by submission | Jun 17, 2020 | Story |
Author: Katlina Sommerberg
The grey tabby crouched low to the earth, her belly collecting dust. Duchess’s eyes tracked an iridescent gleam zipping across the sky. She wiggled in place: a final preparation before takeoff.
***
Her human had adopted her from a shelter, scooping her up in arms reeking of iodine. His home, a tiny house stinking of iodine and filled with jars of mosquitos, became her castle. His warm laptop, covered in coding puns and academia stickers, was her favorite bed.
He always made time to entertain her. As they played, he muttered about his Ph.D. thesis and deadlines. She barely listened to his rants about the ethical concerns or his advisor suggesting new genes to target. Occasionally, they had visitors – humans fiddling with his equipment and observing his trapped mosquitos.
Eventually, the captive mosquitoes reached a population where their buzz became an intolerable roar. Their habitats cluttered the floor. Duchess hated them and spent more time outside; her human didn’t notice. She watched him slave over mosquitos through the windows, until winter came around.
Then he yowled, danced, and rushed outside to scoop her up in his arms – interrupting her mid-stalk. He rocked her side to side as she squirmed, eyeing the fleeing mouse, but he kissed her belly anyway.
She scratched just above his blue eyes. He dropped her. She ran out to the forest and didn’t come home until he was asleep.
When she returned, the house was silent. All the glass habitats were empty. Duchess ate stale sashimi off the table, next to a printout of his thesis, covered in red ink.
His abstract declared the modified mosquitoes, once released into the wild, would reduce local populations to 10% of their current numbers in three years. He drew on previous work analyzing the failed endeavors to cull malaria-carriers from the mosquito population and speculated mosquitos would be extinct at the decade’s end.
Over the next few months, she rarely saw him. One of his friends came over every day to wait on her, and Duchess appreciated this new caretaker. But she missed her human. She scattered his awards in hidden nooks. The temporary caretaker cleaned them out of her hiding places once a week.
This stopped the night her human came home. He crashed in front of the television, where a reporter explained diagrams with exponential decay rates for a multitude of species populations.
“Spiders and dragonflies are hit the hardest, after the abrupt decline of the mosquitoes. Many reached critically endangered conservation status this morning,” the reporter said.
Her human threw a beer bottle at the screen. It exploded against the wall and drenched him in glass.
The next day, journalists lined up outside their house, screaming questions. He stayed inside, only appearing to retrieve delivered groceries or boxes. When he gave her dried food, Duchess screamed for three days. But he refused to brave the crowds to retrieve fresh fish from the market.
She snuck out a half-open window. Grasshoppers and crickets blared in her sensitive ears, but she mercifully heard none of the mosquito’s evil whine.
***
A human’s arms circled her body. Duchess yowled her protest. The human stank of coconut oil, and Duchess craned her neck away from the clammy skin.
“Kitty, you can’t kill a dragonfly –” she said, her lecture broken by one swipe.
Duchess landed and shot off to a bush. Wide-eyed, she watched the woman nurse her bleeding arms. But after a few minutes, the woman picked up her cardboard sign and re-joined the crowd in front of the house.
Duchess slunk off to find more iridescent flashes.
by submission | Jun 16, 2020 | Story |
Author: Morrow Brady
Stavros mooned the earth like the asshole he was. Jacob, the calm, perfunctory overseer AI, had never seen such a thing in its operational life but understood that showing one’s personal point of evacuation to a whole planet, meant something emotional had happened and that it might be mildly amusing to keep an eye on things.
Pulling up his lower torso, Stavros secured the seal to the rest of his spacesuit and climbed across the remains of the lab for the airlock. He ignored all requests from Earth Command and commenced the long walk.
“I’ll let him know myself” and “Bastard!”, the latter repeated thirty-nine times, was the only thing Jacob heard from the helmet mic as it followed the feeds.
After 8 hours, with oxygen tanks nearly depleted, he arrived 30 kilometres away at Peary Crater mine. He removed his suit and stood momentarily naked in the recently re-oxygenated annexe, steam issuing from his bruised body. Grabbing a handful of energy bars, Stavros ripped one open to gnaw vigorously at its chewy strip.
