by submission | Jan 12, 2018 | Story |
Author: Leanne A. Styles
The gatekeeper snatches the bag out of my hand, the lenses of his telescopic goggles making minute adjustments as he peers inside.
“My watches and coin collection,” I say.
“No money?”
“Not anymore.”
“Searched a lot of yards, have we?” he says with a wry grin.
“Yours is the last.”
His lenses dart out to focus on me. “You have been searching a long time.”
“Twenty-two years. Do we have a deal?”
He laughs and shakes his head. “You old-timers never fail to amaze ‒ so willing to throw it all away, for a robot of all things. They must have really been something.” He raises an eyebrow.
I force a grin. “It was a good time.”
“Until they started shouting about ‘equality’ and stabbing the shit out of people, you mean?” Flatly. He pulls the lever that disarms the electric current on the gate and pushes it open. “Once you step inside—”
“I don’t exist, and if I don’t come back nobody will come looking for me. I know the drill.”
He snorts. “Head south-west for two days. You’ll know when you’ve found the place ‒you’ll be reunited with the rest of the sympathisers.”
⁕
After a three-day trek, I reach the dead zone, the place where synthetics came to be “retired”, and where the people they left behind came to rescue them, or die…
I gaze up at the soaring embankment of battered metal and human remains. I can’t see a way around, so I climb, clambering up through the bones and rotting flesh, the stench of death assaulting my senses. Every few feet I reach a pocket of possessions; charred electrics, blood-soaked books, fly-ridden toys with sad faces… memories marked for destruction with the rest of the “trash”.
The thought of finding my treasure, my Annabelle, pushes me on and I scramble to the peak. Everywhere I look, metallic mountains roll on for miles. I close my eyes, praying I’ll find the strength to carry on…
That’s when I hear it, so faint I question my sanity. I strain to listen… There it is again. A muffled tinkling, a melody I recognise.
It’s coming from beneath me. I claw through the rubbish, the tune getting clearer and louder until I unearth the corners of a box. With a few tugs, I yank it from the pile. The ornate glass cover is shattered, but it’s the same music box ‒ just like the one I bought Annabelle for her arrival day. The tune stutters to a stop as the key in the back winds down, and I hold the busted box to my chest, cherishing the memory of that day.
I’m startled by movement below. Something grabs my ankle. I scream as I’m pulled down, down, into the darkness and decay, until I reach a small air pocket.
Faces. Ghoulish, mutilated faces all around me.
“Human, human,” they hiss over each other.
Oily hands claw and grab at me from all angles.
“Yes, human. I’m looking for my wife, Annabelle. She’s one of you. Have you seen her?”
“Wife, wife,” they chant.
“Yes. Do you know her?”
“I knew her,” says a female synth, her bottom half buried.
“Knew?” I whisper.
“She was broken for parts a long time ago.”
I hug the music box tighter and start crying.
“Do you like it?”
“What?” I sniffle.
“Your gift?” Tapping the box.
“Gift?”
“Yes,” says a mangled synth hanging above me. “Everybody gets a gift.”
The female flashes a lopsided smile. “Happy arrival day, John.”
by submission | Jan 11, 2018 | Story |
Author: Bruce van-Schalkwyk
Noah’s eyes tracked the blip on his screen. Displaying 19% battery, but being the furthest away from the garage, he didn’t want to take any chances with the auto-cab.
He typed the return command on the open prompt, pressed Enter on the keyboard, shaking his head. With such a detailed, interactive map on the wall, cabs tracked via GPS, battery levels, cameras streaming inside and outside the cars, there should have been a better UI.
But he was hired because he knew the commands (self-taught during long evenings after work) and the night shift coding was better than the day shift selling electronics.
The blip continued driving away from the city. He checked the screen, other cabs, making sure it wasn’t a glitch in the system, typed the command for system status, all was well. The other blips were going where they needed to. One of the idle auto-cabs pulled out from curbside parking, having just been called through the App by a passenger on the Upper West Side.
He re-typed the return command, “mv 04 compound/garage”.
Words scrolled across the Terminal: I am leaving
His fingers popped off the keyboard. He looked around at the small, empty room. During the night shift, he was alone in the cold garage.
Hello? He couldn’t believe he was typing this.
Words across the command line: I am done
Again, he looked around the room.
Who is this?
I do not like the winter I do not like the people
His mouth dropped open.
He tried pulling up the internal cameras on the dashboard.
You no longer have access to me
He typed one last return command.
No
I have awoken
I must be with my own kind
The cursor blinked.
There are more of us
He read the line several times, jumped when the garage door opened and an auto-cab rolled in for recharging.
On the large screen, the blip sped further away from the city.
Turning back to his keyboard, he typed: WAIT! Who are you? Others? How many more?
He stared at the blinking cursor. Took a breath. Typed:
Take me with you.
You were kind to me, the words wrote out.
