by submission | Nov 24, 2024 | Story |
Author: Alastair Millar
“C’mon, Jack, the fans will just eat this up! You know they will”
“That’s kind of the issue, Morty.”
“It’s totally ethical, don’t worry about it.”
“But is it tasteful? There’s going to be people that hate it.”
“Then they can choke on it! This is the future. I’ve wrangled you the chance to be in at the very start of something really big. Don’t blow it.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It is! All you gotta do is spend a morning at a lab while a couple of whitecoats take some tissue samples, and then an afternoon doing what you do best – looking your wonderful, masculine self while shooting some promo pics and maybe a short vid for the advertising guys. After that we just sit back, they do their magic, and in a couple of months the money starts to roll in. Simple!”
“Morty, I’m an actor, and frankly I don’t know if this is where I want my image to go. What’ll it do to my career?”
“Are you kiddin’ me? The focus groups went totally rabid when we suggested it! Every girl and her dog wants a piece of you, Jacky boy, and this is how we give it to them. Nobody, but nobody, in the business will have a connection like this to their audiences.”
“You think?”
“Your face will be in every supermarket in the country. The publicity is going to be epic, AND you’ll be getting paid for it! Think of the tie-up opportunities – all the big studios will be gagging to get you onboard!”
“It’s a little hard to swallow, all at once.”
“Look, I know it seems like a lot. But you’re going to be a trailblazer, even if other people copy the idea later. Prime product, commanding prime prices, which means prime commission baby! And it will make you a lot of friends among the climate warriors and eco-libs.”
“It seems so, so, invasive somehow.”
“It isn’t. It’s not you we’re talking about, it’s a facsimile, just like your image on the holo’s. No difference. Listen, everyone with a brain understands that cultured meat is the coming thing; the way the world’s population is going, traditional agriculture’s unsustainable, and for whatever reason not enough people are going veggie or vegan.”
“Yeah, but…”
“No buts! All we’re doing is kickstarting the trend by making it out of your cells instead of a cow’s! And long pig is the best and healthiest meat there is! Everybody wins!”
“But why me?”
“Hey, you’re a rising Hollywood star! Why NOT you? But I’ll level with you; I met MakeMeCorp’s marketing guy at a cocktail party a couple of weeks back, and the fact is, his teenage daughter’s had a helluva crush on you since she saw ‘Baker Street Butchers’ last year. So he’s going to earn serious cred with his little princess if he can get you onboard. Like they say, in this town, it’s who you know that counts, and this gives you a major in.”
“Morty, you’re my agent, and you’ve always been good to me. But tell me the truth: is this really such a huge deal?”
“Jack, I am so sure that this is going to be absolutely legendary that I’m even willing to cut a percent off my usual commission. And I’ve never done that for anything for any of my boys and girls before.”
“For real?”
“For real. You’ll go down in the history books. To hell with ‘eat the rich’, we’re going to pioneer ‘eat the famous’! Chow down, mister!”
by submission | Nov 23, 2024 | Story |
Author: Yueyang Wang
No.365: assigned as Breeder for Stem Cell No. 173.
I saw my number on the screen.
This was my first time breeding.
The surgery started immediately. Mechanical arms extended a catheter into my body, warm fluid surged in, and then instruments moved back and forth within me. Minutes later, the seed had been planted in my cavity.
I was moved onto a conveyor belt, transported to the breeding center.
Here, everyone was obligated to do the breeding tasks. We can enjoy extra care, great food, and comfortable dorms during breeding.
That night, I dreamed my belly blew up like a balloon and took me outside the window, over the high walls of the breeding center, past this planet’s colonies, into space, and finally toward a mysterious blue planet.
The breeding process was lonely and tedious. Fortunately, I got a partner—who communicated with me through movements inside me. I could feel the changes, realizing I was not just a carrier but a fusion of myself and the seed – a symbiotic relationship akin to roots and fungus intertwining.
By the tenth week, surprisingly, he learned my language and started talking with me in my mind.
“Who are we? Where are we?” He was so curious.
“You are a seed. I am your breeder. I am nurturing you. Once complete, they will study you.”
“Who are they? Why study me? I’m just a fragile carbon-based creature.”
“They are the masters of this world. Seeds come from various civilizations, each shaped by different environments. Carbon-based creatures are weak but adaptive—this is what they want to learn.”
“Why use you to nurture me?”
“Most carbon-based lives have vanished. To obtain your biological samples, they need carriers. We were specially engineered with universal breeding cavities.”
“And after breeding?”
“I might nurture more of you or be destroyed.”
You fell silent.
“Let’s escape.”