The synthetic underwear and subsurface crib suit pried from the battered old storage unit were one size too small. But beggars can’t be choosers when you’re the dumb Lunartic whose hand had been forced to do the dirty work. He entered the dome’s lift core and activated mine environments. Sensors detected a minor leak at level 959, but nothing of great concern, so he cracked the lid, hooked up the descent harness and fell 9 kilometres underground. The controlled fall, lit by a red LED strip-light that descended into hell was hypnotic. His bitter rage pulsed inside.
Stavros, being one crazy son-of-a-bitch, had arrived with time to spare. Four minutes in fact. And being down here, completely clear of that asshole by-the-book AI, he could do what needed to be done and get his ass off this goddamn rock. The pod ejector assembly, stretched in both directions down the laser cut mine tunnel, for as far as he could see. He knew the schematics off-by-heart but knew mining crew gamma left it fully operational before they abruptly departed in the only remaining rocket 10 hours earlier. All he needed was to load an empty class 1 pod with enough oxygen for the three-day journey back to earth.
“I’ll bust his jaw. The bastard” Stavros spat, gulping water from a dirty rehydrator.
With the ejector charge at capacity and the pod locked and loaded, he set the auto-launch countdown and climbed in. Haunched down in the base of the pod, he held the oxygen cylinders in place and braced. He didn’t brace enough. No-one with any sense could have. The acceleration needed to launch a pod fully laden with moon ore was far beyond human tolerances. The instant surge in momentum had him out cold before it had reached a quarter of the way out of the launch tube. Not that it would make a difference, he was after all inside a windowless capsule, flying through a darkened tube, about to be launched through space at a dust mote sized target located in South America – aptly titled the Podcatcher.
At the moon surface, the shaft lid automatically slid back and the pod flew through a plume of gas into space at great speed directly toward earth.
Jacob, barely saw the pod pass by the sensors but the scanner told it pretty quickly what just happened. Stavros had launched and was heading home. The psycho did it and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
by submission | Jun 14, 2020 | Story |
Author: Michael Anthony Dioguardi
I’m getting too old for this shit.
Suzie Zapach. Serial number 386D1286. She’s got the m-series processor and the defect: emotional evidence displays. Category: Lacrimal system malfunction.
There’s been a lot of these since they started autosplicing in the newborns. I’m glad I don’t have any of that junk in my head.
It started with simple additions. People wanted to remember more, so they got the memory unit.
It was small and innocuous—you’d forget it was there at times, ironically. But folks always wanted more. The reaction time and physical strength chips were so damn expensive at first. Now every kid’s got one.
I guess I should count my blessings and be thankful I have a job. When I first started, I was told human chip mechanics would be obsolete in a decade or two. Turns out even the best AI couldn’t repair malfunctioning emotion units. I feel like a damn shrink half the time working on these poor people. The AI just couldn’t think like a human. Technically I’m fixing these folks by getting them to not show a shred of emotion anymore—so they get their money’s worth.
But they’re starting to develop prototype mechanics—only a matter of time I suppose. I just keep on reminding myself: just one tear; keep that lacrimal system working as God intended—for some reason, nobody wanted to cry anymore. I’ve always silently disagreed and that’s all I needed to do to keep myself employed.
My pops was a mechanic. He worked on cars when people still drove themselves. He always mangled the engine parts. I never understood why he did that until I started working on cerebral processing units. Folks would bring their car back in a week with a new problem and he’d do it again. So always break something. They’ll come back.
But there’s nothing to break here. The m-series processor always comes with this defect. I’m surprised the manufacturers haven’t fixed it yet. My guess is, most repairmen are keeping their mouths shut.
Well, you’re about ready, Suzie. Let’s see how you do:
Execute module 36.
And there’s a smile!
Alright, let’s try another. Execute module 53.
And there’s a tear.
Let’s close you up and bring in the next one.
by submission | Jun 13, 2020 | Story |
Author: Michael Walton
How do the stars feel, you ask? You are right to inquire of one of us – we are the ones who know, after all. You little bags of carbon and water, who can’t even see most of the light that we emit, have no idea how we feel.
