by submission | Apr 27, 2018 | Story |
Author: Tia Ja’nae
My hands are sweating something fierce, even though they shouldn’t be. Just nerves, I guess since I’m here under false pretenses. Got arrested on my birthday for violating societal acts of moral turpitude. Federal law stipulates you can’t stay a virgin past age twenty-four. Been that way since they made robot brothels legal. Court intervention said it’s either Pleasure Dome or incarceration, so here I am, using poor taxpayer tithes on copulation vouchers to avoid a felony.
The Department of Human Behavior swears artificial intelligence keeps neutral gender equality while eliminating conception, disease, and potential sexual predatory behavior. Any possible freaky thing that would be illegal to do with a human I’m supposed to get out my system with some machine. I’m just not so sure I’m ready to do it based on answering a survey huddled in what looks like a voting booth from the 20th century.
The place feels like the gynecologist office, stirrups and all. Bad enough the mainframe verified my medical records doing spot testing for diseases; once that’s over I’m left waiting in a gown for a mechanical stranger to feel me up in all the wrong places. Enter Jeff, the android doing the government’s dirty work. Stares me down as if he’s guessing what panties I have on, reviewing my sordid curiosities. Would have turned me on if his pillow talk was on point.
Whispers in my ear shouldn’t have been that his seductive pan and scan were diagnostic calculations to factor my level of uncomfortableness to engage the right sequence to relax me. We settled on a basic massage. A safe bet considering its included in the first time package at no additional cost. But at least he looked and felt like the real thing.
Kneading my shoulders did nothing to take the edge off after an unnecessary explanation of how his base model’s intricate synthetic tissue design was modeled after human foreskin. Foreplay of technobabble was a mood killer. His tongue technique was regimented, giving away he wasn’t a real man. The texture was all wrong. Different alternatives offered to correct my displeasure weren’t even close to the thick goodness of the original source material.
Finally, it was time to get down into the biology part. Jeff had a cheat sheet of my sexual proclivities uploaded into his database, so I can’t say it wasn’t physically satisfying in that regard. Still, no newcomer in the sexual arena is going to get off knowing her throes of passion were continuously updated to the central government office of records. Nor is it sexy to find out the second mission was officially accomplished Jeff sent a report to log my new status.
Now that I’ve become a government mandated woman, I’m ready for the walk of shame. Jeff and I were barely separated in the biblical sense before he started encouraging me to participate in a customer satisfaction survey to suggest improvements. Notes on my new sexual profile with his tips fresh out the starting gate were anything but blissful. And I’m not going to put it past this government to not have video surveillance for my permanent record.
A machine’s perfect nature is to be a selfish lover. It steals your intimacy under the auspice of lust, as it’s their purpose. Society’s going in the wrong direction if a hunk of junk compiling sexual profiles for the government to analyze and plaster over all our future background checks is the savior to a free and just society.
And all I have to show for this state violation of privacy is not going to jail.
by submission | Apr 25, 2018 | Story |
Author: Kemal Onor
Captain Dean returned home late. The welcome party had already made coffee and spilled through the halls and rooms to talk in bursts of stories. There was the initial buzz of salutations and welcoming home. Cups were raised and health was toasted. The captain did not slow his long-legged gate and went to the living room. He said nothing.
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, as though listening to some distant sound. He still wore his royal blue uniform, and he ruffled his hair, giving an audible sigh. Dean blinked long blinks, and his mind lingered on distant planets. Planets that drifted frozen as a lake in January. He pulled a folded picture from his pocket. Opening the folds, he smoothed it in his lap. It was a picture of a blue planet. Green, blue, white, and dark. The planet was spinning, always spinning without end. He had been gone a long time and had forgotten the sensation of constant movement.
He had spent too many days and nights in perpetual days, or everlasting nights. Now, as he closed his eyes and took in the familiar smells of his earth home, he wondered if he might be coming down with what many called earth sickness. He stuck his thumbs in his mouth and bit down hard. He opened his eyes. Everything looked to be spinning. His hands gripped the chair, and he tucked his feet under as well. He remembered suddenly the feeling of lifting off in a rocket. The terrible shaking, as numbers counted down. The jumping and jolting. He felt to be lifting from his very seat now.
He stood, holding his arms out, as though to catch himself from falling. He teetered in his stance. Feeling a terrible urge in his stomach he staggered to the bathroom and threw up. After rinsing his mouth, he looked at his reflection in the mirror. He was sweating, and thin in his face. His eyes looked to have shrunk. His lower lip still held the impression of his teeth. He grimaced and returned to his chair, collapsing as though fatigued. Looking before him, Dean saw a number of children had gathered near his chair. They looked with anticipation in their eyes at the space captain.
“What’s space like?” asked one of the children.
“It’s empty and dark, and cold,” said Dean. He now looked like a drunk man, struggling to keep his head up. The room was spinning. The world was spinning. And captain Dean knew that as he sat in his home on that blue planet that it was spinning and silently moving. Through the cold, and through the dark.
by submission | Apr 24, 2018 | Story |
Author: Alex Z. Salinas
“I got to know some people.”
Something nobody says anymore. So when a guy behind me at the café whispered that in my ear, I turned around and shushed him. Put my hand over his mouth. I told him we could get killed if somebody heard that.
Nobody says anything anymore.
Back in my capsule after another night of pointless carousing, I’m restless again. Idealess again. The moon is out, but I can’t see the stars.
In this third and final act of civilization I call post-Socialization, we’re cooked. We’ve primed ourselves for a cyber-sunburn, and now we’re toast.
