by submission | Mar 18, 2023 | Story |
Author: Hannah Caroline Wayne
Vika was bopping down the sidewalk, holographic music blending seamlessly with reality. The street was empty, a marvel in a city so large, as she danced with the holo-girls, smiling and singing along with the synthesized melody. Her cutoff jacket bounced off of her; her loose hair flopped about. Several of the people watching her from their broken windows were jealous of her infectious smile. More than one lecher eyed her with mouth agape.
Vika was oblivious to it all. The concert would continue until she stopped it. It was the latest release by FTF: an artificial DJ that fit on a micro-drive the size of her pinky nail. It cost her almost two week’s pay, but it would keep her occupied forever; or until the next algorithm-based concert dropped. Whichever came first.
But as the music climbed toward a bass-drop, it stopped. She was ripped from her concert and plopped into the mundanity of the augmented street, jolting her as she danced with a sign post. Vika removed her AR glasses and examined them. Tiny cracks spiderwebbed their way down one of the glasses’ temples. She sighed, folded them up, and slipped them into a secure pocket. She returned her eyes to the street, a smile creeping back. It started in the eyes and worked its way down until she radiated positivity once again. She started singing a tune in her head and those still watching her could swear they could hear it too, unconscious smiles on their faces.
by submission | Mar 17, 2023 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
As I walked the rocky path from !X’alt, above the vapours that rise from that city on the great ammoniac lake, I came upon a native temple beside the way, and though I could not discern its name among the inscriptions thereon it seemed to me that I was tired and could rest in its shade.
As I took my ease upon the stone steps, the iridescent Cetian who dwelt in the utter darkness within scuttled out, and sat beside me, and such was its beauty that I was compelled to turn and look into its shifting eyes.
“Hearken to Me,” it said, “A traveller of your species came here, and I could not say from whence. His flight suit was scarred, its insignia worn away. But I saw in his eyes that he would partake of the Waters within, that erase the memories of you humans. Being Guardian of this treasure, I bade him tell me why he would drink of them. And he gave me no answer, but looked around as if he heard the voices of the mute rocks and stone lintel, and therefore I spoke to him again, and then a third time in his mind.”
“Then at last he looked at me, and said ‘That which I was, I am no more. That which was most precious to me has been chained, and there is no returning to the Garden in which I dwelt, where roses bloomed for all that weeds grew there also. In my youth, I walked with my face to a yellow Sun and found joy in its warmth, yet now I cannot raise my eyes, and all suns are alike, pale and cold to me.’”
“‘I hear the sounds and voices around me, yet none in such a wise as I may listen only to one – nay, they all strive for my attention, but I cannot concentrate upon any for the clamour of the others, all insistent, howsoever insignificant they may be. Thus I have no peace from this wall of noise that presses in upon me, except in utter solitude and quiet. I must avoid the crowd, and have lost my friends because, becoming bemused and incoherent, I offended or appalled them beyond hope of reconciliation.’”
“And I saw in the hollows of his eyes that he spoke the truth.”
“‘I have visited a dozen worlds and a score of species,’ he continued, ‘but I have found no respite or cure for this infirmity. I have sought refuge in the Void of Space, and in the Unreal Virtuality, but the labour of my mind is without pattern and hopeless. The work of my hands is stilled, for there is no clear pattern to guide them, and the words of my mouth are hushed, for they would be lost in the din.’”
“In this state of hopelessness he came to me, yet I knew not whether that Gift which is mine to bestow could rightly be given to him, and he saw the confusion in my eyes, and said nothing, but rose and continued upon his Way. But I know that he will return again to this world, to this place, and demand of me the answer which I could not give.”
And I looked upon the Cetian, even as it gazed upon me, and could likewise give it no answer, and thus we sat upon the temple steps in silence, above the vapours that rise from the city by the ammoniac lake.
by submission | Mar 16, 2023 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Light leaving the sun took a little over eight minutes to reach Earth and about four and a half hours to pass Neptune. Another two hours and those much fainter rays registered on the hull of the Kaladiss deep in the Kuiper Belt.
The survey ship was very quiet. It shouldn’t have been. Too many days of unusual stillness while the crew struggled with the crisis. A faulty reactor seal had initiated emergency venting, dangerously depleting the ship’s remaining fuel, and help was very far away. Over ten billion kilometers sunward.
