by submission | Aug 26, 2020 | Story |
Author: Samuel Stapleton
We work with law enforcement often, but we’re not cops. We work with business beings from every populated system, but we’re not economists. We work with medical professionals, but we’re not even versed in basic first aid. In our cheapest job, we paid our client. In our most lucrative job, we matched the yearly GDP of Thebe in a few hours. Whether you’re impressed or not is up to you, but hopefully we have your attention…
My name is Verun Lapzuli, and my robotic partner is RemmyIII, or RIII for short. Welcome to the Translation Offices of Asteroid 47.
We have one rule. You trust our interpretation, or you hire someone else. And…well, we kind of have a second rule. All parties involved hire us, or nobody hires us. So, two rules. Look, we do language not mathematics okay?
My partner and I don’t just translate words though; we translate context, we translate body language, we translate intentions, we translate emotion, or the lack of any or all of those things and more. In short, we translate meaning.
When you’re a colonial Martian speaking with an asteroid-mining redneck American who just ended a conceptual explanation with a haughty Capiche, Amigo? via holodeck…you don’t need an app. You need us. Click here for client testimonials.
When you’re a Nagrandilari refugee being interviewed by System Authority and they’re firing common speak at you faster than the pulse beams the terrorists and ‘good guys’ were shooting…you don’t need an app. You need us. Click here for client testimonials.
When you’re conducting business with an Illythianwrack near the celebration of Kabadule and they say ‘Normundi’ in quiet agreement at then end of negotiations surrounding specific terms of a deal…any app can tell you they said, ‘we agree to these terms until death unbinds us from them.’ But you would need us to inform you that the relaxed posture, quiet tone, and soft smile indicate that your terms are so offensive the Illythianwrack have just implied your imminent, mysterious, and overly-unconcerning death. If you choose not to believe our translation, that’s your choice. Click here for client testimonial.
If you missed it…please carefully re-read that last example until it clicks. If it still doesn’t click…you should definitely hire us.
The last System Census peaked at 10,318 spoken languages. But nobody knows how many body languages, dialects, accents, cultural references, contextual clues, etc, exist. An AI tried to calculate the number once. We would print you the number the AI came up with for the estimate of how many misunderstandings occur during each business day, but the number requires over six hundred Standard System Datapages (SSDs). We just can’t fit that on our holocard.
We appreciate you taking the time to access our advertisement in your preferred language. Feel free to look at any of our 9,876 other language options. Before you go, please remember…you trust our interpretation, or you hire someone else. Unaelewa?
Disclaimer 1 of 53: The Translation Offices of Asteroid 47™ will not be hired for cases involving: open criminal proceedings, communication between spouses, or ex-spouses. Any case involving politicians (because we can’t understand you), or any children under the galactic age of 3 (baby-talk is not a recognized language according to the supreme court ruling from 2089 (Harry vs Blrupppzzs-mammlm)). The Translation Offices of Asteroid 47™ retain the right to deny contracts for reasons other than those listed*.
by submission | Aug 23, 2020 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
Nondescript gray gruel drifted over the worn stainless spoon stirring in a prisoner’s brown wooden bowl. Two ragged, worn men sat facing each other, heads bent down toward a stained wooden picnic bench, one lifting a metal water cup to dilute rancid flavors from his throat.
“Miguel. Quietly,” the larger man whispered across the meal. “They’re listening. Two months. News from the Brazilian?” Anderson pulled his drifting, greasy locks past his eyes while making brief hand gestures on the table, indicating where guards were standing. Miguel put one finger out, tapping it lightly.
“La sangre,” he whispered. Miguel pulled his worn sleeve back, exposing his scars from constant IVs.
“You mean, blood?” Anderson’s eyes widened as he pointed, slowly, to his heart.
“Si, es la verdad, sangre oro.”
“Maybe to make sure those women aren’t infecting us. God knows why they force us on them. Get that fat kiwi broad again?” Anderson choked back some stew, thinking about cramped mating pens with guards prodding, forcing coupling.
“Muy horrible…you call…nightmare?” Miguel rubbed his neck, rolled back his shirt collar, exposing bite marks.
