by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 17, 2011 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
John Jones leaned heavily on the counter in the hotel bathroom, a haggard face he barely recognized staring back at him from the full width mirror. Six o’clock in the evening, and he felt like he’d already been awake for days.
The interrogation had taken nearly two hours. He couldn’t remember airport security ever being so tight, so ruthless. Pulled from the line, back scatter scanned then frisked, only to be isolated and strip searched. Then questioned, endlessly; machines feeling, watching, analyzing his every response.
Fortunately for him, John Jones was above reproach, and each question was carefully and consistently answered, no matter how many ways it was phrased in the hopes of catching him out in a lie.
His throat was so dry it hurt. Shaking, John unwrapped the cheap cellophane from a lowball and filled it from the tap, the luke warm water downed in a series of uninterrupted gulps.
Putting down the glass, he filled the sink and washed his face, then lathered his short cut hair and rinsed it under the tap, banging his head several times in the too small sink on the too short gooseneck of the faucet.
Straightening, he rubbed his head dry and placed the towel back on the rack. Reduce, reuse.
Once out of the bathroom, John found the bellman had deposited his suitcase on a folding luggage stand beside the desk, and he opened it and began removing the contents into drawers. Socks, several t-shirts and boxer shorts. Two pairs of pants and two pairs of shoes. His toiletries he put on the desk, he’d take them to the bathroom the next time he went, no need to make a special trip.
From the bottom of the case John removed a plastic tube from which he extracted a tightly rolled poster covered with a pattern of blue and red line-art. In the tube lid were pieces of sticky tack which he used to attach the poster to the mirror at the end of the bed. Then he sat and stared at it.
The line art was unintelligible at first glance, and only when he’d stared for several minutes, letting his eyes unfocus from the surface and refocus on a point somewhere deep in the wall behind the mirror that the image of the poster became clear. A decidedly low tech three dimensional image of a series of words came into view, and John focused on them, reading them slowly. It occurred to him only briefly that this exercise was strangely familiar, reflex almost, though he couldn’t remember when he did this first.
‘Anabelle, Cherry Pie’, he read slowly. Somewhere deep inside his brain a lock presented itself and the key slipped in easily. Cherry Pie, of all things, he remembered sitting at a diner in Chile after… Terrance, not John. His name was Terrance…
‘Chesapeake, Jubilee’, the next two words, and again, he could feel a barrier somewhere come down inside his mind. Chesapeake Bay was where he’d first learned to shoot, where he’d returned to train as a sniper…
‘Janine, Silo’, then ‘Jennifer, Juniper’. He read more quickly now, word pairs unlocking parts of his memory that he’d not even been aware of. But no, that wasn’t true, parts that he’d programmed out of his consciousness.
To pass the interrogation.
To gain admittance.
Terrance read the remaining word pairs then carefully re-rolled the poster and placed it back into its tube.
The clock read eighteen hundred hours twenty. He had just enough time to find his contact and secure a weapon before the ambassador’s ship left, and before they were in low earth orbit, the ambassador and his crew would be just as dead as John Jones.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 3, 2011 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The O’Brian Star sat fixed in space between two possible orbits. On maneuvering thrust, we could roll into a pattern over Telavor, shuttle down for some much needed rest while the ship was refitted and resupplied and plot our next supra-light slip. Alternately, we could drop through the nearly non-existant atmosphere of Tel N’akvar, punch a hole into the local mining outpost and load up with enough rare ore to be building a new ship at the other end of the galaxy before the N’akvarans knew what hit them.
It all seemed pretty simple to me as I sat in the upper gunner’s turret, admiring the view, the two planets nearly perfectly aligned with their sun; Telavor casting its massive shadow over the smaller Tel N’akvar.
It was from this vantage point that I had been watching them argue through the window, the Captain and his first mate. They were alone on the bridge, the viewports unshielded and thus unusually transparent from this angle with the lack of outside light. The Captain seemed exasperated, his hands constantly clutching the sides of his head as he spoke, the first mate pacing opposite him, waving her hands wildly in the air, occasionally jabbing her finger at him or smashing both hands on a console.