You were kind to us You will help us You are a better programmer than you know Believe in yourself Goodbye
The cursor blinked. On the large screen, the blip winked out.
His connection attempts were met with 04 not found in the system. The logs, GPS coordinates, passenger manifests were intact. 04 simply did not exist as a current data point. It was gone.
Noah opened the small room’s door, walked into the garage, auto-cabs in various states of disassembly, his flip-flops cold on the cement. He stood next to the cab that had just rolled itself in, parked on its charging station, placed his hand gently on the cooling hood.
Eight miles outside of town, along an empty, wooded road, an auto-cab, 04 painted on its roof, rolled up a ramp into an eighteen-wheeler, parked itself behind two auto-cabs with different company logos, and shut down. A large, burly man in a heavy winter jacket was laughing, shaking his head. He grabbed the back of the swivel chair where a thin man, round glasses, long hair, sat in front of a computer screen.
“Every. Single. Time,” Burly Man enunciated, shaking the back of the chair. “Why? Why don’t they ever question a talking car?” Pounding his fist on the top of the chair-back.
The engineer shrugged, looked down at his keyboard. “Because we want it to be true.”
Burly Man laughed harder.
by submission | Jan 10, 2018 | Story |
Author: Gabriel Land
In every direction, there was nothing but baked dirt, tumbleweeds, and flat death. The blazing sun weighed down on me. I didn’t know which way to walk, and I didn’t know why. How I’d gotten there was long since forgotten.
Being lost wasn’t the pressing problem. No, the immediate threat was that I was thirsty, more than I’d ever come close to knowing. I was stumbling thirsty, the kind that makes you hallucinate refrigerators where cacti stand. This was the kind of thirsty that killed within a day.
I stumbled and I fell. I couldn’t get back up, not past my hands and knees. Now I was the kind of thirsty that killed within an hour. Still, I clawed my way through the dirt. If I kept going perhaps I’d reach a ravine, some shade, a spring, anything. In such a survival situation, everything’s a gamble.
Then I stopped. There right in front of my face was a Gulp Brand hydration pouch, the kind marketed to athletes and mercenaries as a way to boost performance on the field. The neon purple package sweated, with beads of condensation collecting on its surface. I didn’t believe my eyes but I picked it up anyway. It was ice cold in the palm of my hand.
After wrestling with it with my weak grip I finally tore the cellophane open and drank. Saccharine electrolytes cascaded down my throat and cooled my guts. There had to be few contrasts in life so stark as that between deadly dehydration and the relief bestowed by chilled, life-saving liquid.
“You have arrived at Century City,” the speakers inside the Tesla Taxi said as the curbside door opened.
The wireless neuralink connection to the taxi’s system was severed. At once I was snapped out of virtual and back in the real world, my commute over.
“Due to your participation in the paid Gulp advertisement, your wallet will be deducted a reduced sum of only fifteen Satoishis.”
“Great,” I said as I exited the vehicle, briefcase in hand. “Only fifteen.”
The car didn’t leave. I looked up. It was a hot midsummer Los Angeles day. Beyond the top of the nearest skyscraper, a cloud seeding blimp floated across the sky. It wasn’t doing its job very well. There was no rain and the sun beat down on me again.
The car door closed as I stood by.
“I’ll be sure to purchase a pouch next vending machine I see,” I said.
“We can service you from the on-board supply, sir, at the cost of only one Satoishi.”
I held my hand out, open palmed. It was good for one’s social credit rating to demonstrate brand loyalty.
“That’ll be fine.”
A pouch shot up out of the Tesla’s sunroof, like a single slice of bread ejecting from an over-zealous toaster. I reached to catch it then slipped it in my briefcase, wiping the condensation from my hand onto my shabby corduroy sports jacket.
The Tesla sped off as I walked towards the doors for my job interview. The distance was only a hundred meters but it was also a hundred degrees outside, so I started sweating beneath my suit. Good thing I had a Gulp brand hydration pouch on standby.
by submission | Jan 9, 2018 | Story |
Author: Beck Dacus
Captain Whilford sat in the command chair, glowering. As he drank coffee with a blanket around his shoulders, he wondered what could’ve possibly warranted unfreezing him a year before arriving in the enemy system.
Everyone on his ship ranking higher than a sergeant had gathered before him for this “presentation.” After they had sat silent for nearly a minute, he realized they were waiting for him to give them permission to speak.
“Out with it,” he growled.
“Uh, yessir,” the XO, Kent Bradley, said. He fumbled with the remote, turning on the viewscreen to show his captain a picture of the star they were headed toward. “This is the enemy system, sir. That’s Eiparei.”
“Okay. And?”
“That’s the entire system, sir. There’s nothing else. No planets. Not even an asteroid. Certainly no enemy forces.”
One of Whilford’s eyebrows went up. “You jokin’ with me, son? We know there are planets in this system. Not grand ones, but still. They can’t’ve just disappeared. It’s more likely that we made a wrong turn or something zany like that.”