Anderson sat back quickly, as if struck by an invisible hand. “You said oro…you mean gold…like golden blood?”
“Si, Anderson. I have the golden blood. You?”
“For God’s sake, that’s it. They took us because we have no antigens. Why…why would they?”
His questioning stopped as guards descended on them. Soon, a feeding area door opened to exude a man in a doctor’s uniform with military epaulets.
“So, Anderson, always the curious one. We’ve watched you. If this one figured it out,” he pointed at Miguel, “It won’t be long before everyone knows, even the women. You can let them go, guards.” The doctor waved thugs off two seated men.
“Explain, asshole!” Anderson turned. A machine gun barrel pushed into his face.
“No, we can’t have that, sergeant. Step back. They’ll settle down. I’m Doctor Evans of Space Command. You, and Mr. Hernandez, are some of our treasured guests. You’ve guessed half the reason, but not all.”
“Treasured guests?” Anderson growled.
“I assure you; my superiors ordered these Spartan conditions after our failures with genetic alterations and artificial insemination. Your kind has complicated reproduction issues. We couldn’t afford to lose a single rare golden blood donor, so…this last alternative. Those pitiful women are just like you—here against their will. We need offspring with dominant genes, ensuring a continual breeding stock.”
“You Nazi bastard…” Anderson reached out before a baton slapped his hands.
“This is about species, not race, Anderson. You see, gentlemen, we have a narrow six-year window. We’re moving an army to Mars to neutralize recent Chinese incursions. Dominance battles are coming. Casualties need universal donor blood supplies from available healthy sources on Mars… babies you’ll make. There are only fifty of you left on Earth. We can’t have that resource wasted.”
“There’s no pit in hell deep enough for what you’re doing…and those women!” Anderson spit at Evans.
“Really? Such bravado. Consider your eventual benefits. Apophis is a planet killer. That asteroid got close last pass, then changed course, so we stepped up Mars migrations. If you aren’t on Mars by 2036, you’ll die. Be assured, you assets will continue mating there, and eventually be crowned heroes. For now, get used to that bitch from Auckland. We need her. She tends toward twins.”
by submission | Aug 22, 2020 | Story |
Author: Ken Poyner
So what: a fleet of alien starcraft sets down in Ohio and lets us know we are not alone in the Universe. Okay. Our rent is still due. The last of that special jam we bought at the farm store just over the state line has soured. You still prop yourself up on one pillow to say that if I am to be done so quickly, maybe I shouldn’t start at all. Yes, I am curious to see what they look like. Yes, I wonder what they came here for. But, as far as anything else – technology transfer, minerals trade, the philosophy of space travel – someone at a higher pay grade than mine will decide all that. My focus is on keeping my lousy job, and when engaged with you in the spearpoint of passion remembering I am not alone. We will get back out to that farm store – it is only a twenty mile mostly straight-line drive down a tourist trap road. We could go next time I have a weekday off. Be angry with me if you like. You know I will make it up to you. Or try. But just now, let’s turn on the television and see if they are interviewing those new aliens yet. I am spear-point curious as to what they could possibly want with us, why we are interesting to them. I would think they would want something and not come so far just to visit.
by submission | Aug 21, 2020 | Story |
Author: David Barber
A sudden rash of volcanoes, spewing poisonous smoke and ash; any closer and rock lofted by the eruptions would be raining from the clouds.
So we fled underground, a move not without risk. Sometimes with eruptions come more quakes and roof-falls, but we have learned that those who hide are never survived by the ones who stay in the open.
The slowest of us, the aged and the injured, were the last to limp into the caves. I turned to take in the baleful red glow to the south. Like the end of the world; though we already knew what the end of the world looked like.
It would be a cold and hungry time for we old ones.
The Chief’s men came to do the count, and one stood over the old woman we called the Nurse, huddled in a corner like a heap of rags.
The man called for help with her, though she must be light as a bird. It wasn’t that he couldn’t drag her on his own, but he wanted to share the guilt.
I stepped forward. “She’s not dead.”
“Soon will be. Who’ll take her outside?”
“I will. When the time comes.”
He looked dubious, then shrugged big shoulders. Breeders and Hunters got fed when food was scarce.