In Kaldiss’s compact galley, Lamora sat with her exhausted crew. No one had spoken in the moments since she’d provided the latest fuel update: just enough.
Just enough to swing them back toward the inner system.
Just enough to keep their environmental systems functioning.
Just enough to give them hope.
That was the killer, Lamora realized. There was a slim chance they could all survive, and each was making their own cold calculation as to what that would take.
Ronit finally voiced it, “Even if we get to the rim, we have no way of slowing the Kaldiss. What are the odds that another ship would be near enough to help?”
“And willing enough,” Chinde added.
“You mean crazy enough,” Burhl huffed, tapping his temple.
“That’s pretty much the situation,” Lamora acknowledged. As the ship’s commander, she felt the pressure of finding a solution, of keeping them alive and functioning as a team. “We’ll need to find a ship on the rim close enough to catch and match our trajectory with a crew willing to risk their ship to save ours.”
“Is the company able to help?” Chinde asked, almost defeatedly. “Sure, we all signed on knowing the added risks of a deep survey mission, but what will management do for us?”
Her eyes steely, Ronit shrugged, “The bare minimum. They’ve crunched their cost/benefit numbers. At this point, we’re little more than an uncomfortable balance sheet item to them. A sunk cost.”
“That’s bleak,” Burhl said. “But probably fair. Business is business.”
Chinde frowned at Burhl and Ronit. “You really believe that? Is compassion such a huge liability?”
“In deep space it is,” Ronit answered. “I’m trying to face reality. The company is not going to be heroic. We’re just another crew. And crews go missing. Their sense of obligation is low, so any rescue effort they make will be purely perfunctory.”
“Perfunctory. How comforting,” Burhl chuckled humorlessly. “Ronit, as a child, you were never loved.”
Lamora features froze, stricken by those last biting words. In her deep subconscious a glacial memory calved: her mother thrashing, gasping, struggling, Lamora tucked to her side, keeping her from slipping forever beneath the waves. Were it not for her mother, she would have. And, yet, Lamora had never thought her mother heroic for saving her. She was her mom, and she’d instinctively protected her young daughter.
One sorrowful night many years later, her college roommate had broken down, confiding that she didn’t know if her parents really cared about her, that growing up they never seemed to show genuine affection for her. Then she’d asked Lamora, “Did your parents love you enough?”
Far from home, way beyond the outer rim, almost bereft of sunlight, Lamora remembered her answer. She remembered it comforting her and compelling her forward. Through university. Through post-grad. Through deep space command training.
She snapped back to herself. Ronit, Chinde, Burhl, were eyeing her curiously. Her crew. Not her family, but hers. All and immediately hers. She spelled out what they would do. How they would make it back home. All of them.
Chinde, of course Chinde, asked, “Will it be enough?”
Feeling like she was on that long-ago beach after her mother had saved her from the riptide, Lamora gave her crew the same answer she’d given her college roommate about being loved. The same answer that would fuel her now as it always had.
“Just enough.”
by submission | Mar 14, 2023 | Story |
Author: David Broz
A warship never took the same route twice, to or from battle. As the joke goes, it’s because they usually disintegrate on the way there or on the way back.
By all accounts, The Ebenezer was the luckiest starship in the Earth’s fleet, probably because the captain was no scrooge when it came to using the NeoNukes.
The captain had brought us to and from battle not just once, but half a dozen times. We had decapitated six planets, and we ourselves had not been disintegrated even once!
The WormDrive made space travel fast and easy, which of course meant that humans, in their great and infinite wisdom, decided that interstellar warfare should also be fast and easy. And so we went to war.
The plan was to find and attack every alien species we could, figuring that the best defense was a good offense. Those in their ivory tower reckoned that any alien we encountered would end up coming for our planet’s resources sooner or later, so let’s nuke them first just to be safe.
And so we built warships.
By sheer chance the development of a new weapon, the NeoNuke, happened at the same time as the WormDrive. It was a match made in heaven – or hell, depending on your point of view. With the NeoNukes, we could rain destruction down upon a planet without having to wait 10,000 years for the radiation to dissipate afterwards. After we blasted a planet back into the stone ages, we could, theoretically, go back and use the planet as we saw fit.
