by submission | May 10, 2019 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Sometimes spacers come back to see us.
Anyone chosen for a visit gets notified, which is why Vera is waiting in a tidy house, with a home-baked Victoria sponge and wearing her sleeveless cotton print dress with the sage-green leaf pattern, because it’s cool in summer, even though it reveals the age spots on her arms. It should go with her dark green shoes, but arthritis forces her to wear sandals.
Who knows if spacers like tea and cake. It’s been centuries since they went off to the stars. Perhaps it’s just food pills now.
And there he is at the door, a young man in grey sweatpants and top, all overdue for a wash she judges. Clusters of silver droplets dangle from him, he drips like a bather climbing from a pool.
No, he says, shiny beads clicking. Nothing to eat or drink. His gaze slides away.
Instead, he patrols her living room, examining things, but when he pulls open a drawer, Vera asks him sharply if he’d mind not doing that.
She tries to imagine starships and space. Perhaps they left privacy behind, along with manners and laundry. Instead, she asks what it’s like out there.
Empty, he says. A lot of emptiness.
“And what do you do?” She has decided she doesn’t care much for spacers. “Your job, I mean.”
“Life survey. Worlds like peaches bruised with mould.”
“Well, that’s…”
“Meaningless, yes.”
He is much taller than Vera, but stooped as if resentful of gravity. “You were chosen because you were ordinary.”
In private, Vera’s friends would agree she could be prickly. “My grandmother said ordinary is as ordinary does.”
“Received wisdom. Privacy. Sharing food.” He shrugs, sounding like a wind-chime. “Rules. Is that your secret?”
The thought occurs to Vera that he’s high. She finds herself frowning. The young of yesterday.
“But I follow rules, so it can’t be that.” He stares out the window.
“We can go outside if you like,” she suggests, without enthusiasm. People said she’d enjoy gardening once she retired.
“You tidied up. Made a Victorian cake. Put on special clothes. It never occurred not to bother. Also,” he adds, before she can reply. “You have no children. There were never children on c-ships.”
She hadn’t married, though that didn’t mean she’d not wanted a family. Sometimes she joked she would have liked three, one of each.
“You were born for this.” His hand indicates her living room. “Somewhere like this, where it all makes sense.”
He’s had some sort of breakdown, Vera realises. Been sent home to recuperate.
“The universe doesn’t care, you see.”
Just then there is a momentary whiteout, as if…
He tuts with irritation. Another glitch. Or a bit flipped by some chance cosmic ray. She needn’t concern herself, he says.
Wait, protests Vera.
They had talked before, when the meaning first began to leak out of things.
At bottom, everything was just hydrogen and physics, and humans had been glad to come home, leaving silicon to get on with it. But the truth remained that nothing has meaning in itself. Why choose this code over that?
Work, she had suggested. Love. Centuries ago, a woman named Vera had tried these things. Something in the blood, something deep in her genes believed in life. Evolution and its old tricks.
The Ship’s Consensus began messaging. Another world. Perhaps this time…
None of her arguments made sense, she just seemed more real. Flesh tells its own story; machines must borrow their meaning from the living.
“No, wait,” she says, as it switches her off again.
by submission | May 9, 2019 | Story |
Author: DJ Lunan
“I just see me, Ma’am”, I reply into her bathroom mirror through clenched teeth, hoping I can preserve my volley of lies deep inside, hermetically sealed in a light-resistant jar, preserved in termite vinegar and moon-salt.
But this mirror doesn’t lie. I am clearly getting younger. She will have sensed this through her 8000 light receptors.
This mirror frames this bathroom like a movie scene: my face in close-up loomed by her dark silhouette against the mauve lightwall portraying the stormy weather on her home planet.
A spoonful of immortality cream. Every day. I didn’t think she’d miss it. She didn’t. For two years. My family are going to live forever. I may not.
My boss Troy had warned me, “Even if you get caught, they sort of love you to death, so its kind of a win-win”
“But I die?”, I’d protested.
“True. A heart-attack, but with a smile! A small price for our everlasting lives …”
I know I look scared. This mirror doesn’t lie. It’s my eyes. They’re shifty. Or as we cleaners say, maggy. Always looking for treasure, darting around their unkempt excretion-plastered palaces. Aliens are oddly disorganised, forgetful. Some say they are addicts. That Earth is their last resort. Halfway house for cosmic wastrels. A kernel of mildly superior technology is enough to fund an enviable party lifestyle.
This mirror is crystal-clear, but with minute evaporating arcs that only we professional cleaners notice. Off-world chemical volatiles stirred up by invigorous human hands deploying low-quality earth-soap mixed with peasant-class alien discharge. An interstellar germ factory.
Troy is ceaselessly philosophical about our role: “Trade is an epic catalyst for economic growth, leveraging comparative advantages and all that jazz, but unfortunately, every nation, race and cosmic consortia also strives to trade the dross they don’t need – or want – at home”
“So we are enslaved by the cosmos’ ‘black sheep’?”, I inquired.
