars and so much death. “We tend to take the path of least resistance.” The words echoed in his mind, he had to find a way out. The “path of least resistance,” as it turns out, meant that everyone kept dying as usual, everyone kept fighting as usual and the world kept going to shit as usual.
For the first time in ages he felt genuinely nervous. He had to find a way out of this universe and into another one. One that still had people, civilization, a reason to live. He put the quantum superimposed revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger…
by submission | Dec 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Asher Wismer
“It’s worse than that,” I said. “Everyone coming out of sleep at the same time, my staff is overtaxed, and you tell me half the ship is missing?”
“Entirely gone,” Captain Stefan said. “Almost the bottom third of the ship. Sleep pods, living quarters, hydroponics, two singularities; all gone, like something came by and sliced it off with a laser torch.”
“Have to be a big torch.”
“And the problems with waking–”
“I know about those,” I said. “Remember my medical degree.”
“But it’s all too much, they never trained us for this.”
“They trained as best as they could,” I said. “Now hold still.”
I injected two CCs of epinephrin in the Captain’s neck, just above the esophagus. “You should start feeling better in ten minutes. Now, I really have to check on–”
“But what could have done it?” he said, plaintively. “All those people, gone, dead….”
I sighed. “If I think about it for five minutes, will you go and let me tend to the others?”
He nodded. I checked his readout, saved it to my files, and sat.
After about three minutes, Captain Stefan took a deep breath.
“Better?”
“Much.”
I clicked a cabinet open and took out three foil-wrapped tablets. “Take one of these before bed for the next three nights. Let me know if you have more trouble after that. Magnets.”
He took the packet and blinked at me. “Magnets?”
“Children often swallow small things, and small toys often have magnets inside. They stick together, you see, and if they are in different loops of intestine they can stick, pulling the intestines out of place, causing blockage and pain. You might check our telemetry, see if we passed by something very large, something with a lot of gravity. The singularities in the lower section could have attracted–”
“–and although our speed was too high to pull the ship off course,” he said, “they would have enough attraction to push against the magnetic couplings. We built the ship for containment but I bet they never considered something attracting from outside.”
“Send someone EVA,” I said. “Check the rivets. Probably the ship parted on seams, and everything just fell off.”
He was already standing. “I’ll call you,” he said.
“Please don’t,” I said. “I have responsibilities.”
The door hissed shut. I turned to my screens and tabbed through a crew list. Almost six hundred people, simply gone.
Who knew if my solution was right. The point was, with fewer people to get sick, I would have much more time away from the clinic in the years ahead.
There’s a silver lining.
by Duncan Shields | Dec 3, 2010 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
Trees lay flat behind the ship where it had crashed to the ground in the forest. Its silver shell winked in the sunlight, shuddering occasionally as whatever machinery inside of it quaked to a wounded stop. The hunter had seen nothing like it, not even on the newsfeeds. Maybe a new kind of experimental ship that had crash landed.
Setting his jaw firmly and readjusting the grip on his gun, he stepped forward towards the silent craft. The violence of the craft’s crash landing had ended. Squirrels resumed foraging, deer resumed grazing, and birds began their songs anew. The ship’s hull ticked as it cooled. The film of frost that had formed on it started to melt in the sun.
Through the largest crack in the dripping hull, the hunter could hear movement. A whispering shuffle that ended with a clank. The hunter knew the sound of a wounded animal when he heard it. He advanced to the crack with his gun ready. The alien inside the craft was probably close to death or stunned. The hunter walked slowly and softly towards the crack and peered into the gloom.
A silver whip of corded metal shot out from the crack and skated across the hunter’s cheek, laying it open. The hunter’s hands tensed in surprise and he emptied both barrels of the shotgun. A shower of sparks from buckshot ricochets lit up the interior for a second and the hunter clearly saw the alien life form.
It was like a metal octopus with many more tentacles. The tip of each tentacle ended in a specialized tip. The hunter had shot directly into its center of mass. The creature thrashed and lay still. It was a lucky shot. If the creature had integral organs there, it was almost certainly dead.
The hunter’s cheek buzzed. His right eye closed. He dropped his weapon. There was something in the cut on his face. He felt his heart race and a fever take over his body. He fell to his knees and the sun seemed to get brighter. His breathing came hot and fast. He passed out.
When he awoke, he felt refreshed. He brought his hand up to his cheek to find it healed. He felt the ridge of a scar. Judging by the position of the sun, it looked like about an hour had passed. He stood up, picked up his gun and went back to his cabin. In the morning, he’d go into town and report what he had found. Right now, though, he was exhausted and thirsty.
It didn’t occur to him until he got back to his cabin that he knew exactly how to build a metal octopus and spaceship. Chemistry beyond his education unspooled in his mind. Mechanical processes popped through his mind. He’d need to invent the tools needed to create the compounds necessary to make the chemical chain reactions that would result in the hardest bonds in the new metal. There were no names for what he was thinking about, just clarity and pictures. The memories of the alien life form were there as well. He couldn’t access them but he knew they were there in a corner of his mind, waiting for download into the shell he now had the ability to create.
It would take six years and it would make him rich if he kept the goal of his projects secret. The patents would change the history of Earth.
The hunter looked at the mirror in the cabin’s bathroom as he prepared for bed. The scar on his cheek was silver.
by submission | Dec 2, 2010 | Story
Author : Sean Austin Murphy
I was 19 when I first heard them. I thought I was crazy. They assured me I was not. I told my family. My family agreed I was crazy. I went to the doctors. The doctors gave me pills. The pills don’t work.
They said they were from the future. They said I was the only one they could contact. They said I was a mutation. I believed them. They said the sun was dying. They said I was the only hope.
They told me to build it. The device. I was given clear instructions. I gathered the materials and I began construction. Every piece fit. Everything was perfect. But then the others came.
The others tried to stop me. The others said not to trust them. The others said they were evil. I was shown images. Horrid tortured by visions of the future. The others said they were responsible. The others said they were invaders. The others said they came from nowhere and attacked for no reason. I almost believed it. But the others made a mistake.
I don’t think they could hear the others, but still they knew. They knew when I stopped working. I was almost done, one more piece was all. But the others had given me pause. They guessed what was happening. They told me who the others really were. They told me the others were people. They explained that as the sun faded humanity went mad. They said the few still coherent were zealots. Survivors believed this was gods wrath. They said the others believed to interfere with god was wrong. They said they were only here to save what humanity had once been. They showed me images.
It’s a powerful feeling, to decide the fate of your world. I almost believed the others. Then the others showed me an image. It was of the others counter attacking the invader’s ships, to drive them from our world. But I had already seen this image. They had showed it to me. They had showed me how the madmen had destroyed their outpost, murdered the families inside.
As I finished the device the others begged me to stop. When I asked the others didn’t even know what it would do. The madmen even tried to claim it was a bomb.
When the final piece was in place the voices stopped. No more images, no more arguing, just quiet.
The others still don’t know what it is. I tried to tell them, the others that is, but they think I’m crazy. All they know is that the invaders are talking to someone in the past, planning something, and that they have to stop it.
They’re in the other room now, the others. They are all I have left, the only few survivors still fighting the good fight. They have their theories as to where the invaders came from, but they don’t really know. I do.
It’s not a bomb the invaders are building in the past, it’s a beacon.
