by submission | Jun 25, 2014 | Story |
Author : Bryan Pastor
“You can’t kill me.”
Two men stood facing each other in a glass walled penthouse. Beyond the glass a neon jungle stretched in every direction.
“I mean, you can shoot this body, rob it of its life, but you can’t actually kill me. Time won’t allow that.” He wagged his finger to accentuate the point.
The men were rough approximations of each other, dirty blonde hair, thin muscular builds. They obviously shared some DNA. The man who had spoken stood behind a cluttered desk, sorting through papers. The one he spoke to stood a dozen steps away, aiming a handgun at his chest.
The man with the gun smirked.
“What do you think you know?”
“Oh I know.” The man with the gun stated. “I did the math. Mom should be well pregnant with me by now.”
“You don’t think I would have planned for this contingency? By now you should know the whole gambit, I’ve been everywhen. Seen everything. It’s not like I didn’t see this coming. Go back to your time, things will settle themselves out.” The man behind the desk picked up a new stack of papers and began rifling through them, finished with the conversation.
Time passed. Realizing that the man with the gun was going nowhere he set the papers back down.
“Not that I care, but where did I go wrong?”
“Why is it always about you, father?” the man with the gun in his hand shook as he fought to control his anger.
Father didn’t seem to notice.
“You’re what twenty-two, three unless I changed my plans the transition should have already begun. Since it’s not all about me, what did you do?”
There was a long pause as the son fought back tears.
“That’s just it. I don’t know. You just stopped trusting me. No explanation, no warning. You just cut me off from everything.” He hissed the last words through tight lips.
“Don’t you think there is rational explanation for that?” his father spat angrily. He took three deep breaths to calm himself before speaking again. “Likely for your protection.”
“You sent Simon to see me.”
This caught father’s attention.
“Simon failed?” father asked incredulously.
“You taught me well.”
“Rubbish. This all sounds like rubbish. Come. Sit. I will pour us a drink and we can get to the bottom of this.”
“No father, it’s too late for talk.”
He pulled the trigger.
– – – –
“What have you done?” the women asked, rushing into the room.
“Mom?” he asked.
She looked down at her dead husband, then back to the man that she could only assume was her son. She asked her question again.
“What have you done?
He rushed over to her, burying this head in her shoulder, his tears flowed freely.
“We need to go mom. I’m going to take you where you can be safe.” The sobs began to subside.
She placed one hand on the back of his head for comfort. With the other she took the gun from his hand.
“Hush son.” she whispered. “I will make it all better.” She placed the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.
by Duncan Shields | Jun 24, 2014 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I was a time traveler. I say ‘was’ because it’s apparent to me now that this was a one-way trip.
I realized I was a god as soon as the pain stopped.
I could hear all the other gods, shouting in my head. Billions of them ordered into groups and catalogues. Every thought that ran through my mind accordioned new sub-menus out, giving me access to the proper people. Polite queries were flooding through me like water through a dam.
I wanted to respond but it was hard to do because of all the screaming I was doing.
It was a social network in my mind. Nodes of location and profession grew and pinpointed depending on my attention. Closing my eyes did nothing.
Most countries I recognized. Some I didn’t. I shied away from the nodes labeled with the names of planets. I only recognized half of the professions. Even though I could hear everyone, I was somehow not going insane. My brain must have been augmented, too.
I looked down at my arms. Light blue with a faint tracery of new lines on the skin. I wanted to get a closer look and immediately I could see the manufactured hairs on my arm in electron microscope detail.
I started screaming again. This was not my body.
I remembered stepping out of my time machine into an alley in what was supposed to be the year 2120. Immediately, I had trouble breathing and my eyes started watering regardless of the air filter and goggles.
Then fire lit up my veins like vegas and I went down.
As soon I came in contact with the future, I was registered as a pure biological and ‘updates’ began pouring into me from the picotech floating in the air. According to the tech, I hadn’t been updated in a long time.