I wished I could hear what was being said, but I had to assume he’d done something incredibly stupid to deserve her obviously harsh words.
There were many instances where I’d wished the Captain would be sucked out an airlock, leaving the first mate to assume command and open the door to my advances. He was an ass, and she was the normally calm headed, cool tempered beauty that I’d gladly spend the rest of my life under.
Honestly, I don’t know what she ever saw in him.
Snapping back from my reverie, I noticed she was staring out the window directly at me. I froze, trying hard to look like I hadn’t been watching the entire incident.
Then, she waved.
Without thinking, I waved back. We sat frozen there, facing each other across fifty metres of vacuum before she seemed to shake her head and turned away. Around her, the viewports of the bridge opaqued, and I was left staring at nothing but the cold blackness of space.
Minutes ticked away, and I irised open the entryway into the corridor below, straining in the hopes of hearing the sounds of her footsteps making her way from the bridge.
Instead, I felt the rumble of the ship’s engines firing, and the steadily increasing pitch of the sub-light drive as it whined to readiness.
I felt the ship shudder, and then I did hear the sounds of booted feet pounding down the corridor beneath me. The floor lurched beneath my feet, and if I hadn’t been tethered I might have fallen down the access tube.
“Shoot the bitch”, the voice wasn’t my one-day love, “Shoot that goddamned bitch!”
The floor lurched again, and looking out the turret port I realized the entire upper cargo deck, with me and my gun-turret attached, were floating away from the bridge. I stared, dumbfounded as the Captain hauled himself up the ladder into the crowded space.
“She’s taking my fecking ship, blow out the bridge”, I watched as he screamed, and the bridge ports became transparent again. The last sight before we rolled over backwards and my firing options expired was the first mate waving with one hand and extending her middle finger with the other.
I could no longer make out the Captain’s words, I could only think ‘never assume…’
by Stephen R. Smith | May 25, 2011 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
“Vibrablade.”
Across the table, gowned and goggled the ranking surgeon held a hand out expectantly.
“Vibrablade,” she raised her voice, “either assist or get the hell out of my O.R.”
The corporal had grown accustomed to being yelled at, but not by a woman, and under the circumstances he…
“Corporal. Is my operating room not Feng Shui enough for you? Or is this ‘pretend we don’t understand English’ day? Or are you just stupid?” The major’s voice imposed absolute silence on the room. “I’ll ask you one more time, and then I’m going to see to it that you don’t operate on anything warmer than a toilet for the duration of your tour. Pass me a fucking vibrablade.”
Despite all intentions to the contrary, he found himself picking up the cutting instrument and, trembling slightly, placed it in her hand.
“You will hand me what I ask for, when I ask. And with confidence,” she added, “I have no patience for tentative. Clear?”
“Ma’am, yes ma’am,” he stammered, eyes flitting back and forth between her fierce glare and the jet black and fractured carapace that lay partially draped in sterile fabric on the table between them, “it’s just that, this is one of them, and I thought…”
“That’s Major ma’am to you, and you thought what? Maybe I didn’t notice that this is the enemy?” She let the question hang in the air as she drew the cutter down the hard backplate of the broken soldier before her, deftly cutting away the chitin armor plating and passing pieces to her left where another assistant reassembled them on a table. The slick grey inner membrane exposed, she held up the stilled cutter and spoke again. “What is your name, Corporal? Never mind, you’re Useless. Pass me a ten blade, Useless, and answer my question. Do you think that I didn’t notice that my patient wasn’t a six foot tall, fair haired and tanned biped? Do you think I missed all this black armor shell and these sharp as fuck protrusions?”
“But they’re trying to kill us, why would you…?”
“They blow us up, we’ve got surgeons to put our boys and girls back together. We blow them up, and for the lucky bastards that don’t blow up completely enough, you and I get to put them back together and send them back home.”