How do the stars feel? We feel heat. Stars are great furnaces of hydrogen – and, in our older days, helium, carbon, or even iron. We burn, and every part of us burns so much brighter than it does in you. Our loves span ages. Our feuds last for eons. Our fleeting whimsies outlive entire civilizations of yours. The rage of one such as us is a conflagration that scours whole regions of space. And when two of us come together, it is an orgy of light and fire and passion that makes your most torrid affair seem as the lightest brushing of shoulders on a crowded street. How do we feel? We feel sad for you poor, cold, emotionless things.
How do the stars feel? We feel old. Ten million of your years is mere infancy for such as us. A billion years to us is childhood. Two billion, adolescence. Our spans are so long that, if we but blink, we miss entire generations of you. How do we feel? We feel pity for you fragile, fleeting, impermanent things.
But what do the stars feel most? Imagine how rare it is that we come together. Picture if you can the distances between us, gulfs so great that life on dirt balls like the one on which you live can evolve, fail to prove itself worthy to reach us, and die in the time it takes light from one of us to reach another. Think on this and ask again, how do the stars feel?
Lonely, you heartless little cinders. The stars feel lonely.
by submission | Jun 11, 2020 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
“Don’t feel threatened, Melissa.” A squat, balding officer faced off a bewildered woman in a beekeeper’s outfit, shackled to an interrogation desk.
“Threatened? Your armed thugs dragged me inside for just crawling ten feet over your fence. What the hell…who the hell are you? This isn’t a USDA bee research lab.” She pulled back away from him as he leaned forward.
“Obvious, I’m sure, after we escorted you through our main laboratory. You saw what we wanted you to, enough to pique your curiosity.” He leaned back relaxed, hands locked behind his head.
“I know bees, mister…whatever your rank…”
“Captain, but just Brian is fine. We hoped you would track your missing swarms, wondering where they disappeared. I’m sorry we tricked you, but you’re dearly needed.”
“Needed? You’re kidding, after you arrest me like a common criminal!” Melissa surged forward to choke him, but shackles restrained her fury.
“That redhead spirit, too. Fits your profile folder.” Brian leaned forward, outside her reach. “Probably another reason Northern California beekeepers don’t like you, especially after your illegal breeding program using Alpine bumblebees smuggled from Tibet. Brilliant. Your successful combination of alleles produced a new species. That shock spurred our program to make bees thriving in limited atmospheres. You’re amazing.”
“I’m happy for you, creepo,” Melissa responded, slamming back in her steel chair. “Just what I need–my government spying on me. I mind my business. This is what I get?”
“Melissa, you propelled our program ten years. You deserve a medal, but there’s more to do for your…no, for your world. Bees are dying. You know that…even the bumblebees. Your mutants could turn that around, but we’re looking for even more. You saw the springbank clover in lab salt tanks. Surely, you wondered about that and the algae ponds. We also took you through the robotics center. You dragged your feet, taking a hard gander at electronic bees. No one sees those experiments unless they’re carefully screened. You are, dear lady, the most perfect candidate on Earth.”
“For what? Hey, if this is a sex-slave trafficking thing, forget it. I won’t put up with any shenanigans.” She bit her lip and then crossed her legs.
“You misunderstand. We need a tough, brilliant person to lead the next step. The algae fields are already growing in brine water from near the pools we identified. Our modified clover was planted by algae growths last spring. It’s taken off, but needs regular pollination to thrive. It’s a beginning. Now, we need a beekeeper for the next evolution to prepare our new home–someone with no family and only bees for companions.”
“What? I’m confused. Where is this all going down…in those salt marshes in the Delta, near Stockton?
“No. I’m afraid not. We’re asking you to volunteer as the pioneer with our new hives. They are part bee, but they don’t breathe oxygen. They survive on carbon dioxide. Our algae and clover are producing oxygen and nitrogen soils. But, we need our new insects to spread the growth. You could be critical for establishing a new home for all Earthers…as the first Terra-former.”
“No bee can live in carbon dioxide. Can’t happen. Terra-forming what?”
“You see, we merged your new bee’s DNA with a tardigrade, the only animal we know can survive freely in space. Took years, but now we have living specimens that can fly, pollinate, and build hives. That’s why you’re here, Melissa. You can be the first queen bee on Mars. Interested?”