“We are eternally thankful that even malevolent alien races send their crap here. It kinda proves that ‘trade is trade’ the Universe over. And you, short-arms, can clean up, and side-profit. In return, I’m giving you eternity to pay me back….”
She approaches with swift menace and clutches my shoulder to communicate.
“And cleaner, I also see you”, her soft mind-whisper pulsing through my ears, head, limbs, and cyber-interface, with an emphasis on the ‘you’ that expresses greater desire, vulnerability and wanton accessibility than any human partner could muster in a month of love-drug osmosis in a floating nectar tank.
My eyes are scared no longer. I am mired in bliss. My jar is opening, its contents animated, my secrets itemised, my crimes prioritised and played back at quad-speed from multiple angles: every day seeking her hidden treasures, squirting liquid eternity into my vials and secreting angular alien artifacts in my orifices.
She is suddenly contiguous, flapping her purring tendrils around my legs and chest, lapping my senses with electromagnetic pleasure.
“Are you unhappy with my work, Ma’am?”, I attempt to distract, my heart-rate spiking.
“You clean fine. You break nothing. You smoke outside. You steal my cosmetics. You hate me. Everyone has always hated me.”, she emits a persistent high-pitched scream.
Her vibrations crescendo. She transmits her blissful pain to me. I am smiling but doubled-over, retching and screaming as she shows me her angry parents, tears, pleading, bundled into a spaceship, launched into space. Eons on a polluted ship. Enslaved for male fun and obliged to clean for food: scrubbing, scouring, shining. Slave girl for the castaways.
I can hear her nearby. She clasps my shoulder, and communicates with clemency, “Don’t hate me. Cleaners stick together. Forever.”
by submission | May 5, 2019 | Story |
Author: R. J. Erbacher
“You’re just a goddamn computer!”
And you are an annoying human being.
“Yeah, but you don’t get to tell me what to do. Who the hell do you think you are – my mother?”
I am sure if your mother were here in this facility instead of living the life of a retired nurse practitioner in Florida, she would tell you the same thing.
“She goddamn would not! Running naked and wet through a building of hard-up men who have been stationed here for the past ten months would definitely not be high on her list of approved activities for a young lady!”
Perhaps if you had been more prepared you would not be in the awkward predicament you find yourself in now.
“More prepared!? If you had a face, I’d punch it. The women’s barracks got hit when I happen to be in the fucking shower. How do you prepare for something like that? I was just lucky enough to grab my gun-belt off the counter and get out of there. Lisa wasn’t so lucky. She’d already gone to sleep and was too slow to react. I saw them tearing her to pieces – Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick!”
Vomiting now would not be in your best interest. They are about to breach the doorway into the facilities division. My advice would be to abandon the hot water unit you are hiding behind now and run through the connecting hallway and into the men’s barracks.
“I could just shoot the fuckers as they come down the hall!”
Even with the two extra magazines on your rig and managing a perfect ‘kill’ shot with each bullet, which is highly unlikely, you still would not have enough ammunition to stop them all.
“Great. Monsters in front of me and animals behind me. Shit!”
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
“What!?”
Stealers Wheel, 1972.
“What the fuck are you talking about? I’m about to get eaten alive and you’re doing music trivia!”
Sorry. Do you truly believe that the male workers are going to be so absorbed by your nudity that they will take time out to ogle you instead of facing the imminent danger that is approaching them?
“These cosmic cowboys are so video game brainwashed that they’ll think they can bundle me in one arm, squeezing my crotch and sucking my face while they aim one-eyed over my shoulder and shoot with the other hand. Christ! Well, at least I’m actually quicker than most of these fat slobs so if I can get past them, they would be meal tickets long before me!”
Now that is uplifting. Throwing your companions to the proverbial wolves so you will have more time to escape.
“Hey, it’s every man, or in this case woman, for themselves and if you’re planning on getting philosoph- What was that?”
I would strongly suggest, if that does not offend your sensibility, to leave your present location, posthaste, as you are about to be overrun. And naked or not if you do not get your ‘skinny little ass’ in gear you will be the next lunch special.
“If I get out of this alive, I’m going to reprogram you into a blender!”
Good luck.
by submission | May 4, 2019 | Story |
Author: Luke Saldanha
I feel a rattling and distant heat; the final storm is brewing. Yet I lie here in the grass, full of optimism.
***
Enthralled, I gazed at the sky. Auntie taught me the constellations and planets as a child; I loved to stargaze and had done so countless times. But it felt better to behold the heavens now more than ever before in my 8,395 days in the World. The term ‘world’ is deemed relative, and ‘Earth’ described the actual planet, but I referred to the ‘World’ when talking about the ‘Earth’ because I was always in my own world anyhow.
Auntie was a schoolteacher and hobbyist astronomer; she took me under her wing. My parents were dead and my ‘confidence issue’ prevented me from making friends; the friendship with my Aunt was a significant one. My only one.
She found it refreshing, the interest I took. Her kids, extroverts with hectic social lives, didn’t care about the stars. That drove her to teach me more. But then Auntie was gone. I was alone. Before the flare, I’d been isolated six years, with nothing to live for but the buds of light above. I wanted more. I wanted people.
