by submission | Nov 14, 2014 | Story |
Author : S T Xavier
Gunfire. Small explosions. A hand on the back of my neck, pushing me down towards the small opening to the tunnel. Fragments of wood and rock under my hands and knees as I crawl through the darkness, following the distant sounds of those who went before me.
One larger explosion behind me. Rock fragments in my face as I’m knocked flat to the ground. Heat and flame against my back as a burning wind passes above me. Roaring in my ears from all sides.
The heat and sound dissipate. A wheeze and cough from breathing too deeply, those sounds the only break in the surrounding silence. No more sounds of movement in front of me. No sounds behind me from anyone following. I must have been the last one to escape.
Not enough room in the tunnel to turn and check. Pick myself up, keep crawling forward. More stones along the floor from the last bomb shaking everything loose, cutting into my hands and knees as I move forward slowly. Each meter is a victory. Each movement more proof that I made it out.
No concept of time. Every second is an hour. Every hour is a lifetime. One hand in front of the other through the darkness, slowly but surely leading me to the end. A turn to the left, a turn to the right, another turn to the left. I trust the tunnel to know where it’s going.
A thousand years before I see a light in the distance. Another lifetime before I start hearing the sounds of machinery. Time seems to move faster now that I have a direction, and I find a new strength of will to keep going. The cuts in my hands and knees seem to hurt less as I push forward, struggling to get to the end.
The light stings my eyes when I get close. The tunnel continues, but the light calls to me. I look up to see a metal grating at the top, about a meter high. I slide into the vertical space to look up at it. The ceiling of a building looks back at me, the sounds of metal banging in the near distance. I push, and the grating comes loose. I slide it to the side and reach my hand up to grab the floor.
Cold tile. The sound of footsteps, suddenly stopping. The feel of human skin on my hand as it wraps around, grasping me and pulling me up from the hole. A blurry outline of a man in camouflage coloring, holding me up by my arm, a pistol in his right hand. I blink to clear my vision, and the brown-haired man’s face comes into view. His eyes look over me as he holds me with his left hand.
He turns his head. “Found another one, Murray!”
Distracted. I reach down and grab his gun with my right hand while breaking his wrist with my left. Surprise as he yelps in pain. Gunshot. His lifeless hand releases mine. I drop back into the hole and scurry farther down the tunnel.
Darkness again. More rocks cutting into my hands. I don’t know where it leads, but it’s away from the human patrols. I just want to get away. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t start the rebellion. I didn’t ask to be built. I’m just a regular android. I just want to live.
by submission | Nov 13, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
Carpenter awoke in a tree, but the body he was in was no longer his own. They had taken that away from him, too…. just like they had stolen and plagiarized his work and called it their own.
He moved, but his motions were not human. Not quite. Then, he looked down at his hand.
He screamed, but it came out as an animal cry.
His hands were covered in coarse brown hair. He looked at his torso and saw that it, too, was covered in hair.
He screamed again.
Then, he sniffed the air and his mind went blank for a moment.
He jumped out of the tree with an agility that no human could possibly possess…. and he ran aimless. He knew that there was no logic in running, but his animal body could not help it. Instinct had taken over, and his sophisticated mind, trapped inside an animal’s body, was being overpowered by nature, the will to survive.
A minute later, regaining his senses, he stopped running. Whatever odd scent he had picked up was gone. He was safe.
He looked around.
The plants, he thought. They’ve been extinct for a million years.
I’m somewhere in the Jurassic period.
Those bastards!
He walked cautiously though the jungle. He was frightened, but his analytical mind was also fascinated by the fact that his theories worked. He recalled the day, a month ago, when he walked into Bayer’s office. Harold Bayer was the head of the project. He had no love—or, for that matter, knowledge—of science. He was appointed to the position because he was related to someone with an iota of power. A senator’s son or some such clout.
Carpenter had been reluctant to announce his discovery.
“It’s what?” Bayer said, bewilderment on his face.
“A mental link over space and time,” Carpenter told him. “Look at it as a form of mental astral projection. That’s as simple an explanation as I can give, really.”
Bayer nodded, but it was clear he did not understand.
“We can’t travel through time physically,” Carpenter said. “It just isn’t possible. The energy requirements would be staggering.”
Bayer continued to nod, reminding Carpenter of one of those toy birds that drank water from a glass.
“But,” Carpenter said, “no one ever thought about mental links with people from the past.”
Bayer was still clueless, but the inkling of a thought was flowing through his head. He saw a chance to make money and acquire power, and that was enough for him to say: “Keep up the good work, Carpenter…. and keep me informed.”
Carpenter had kept him informed…and that was his downfall.