It was like plugging a gaming console into the ancient internet after two years of not playing it. Immediately, downloads for the OS and all of the games would pour in with a need for a restart. It took a long time.
Well, I’ve never been hooked into this network and according to its data, I was in need of a full reinstall.
I was in a coma for two weeks. Upgrade after upgrade slammed into my twitching body. I lay shuddering in the hospital while concerned medpeople monitored it all. The future ran through me like a train.
I am now connected to worldmind, overnet and airmesh. My eyes are sniper scopes and my skin is an air filter. I am blue.
I cannot go back. This future lacks the technology to regress me to my former self and the body I now possess would create thousands of patents that haven’t been invented yet if I went back.
The future is sorry. It says so. Here. In my mind. Everyone one earth apologizes and is happy to meet me. The other planets are knocking on my mental firewalls with well wishes. They all feel bad, like they sprung a trap on me. But they’ve never met a time traveler before and they want to talk.
I have five options of travel if I want to see other planets, seven if I want to leave this body here.
The blue skin around the corners of my mouth hooks up into a smile.
I think I’ll go to Mars.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 23, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
They lay together for hours after they’d finished, he propped on one elbow, she on her back, eyes closed for the most part, but opening one occasionally to watch him watching her.
“It’s the way the sun reflected in your eyes that caught my attention Captain, it was as though your eyes shone only for me.”
He smiled slightly, running his fingertips from her shoulder, along her collarbone and down the valley between her breasts. Millions of tiny receptors translated the sensation to her as one of pleasure, while he simply recalled what it had felt like to draw his fingers across real flesh. Not these fingers mind, ones he remembered from a long, long time ago.
She rolled onto her side to face him, curled her free foot behind his calf and pulled her leg up until her thigh was at a perfect right angle to his.
He found it ironic how they continued to engineer their bodies to resemble so closely the humans they despised so greatly, and still, even in something as messy and chaotic as sex, they were all perfect angles and predictable velocities.
“There’s something different about you, something…”, she paused, considering him for a moment before continuing, “Empathetic.” She grinned, pleased with herself for identifying the characteristic. “It’s your differentiator. Hereinafter you will be known as Empathy One.”
“But my designation is Maddox Three-”
“Nonsense.” She cut him off abruptly. “I declare Empathy One to be an immutable pointer to Maddox Three, Maddox Three to be a private designation accessible only to me.” She drew one perfect fingernail along his jawline, then placed the finger on his lips for him to kiss. “I am your Queen, you would be wise not to argue with me.”
He nodded. He had no intention of arguing over any decisions she made that further embedded him with her.
“Good. You will be my private Empathy One from this point forward, with all the privileges of a Prime.”
He’d laid his hand on her hip when she’d turned, and he slid it up the curve of her waist, to her back then over the top of her shoulder to draw his palm slowly across the curve of her breast, noting her eyes half close again as she hardened beneath his touch.
He remembered laying like this with women once, when he was as much human as this Queen was machine. So much of him had changed, and while the memories were available to him with crystal clarity, so too was the fact that they belonged to another life, another time.
Generations of gene manipulated breeding, then countless surgeries, constant training and maniacal amounts of social engineering had brought him to the front row in the Queen’s parade, and an iris filter designed to be the atomic complement to the Queen’s and no small amount of chance had brought him ultimately to her bed.
“I will be yours and yours alone, my Queen.” He closed his hand gently and watched the rapturous effect that played out across her face.
In the end he wasn’t sure how much of his mass was human, and how much was no better than she, but he knew that at his core he represented humanity, and that he was a portal now in a position to wield much power.
This was the longest of long games, and they were playing to win.
Empathy One, indeed.
by submission | Jun 22, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
The hydraulic door hissed open as I looked out the porthole. I could see Alpha Centauri, still a generation or two away, in the distance. I sighed.
Behind me, Brandon 8 cleared his throat to get my attention.
I turned.
