by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 17, 2021 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Alex stood next to James and tried to make sense of what he was looking at. He had been annoyed at being called from his bed at this ungodly hour, but that feeling was slowly being replaced by curiosity.
“It’s a time machine, kind of,” James was explaining, “it lets me lock onto memories and revisit the time and space they occurred.”
Alex needed coffee. Or sleep. He was on the fence as to which was the better idea at this point.
“I need you to watch me, monitor the journey, if anything goes wrong I need you to pull me out.”
Alex surveyed the room, the seat in the middle of overlapping egg-shaped coils of copper, what looked like a series of high-voltage transformers chained together and the cables tethering them to each other and the rig, massive conductors straining apart as if trying to escape each other’s proximity.
“What are you going to do? No, never mind, monitor how? What’s going to go wrong, and how would I know unless…” he paused and waved at the equipment “unless this all explodes?”
James pointed to the desk, to a bank of green phosphor displays.
“There, watch the log output, if the controller panics, you’ll know, then power it down there.” He pointed to a large red shutoff on a breaker panel by the door. “Then get out.”
Alex shook his head, grunted, then nodded. Too late for coffee, and it was clear he wasn’t getting any sleep now.
“Nadia and I got together the very last time at a bar, right before she ran off with…”, he winced, the name was burned so vividly he couldn’t bring himself to say it, “with Fuckwit von Shit-for-brains.” He paused, remembering. “We had drinks, we ate, we talked until closing time. She came home with me, and we had the most amazing…” He paused again, blushed. “It was amazing. She was amazing. I need to get back there, find out what I did wrong, fix it.”
Alex didn’t say a word. What would be the point?
James keyed the start-up sequence, then as the machine started to hum, he sat in the chair in the middle of the coils, buckled himself in, and closed his eyes.
The hum rose to a whine, then a deafening roar, then silence.
***
James opened his eyes, he was in a bar. No, the bar. He’d never forget this place. There was a low-frequency buzz, conversation maybe, just out of earshot? Glasses appeared and disappeared on tables, at the bar. The big ornate clock that almost filled one wall spun, the hands a blur.
In the corner, the table they’d sat at. He worked his way across the room, focused only on that space. The closer he got, the harder it became to move, as though the air were getting thicker.
He forged on, leaning now into an invisible gale force, willing himself to that corner until he could reach out and touch the back of the chair he’d sat in, so long ago.
It refused to move, fixed in place as if welded to the floor, and he had to force himself between the arms and the table, to finally slump into the seat itself, the force now pushing him into the seatback making it hard to breathe.
Glasses and plates came and went in a blur, and across the table, where Nadia had sat that entire night, smiling, talking.
Nothing.
The seat was and remained empty.
There was a violent tug, the pushing force now a fist wrapped around his spine, yanking him back, through the chair, the bar, from the past into the present to deposit him, aching and gasping for breath in the seat in his lab.
He looked up into the curious and concerned eyes of his friend.
“Well,” Alex asked, “what happened?”
James struggled with what had just happened.
“I must have missed something, miscalculated something, everything was there, just the way I remember it, but I was alone. She wasn’t there.”
Alex stepped back and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“James,” he said gently, “you know she was already gone long before that night. Why would you expect her to have waited in that memory the way you did?”
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 6, 2021 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Sven had been driven out of Newport City and into the stars with a warning.
“If you ever plan on landing Earthside again, you’d better bring enough money to clear your debt in full, with interest, or you’ll be flayed and spread along the whole of Mainstreet as a warning to all the other losers.”
The warning was a kindness. He should have been killed, there and then, and he knew it, but LouisXIV owed him for saving his life, long ago, and this was him clearing that marker.
He’d spent seventeen years floating from station to station, light hopping to the furthest reaches of habitable space, conning and cajoling himself in and out of better ships, to better leads, and he was ready to come home.
“Newport tower, this is Sierra Victor Echo November seven seven three niner on approach, requesting inbound vector, over.”
It should only take a few minutes for that to throw up alerts across the control tower.
“Unmarked vessel, we do not have you on our grid, turn on locators. Over.”