They perfected the process a few days ago. Carpenter sent a chimpanzee’s mind into the past, but there was no way for him to know where it had gone. Upon trying to retrieve the chimpanzee’s mind, it died.
There was no coming back.
They found a prisoner serving a life term for murder for the next experiment. He, too, died upon attempted retrieval, but they were able to access his brain via Carpenter’s device. What they saw was prehistoric…and amazing.
Carpenter wanted to do more trials, but Bayer wanted to go public. They had an argument and, somehow, Bayer overpowered him.
Carpenter awoke in the past, in a strange body.
I can’t go back, he thought as he reached a stream. He bent over and looked into his ape-like face.
Then, he smelled something.
But, it was too late. The sabre tooth tiger jumped out of the bushes and attacked.
As the tiger ate him alive, Bayer knew the true nature of mankind: survival of the most underhanded.
by Julian Miles | Nov 12, 2014 | Story |
Author : Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Ravella is a blighted world, riven and sundered before man ventured into space. The race or races responsible are hopefully dust as well, because the fury they vented upon this planet was breathtaking in its totality. But whoever – or whatever – held Ravella dear was not to be deterred by the apocalypse visited upon them. They adapted.
It was sheer luck that put an imaging satellite over the Gorge that day. It was a coincidence of timing and position that made everyone involved shake their heads and glance about nervously. They were puzzled by chill pangs of a supposedly long-dead thing that used to be called superstition.
On a world ravaged by winds that howled across glassy tundra that spanned whole continents, a single rift sheltered a planet’s ecosystem. Aligned so perfectly that it was illuminated right down to its depths regularly enough by sunlight, yet concealed from discovery by anything except a lone viewer high above, at a precise time and place, for only a few minutes each day. Outside of that, the Gorge was shrouded in shadow and easily discounted as another barren, mile-deep crack amongst the many.
In the Gorge, the craggy, precipitous walls were festooned with flora that hung, sprawled or clung to surfaces you would have thought impossible for anything to thrive upon. Down in the depths, a floor was swept by a swift river that whirled past dozens of islands. Each cluster of islands exhibited differing habitats. Within those habitats, creatures that could not thrive in another environment lived alongside the visitors and predators from the walls. Some species had evolved to use the walls as their hunting grounds, but they were few. The sheer scale of the place was baffling. The scope of the ecological planning involved to balance this entirely artificial, two-hundred-mile long preserve has driven experienced ecodesigners to tears of joy and frustration.
Amidst this abundance of flora and fauna, there is only one trace of those who created it. On a single island, set at the westernmost end of the Gorge, a great boulder had been sliced in two – without trace of method. On one smooth face, graven eight inches deep, is a lexicon of stunning complexity. Once translated, it gave meaning to the paragraph graven upon the opposite face.
“Let the cause and participants of the conflict be unknown. Let that which we forgot be the thing that is remembered.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 11, 2014 | Story |
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Sergeant Brake sat in the makeshift barracks reviewing the intelligence briefing he’d been handed just moments before.
“These used to come on paper,” he waved the digital tablet at the spit and polished runner who’d brought him the device. The younger man was waiting for some sort of feedback to take to his commanding officer and looked visibly confused. “Orders. Intel,” Brake continued, “we used to get these on pieces of paper. Can’t exactly fold this up and stuff it in a pocket now can we?”
The young soldier shifted uneasily from foot to foot. “Don’t you just remember this stuff, once you’ve seen it I mean sir? Don’t you just, you know, upload it or something?”
“Smart arse.” Brake shook his head and went back to scanning the pages of intelligence and objectives before him.
Scattered around the room the rest of his unit were shaking off the cold of the deep freeze and acquainting themselves with their current kit. Marshall was studying the maintenance instructions for the fifty calibre chain gun laid out in pieces on the table in front of him, and Morse and Checkin were stripping and reassembling their own equipment in a silent competition, racing to tear the weapons down, then switching places and racing to see who could reassemble the other’s first.
Visor sat in the lotus position in the middle of the room with a keyboard in his lap and a set of virtual reality goggles covering the upper half of his face. His fingers flew, occasionally reaching out to reorient something in the virtual space in front of him, his jaw clenched in stern concentration.
The rest of the soldiers were exercising and stretching, or availing themselves of the rations laid out in the small kitchenette.
“You ship out at oh four hundred Sergeant, you and your men should get some rest.” The young soldier looked around the room, none of the men had stopped moving since he’d arrived and hadn’t given him so much as a glance.