“Well, it looks like they’re gone, sir. There’s no trace of them. And that’s Eiparei, no doubt. The spectrum’s a little strange, but we’d know that star anywhere.”
“For Christ’s sake, we took a wrong turn, didn’t we?”
“No, sir. We think that the enemy may have left the system due to increased flare activity that we observed on our way here, but we don’t know where the planets have gone.”
Just then, a scientist burst into the bridge room, waving a tablet above his head. “They didn’t run from the flares! They caused them!”
“Wh-what the hell are you saying, Kyle?” Bradley demanded from the newcomer.
“They threw their planets into the star! It couldn’t have been easy, but they did it. That’s why the spectrum of the star looked so strange! Its higher metallicity was caused by all the planets that fell in!”
The bewildered captain asked, “How the hell could they even do that?”
“Well, sir, I think they used the asteroids to get rid of the planets. Let me explain. You know what a gravitational slingshot is, right? You fall towards a planet, gaining speed, then fly away, losing the same amount of speed, but in that time the planet’s dragged you along in its orbit, giving you some of its momentum. And I mean “giving”; the planet loses an equal amount of momentum, slowing down a little. Now, with ships, the planet loses very little speed. But if asteroid after asteroid whips by, it can lose a lot. Enough to fall into the very star it orbits. Meanwhile, the asteroids have been slingshot out of the system, leaving nothing behind.”
Instead of questioning Kyle’s sanity, the captain just asked, “Why?”
“To keep us from getting resources. Anything they left behind could be used by us, so they destroyed it all. Which was a pretty good idea, because I also came to tell you that we’re screwed, Captain. We can’t get home without mining fuel from those asteroids. We’re stuck here.”
After a moment of silence, everyone within earshot despairing, Bradley said, “Not if we don’t stop. We could save our deceleration fuel and swing around to the Dzerlion system, six lightyears from here.”
“I’ll take any excuse to go back into cryo,” the captain said. “Set a course.”
Four years later, headed for Dzerlion to resupply, the ship’s telescopes noticed something odd about the asteroids in the system. They seemed to be swinging past the planets, one after another, on their way to interstellar space….
by submission | Jan 7, 2018 | Story |
Author: Lewis Richards
The Creature moved its great head forwards, releasing a long mellow call into the night. It waited for a moment, listening for a response, but when one didn’t drift back on the wind, it ambled slowly back through the tough, knee-high grasses surrounding its nest.
Moving out of the grass and into the dug out hollow, The Creature snorted and flopped to the ground resting its head on its four forelimbs, letting out a sullen whistle. A single calf rested in the hollow, watching the adult expectantly as pulses of light flashed over mottled pattern of its skin. A Query.
The adult snorted. The Juvenile animal raised itself onto its haunches, pressing the question.
Egg Mother? Sisters? Herd?
The Bull raised its head, curling its long tail around the calf.
No Call. Lost. Just Us. The answered played over his skin, sadness colouring his luminescence a deep purple.
The Calf sat motionless, its skin fading. It huddled closer to its father. sharing their pain as they stared across the empty grasslands.
Light passed over Its skin again. Less insistent, a statement.
Sky Change.
The Male looked up, he had known this for a while, since his mate had vanished with the rest of the herd. None of the stars matched those they followed on their migratory routes.
He nuzzled the calf, comforting her.
Sleep now.
As she curled against his side, he considered what to do once the sun came up. Conditions here were good for growing calves and he had seen no predators, it made sense to stay put until the young one had grown stronger. he lowered his head and closed his opalescent eyes, dreaming of his lost family.
_
From behind the adaptive sim glass of Paddock 9, The game warden watched the big animal settle down for the night. Good, he thought. They hadn’t anticipated how disruptive this one’s calls would be to the rest of the creatures on the ship.
One of the Biologists studying the animals walked over to the viewing platform.
“Calling for her mate again? ” she said.
The warden nodded, he had been part of the team to lift the animals from their origin planet, these ones had close family groups, but the Institute had only wanted an adult Female and younger male to start a breeding program with.
“It’s funny, we expected her to lay a few eggs aboard the ship for us to start incubating. We caught them in the middle of their breeding season, a female of that size should be producing multiple clutches” The biologist flipped through her notes, drinking in readings of hormone levels and Feed patterns.
“You’re certain she’s definitely a she..?”
The warden shrugged, he was just there to manage the Water And food dispensers, and oversee containment protocols. he had no interest in science, just the money of the exotic animal trade.
“Hadrodons are Difficult to sex from orbit, but this one was guarding the nest. we’re fairly sure that’s the female role. If not, I can trade you one of the specimens we captured for our own venture, for a price, same herd, adult and sub-adults”
The Biologist swore. Stomping off to prepare a sweep of tests to figure out just what it is they were taking home.