It’s the devices. They’ve changed us. They’ve scrambled us. Through them, something’s been put into us. We have no control. We’re not free.
Literature exists still. I’ve read some of it. But I’m one of the few, I suspect. I’m shocked at how things used to be. Now, I can’t get an idea out of my head.
In recent news, communities of violent humpbacks have sprouted up—people with re-engineered DNA from decades of looking down at their devices. They’re out for blood. They’re coming for them. And they’re coming for us. All of us.
Church is dead. Temple is dead. God is dead. Small business is dead. Land developers have destroyed them. Our religious have turned to webinars. If their servers are discovered, they’re risking everything. It’s only a matter of time. But I pray for them.
From what I understand, only hospitals remain mostly the same. A few months ago, out of curiosity, I snuck into an emergency room. I wandered the hallways until I came across an old man on a stretcher. I walked up to him to get a closer look. I assumed he was unconscious. Suddenly, he grabbed my collar and yanked me close to his face. His eyes were watery and yellow. I could smell something awful in his breath. The smell of death.
“Get out of here!” he shouted. “They’re watching you! Let me meet Allah in peace!”
I ran out of the hospital as fast as I could. I didn’t look back. For weeks, I had nightmares of the dying man.
I’ve been trying to write everything down. Trying to tell the truth. Trying to spark something.
I want to burn this endless prison we’re in to the ground. But I don’t know how. I don’t know how much time is left.
I’m being watched. I know it. I can feel it.
The devices still call out to me. The urge is eating me. I can feel myself ripping apart slowly.
We’re not alive, most of us. We’re not well.
Something needs to happen. Before it’s too late.
A spark.
Somebody’s knocking on my capsule.
I have to see who it is. I don’t have a choice.
There’s only one way in and one way out.
by submission | Apr 22, 2018 | Story |
Author: David Henson
A gust of wind found us while we were walking in the park. She opened her arms, skipped backwards, pretending to be a kite. Like you used to do. Before you got sick. Before you helped them create her, your dying gift to me.
We came upon the spot where you and I once had a picnic — cheese and a baguette. She had your memory of hiding red wine in a thermos because alcohol is against park rules.
When we got home, she made spaghetti for dinner. The sauce tasted exactly like yours. She knows all your secrets.
After the doctors said there was nothing they could do, you spent more and more time with her creators. You told them everything you could think of. About yourself. About us. Now it all resides in her.
She looks like you, laughs like you and cries like you. Just as promised. When I kiss her, I’m overwhelmed by the scent of you. When we make love, she moves like you. As I said, she knows all your secrets.
Tonight we sat and talked for hours. Just like you and I used to do. I lost myself in the rhythm of her voice — your voice. After a while, she began speaking slowly and softy, and her eyes dimmed. Reminding me I need to charge her. Reminding me, yet again, she’s not you.
I wish I could live without her.
by submission | Apr 21, 2018 | Story |
Author: Neil Otte
“What a strange way for an Arkansas farm boy to die”, he thought. He could imagine Gramps shaking his head and saying, “Son, you are a caution”.
Of course, his love of numbers, ability to fix mechanical systems, and delight in growing things – all traits he got from Gramps – were the reasons he ended up here. When he saw Hydroponics Lead as one of the positions on The Foundation’s roster, he knew he had to apply. Not that it wasn’t hard to become one of the “crazy, selfish dreamers” as the vocal deriders of the Foundation’s plans called the ones who signed up. Although Hebert’s implementation of the EmDrive made interstellar travel possible, the multi-decades voyage was a high-risk proposition. Years of acceleration to a large fraction of light speed, followed by years of deceleration gave large probabilities of failure in even highly redundant systems. World opinion was split on the prospect, but in the end, the multi-national Foundation was formed, and the first interstellar mission was born.
It was Gram’s influence that gave him the courage he needed to apply. He could remember sitting at the picnic table outside church and her saying, “You have a purpose in life and you need to pursue it with passion and integrity. If you do, you have nothing to fear, not even death, because, at the end, you’ll have peace.”
Now as he thought back over the last three hours, he wondered if he had seen the culmination of that purpose. When the explosion occurred in the transfer station it holed both tank 2 and 5, venting water systems that constituted 38 percent of their capacity. He knew to the liter what they were going to need to make it to Vaetta, and at the rate of venting, they had 68 minutes to find a solution. Even now, with time to think and ponder, he couldn’t think of anything else he could have done but vent the just harvested hydroponic bays 8 -12, and then vent the ruptured tanks into the bays. Not a perfect solution, but the bay filters would not allow moisture to vent, and the bays would hold enough water in vapor form to reclaim once the damage was repaired. The fact that the only way to now shunt water from the tanks to the bays was via the original loading system on the outside of Finaer, and the only available way to get to the loading system controls was the limited range/thrust IMU, seemed like a minor detail at the time. The IMU had barely enough propellant for him to maneuver his way to the control panels through the venting cloud of ice. In the movies, the hero would have been able to make it to the tether node and the hook would have caught by a fraction of an inch on his last desperate attempt. In reality, he didn’t get within 15 meters of the node before the IMU propellant was depleted, and the vapor accelerated him steadily away from the Finaer.
Now he floated silently through space as the Finaer dwindled to a gleam against the backdrop of red-shifted stars. They had run the numbers on using one of the CMU’s to retrieve him, but it was clear the delta-v was too great. The goodbyes had been said, the thank you’s and commendations given. Now as he gazed out over the expanse of the universe, he realized that Gram’s words were absolutely true.
“Thanks, Gram”, he whispered. “See you soon”