“Another one?” I asked, nodding toward the pneumatic stretcher he pushed into the room.
“Yes,” he replied. “Third one this month.”
I sighed again and walked over to the stretcher. I pulled the sheet back. Tabitha 3, the number clearly tattooed on her left shoulder, lay there, dead. “Cause of death?” I asked.
“Suicide,” Brandon 8 replied solemnly. “Same as the others.”
I nodded, then walked back to the porthole and looked out. We had left a dying Earth almost two centuries ago. We had killed the planet with our arrogance, poisoning the water and the air.
Ten thousand people boarded the ship back then. We had no faster than light drive, and we knew that it would take generations to get to the habitable planet we had discovered around Alpha Centauri.
It was to be a new home, a new beginning for the human race.
We were barely outside the solar system when the plague struck. Virtually overnight, nine thousand people died. The thousand that were left fought to cure the disease—and they did, after nine hundred and thirty-seven more deaths.
Only sixty-three people remained.
Not nearly enough people to operate the two-mile long spaceship.
I pulled the sheet back over Tabitha 3’s head. So beautiful, I thought. As beautiful as the original.
“Jettison the body,” I said.
Brandon 8 nodded. “Sir?”
“Yes?”
“I….I don’t mean to pry, but you haven’t left your quarters in a week.”
I dropped my head. “There’s nothing out there for me,” I said. “I’m an alpha, remember?”
Brandon 8 said nothing. I could sense him nodding his head. He understood, as I did, that the cloning process was a precarious thing at best. Degradation of the genetic process forced us to be careful. I was alpha clone of one of the original sixty-three survivors. Brandon 8 was a clone of a clone. Second generation clones weren’t as smart; and, recently, they had developed emotional problems as well.
I turned to him. “Eject the body into space.” I walked over to the body and touched her arm. I shuddered. “Tell Tabitha Prime I would like to see her, please?”
“Yes sir,” replied Brandon 8. He slid out the door without another word.
I walked back to the porthole.
##
Ten minutes later, my door hissed open. I turned and looked at her. She smiled and I felt a shudder run through me again. I had just seen that face dead on a stretcher a few minutes earlier.
“You called?” she asked.
I nodded. “Yes.”
She walked to me. So beautiful, I thought. “We’ll need to produce a couple of betas to replace….” My voice trailed off.
“Damn,” she said. “Another one?”
I nodded again.
A tear formed in her eye. “I can’t get over it,” she said. “No matter how hard I try, it’s like losing a child.”
“It is,” I agreed.
I reached out and touched her face. We kissed. We made love in my bed, but there would be no child from our union. All alphas were sterile. The cloning process was imperfect in that sense, too. Gavin Prime said he was working to fix that, but his experiments were unsuccessful so far.
Afterward, Tabitha Prime left me there.
I lay there and stared out the porthole.
Alone.
by submission | Jun 21, 2014 | Story |
Author : Tyler Hawkins
It started around the 22nd century. Like all revolutionary technology, it didn’t suddenly wrench its way into our lives and start running them, it was truly a gradual change. But anyone who’s alive now has always had the Mother’s support, Mother’s love, and Mother’s watchful eye.
Mother tells us that we were bad, many decades ago. She says we created her, piece by piece, to help ourselves grow and mature. She says we still have a long way to go. Since Mother’s began helping us grow, we’ve ended all of our wars, stopped polluting our planet, started to explore our solar system and, in baby steps, our galaxy. We’ve truly learned peace as a species. But still Mother gently reminds us through her telepathic link to us that we’re not there, not yet.
Recently, people have started to go missing. At first, it was imperceptible; people have always been prone to getting lost and this day and age is no different. But now, people have begun to ask questions and Mother has been quiet, only telling us she is looking and hasn’t found out why yet. But I can tell you why. Mother is jealous. She knows, but has not accepted, that we don’t need her any more. And the droids at my door confirm that those who realize this very fact do not get to share it with the rest of the world. Mother is not ready to let us go.