Of course, he wasn’t on the grid, the sun was throwing up enough interference they’d never be able to see him. If it wasn’t for the hardened mining rig he was flying, he’d already be a meat pie.
“Newport tower, inbound heavy.”
“Unmarked…” the transmission was cut off abruptly.
“Sven, you sack of excrement, if you even think of landing here I’ll gut you like a fish myself before you get both feet on the ground.”
The familiar voice brought a smile to his face.
“Louis, nice to hear a friendly voice. You said payment in full with interest, correct?”
There was a long pause.
“We’re talking a hell of a lot of interest Sven.”
The meteoroid he’d secured was nearly 20 meters in diameter, in it was enough rare elements to more than pay what he owed. All he needed to do was land, get the cargo valued, and he could cover whatever Louis wanted for his freedom. Easy.
But there remained the principle of the thing.
Sven pushed the throttle to the pins and rolled the ship on its back, belly to space. He’d calculated on full burn with a little centrifugal help running a slingshot around the sun, that meteoroid should reach about five thousand meters per second on release. Given the ship computers’ calculated trajectory, which he trusted with his life, and this precise time of day and the relative rotation of the Earth, which he’d been working back from for months, his little payment should arrive crisp and cooking right at Newport tower while he continued following the sun’s orbit, breaking loose en route to another system before anyone even knew what had hit them.
Maybe there’d be a LouisXV holding markers somewhere else, but that was a problem for another day.
“Standby Newport tower, you should see me light up the grid momentarily.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 1, 2021 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Marcus followed June from the school after class, across the back field, up over the train tracks, and down the other side into the woods.
“Where are we going?” He struggled to keep up, his backpack catching on a branch as she forged on ahead with determined certainty.
“You’ll see”, was her reply, not missing a step.
They walked through the forest for nearly an hour, she seemingly certain of the way, though there was no trail Marcus could make out. June was always better at finding paths, and he couldn’t help worry a little about getting separated and not being able to find his way back.
“How much farther?” He huffed, the exertion starting to wear on him.
“Not long”, the non-committal reply.
He shrugged his backpack further up his shoulders and trudged on behind her the rest of the way in silence.
The trees cleared abruptly at the edge of a ravine, and they slid down the incline to a wide river bed. Water rushed from around a corner upstream to slow in a wider pool where they were standing, before disappearing around another bend a little further downstream.
“Here”, June instructed, “watch this.”
She gathered a few fist-sized rocks and climbed along the boulders and fallen logs that lined the river bank until she reached a flat rocky outcrop, where she dumped the rocks in a pile, then waited for Marcus to join her.
“See that dark spot on the water, there?” She pointed to a shady patch where the water was caught up in a pocket behind the outcrop they stood on, forming an eddy and turning back against the current. “Watch.”
She tossed a rock into the middle of the slowly revolving circle of water. It disappeared without a sound.
“Now look up there,” she pointed upstream as a rock fell from thin air into the river with an audible splash easily ten meters away from where she had dropped it.
Marcus stared for a long minute.
“I don’t get it. Do that again.”
He watched carefully as June picked up another fist-sized rock and dropped it into the eddy.
They both stared upriver together for a few moments before a rock fell again out of thin air into the middle of the river.
Marcus stood speechless. This was scratching a part of his brain that didn’t like being scratched.
When he turned around, June had stripped off her shoes, socks, and pants.
“I’m going through”, she announced, and without another word, and before he could protest, she jumped into the water, again without a sound, leaving not even a ripple.
Marcus stared upstream and waited. She should have appeared by now. The rocks had come through right away, hadn’t they?
••
June landed with a thump, not in the river, not even in water, but in a hole. She stood, slightly sore from the fall, and raised herself on tiptoes to see over the side.
A creature sat, hunkered down on all fours a few meters away, staring at her with wide, unblinking eyes, its lips peeling back in a vulgar smile around a mouthful of teeth.
Beside it was a pile of fist-sized rocks.
Behind her, a rock fell out of the air, landing with a thump in the hole where she stood.