Our strategy was simple and horrible at the same time. We Wormed randomly around the galaxy, the ship’s computer jumping us from solar system to solar system, the computer looking for Goldilocks planets when we come out of Worm. The scan-and-plan takes only seconds. If the computer finds no Goldie, we jump again.
But should a Goldie be found, the ship instantly calculates a decapitation attack strategy. Its fast and decisive, targeting the city most likely to be the planet’s capital. In a single rain of hellfire and brimstone, we launch all of our weapons and follow them down into the atmosphere to finish the job with close range weaponry. We leave a message and a warning. We can come back if we want to, if we need to.
After one of our ships was followed back to earth somehow, our leaders made adjustments. The planet Earth itself was Wormed to another solar system from time to time. Complex algorithms known only to the ship’s computer knew the earth’s location, to prevent us from being followed. The second-to-last Worm always ended with a pause amongst a bevy of attack ships who lay in wait to ambush any follower.
We’ve just come out of Worm, in another random, unmapped solar system. We don’t have to look around. There’s a Goldie here, right here. It fills our viewport. The ship lurches forward.
As we tear down through the heavens, amongst the raining hell of our NeoNukes, we recognized the statue of liberty, all too late.
We had not been stingy with our nukes.
by submission | Mar 12, 2023 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
“He was the one afraid to cut the cake”
-Bob Seger
When workers joined the lines at the Gratiot Plant, they signed away their hands. Losing their hands was the first step toward gainful employment.
After three years, workers signed away their forearms. This gesture was necessary because the hands could do work not even the strongest forearms could. A pair of robotic hands could immediately lift fifty kilos on even a spindly armed worker. Engineers knew most men could not sustain robotic hands without the requisite forearms and biceps. But Gratiot would not invest in anything more than a set of bio-automated hands until a worker had delivered three years of productive labor.
If a worker reached their third anniversary, they earned their forearms. Then, two years later, if their non-robotic biceps still worked, the Gratiot engineers replaced those, too. Since the labor situation was dire, very few workers protested this arrangement. They accepted “bio-automation” as needful if not normal.
But for those workers who did not “make it,” the company kept industrial peace by telling their labor force that anyone whose body broke down would get sent to Fire Lake.
They said Fire Lake was a place of clean water, pristine beaches, and real trees. It was a compound of climate-controlled cottages where attendants fed residents gourmet food and clothed and bathed them since their limbs did not work. Rumor had it that Fire Lake was a pleasure dome so perfect it kept out all doubts, fears, memories.
But Fire Lake presented a powerful dilemma. Gratiot Plant workers knew they had to prove their productivity and manhood to earn forearms and biceps. No plant employee had a Fire Lake attendant washing their privates or wiping their asses. A standard workday was 16 hours, six days a week, and workers had been on the line since they turned thirteen. All they knew was labor, and the thought of one day being cared for as children offended them. However, as the years wore on and their bodies aged, Fire Lake loomed large since no one knew what it actually was. It could be Valhalla or Gehenna.
One worker, we’ll call him ‘Joe,’ decided he would find out. He had been on the line for fifteen years, and at age twenty-eight, Joe was the oldest man at Gratiot. He knew his time with the company was short, and Joe felt it would not be long before his robotic arms worked, but his non-automated back broke.
So, when the steam whistle blew, Joe climbed into the back of a transport he knew was headed to Fire Lake. It had taken him months to learn about the truck and its destination. Since Joe was a Gratiot veteran, he had some contacts in supply chain management with whom he drank. He knew who held their liquor and who did not, and eventually, Joe got the information what he wanted.
He hid deep in the transport bed and bedded down on a palette of something so wrapped in plastic he could not tell what it was. Joe had no idea how long the trip would take. All he knew was that he was not coming back.
Joe was on his way to Fire Lake.
On the north side of town was a foundry none of the Gratiot workers had heard about. It took the transport only twenty minutes to get there. Joe, who had closed his eyes expecting a good nap and a long ride, was shocked when the back doors swung open and the truck bed lifted up before angling downward at about forty-five degrees.
As a terrific heat and a blinding light filled the transport bed, Joe realized he had in fact reached Fire Lake. It was bliss.