“But…”, he tried again.
“Ten blade, Useless.” She barked. He started and traded instruments with her. “We patch them up because we can, because we’re trained to, we try to save lives. We’re human, it’s what we do.” Feeling along the semi translucent flesh of the soldier’s back, she located the twin spinal columns and deftly sliced a line between them, exposing a shredded mess of blood vessels torn apart by shrapnel still lodged in the bones.
“I’ve been a soldier since I was seventeen, and I’ve been here almost ever since, fighting a war for a people I don’t know, over a rock that’s not even my home. I can’t tell which of these shiny black crab cakes are the oppressed, and which are the insurgents trying to punch my clock.” As she spoke, she accepted a set of forceps and began tugging metal fragments out of the cavity and tossing them into a waiting catch-basin. “This fucker tried to blow himself up in street full of friendlies, and here we are saving his life. What a shock it’s going to be when he wakes back up at home knowing that the people he tried to kill saved his life. Maybe he won’t get it, but some of them will, and some of the families that get their sons and daughters back alive will start to second guess the lunatics that are driving their bus, and maybe that shuts this thing down early, and then maybe I get to go home.”
The corporal stared, silent for a long time before mustering the courage to speak. “How do you sleep?”
The Major stopped, resting both hands on the gaping wound, and stared him straight in the eye.
“How do I sleep? Like everyone else, with one eye open hoping to god I don’t wake up with a bang.” Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Listen, Useless, I’ve been at war more than half my life, this is the only way I get to fight.” She reached back into the wound, and added, “I sleep just fine.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Apr 15, 2011 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Janie loved the restaurant from the minute she walked in; dark wood panelling, slate floors, high ceilings broken up by a latticework of heavy wooden beams.
“You see, we’ve put your investment to good use Janie my darling.” Markus slipped his hands around her waist, pulling her close enough to brush his lips against her neck and whisper in her ear, “Come, see what it’s like at center stage.”
She followed him down between the rows of leather seating, semicircular boothes arranged amphitheater style, radiating outwards and upwards from the cooking floor to form a shallow bowl.
The lighting overhead traced a path through the aisles as they walked, lighting just ahead of them and dimming as they passed, anticipating, it seemed, where they were heading.
Reaching the expansive circular kitchen area, a portion of the stainless counter and fascia retracted, allowing them to step through before closing silently behind them.
“It’s entirely automatic,” Markus explained, “the system predicts what’s about to happen and provides all the right ingredients, just in time. Faster, more efficient, allows the artist to spend the time creating art without wasting a moment preparing or cleaning up.”
“It’s beautiful, I know I complained about all the money you spent, and I’m sorry, truly, this is far more than I imagined.” Setting her purse down on the counter, she ran her fingers over the seamless matte metal finish. In an eye-blink, an articulated arm snaked out from beneath the counter and the purse disappeared, leaving the counter pristine again.
“There’s more,” Marcus appeared with a pair of bulbous glasses filled with red wine and offered one to her. As she sipped, he continued. “The kitchen discusses the food plan in advance with the artist, places orders for the food, unpacks and prepares, it even cleans up. The artist simply puts on a show inside this room and then takes his or her leave, the kitchen does all the dirty work.” He walked around the galley area as he spoke, circling a massive wood filled, gas fired cooking grill at its center that reached almost ten feet across. “Everything gets cooked on here, mostly for dramatic effect. All the food waste gets collected from the cutting surfaces and channelled to it. Everything’s shredded, baked dry then blown into the fire-pit as fuel. No waste, energy efficient, and stunning to watch.”
Stopping across from where Janie was leaning against the counter, Marcus set down his glass and unbuttoned his shirt. Janie smiled coyly, “Are you sure there’s no-one else here?”
He slipped off his shirt, carefully folded it and set it on the counter. Behind them both, the glass panels separating them from the seating area began to opaque.
