by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 1, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Thomas was spending another Saturday afternoon looking for deals. Today it was furniture, specifically something unique to fill the vacant corner by the window in his apartment.
“That’s Ralph Lauren,” he hadn’t heard the salesman approach and he jumped despite himself. The salesman ignored the reaction and continued speaking. “Avalon Lounge Chairs, very nice, very expensive. These two are kind of a matching set.”
Thomas regarded the pair of chairs carefully; indian red leather, featureless seat and back held aloft by a tubular frame which formed the base and arms in a continuous gleaming rectangle of chrome.
It was apparent that one wasn’t quite the same as the other, it was close but there was something a little strange about it.
“That’s a knock off,” Thomas pointed to the slightly misshapen piece, “how much are they?”
The salesman stepped up to the suspect piece, carefully polishing the seat back with one corduroy sleeve. “It’s a novelty, not a knock off. Twenty three hundred for the pair,” he paused, revealing nicotine stained teeth in a practiced smile, “Twenty two hundred cash.”
He didn’t really have room for two chairs, and while it appealed to sense of style to purchase the genuine Ralph Lauren piece, he found himself quite enamored with the odd reproduction.
“How much for just that one?” He pointed to the chair the salesman was now leaning on.
“Two hundred. One eighty if you pay cash.” His tone reflected his lack of interest in pursuing the larger purchase his customer was obviously not going to make.
Thomas was already counting out the bills.
It took the pair of them to carry the deceptively heavy piece of furniture and lift it into the trunk of the Audi, the suspension sagging noticeably as Thomas fastened the trunk lid down with a bungee. It took the promise of a six pack at the apartment to convince the superintendent to help wrestle the chair out of the car and onto the elevator, then down the hall to Tom’s apartment.
Finally in its new home, Tom was surprised at how much darker the chair seemed than in the store. The leather was almost black in the late afternoon sunlight, and decidedly more rubbery than he’d realized. He’d need to find some leather cream to soften it back up again, but that was another days work.
On Sunday Thomas travelled to the nursery, buying a pair of five foot tall indian rubber plants in terra cotta pots. One he placed beside the pseudo Avalon chair, the other flanked it in the other corner of the room.
From the kitchen around a mouthful of beer he could swear that the chair had turned green, and the chrome was reflecting back the terra cotta color in such a way as to almost look like terra cotta itself.
Heating a plate of leftovers in the microwave, he took the food and another bottle of beer to sit in the new chair and wait for his girlfriend to arrive. He finished the food, downed the last of the beer and dozed off.
It was nearly midnight when Jilly knocked at the apartment door and then let herself in. She dropped her purse and keys on the kitchen counter as Thomas entered, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“Hey baby,” she met him halfway and gave him a quick kiss, “did you get a haircut or something? You look different somehow.”
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 19, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Atto hovers at the end of the bar furthest from the dance floor. Under the harsh lights his skin seems translucent even to him. The revelers around him tipping bottles back and clinking glasses look right through him. He knows a kind of invisibility now he’s never felt so completely before.
The music slips between songs without apparent effort; the DJ has phase shifted something new so that the thumping of the bass tracks line up perfectly, one giving way to the other without missing a beat.
While he watches, Edie glides out from a crowd of dancers, hips swaying, arms pumping and wearing a smile that splits the room in two.
For a moment Atto loses his composure, hands shaking and head reeling he worries that his legs may not support him. He looks for something to lean against and realizes the futility of that. Instead he counts the bottles on the back bar until his anxiety passes.
On the dance floor Edie draws a crowd, young men with bulging muscles and unquestionable intent cycle in and out of her personal space, each trying to outdo the last in some form of tribal mating ritual.
She used to look at him like that, once.
Atto wasn’t bulging muscles and animal dance moves, he was stoic and intelligent, a pragmatist. He was project lead at his laboratory where people trusted him to create things no one imagined possible, trusted him with secrets no one else could know. Atto was known as the ‘Science Spook’, he knew more and was seen less than anyone else in the business. Why Edie had loved him he didn’t know, but she had always danced like that with him, for him. That was then.
Trembling, he stepped toward the lights, towards Edie. The bass rumbled in his chest, and he pictured for a moment the tissue samples they had blown apart with low frequency noise not entirely unlike these tones. A waitress passed by with a test tube rack filled with shooters, their bright colours fluorescing in the ultra violet lights and he reflexively flinched away.
Edie gyrated, sweat rolling off her body and soaking through her clothes. Her eyes almost met Atto’s as she pushed a lock of wet hair back behind her ear, only to shake it free again as she turned.
Atto squeezed his eyes shut, trying hopelessly to shut out the sights in the bar. The music assailed him from all sides, pounding away at his senses until he was sure the pain of it had reached his limit.
“Hey baby, come dance with me.” Her voice cut through the haze like a velvet blade, and for one incredible moment she was looking right at him. He stepped forward, reached out his hands towards her. For an instant he thought everything could be alright again.