Later, they sent someone to remember the Nurse’s words, preserving the past, the way we hold onto knowledge that was common once but is precious now. Our future depends on knowing more than our rivals.
The girl they sent was not a Survivor – what we old ones call ourselves – but from the generations after. She shrugged when I asked her age. Thirteen, fourteen? Hard to guess, though her hips were still too narrow for childbirth.
She had a spiral tattoo on her brow and the top joint of the little finger on her left hand was missing. These were marks of affiliation, of ownership perhaps. The young have secret lives.
Together, the girl and I roused the Nurse with water, and some scraps I had kept back for harder times.
Perhaps the girl expected to hear secret tricks of healing, but the Nurse had already passed on what she could.
“Out of nowhere,” she mumbled. “Like a thing bobbing up from underwater. Big as the moon.”
She clutched at the girl, searching her face for comprehension. Still trying to make sense of what befell us after all this time.
It had surfaced with a surge and suck of gravity that made the Earth flex in torment. It was fleeing the wavefront of some unspecified catastrophe, but sniffing a waterworld like ours, and with true sentience in the cosmos so precious, it snatched at the passing chance of rescue.
Days later, with the saved safe inside the belly of the behemoth, it vanished in a splash of physics that blew every lightbulb on the planet. Whether it was some sort of living starship, or a vast leviathan of the interstellar deeps we never knew.
The girl shot me a bitter glance. This was the creation myth of her world.
“No room for everybody, so some was saved and some was left. That what she say?”
Perhaps anger and resentment would nourish them through hard lives. When my time comes, I shall not add to their burden with the truth.
We scientists didn’t understand at first, as quakes and tsunamis grew increasingly violent, as we scanned the heavens for a catastrophe that seemed already here. It was a while before we realised all the whales were gone.
by submission | Aug 20, 2020 | Story |
Author: Thomas E. Simmons
That spring, the young woman we now know as V-3 crashed; purpled herself across a dead bocage of extraterrestrial mire with the proud medallions and Coat of Arms of the sovereign clipped to her lapels, while back home they made a wearisome postage stamp in her honor; to ‘stamp her with honor’ some said, in red and grey, and thereby credit her as a heroine; a martyr; the first smelt craft to reach the surface of another system’s planet, and rather dramatically at that.
The assembled bureaucrats claimed credit and sang songs of achievement.
There wasn’t much left of her (or of the medallions (or the Coat of Arms, either)) given her speed of impact, except that honor.
It wasn’t what you’d call a soft landing.
She became ejecta.
But before that, with her long passage across the chasm between two orbits behind her, she’d aimed herself steadily at her target.
She situated the vector of the second orbit in her crosshairs.
On her first attempt, her trajectory had been unfaithful to her and she’d bypassed the ragged fur of the outer atmosphere by sixty thousand kilometers or so, but the neuro-communists doggedly programmed a corrective maneuver into her temples and rammed her into the planet, they say, on the first of March.
From a ravine back home came the tuneless singing. The banal praises.
And within that singing and labyrinth of human motivations which powered her could be found ambition, allegiance, a clove or two of fealty, and some sizable cravings for creation-revelation fixes, but there was a germ in the petri dish, a minotaur in the maze, a basilisk in the nursery, against which she lacked any immunity because, you see, contemporary outer space historians have concluded (more or less in concert; a dissonant concert-choir of lovable, nerdy men who disdain contact lenses for reasons no one can identify) that the new soviets actually lost her in the cusp of her flight in mid-April – when she scalped – and that she never exuded upon a curve at all and – as a result – was devoured sideways (by dishonesty and dissembling, rather than via a heroic mashing) and that if she did (perish prematurely in a bellow of propaganda, as now seems the case), she may never be truly credited; her honor thereby dis-credited, except for the official and wholly unattractive postage stamp bearing her fissures which even the most dedicated communist-friendly philatelists deride for its stretched-homeliness; its hollow-headedness in recalling the lady’s deeds (if she achieved them, which we’ll likely never know) and a split-abdomen of slumping reflected upon a cancelled stamp and the medals rudely sutured to her before she’d taken her leave.
Such was the journey of V-3.