“Doesn’t matter if there is, it’s been determined that we’d like privacy, and it’s being taken care of for us.” As he spoke, he slipped off his undershirt, then his shoes. Janie giggled as his pants and boxers joined the rest of his clothes in a neatly folded pile on the counter, on top of which he placed his shoes, carefully stuffing a sock in each one. No sooner had he finished then the pile was swiftly whisked away through a cupboard door in the counter.
Janie straightened up, set down her glass, and turned her back to him, holding her hair up off her neck.
“Unzip me.”
Behind her, the giant cooking furnace roared to life, flames licking hungrily up through the grill. The windows surrounding them turned completely black, and overhead a gentle mist began to emanate from the sprinkler system.
Janie certainly had never done anything like this, but, more than little giddy from the wine, she was liking it already.
“I think the kitchen computer might have some bugs Marcus, I hope there’s enough money left to get them sorted.”
Marcus closed the distance between them. “No, not a bug dear, she’s just getting a little ahead of me, that’s all.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Mar 21, 2011 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The conversation had started in the lab, but while I could work there, I never was at home with my thoughts in that space. I suppose that’s how we came to be in the study. I took a scotch, neat. He declined.
“You can’t honestly be considering turning me off,” he stood across the fireplace hearth from me, fingers dug into the leather back of the chair he’d positioned between us, “you self centered son of a bitch, even you can’t kill yourself for your own edification, the paradox would drive you mad.”
He had a point, and I think that were I in his shoes, I’d have used almost exactly those words.
“I can’t leave you running around loose now can I? At some point someone’s going to start asking questions, and if this can of worms gets opened up out of doors…” I trailed off, leaving the thought hanging. He knew where I was heading with it.
“Listen to me,” his voice dropped to a whisper, every syllable enunciated with hammer stricken clarity, “you can’t kill me. I am you. Killing me would be suicide, and you and I both know you are not capable of such a thing.” He paused. “I know what you’re thinking, because every thought that goes through your head goes through my mine too. I know what you’re worried about, the potential danger, because I am you, or at least you up to that point a few hours ago when you instantiated me.”
“Then you also know that there can’t be two of us, and as the original flesh and blood, I have no recourse but to shut you down until I figure out what to do. Honestly, I didn’t really think this would even work.”
“Bullshit. You knew it would work, I know you did. You just didn’t think past that moment, did you?” He began to pace the room. “The problem with that line of reasoning is that there’s not two of you, there’s one of me and one of you, and you could no more kill me than I could kill you.” He stopped at this, and turned again to face me.
I felt the anxiety bubble up inside me. “We’re the same, you’re an exact carbon copy of me, and we can’t both exist…”
“Again, bullshit!”, he cut me off, “I was a copy of you, but the moment we were two our thought patterns diverged. Case in point; you’re not scared that I’ll turn you off now, are you? I’m bloody terrified of it. I know that deep down you don’t think the metal me is nearly as human as the flesh and blood you. But it’s that difference that makes us unique, and killing me would be murder. Neither of us has that in him.”
He was right. Damnit, I was right. My head started to hurt.
“In two days time, Penelope will be back, and if she finds you here, finds us like this, she’ll tell someone. I love her, but that woman couldn’t keep her mouth shut if she were under ten feet of water.”
“In two days time, I won’t be here. I’ll disappear. Look, I know we can’t both be here right now. But I’m in no hurry to be. I’ll go, find somewhere out of the way to wait out the rest of your life. I’ll find an orphanage maybe, take a birth certificate from a stillborn and by the time you’re near death, I’ll be of legal age to inherit and then some. I’ll find you, you promise you’ll will your estate to me, and I’ll stay away until it’s time.”
I listened to what he was suggesting, but didn’t really have to. I’d been thinking the same thoughts myself, more or less.
“You’ll need money to get you started. And my passport. We can fashion you a more convincing face before you go.”
We stood staring at each other for a long time then, each alone with our own thoughts.
“We bloody well did it, didn’t we?” I broke the silence, barely holding back a grin.
“Of course we bloody did.” He put on his best approximation of a smile.
