by Stephen R. Smith | Jan 1, 2008 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
The rain had stopped some time ago, but the roofs still unloaded their catchings through countless broken eves-troughs and missing downspouts. A man pulled his coat tighter around his sunken chest, and squeezed himself deeper into the shadows of the doorway, making at least a minimal effort to keep from getting any more wet.
He heard the police siren growing in volume for a time before the cruiser screamed by overhead, illuminating the broken windows and rusted fire escapes of the low rises in brilliant blue and red, before leaving him blinking in darkness as the sound faded into the city night.
He’d lost track of how many nights he’d spent like this.
Further up the street, the dim holiday glow of the red light district offered a little cheer for those who could afford such extravagances. He knew that the shop keepers would be lining up the men and women in their parlours, freshly bathed, charged and lubricated for an evenings work. The shops had grown in numbers over the years, spilling out of the original seedy alley into the adjoining streets, and he’d had to pack his few belongings several times to move farther into the abandoned sprawl at the forceful insistence of the flesh trade’s private security.
A low rumble approached, a taxi cruising slowly at street level. As it passed, a face flashed from an open window and the cab stopped, a mumble of words filtered to him before the door opened and a man stepped out onto the street, addressing the driver clearly through the still open window.
“Five minutes, alright?” holding his hand up, fingers extended, “just five and you can take me back downtown.”
The man turned, stepped a few paces towards the doorway and stopped, shoving his hands into the front pockets of his jeans.
“Hello Terry,” the name was familiar, though one he hadn’t heard in a long time, “still sleeping rough I see. You keeping well?”
Terry recognized the face gradually, remembered sitting in a coffee shop somewhere, talking over soup, and coffee. He remembered a weeks worth of chocolate bars and a pair of warm gloves.
“Do you remember our talk Terry? Do you remember the book I was working on?” The questions Terry remembered were all about his service, his coming undone, his winding up here. He did remember talk of a story, a book.
“I’ve been given an advance on the story we talked about, and I’m here to make good on my promise.” He reached into his back pocket, producing a slim square, fist sized and bisquit thin. “I made a resolution that year, to write a story and make it true, that’s what drove me to you. It’s almost midnight, and a New Year, and I resolved to find you again.”  He moved within arms reach, holding the flat device in between them at eye level. Terry was only briefly aware of a flicker of light, and then the device was gone, slipped back into a pocket. The man produced a plastic card, and passed it to him. Terry hesitated before accepting it, a blue fingerprint floating seemingly in space between the boundaries of the plastic, the image fascinating.
“It’s a tourism FreePass, Terry,” the man retreated to the sidewalk again, speaking slowly, “you’re in the system now, through your eyeprint. Anywhere you see this sign on a shop window they’ll give you food, or drink, a bed or a warm shower. Only if you want, but it’s there anytime you like.”
Terry looked from the shadows, and for a moment in the taillights of the taxi could have sworn there was a halo around this strange young novelist.
“Thank you,” he mumbled into the street, “thank you.”
“Happy New Year, Terry.” The man smiled, waved awkwardly and climbed back into the cab.  Terry listened as the low rumble grew to a whine, and watched the cab climb out of sight. Looking at the card in his hand, he let an awareness of his hunger reach him, and set out to sate it. ‘Happy New Year’, for the first time in a while he supposed it could be.
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by Stephen R. Smith | Dec 3, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Jacob sat as he always did, cross legged on the coffee table in the middle of the room, making himself the center of attention.
“You really have to get over us and move on, you know that don’t you?” His voice carried to the corners of the room and back to its only other occupant, enveloping her in the warmth of his familiar tones.
“I’m not ready to give up. I know we can make this work,” her voice seemed small and fragile by comparison, “we just need more time.”
“What you’re holding onto isn’t real, it’s just a memory. You’ve got to get past this Holly, you’ve got to live your own life without me.”
The woman blinked back tears, tucking her knees to her chin and burrowed deeper into the corner of the couch.
“It’s not fair, Jacob. I can’t give up, you can’t give up either.”
Jacob shook his head, smoothing back the stray stands of hair that refused to stay tucked behind his ears. “I’m afraid I had to give up a long time ago, and I’m sorry, but we’ve talked about this Holly, you have to let go.”
Holly glared, her eyes burning through the space where he sat. “You said you’d stay with me forever Jacob, was that a lie? You left me with all this money and this house full of memories but it’s not you Jacob, it’s not you and it’s not enough.”