The sensation of the younger man passing through him wasn’t nearly as gut wrenching as was watching him take Edie’s hand and slide back onto the dance floor, stealing his Edie right from his grasp.
Edie had looked right at Atto, looked right into his eyes but where there should have been recognition there was nothing. In an instant she was gone.
Atto stumbled towards the door, passing through crowds of people like damp breezes without them even knowing. The door came and went and he found himself out on the road, street lamps casting long shadows in the late night gloom, shadows of everything but him.
He imagined her smell on him, the taste of the sweat from her skin on his lips.
As a scientist he’d done what no one imagined he could do, shifted himself just enough to see but not be seen, neither touch nor be touched.
As a spy he was without equal, he could observe anything, be anywhere.
Except with her.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 9, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Walter had felt cold before, but nothing like this. In the hours since sundown the temperature had dropped steadily, but in the last hundred yards it had been dropping twice as fast.
He had to find shelter quickly or risk freezing to death.
Cresting a small hill, Walter came upon a door stuck as if by accident in the side of a tall snow drift. A smooth metal oval was clearly cut into the side of a wall buried in the ice. Walter, too cold and desperate to be cautious simply pushed on it, and when it retracted out of his way, he fell in a heap to the floor inside.
Walter struggled to regain his footing, and with difficulty managed to stand. Turning, he realized the oval shape had closed behind him, sealing him off from the cold and the wind outside.
Before him a round tunnel stretched away, smooth walled and featureless.
Walter cleared his throat noisily and was startled by a voice.
“Come, come, bring it to us please.”
The sound was nothing if not unnerving.
Realizing there was nowhere to go but on, he walked slowly down the passageway until it emptied out into a large squashed spherical chamber. This space, unlike the stark emptiness of the hall was filled with clutter. Quilts of earth toned fabric hung in sheets from the walls and ceiling, thrown over climbing rope that was looped through pitons hammered haphazardly around the room. Carefully sorted piles of canned goods, glass and other equipment decorated the floor. In the shadows of the perimeter he could make out what looked like long bolts of cotton.
Something moved, and Walter’s attention snapped to it, heart pounding.
“Warm, warm, it comes to us warm.”
The speaking shape resolved into that of an old woman, only the sagging skin of her head and hands were visible from a cavernous patchwork gown. Her hair was filthy and drawn back in a long ponytail, her forehead expansive above brow-less eyes.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Walter spoke slowly, “but it’s bloody cold outside and I was afraid I might freeze to death.”
The strange woman tugged at her forearms through her sleeves, the skin of her hands pulling taught and then falling slack again as she let go.
“Cold outside, cold inside, we takes the heat from where we can, far away and far below,” the woman smiled, her mouth a black toothless gash in her face, “we’re so happy you’ve come.”
Walter felt his stomach turn, empty though it was.
Walter began to back towards the mouth of the tunnel as the woman dropped her arms to her sides. One of her hands fell away, and Walter realized they weren’t hands, but rather gloves made of skin. Turning to run, he tripped over one of the bundles on the floor, falling hard and hearing the sound of breaking bone. When pain didn’t follow, he looked to see broken bone protruding not from his leg, but from the white mass on the floor.
“All the warm stays with us.” Walter whipped around to find the creature standing over him, the braided wig slipped sideways now at an impossible angle. The face was that of a woman, but pulled over something else as a mask. It moved impossibly fast as he tried to scramble for the tunnel, the arms clamped onto him, pulling him toward it. He screamed as it reared up on it’s hind six legs and spun him round and round into a long bundle of sticky silk. By the time it bound his face, his voice had left him.
Walter could feel it drop him and skitter away across the floor. He only hoped he could freeze to death before it got hungry.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jul 4, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Jeanine walked the length of her racer, running her bare hand across the seams, feeling for any fastener stressed out of place, trying to get a sense of any uneasiness in the craft. She paused and read the name stenciled down the side, “Spirit of America : Ultra III”.
“Craig ran the Spirit to four hundred miles an hour in nineteen sixty three.” Jeanine talked over her shoulder to the small group of friends and family that had gathered on the Salt Flats to cheer her on. “In sixty three, Corvettes were pushing one hundred forty, maybe one fifty miles per hour. Breedlove took her to four.
The fifty foot long silver tube lay slung between four tall skinny wheels at the end of axels shaped like aircraft wings. The cockpit was barely a sliver disrupting the graceful arc of the craft ahead of the massive intake ports and menacing teeth of the turbines.
“He almost got to seven hundred before he crashed. Might have gotten eight if he’d had a better day.”
The salt crunched softly under her boots as she continued her walk around, pausing at the tail of the craft to pull away the exhaust cover and hand it off to a ready set of hands. Deep inside the heart of the new Spirit was an engine that had been liberated from a research facility near Black Rock. The exact circumstances of its disappearance were unknown, but it had arrived at her shop late one night by trailer, an unusual hybrid of conventional jet technology and something she’d never seen before. She could tell it was something special and asked no questions.