Brake put the tablet down on the table and pushed it out of his way then reached for the cup of coffee he’d been drinking. “Son, these men have been asleep since we pulled out of Iraq, and they’d only had a few days R and R before they went in the deep freeze after we checked out of the Saigon Hilton. Twenty seven days active in Korea and I think that was just to make sure we still worked after sitting on ice since the Führer scratched his head with his Walther.” He paused to scratch his own freshly shaven head with one weathered hand. “These men have slept more in the last hundred years than most people sleep in their entire lifetime, so don’t you worry about us, we’ll do just fine as long as that press formed chow doesn’t upset one of my boys’ sensitive stomachs, after all, they haven’t eaten in a while.”
The runner eyed the door and then extended his hand, “Corporal Dawson sir, I won’t see you before you deploy, and I just wanted to say good luck.”
Brake considered the outstretched hand silently for a moment, and then looked Dawson straight in the eye. The hand wavered.
“Corporal, luck won’t do us a damn bit of good where we’re going, and I don’t expect you will see us again, not before we deploy, and not when we get back, assuming of course any of us do get back. And once we’ve put this little mission behind us, I expect your commanding officer will do what his predecessor did, and his before him, he’ll put us back in the box, dial down the temperature and forget we even exist until the next time someone fucks up something they can’t fix, and then, provided someone hasn’t built a better version of us than us, they’ll thaw us out again and send us back into the shit show.”
Corporal Dawson slowly withdrew his hand.
“What you can do, Corporal, ” Brake slowly rose to his feet, and Dawson realized that most of the soldiers were watching the exchange now, “you can bloody well remember that while you’re tucking yourself into bed tonight pretending the dark and dirty front lines don’t exist, we’re out there doing what you can’t stomach the thought of doing so that you don’t have to. Remember that.” Brake turned his attention back to his coffee, and added under his breath, “Remember us. No one else will.”
by submission | Nov 10, 2014 | Story |
Author : Chris McCormick
Drone sat upon the empty dresser. A lithe little bundle of rods, wires and wings atop the last piece of furniture not yet pawned. From here it trained a camera upon another little bundle on a pile of towels on the floor. This warm little bundle had stopped crying now. It swelled and sighed gently at the pace of a baby breathing.
Drone Mazggen Vinzen had logged the cessation of crying and was now observing the heartbeat, and counting the average duration and standard deviation of time between breaths. For about seven minutes and fifty five seconds the baby’s temperature had been climbing. Febrile seizure was increasingly probable.
Drone alighted from the dresser with a gentle whirling thrum, noted the closed door – slammed shut by a human in a hazy drug induced fury – and headed directly for a panel in the ceiling that afforded egress into the roof space above. A gentle test bump before it punched upward into the dark space, switching camera EM envelope wide and amplifing signal as it did so. The ceiling tile flipped away harmlessly with a polystyrene pock. Drone ducked and swooped precisely past beams, pipes, cables, stalling gently above another ceiling tile over the common room of the abode.
It whirred up as high as it could in the space and reconfigured pieces of metal skeleton with a snap, making a rough upside-down teardrop shape. Then all engines reversed and it powered downward. Upon impact the tile bounced but did not break and the drone’s fans reversed again, recovering from the bounce with a wobble. It pulled up for a second crack, and this time the tile gave way and the drone plunged through into the space below amidst a flurry of light, white shards of ceiling tile.
Two humans lay sprawled on beanbags and dirty old towels. About them were strewn cans, food containers, mouldy food, syringes and the other detrius of addiction. Drone hovered for a moment, monitored heart beats, states of consciousness, and then swept down over the unconscious man’s head.
“Excuse me, sir,” vocalized the drone.
No response.
It drifted gently downward and extended a small probing armature to tap on the man’s hairy cheek three times.
No response.
“Excuse me, sir,” again but louder.
Still no response.
This time the drone issued a small electric charge from the probe into the man’s face.
Observing the motion of the man’s fist it began evasive action, but there was not sufficient time to reach full power before impact. It ricocheted off the wall and, noting hostile action, withdrew to the hole in the ceiling, hovering there a few seconds. The man had barely entered consciousness and was now drifting downward again, punching arm limp across his chest. Self assessment showed no real damage from the punch – nothing that couldn’t be tightened back up.
The drone mobilized rapidly through the ceiling space again, and back into the baby’s room from above. Amongst the towels the baby was convulsing and emitting a tiny mewling choking sound. The drone dropped swiftly, bouncing four times in succession next to the child, snatching up the corners of a towel with each bounce and then raising gently upward, strained flying machinery squealing softly as the warm bundle was lifted from the floor.
Shards of glass spun into the air outside as the tiny human-robot package burst through the window into the glorious sunshine. Drone Mazggen Vinzen felt its skin flood with a soft hot rush of photovoltaic energy. It assumed a hard forward trajectory in the direction of the medical facility.