We came to the walls at midnight. You taught me to find steel rods and use them as footholds, moving step by step upward. My bloated body made climbing difficult. Slowly and finally we reached the top.
Beyond the wall lay a vast swamp.
“Jump!”
The cold relentlessly invaded.
Where could we run?
We were chasing an unknowable dream.
Eventually, they caught us.
They tied us up and roughly opened my cavity.
It was empty.
I knew you had left my cavity long ago, settling instead in my mind.
They started probing everywhere in my body.
“Now!” You shouted.
I grabbed a blade from the surgical table and stabbed into the mechanical arm.
Sparks exploded on the silicon panels. It made an electronic groan, collapsing into a cube-sized box.
Alarms blared.
I picked up an alcohol burner and smashed it to the ground.
Flames roared.
They could no longer control me. Here, no death—only fire and glory.
Experiment Summary No. 173:
Stem cell No. 173 originated from the dominant species of the Solar System’s Earth (known as “humans”). Neural stem cells were dedifferentiated in vitro to achieve pluripotency and implanted into the carrier.
However, we overlooked the invasiveness of human cells and their epigenetic memory. The embryo did not develop normally within the cavity but invaded the breeder’s brain, reshaping Breeder No. 365’s neural network.
The invasion endowed Carrier No. 365 with a strong sense of self and rebellion.
This transformation leads us to reevaluate human civilization.
Though their civilization ultimately reached only Level 1, it produced vast cultural works of collective consciousness. Humans possess insatiable curiosity, an indomitable will to conquer challenges, and defy death with love.
Human civilization—so short, so powerless.
And yet, so persistent, so determined.
by submission | Nov 22, 2024 | Story |
Author: Srdjan Budisavljevic
..Finally, he opened his eyes. The feeling was strange, like the feeling of rebirth. Faint images of his former existence sporadically surfaced in his consciousness, but he was unable to recognize those memories as integral parts of his existential continuity. The first thing he felt was amazement, immense amazement, and then his being was filled with fear. Inherent, primal fear. His reality collapsed into a blink of the present moment, his perception shattered into fragments. Water, turbulent water, water and foam, the familiar blue element, then the wire, and the foreboding sense of an alien presence. And then the strange unknown outlines, which had never found a reflection in his eye before, and the voices, muffled at first, but increasingly clear over time, rough, aggressive, voices that called out to each other. It seemed to him like the voice of a flock of raptors cheering themselves on, tightening a ring around their prey. But the weapons and the cunning of this enemy did not belong to his world, in the depths of his bowels he felt the unknown superiority of the life that was subjugating him. Suddenly, in great fear and convulsion, he pierced his face through the surface of the water in which he was immersed and finally saw the Eye. It was the Eye from the other side, the mirror of the will that wants to dominate the universe, the display of a machine devoid of empathy that operates on the other side of good and evil, on the other side of the postulates of nature and the laws of the soul and conscience. And maybe, for a moment, with the spark of his eye, in all that fear and despair, he tried to ignite the flame of love in the cold neon glow of those sockets. Maybe, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Just as it doesn’t matter what all the procedures and treatments foreigners have applied to him.
What was important is that one sun-drenched afternoon, in the Arena XXX aqua complex, he jumped out of the water, with all the grief and misery of his restrained soul, performing a graceful figure, followed by the roar of hundreds of wild foreign throats.
And he was just an angel trapped in the body of a fish, like any dolphin.
by submission | Nov 21, 2024 | Story |
Author: Jas Howson
Xero had been scouring the planet for scrap parts for half the day. When she and her partner crashed, their comms device, along with the rest of the important equipment on their ship – and their ship – had scattered across the planet. Frequent sandstorms prevent one from simply scanning the surface for rogue components – you could be stood right on top of a piece but not find it until the sands shifted again.
An advisor had sent the pair of scientists to check up on the planet’s research station. It’d been constructed a few years back, fully automated and programmed to send back data; UV levels, soil fertility, air toxicity and all that, but it had stopped about two weeks before anyone thought it necessary to do something about it. Xero had since adjusted the PH levels in the soils and monitored the oxygen levels with a gas detector. She couldn’t, however, sus what had gone wrong with the solar panels, or how to transmit the data back home. She was only a botanist. Sol was the technician, but he hadn’t stepped a foot inside the station since they’d crash landed.
There was a cool breeze in the air. It helped with the swelling heat from the planet’s suns, but it did little to stifle Xero’s boredom. She checked inside on her crops, kicked at the solar panels to see if that would do anything – it didn’t – then slumped in the shade of the station and thumbed through Sol’s old tech manuals for the zillionth time over.
