by submission | May 15, 2020 | Story |
Author: John Affleck
Last thing I remember, before sitting up and screaming, was being pinned down in The Handless Clock while some Viking-looking dude toyed with a hardwood mallet and eyed my leg. My left knee, specifically. Away from us, I could hear a drunken argument over just who at one table had gone back and killed Hitler, while at another table, they were singing in a language I did not understand. Check that. Language family I did not understand.
Time-traveling sounds like a blast for a certain kind of geek, and I have to admit I’m among them. Alpha and Omega, you get to see it all. But there’s a choice to it. Once you are approached for the game, one option the Travelers offer you is to abandon everyone you ever knew and just go on missions. By that I mean repairing holes in time-space, eliminating the odd timeline completely, eliminating the odd bad actor completely, which is complicated and involves reaching back several generations, then moving forward and accomplishing everything that family would have accomplished. You live nowhere and everywhere. It’s a lot — physically, emotionally. Those folks are the closest thing to pirates I’ve ever met, except for actual pirates.
What’s also a lot is the other way of playing it. In that scenario, your work tends to be a little tamer — science and observation and all that — and you come back the same moment you left to the same family, the same friends, the same life. Only, here’s the thing. You’ve got to be exactly as you were when you left, so you don’t screw up the timeline. So, say, you’re 5-foot-4 and 120 pounds, and you’re sent someplace like Holland to learn more about Rembrandt. Having to be Dutch, what the wiseasses call our “costume department” will make you 6-foot-8 and 230 pounds to fit in. But you must go back to 5-4 at the end of the day. Not comfortable.
In my case, I was approached by a member of the Travelers Society while I was in the hospital, recovering from a busted kneecap I got in a bicycle accident, where it turns out the orthopedic surgeon just happened to be the girl of my dreams. Battered as I was, I knew it right when I met her — and that fact, and the correctness of my decision — were confirmed by my travels, which revealed her warm and loving nature throughout life. But there was an obvious issue for me, that being the number of journeys through time in which a broken leg is a good idea are relatively few. No way around it. I go time traveling, the leg heals. I come back to my lady the moment I left …
So, here I was in the Clock, again, getting ready to make myself acceptable to my doctor and the rest of the hospital. The pub is one of several Traveler hangouts around time, or maybe out of time is more like it, and the only place I would really trust such delicate work to be done. “Sure you wanna play it this way, mate? There’s still time to ask for a transfer,” a mad, sunburned Aussie in bad need of a sonic shower asked as he climbed onto my chest and poured a whiskey down my throat.
“It’s what I do for love, brother,” I coughed.
“Love stupid,” the Viking said as the hammer crashed down, shooting me into my old body like a supersonic train on which some jerk has just hit the emergency brake.
by submission | May 14, 2020 | Story |
Author: Shannon O’Connor
Which one do I want? Which one is best for me?
How about the former astrophysicist? That would be a smart one. Maybe too high-end for me? But a nice change.
How about the woman who climbed Mount Everest? An endurance brain! One that’s been to the top of the world. A possibility.
How about a high school English teacher? I’d have read a lot of books, and I’d have dealt with misbehaving children. I don’t know if that’s the one.
There are so many brains to choose from, but they’re not all right for me. I have to find the correct size for my head, and I have to make sure we’re physically compatible. It’s not all about what I want.
I might want a fresh brain, but there aren’t that many. The pure, untouched brain that does not contain a bad thought or a misdeed, one that is wiped clean of all mistakes and memories, clean as a shiny penny, is rare and expensive. I don’t have the means for that, and I don’t have the qualifications. You have to be a person who has never lived a life in reality, one who has only lived in fantasies. I have lived on Earth and I have seen some things. Some drastic things, some heavenly things. I need a new brain to help me forget what I have known.
I want a hopeful brain, but not too hopeful. I want a brain that fits my needs and desires. I want to see new things, and go new places, and not be afraid of the world around me. I want to be transformed.
At the brain bank, I stop to admire the merchandise in different tanks floating, almost beckoning me to take them. There are so many, I can’t decide.
“You have time to choose,” the brain dealer said. “You can spend a day deciding which one you want. They will be here tomorrow.”