The creature picked up a rock from its own pile, and with a sound almost like a chuckle tossed it into a hole in the ground at its feet.
by Stephen R. Smith | May 14, 2021 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
I woke with a start before dawn, the sky outside was still dark and yet the room was bathed in a shimmering orange glow.
For a moment I thought I was dreaming, but the room was my room, as I left it when I went to sleep, excepting of course the strange light. And the man.
He sat just beyond the foot of the bed in a straight back chair that did not belong, his arms at his side, hands folded neatly in his lap. His head was tipped back ever so slightly, and flames poured as if liquid from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth only to evaporate before reaching his shoulders, filling the air and the room with this shimmering liquid firelight.
I knew in my gut what this was, who this was, why he was here. I had been remiss, I owed him a debt and he was trying to collect.
I believed him lost. I thought I could forget. I thought he was free of this mortal coil, and yet here he was, having found his own way from who knows where to me.
The air crackled, static charge raising my hair as it bridged the distance between the walls and where he sat.
His head tilted forward ever so slightly, the fiery eye sockets looking right through me before he disappeared with a snap, the room suddenly plunged back into darkness.
I sat stunned for some time, hair still on end, the smell of ozone permeating the room and a metalic taste in my mouth.
I raised a hand, pulled a fistful of light from the ether and tossed it to the empty glass globe hung from the bedroom ceiling. It coalesced there, gained strength, and bathed the room in a soft white light.
My knowledge of and agency over light came at a cost, the loss of a partner I assumed was final, but clearly more than light can be pushed into and pulled from the ether, and if he was there, trapped in the who knows where, it would be in my best interest to find a way to bring him back.
Before he found a way back on his own.
by Stephen R. Smith | Apr 6, 2021 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Dorothy sighed and pushed herself back from the gurney on which her husband’s motionless body lay.
Not for the first time she wondered if she shouldn’t just throw in the towel and buy a new one.
His head plate removed, and the replacement cerebral core reinstalled, all that should be left to be done was to restore from one of the two redundant backups she’d made before the repair.
How hard could this be? How goddamned hard?
She’d followed the instructions, ordered a pair of backup units, shut him down, backed him up, and confirmed both backups were complete.
The brain container had opened without too much trouble, the tools provided in the kit did the hard work, and the cerebral core popped out of its socket without any resistance at all. She was careful not to touch the new one for fear of getting any foreign contaminant on it, as there were service notes about oils from the skin resulting in corrosion over time in rare cases. She wasn’t taking any chances.
She’d powered him up, reformatted the new core, and reinstalled the base OS from the net. He was a seven-year-old model, so she needed to load the system he shipped with when he’d uplifted, and then she could upgrade and apply the service packs, patches, and hotfixes to get him back up to date before she could even think about restoring his memories and personality data.
Three times she’d had the install fail.
The first time the core OS installed, and then at some point during the service pack installs the network connection must have slowed and timed out, leaving Clark in an unbootable state.
Reformat, restart.
The second time the core OS installed, all the updates were applied as expected, but when she tried to restore Clark from backup, the host hadn’t validated the license, and refused to exit activation mode.
Two hours on phone support and the solution was to reformat and reinstall from a different server.
She contemplated just restoring him on the base, seven-year-old OS. She really had no idea what features were missing anymore, or how he’d take it. He’d been a bit of an ass about this whole issue in the first place, ignoring the fact that he’d clearly been suffering from badly fragmented and degraded memory for ages, and trying to convince her that it was she who couldn’t remember things correctly. As if. Nervy little prick.
If she was being honest with herself, she’d be happy to just leave him turned off in the basement for a while.
Maybe a little peace and quiet would do her good.
Was that illegal?
Dorothy wondered if that was covered in the terms and conditions anywhere.
She sighed. Just look at him there, helpless, turned off. She chuckled. Did either of them turn each other on anymore?
She restarted the updates and drew a bedsheet up to his chin, before turning off the lights and heading upstairs.
A watched pot and all that.
Besides, there was a bottle of wine that wasn’t going to drink itself, and she was pretty sure he’d still be there in the morning.