The engineering of the jet tech graft made it fairly straight forward for her and her crew to swap it in, replacing the GE turbojet that had to that point powered her Spirit, and many Spirits before.
“I’ll bet we break a thousand miles an hour today.” Jeanine’s grin split her face between the ears, eyes sparkling as she ran her hand across the edge of the exhaust nozzle. “A thousand easy.”
Her reflective demeanor gave way to one of purpose, and Jeanine collected gloves and her helmet from a crew member, waved at the nervous and fidgeting crowd and slipped into the cockpit of The Spirit.
There was a rumble, then a whine steadily increasing in pitch as the turbine came to life. The crowd hastily pulled on headsets or covered their ears and moved away as Jeanine rolled the Spirit out onto the flats to line up her run.
The noise was deafening, and The Spirit almost disappeared in the haze of exhaust gasses heating the space behind her.
“Ok baby, let’s show ’em what we’ve got.”
She pushed the throttle forward, holding wheels steady and straight with both feet braced against the steering pedals. On the dash, streams of data flashed by as the onboard systems reported the state of virtually every component, and every compensation or adjustment of her course.
Her suit adjusted pressure in step with the rising force of acceleration, and she pushed the throttle farther still, watching the ground slip past outside in a smear. Five hundred miles an hour flashed past in an instant, eight hundred an instant later. The thousand mile an hour milestone came and went and still the craft was surging forward, wanting to go further, faster.
Jeanine’s hands were frozen on the throttles, pushing them hard against the forward locks. She’d never felt such emotion in her entire life. They’d done it, pushed The Spirit back on top of the record books.
From the ground, the crowd watched the glimmering point of light streak across the flats before nosing up and tearing a hole in the midday sky.
There was a rapid series of snaps, then The Spirit left earth bound for the heavens.
by Stephen R. Smith | Jun 22, 2010 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Another Saturday night wound down as the cargo loader deposited the last of the shipping containers in the hold of the space elevator. It was just a few hours before midnight as he parked and shut his rig down for the night. Despite the delays clearing that last crate, the lift would go up to Ver Punt Station on schedule.
Inside, the doors had no sooner sealed than the lock on that last container released, and a handful of light balls were thrown out onto what little floor space remained.
“Move, move, move. Liftoff in less than five.”
A dozen suited figures clambered out of the container carrying helmets, air tanks and molded launch cushions.
They spread out evenly along the clear aisle, maglocked the cushions to the floor and then donned their helmets. They punched into their air supplies and strapped themselves into the forms on the floor, their helmets crackling with encrypted short wave signals as each of them sounded off their readiness.
There was a rumble, then a deafening roar and they were pushed hard into the floor. As the car raced up the tether, the crushing force began to ease, until after what seemed an age, the car slowed and shuddered to a stop, cradled as it was now in the arms of the orbiting station.
“Ok. Jasper, get the doors. Jupiter and Jade, lock and load and make sure nobody’s putting in overtime. Marcus, get a loader and run our kit up to the OEM.” David, the leader, barked out instructions.
As he spoke, each of the crew was already moving to the carefully choreographed plan. Jasper patched into the door panel on the run, overriding and opening the bay doors without slowing down and unlocking and firing the engines on the loader as Marcus was climbing into its driver’s seat.
As the heavy machine trundled into the cargo area, the lithe point guards slipped past on either side to sprint across the docks. By the time they reached the elevator that would haul the crew and their supplies up into the Orbital Escape Module, Jasper had opened its doors as well. They confirmed the car was empty before continuing up the neighboring stairwell, snub nosed weapons at the ready.
Marcus scooped their cargo container and began hauling it across the loading dock. As he rolled, the remaining crew jumped and mag locked a boot and glove to the side, catching a ride. Marcus ran the loader flat out, slowing only to avoid crashing through the back wall of elevator.
David dropped to the ground as the vehicle slowed, and was joined by Jasper, still gesturing with wild purpose at the suspended display only she could see. The cargo lift shuddered into motion, beginning the slow and less dramatic ascent to their next destination.
“OEM is fired, cargo bays are open, Jay and Jay are onboard and the coast is clear.”
Marcus pushed the throttle forward as the elevator leveled off with the upper deck, and steered without hesitation towards the gaping maw of the craft at the end of the corridor.
Seven figures peeled off and made for the crew cabin as their supply cache was rolled into the hold. David walked patiently beside Jasper as she cracked the station’s systems and authorized a launch, then headed for the cockpit as Marcus locked down the container, abandoned the loader on the dock behind them and secured the cargo bay doors.
From the cockpit David patched into the ship’s intercom.
“Class, I think you’ve earned a passing grade today, with honors.”
There was a rumble as the OEM’s engines came to life and the craft unmoored, beginning its slow ascent from the station.
“It was once written ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’, but I say,” David paused as the craft cleared the superstructure and the expanse of space spread out unbroken before him, “I say the meek can have the earth, we’ll take our place in the stars.”