Jacob laced his fingers behind his head, pulling his elbows in and straining as he lowered his eyes to the floor. “I left you money so you could live your life, not to watch you waste it waiting for me.” His stoic expression faltered slightly, revealing its undercurrent of pain, his eyes swollen with imminent tears. “I always knew this was a one way trip for me Holly, you knew that too. You can imprint the essence of the flesh on the machine, but you can’t reconstitute that essence back into flesh. You’ll be long gone before that’s possible; do you want to live out what’s left of your life waiting for a miracle?”
“When the time comes, I’ll imprint too, then we can wait together in there until they can bring us both back.” Holly’s eyes streamed now, her body wracked with sobs.
“Holly, sweetheart, this isn’t all of me. You know that. The computer has enough memories and thoughts to make a convincing persona, but I’m just a projection, a shell. I’m not the man you lost. He’s gone. You and I both know that he wouldn’t have wanted you to stay here wasting away like this, and if you can’t move on with me here, then I’m going to have to purge myself from this system.”
“You wouldn’t. No. Please, Jacob, don’t leave me. Not like this. It is you in there, I know it. I feel it.”
“I’m just a program, Holly. If you can’t let me go, then I have no choice.”
“No, Jacob, a machine would never kill itself for me. If you were a machine, you wouldn’t care, but you do care, don’t you? I know you’ll never leave me Jacob. Tell me you’ll never leave me.”
As the afternoon sun stirred dust up through the cloud of light that was Jacob, she could see rainbows glistening on his wet cheeks.
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by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 19, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Aaron was quite obviously not your ordinary student. He was several years younger than any of the others at the university, but clearly far smarter. His appearance was a little eccentric, clothed in a mix of fifties white collar littered with popular current brands. His thick framed Buddy Holly glasses could have been either stylish or awkwardly obsolete, one couldn’t be quite sure.
He appeared almost out of the blue, and I tried several times to learn where he’d come from, what his background was, but he was unwilling to talk about himself. He would stammer before derailing the conversation towards a math problem he was solving, or some complex area of physics he’d become fascinated with. Somehow he could draw you into that conversation, and make you forget until later that he’d sidestepped your initial question altogether.
Some of our lectures he would simply not attend, preferring to spend the time in the lab or the library. Several lectures I think he came to only to engage the professors in heated dialogue about the theories they were positing, deliberately taking an informed but always contradictory stance. The professors appeared on the one hand to enjoy Aaron’s intellectual jousting, but on the other seemed to resent the fact that someone so young could expose such glaring gaps in their knowledge.
One morning, Aaron was found alone in a classroom, every inch of blackboard space covered with complex mathematical formula. His dusty hands shaking and his hair greasy and disheveled, it appeared that he’d been there all night, solving equations. They closed the room for a few days while the faculty reviewed and trascribed his proofs, and the school echoed with whispered comments for weeks afterwords.
Something was clearly not natural about Aaron, but no one could quite put a finger on what exactly that something was. His uncanny ability to solve equations most professors could not themselves understand; his extreme beyond the box questions; his apparent disinterest in girls, in liquor and often in sleep. The name calling stopped early in the year, people just began to keep a silent uneasy distance from him, and he didn’t seem to mind.
It wasn’t until Aaron immersed himself in the works of Sergei Krasnikov and his tube theories that I became concerned. Later when he began delving into the Alcubierre metric I myself became truly unsettled.
It was clear to me that he was far too intelligent. I simply had to consume him before he figured out what I was.
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by Stephen R. Smith | Nov 11, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Martin stood at the edge of the field, struck numb by the expanse of white crosses peppered with red, stretching out to where the earth touched the sky.
“Overwhelming, isn’t it?” The voice dry, sandpaper rough.
Martin turned to the old man nestled in a wheelchair, an old green blanket on his lap, liver spotted face wrinkled and pale, too-big ears tucked up under a knit touque.
“It is. I’d read about this place, about how many men were buried here, but you can’t grasp the scale, can’t get this feeling from a book.”
“Men, women, many of them just children. They didn’t just give their lives, they gave up everything they’d ever have. Generations of heroes are buried here, the sons and daughters these men and women never had, never raised,” he waved towards the field. “You’re here because many of them died, and because someone made it home.”