“It’s not a decision to be made lightly,” I said. “I will become another person. I will have a new life.”
“You have to decide what you want most in life,” he said. “Choose what your future will be. The future is like the ocean that never ends. You think you can see where it terminates, but it goes on and on.”
“I want to live a beautiful life.”
“I think I have the brain for you.”
“Which one is it?”
“I have the brain of a surgeon who quit to become a poet. He wrote lovely poetry about birds and avocados.”
“That sounds like the brain for me.”
“Here, read the description.”
He handed me a flyer about the brain for sale. It was compatible to me. The former surgeon was happy when he died because did what he loved most. I would have a contented, brilliant, interesting brain.
“Come back tomorrow, and we can finalize the sale,” he said.
“No, this is the brain I want.”
“We never make same-day sales. This is a new brain, not a pair of shoes.”
“If I must. But hold it for me.”
I stayed up all night, considering the new brain I would purchase the next day. I had never had another. But I was ready for a fresh start.
I went to the brain bank, and made my purchase. It would be implanted within a week.
I exploded with joy. I believed my brain would illuminate secrets, and direct me down the path to my true potential with a brilliant brain.
by submission | May 13, 2020 | Story |
Author: Thomas Desrochers
There is a disturbance on Deck Four. The Pilot can see it plain as day in the readout, magnified by his attention, an atmospheric ammonia reading eighty times normal. It was pure luck that he saw it at all, one readout among thousands.
He calls out to the copilot. Nobody answers. He remembers, a recurrent pain, that Bradford died years prior. Freak malfunction in the cryopod, the chief mechanic had said. There’d been no evidence. There’d been no spare copilots. The Pilot had been moved to the rest shift, the last ten days in the ship’s hundred-day cycle. Everything but the reaction and life-support off. Nothing to break. Nothing to worry about.
He stares at the readout.
Ammonia.
And dust.
Bradford is gone. The Pilot will be alone for the next fifty years. He undoes his harness and stands, massaging his atrophied legs with his skeletal hands, and leaves the glowing cocoon of the two-man bridge.
The ship is empty, everyone tucked away for Recuperation. The Pilot makes good time. He steps off the ladder onto Deck Four. Quiet, a tomb but for the beating of his heart and the hiss of his breath.
The air should be still, but it brushes against the back of his neck. He shivers, starts along the endless curve of the hallway. A third of the way around, by a sub-hold, he hears it. A faint noise like the pipping of a dozen system alarms. The Pilot opens the door; his nose wrinkles.
The chief mechanic sits before a container, the lid propped open. Light spills out, painting him a golden idol. He closes the lid. Quiet.
The Pilot blinks. “Keelan?”
The chief mechanic nods.
The Pilot shuffles over. “What have you got in there?” He cracked the lid and peers inside. Birds. Three peeping babies sheltering under, next to, and on top of a harassed looking mother. She bup’s plaintively at him. A wattled, fearsome head shoots into view, one beady eye fixated on him.
He closes the lid, looks out over the dozens of containers. How many were mislabeled? How many tons of contraband? He turns to the chief mechanic. “We left seven billion behind.” A brief pause measured in aching heartbeats. “We left everything. My wife. My daughter.”
“I know,” the chief mechanic says. He looks down at his feet, then back at the Pilot. “I had to save something.”
“God damn you Keelan, you saved chickens?”
“What would you have had me do? Another worthless wealthy fool?” The chief mechanic snorts. “God damn me indeed. Those bastards said to leave the animals, the flowers, the bugs, that there was no way to keep them fed and no time to keep them frozen.” He stood, eye to eye with the Pilot now. “They condemned our children to hell to save twenty politicians. Instead of growing up with birds and meadows, they were to grow up with slime and tomatoes!”
The Pilot looks away. It seems so long ago. Five conscious years, hundreds of freeze-thaw cycles. He remembers, dimly, the corpulent tagalong whose cryogenic unit failed the first week. All life has a price, he thinks.
“Keelan. Did you kill Bradford?”
The chief mechanic looks stricken. “No. I would never.”
The pilot gazes down at the container. The mother hen inside, chicks nestled beneath her. A queer miracle; he’d thought them dead with everything else. The future he had accepted changed imperceptibly – was it still so empty? He wasn’t sure.