She craned her neck to the dual suns that that watched her like eyes. Noon at last. Days were long here. Unbearably long. Since dawn had broken across the planet’s horizon 36 earth years had passed.
36 years since she’d woken up, parachute tangled in the winding fingers of a tree, facing her partner. It had not been the ship’s antenna impaled through his abdomen that had killed him, but Xero’s own parachute wrapped tight round his neck. Sol hung limp and pale, his expression permeated in that of someone who had died slowly and alone. He was twenty.
Xero forced herself out of her head and began comparing her scrap findings of the day with the tech manual. She had circled only pieces absolutely necessary for a basic comms device. She sucked in a long, dry breath. She had them all.
To the best of her ability, though she’d had long enough to teach herself, she soldered and twisted and hammered and screwed each piece into an untidy little machine – all but one.
She knew precisely where it was: in the same place it had been for last three decades. She rose and strode a little way from the station to a mound of discoloured dirt where tufts of grass had started to grow. From the ground protruded a warped spike of metal, which Xero reached reluctantly down for. She tugged the antenna from Sol’s grave, though with less force than she had from his corpse.
She brushed off the grit and dust, and attached the antenna to her mound of panels, buttons, dinted batteries and half exposed wires, fixing it with a despondent sigh. She flicked the power on, and the device whirred – a good sign – and shakily clacked the Morse key. Three dots. Three dashes. Three dots.
And she waited.
by submission | Nov 20, 2024 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Over the centuries it had become a tradition for the Immortal Emperor to wash away His guilt in ceremonies at the Schwarzschild radius.
Since nothing escaped the event horizon of a black hole, awful secrets could be whispered there, cruelties, mistakes and bad karma consigned to the singularity, and history begun afresh. But the Emperor had not always answered threats and heresies with weapons so terrible they snuffed out suns, and heretics whispered that immortality had driven Him mad.
Orbiting a distant black hole, the Station of Eternal Renewal prepared for the Emperor’s arrival in full pomp and circumstance, and amongst those waiting was Anders Aquila, the Imperial Navigator, and secretly a heretic.
Turning to leave after the Welcoming, his path was blocked by an Officer of the Emperor’s Blood Guard.
“You didn’t sing the Anthem, and you mumbled your responses to the Oath.”
It was said the Blood Guard always knew when you were lying, but for Anders the lie was his entire life. Still, he had been careless.
“It was the presence of the Emperor,” he said carefully. “I was struck dumb.”
Head bowed, Anders watched the Officer’s hand settle on his pain stick, then lift off again, like a wasp shooed away from something sweet.
Anders raised his gaze to the man’s face.
The Emperor could order a clumsy servant punished or worlds set ablaze with the same wave of His hand. The Officer had carried out both acts, and found it increasingly difficult to tell the difference.
“The Imperial Navigator should set an example,” he said finally.
The Emperor had already boarded the Imperial Grace, secluded from all but his Guards and the Priesthood. Anders waited at a lesser airlock while his identity was confirmed.
Generation after generation of conspirators within the Imperial Bureaucracy had come and gone since the Emperor’s conscience was last cleansed, each faithfully doing His bidding while always ensuring one of their own was in a position to act.
Anders Aquila was the latest of these.
He was escorted to the Bridge where the Pilot and Engineer already sat. The faultless autonomics of the Imperial Grace flew an orbit that would safely skim the event horizon, the three of them being just another fail-safe redundancy.
They had never met before, the paranoia of the Guard having plucked them from far-flung planets of the Empire. Anders had no idea if either was a heretic. It made no difference.
One of the Blood Guards stationed around the Bridge stepped forward.
“What are you doing?”
Anders realised he had instinctively hunched forward to conceal his actions.
“Running a simulation of our trajectory one last time.”
Imperial Navigator was an honorary title, but by tradition his role was to oversee their course.
“Your heartbeat is raised.”
“Gravitational frame dragging around spinning black holes means our approach must be prograde and precisely equatorial, so—”
Detailed explanations tumbled out of him, but the Guard had already stepped back.
Half a millennium ago, a nameless heretic had inserted code that waited like a seed in the earth for this simulation to waken it. The subtlest of course changes which the autonomics should now blindly follow.
If this ancient plot succeeded, the Immortal Emperor, the Imperial Grace, and everyone aboard, guilty and innocent alike, would vanish across the event horizon forever and a thousand worlds would be free.
Anders had accomplished his life’s work, though strangely he felt no triumph.
But then, heretics claim that evil is neither created nor destroyed, we merely call it by another name.