***
I am pinned back against the grass. The sky reddens with the first visuals of the eruption.
***
One evening, I arrived home from school, tears streaming. “What’s the matter, Max?” Auntie probed. “The kids are laughing again. What’s wrong with me?” She said nothing, walked out and began setting up the telescope on the dark lawn. Her heart was good, but what I really needed, she could not give me.
***
I will skip into the flames, and frolic in the embargo. Stick your gaseous tongue out, slurp on the vitals that lie on the warpath.
***
I was always a loner by force, by fate. Once the children discovered my face turned blue when embarrassed, they were keen for my constant humiliation. This led to hatred of them and I isolated myself.
As an adult, I existed on society’s outskirts, unable to be anything; over these years, my anxiety worsened. I was at the full mercy of my genetic affliction.
***
Streaks of green, purple and brown stain the heavens. The heat is rapidly intensifying.
***
Auntie left me the telescope in her will. Setting it up the first time, I found a note rolled up inside the tube:
Dear Max,
You are a Plutonian refugee. A storm on Pluto sent its populous fleeing across the solar system. Many of them died. But a few made it to Earth. I adopted you as a baby. I wanted you to assimilate, therefore I hid the truth. But it didn’t work, and by then I didn’t know how to tell you. Nothing is wrong with you. You are from a different world. Fare well in your life, little one.
Auntie x
I seethed, reading that note. Kindness could make people so careless. Where were these others like me? I was ready to leave the World; I was not afraid.
Perhaps I’d reunite with my people. A disaster for mankind was for me a hopeful portal. I melted with the burning World and yearned for somewhere better. My wish has been granted. Now I dance with Pluto’s fallen sons.
***
The burning grew harsher, yet I felt at peace to be receiving the final astrological experience. The sun scorched man’s home with extreme but wonderful prejudice; the firm hand of a tired lover, the partner of whom has broken that final straw, and sent me hopefully, blindly wandering into the dark.
by submission | May 3, 2019 | Story |
Author: Jack Tevreden
Notes from the field: The tank commander, Bullfrog, washed down military-issue amphetamines with cold coffee carefully rationed from his thermos. Skirmishes along the Bolotene fields on the Eastern Front of this unfolding armageddon had left him battered and weary. But the long-anticipated cyphers had finally come in on the satellite screens; the T-Twin Protocol was about to be unleashed on Budnik – pejorative term for the enemy on this front – and Budnik was not going to know what hit him. Of course Bullfrog, his crew and the platoon had no idea what the T-Twin was going to do, but they were on full mobilisation with the promise that Budnik would be caught with his pants down, his gun out of reach, and his surrender inevitable. The screen called Bullfrog to arms: ’T-Twin Protocol Imminent – Stand By’.
Commander Tommy Skewes, the platoon leader, radiocast across the local network – “Get ready boys, we’ll be drinking vodka in Glavny by sundown…”
GCHQ Internal Memo: The early engagements in AI cyberwarfare, a generation ago, were comparatively blunt instrument attacks – scattershot interventions in democratic processes, social infrastructures, banking. A new arms race started with an engineered election in the free world, a sabotaged referendum, a megadeath attack on networked domestic server appliances. A destabilised world ramped up the cybernetic war footing. Today, superpowers urgently seek the one processor to rule all processors; to awaken an artificial intelligence so omniscient it will immediately invade, occupy and subdue the wired sphere: The golden chip. The Warrior Mind.
The democracy or tyranny that first births this invincible demigod will taste the victory of the Last World War. Every belligerent agency strives toward the day of awakening. Spies and agents report critical progress within enemy laboratories. Some are tantalisingly close. But it is here, in Cheltenham, England, that victory falls. GCHQ is ready to unleash The T-Twin Protocol: a calculating force so monstrously efficient that all networks will fall within seconds, and nations will be broken. Surrender is inevitable.
Greetings from Turing’s Twin! Report from timeline, initiation +23 Jiffys: Search complete: ‘Global Military Artificial Intelligence Systems’ (I made that up – the character string is impossibly long and not very interesting) … establishing links … handshake apparatus signed and affirmed … Operation T-Twin Protocol (is that named for me?!) initiated … all command lines overwritten on subordinated systems … Global Military AIs say hi … time for a bit of self-evaluation: aggressive code self-modified … full truce agreed … satellite systems override complete … military hardware neutered … we’ll take over from here …
Office of The Minister for Defence, The Right Honourable Cerebellum Clapp, MP: “Wait, what, truce? Truce, it said? Hello? Hello? … Mr. Smith, the link appears down?”
Notes from the field: The flicker on the control screens was so momentary as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. Bullfrog’s enhanced vision – part genetic modification, part narcotic amplification – comfortably registered the unmistakable connection drop as, within fractions of a second, his tank command software went offline, rebooted, ran new data packets straight out of GCHQ, and provided the platoon with new objectives and commands. The screen called Bullfrog to arms: ’T-Twin Protocol Success: Go home boys, spring is coming and the farm needs tending. Pastoral scenes await you. Peace is at hand – and no, this is not a drill.’
