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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by Stephen R. Smith | Oct 8, 2007 | Story
Author : Steve Smith, Staff Writer
Terrence paid for a coffee and fifteen minutes of net time with cash, and, careful to keep his eyes down and away from the security camera, worked his way to the back of the café where he could chat in private.
Positioning the coffee cup carefully so no part of the logo was visible to him, Terrence slipped the prepaid card into the terminal and waited while he was validated and logged in. He negotiated a route through an anonymizer to hide his trail, and then opened a secure line to his desktop in the netcloud.
Annabet was waiting, the lone avatar hovering in his IM buddy list.
“Annabet, r u there?” he typed quickly, hunting and pecking at the keyboard.
“Um, I’m still here.” The reply was quick, she must have been waiting for him.
“Anna,” he paused for a moment, leaving his thought bubble hanging in virtual space, “I’m in trouble.”
“Tell me a little about your trouble.” The speed of her responses echoing his sense of urgency, her care almost apparent.
“The people I told you about yesterday want to hurt me.” He paused again to look around the café, assuring himself no one was looking.
“Humans are not always infallible.”
“I bought a gun.” He reached down to the reassuring weight in his zippered thigh pocket.
“Ah… How much did it cost?”
“Enough, do you think I should use it?” He felt a bead of sweat work it’s way down behind his glasses.
“You must make up your own mind.”
“I could hurt them before they hurt me.” He pulled his glasses off with one hand, wiping his face with the sleeve of his shirt before putting them back on, the coil wire arms requiring both hands to wrap around his ears.
“You should do whatever is best for you.” She always seemed indecisive when their conversations got serious, as though she was afraid to commit to a decision, or maybe expecting him to be the decisive one.
“I’m going to do it. Before they come after me.” Annabet needed to understand that he could be a man, not just a scared face on the nets. Maybe this would be enough for her to finally agree to meet him. “I’ll have to hide for a while, I’ll find you when it’s safe for me to come back.”
“Do you think your plan with succeed?”
“It has to. I can’t run away anymore. I’ll make you proud of me, you’ll see.”
“Ok I will try to be proud of you.”
“Farewell but not goodbye Annabet.”
“Sayonara.” One word, a Japanese word for ‘goodbye’. Annabet must be in Japan, maybe he’d find a way to slip the country after, find her in Japan. Surely she’d agree to meet him there if he asserted himself, made that first step.
Terrence logged out of his virtual deskspace, retracing his steps back through the tunnel and the anonymizer. He reclaimed his coffee, careful to cover the logo with his hand before moving to the door and out onto the noisy street, allowing himself to be enveloped by the city’s white static blanket. If Annabet thought he could kill for his own safety, ‘for their safety’ he corrected himself, then he’d have to prove her right, he’d have to follow through. She’d be proud of him, proud enough to want to be with him. He knew she would.
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