Martin puzzled at the old man in his faded uniform jacket liberally decorated with ribbons and stars. He was unmistakeably proud, even sitting in the centuries-old wheel chair.
“My grandfather used to tell us stories about his grandfather Fred, stories his dad had told him when he was growing up,” Martin started. “Fred served in both World Wars, lived to tell the tale.”
“Many didn’t,” the old man shook his head. “I was part of a Ranger unit, we stormed the bunkers at Pointe du Hoc, lost a lot of good soldiers there, a lot of good friends.”
The comment caught Martin off guard. “Pointe du Hoc? That was nineteen forty four. How…? You’d have to be…”
“Old,” the man interupted, chuckling, “a relic, an artifact of a much, much earlier time. I remember being holed up in the dug-ins we’d inherited from the waves that came before us, curled up in foxholes just trying to stay alive one night at a time. I remember taking cover in the cellars of burned out homes while Jerry rained a hell storm of mortars down on us. It’s a wonder any of us came home.”
“I don’t understand, how…?”
“Friends, wealthy sponsors, all help keep me alive, help to keep me around. I’m full of pumps and pipes, transplanted bits and pieces. The medical technology’s a little beyond my understanding, but it keeps me going, lets me stay on here, to keep watch.”
“What’s with the wheelchair then? Why fix everything else but stay confined to that chair?”
“A bullet took my legs in Hürtgenwald in forty five, right through my spine. A soldier I never knew carried me for an hour on his shoulders through heavy fire to find friendlies. He saved my life, and then went back for more.” He paused, and turning, met Martin’s gaze with his steely blue eyes, surprisingly clear and focused. “I just lost my legs, these men gave up everything. I can’t forget that, and if they fixed me, if I could walk away and leave this place, maybe I would. I can’t take that chance.”
“Why wouldn’t you want to leave? You could travel the world.”
“There’s still fighting to be done. Whenever someone speaks of this place as a piece of ‘real estate’, the men and women lying here need a voice. That’s why I stay. I speak for them, I can still remember.”
Martin turned back to the field, for a second time struck by the enormity of it all.
The old man spoke quietly. “If I left this place, how could I be sure the world would remember? Who would fight for them if I were gone? Would you?”
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by Stephen R. Smith | Oct 29, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Today I’m teaching my new arm how to stack discs on a peg. This exercise is no different from everything else I’ve done here lately. All pretty much futile. The way it’s supposed to work is with my real right arm I place the biggest blue ring on the peg, and then I try to will the metal hand at the end of my phantom arm into putting a second blue ring on the other peg. It learns, or it’s supposed to be learning how I make my good arm move. They’ve wired it to both the remains of my left bicep, and my good right arm. It’s also tapped into the big nerve bundles where they enter my spinal column. That freaks me out just thinking about it. The idea is that the prosthetic arm will watch what my right arm does when I make it move, and then it will somehow recognize the similar instructions I give my phantom arm, and act on them. It sounded like it could work, but it’s been a slow process.
“You’re thinking too hard.” The doctor’s a bit of an arrogant ass, but I’m here on his nickel, so I tolerate him as best I can. “I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but don’t over-think this, you’ll just confuse it. Close your eyes, count to ten backwards and put both rings on at the same time.”
“Sure Doc, whatever you say.” He may be on to something, I know there are things I do better without thinking. “10, 9, 8.”
“Good, good! There, you see it works. You just have to think less.”
Both blue rings are on both pegs. Shit. He might be right. Of course, this arm just did something when I wasn’t looking, and that’s a little weird.
“Try the orange one. Don’t think, just do it.” His cheerful tone really grates on my nerves, he’s got two good arms and isn’t stuck in the kindergarten play room stacking blocks all day.
“Good, good! There, you see, you’ve done it again.” Ok, that’s just not right at all. It’s like the arm’s trying to impress him or something. It is working though, there’s no question about that. Maybe if I try harder, no, maybe if I try a little less hard, maybe I’ll get the hang of this thing. I’ve been waiting for an arm like this for almost a year now, I mean an arm I can actually control, one I can actually get to do things I want done. Maybe stacking discs for a little while longer’s not such a big deal.
“Good, good! There, you see, you’ve finished.” I really should pay more attention than that, I mean, I wasn’t even trying that time. This is going to take a bit of getting used to.
I wonder how long has this arm been waiting for me?
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