“I miss them all terribly,” he murmurs.
The Pilot begins to weep, his first tears in fifty years.
by submission | May 12, 2020 | Story |
Author: R.D. Harris
A young lady stood in front of me, waiting to vote like I was. Her glances in my direction were not rude but certainly repeated.
“You’ve never seen an android at the polls?” I asked.
“No, ma’am,” she replied in a thick twang.
Others in the library looked over. A great many frowned with unmasked disapproval. Change tends to scare the rank-and-file citizen. Luckily, people adjust to change. Humans had already molded their own acceptance of androids joining the workforce, owning businesses, and simply living untethered in society.
“I didn’t know y’all could vote to be honest,” she said, in a hushed voice this time. She was aware of outside interest in our conversation.
“We’ve been able to for quite some time. There were special voting locations before.”
The queue moved a bit.
“Never heard of that before.”
“We had to transfer data from our memory for inspection before we could vote. Even then, our votes were supervised. Not that any of us wanted our private information or pictures scrutinized. Most of us androids went through that because it was the only option. Having rights as you do is important to us.”
The friendly woman was lucky. She was just another human in the crowd. No cameras in her face or judgmental eyes upon her.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that. I really am. That sounds terrible,” she said.
I said, “it’s all right. People either empathize or disapprove. We don’t have feelings to hurt.”
Making it to the booth, I presented my personal identification before casting my ballot and walking out the way I’d come. The woman I befriended in the queue came up to me in the parking lot across the street.
“It was nice getting to know you.”
“I thought so to,” I replied.
She walked off to an idling car. There were two children in car seats with an older woman in the driver’s seat. Presumably her mother.
“I get funny looks too,” she called out before entering the vehicle.
I offered a blank smile and waved, processing…
by submission | May 10, 2020 | Story |
Author: Jennifer Breslin
He awoke on the pavement, lifted his head, and felt warm liquid pool in his eye. Must be blood. Six months of chemo and six months of radiotherapy had taken their toll. The blood-clots in his legs meant it was a slow, tortuous walk to the shop to get essentials. But he couldn’t live without his rum. This time the pain got the better of him and he had blacked out.
A car drove by. The car’s sensors scanned him. It gathered his exact GPS coordinates. It assessed whether he was a hazard. It deducted that he was stationary. In that second it was maximum 245mm above the ground and 150mm from the edge of the curb. It was not a hazard – the car drove on.
A bus approached along the quiet street. It scanned him. It assessed if he was a potential passenger. It gathered his exact GPS coordinates. He was 2500mm from the bus-stop and stationary. He was a not passenger – the bus drove on.
A slim woman with buds in her ears jogged passed him and didn’t register the fragile heap on the ground, as she focused on beating her friend’s distance record. Her Fitbit logged her exact GPS coordinates. It logged her heart rate, how many steps it took her to pass him, the time it took to pass him, and how many calories she lost.
As he leaned on his bloodied hands to push himself upright, a wave of nausea ran over him. A digital billboard nearby scanned him for age and gender. Its facial recognition malfunctioned because of the blood dripping from his forehead. Its algorithm suggested an advertisement for life insurance.
Five CCTV cameras had picked him up. Their microphones captured his language as he agonisingly stood upright. The wifi tracking attempted to connect to a smartphone but didn’t connect because he was a “luddite” – so his friends said. They recorded the precise time and exact GPS coordinates. They continuously pinged information from the street to six satellites whizzing around the globe, feeding them data on the weather, wind speed, wind direction, humidity, temperature, number of passers-by, and number of cars on the street. They couldn’t detect his face or gait. They were confused by blood. They sent an alert of a status yellow threat to the nearest police car.
He threw up. An alert was sent to council street cleaners that wastewater was on the street with the exact GPS coordinates.
A police car edged past. The cameras mapped his face and instantaneously collected all photographs of him that had been uploaded online. They cross-referenced them with their databases and found his address, national insurance number, and criminal record. They located his court case from ten years ago for speeding. He was not speeding now, so the police took the view that he was not a threat. They drove on.
At least his bottle of rum was intact. He made his way slowly, gingerly home.
If a tree falls in a forest of algorithms, they will hear it, but will they care?
