by submission | Jun 7, 2017 | Story |
Author : Philip Berry
Carl insisted that he travel alone. The invitation was sent to him, the wording made it clear that they were interested in his ideas, and the fact that he was only fifteen made no difference. His ideas were mature, that was all that mattered.
Standing on the mile long causeway, limitless blue sea to the left and the right, he looked up. The Lance’s summit was obscured by violet tendrils of ion clouds, an almost permanent meteorological feature at this latitude. In Carl’s opinion, and in the opinion of many others in the blogosphere, the pacific archipelago was a very strange place to build a mesospheric needle. But all agreed the ambition was laudable. Since its ascension, the Jekatek administration had followed through on its vow to advance interplanetary transportation and system-wide habitation. The Lance, albeit poorly functioning, was a symbol of its commitment to move out and find an alternative source of phosphorous before Earth’s supply was finally depleted.
Carl joined three other invitees on the sweeping steps; a bookish boy, a punk girl, and an intense-looking thirty-something with no hair. A woman in dark red uniform escorted the group to a bank of elevators in the tree-walled lobby.
“256th floor. You will receive instructions.”
They entered a circular hall where the air glittered with numerous, suspended screens onto which the designs and visions created by the people below were reproduced in real time. As they were signed off, these plans were rendered three dimensional by a projector under the ceiling’s hub. Here they rotated on all axes and were scrutinised by a long line of surveyors and advisors who stood on a raised ‘whispering’ gallery. Then the designs were either transferred into a visible ‘shortlist’, or collapsed to a point of light and erased.
This was the competition. To design habitats.
Carl saw clichéd wheels spinning in space, paired canisters tumbling on wires, interwoven spirals a hundred kilometres long, tetrahedral lattices of interconnected households, excavated moons, magnetic wells, towering castles of frozen methane…
He walked to a vacant workstation and sketched. Half an hour later he sat back, pressed ‘SUBMIT’ and saw his vision take shape and volume near the centre of the room. A surveyor was evidently giving it a thorough examination, as the virtual model was spun around several times. Briefly, an exterior part was removed and the inner parts revealed. Then the hologram moved sideways to join the shortlist. An assistant tapped his shoulder and led him to a smaller room where Carl joined a hundred others. The chief scientific advisor entered.
“You represent the best of us. All of your ideas could work. Soon, we will need one of them. But only one. And that is the problem. We must all agree, and we must channel our resources in one direction only. Dissent will lead to waste, time will be lost. Our society cannot entertain competing visions. You are the best, but you must stop. We have made our choice.”
Carl looked around him. On every face, in every eye, disappointment.
“By accepting today’s invitation you gave over ownership of your concepts to the Western Hemispheric Government. Additionally, your departure today is contingent upon signing an oath that you will cease creating visions of the future.”
Carl felt the creative spark die within him. The punk girl, standing to his right, said,
“Yeah, well I hope the one they’ve chosen isn’t the same joker who built the needle in the Goddamn ion strata!”
And of course, it was. The chief scientific advisor. Envisioner-in-chief.
Carl moved away from punk girl. He wanted no trouble.
by submission | Jun 6, 2017 | Story |
Author : David Atos
You look like a worm to me.
No, please, don’t be offended. That’s the best way I can describe it to you. To your poor mind, trapped only able to see three dimensions, while you zip along on a fourth. Four simple dimensions, it’s so limiting.
A worm. That’s what you look like. A pink, fleshy worm. The head of your worm emerges from your mother at the time of your birth, and it stretches along your entire life.
Your worm tangles with other worms along its length. Each time you meet another person, shake their hand, dance with them, you tie an intricate knot. Your lives are tied together at almost every point along your length.
But as interesting as you all are to watch, you’re so much fun to play with as well. Cut the worm, and you experience a complete blackout, only to wake up later. Twist the worm into a loop, and your delightful minds call that, what was it? Oh, yes, “deja vu.”
I tried rotating one of your worms once, but it wasn’t pretty. Have you ever seen a man eighty-seven years tall, with a lifespan of only twenty-three centimetres? That was a little disturbing even to me.
But you, I don’t need to play with you. You’re such an interesting worm, without any interference from me. So many tangles with other worms. So many convoluted knots. And look, just look, at that knot there. At your tail. You’re so close to it. And tied up with so many other worms. It’s just fascinating.
by submission | Jun 4, 2017 | Story |
Author : Elora Powell
Just an ordinary day. Woke up. Had breakfast. Went to work. Came home and made coffee. Sat down in front of the TV.
Some old movie was on. Black and white. About a mad scientist and his wife.
“Lance! You have to stop the experiment. He’s been in there too long!” She pleaded.
“I can’t stop it now, Sophia. He has to come out of it on his own.” Said the mad scientist.
They panned over to the experiment, but the screen dissolved into static, and I couldn’t get the signal back. I changed the channel. There was a hockey match on. They were replaying an old game. I saw it with my dad on my ninth birthday.
My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. It was my girlfriend, Macy.
“You’re picking me up at 5:30, right?”
“Oh…yeah! Of course.” I replied.
“Cougars vs. Cats! The big rivalry! You didn’t forget, right? I just put on my face paint.” She said.
“No. ‘Course I didn’t forget. I was about to get my war paint on.” I said.
“Alright.” She said. “See you at 5:30.”
Problem was, I had forgotten. How could I forget about the Cougs vs. Cats game? Macy seemed more excited about it than I was. That was part of the reason we started dating, I guess. Or was it? For a moment, I couldn’t remember how we met.
I was just tired from a long day of work. I chugged the rest of my coffee, and flipped through the channels looking for any pre-game speculation.
The black and white movie was back on. The scientist’s wife was messing with some dials, then typing a message in the keyboard.
“You were right.” It said.
I flicked off the TV and went into the bathroom to paint my face blue and gold.
Picked up Macy at 5:30. She looked great, even in face paint. I remembered that we met at a basketball game in college. She was a cheerleader.
The first half of the game the Cougars dominated. I should have been ecstatic.
But Every play, every penalty, every score felt familiar.
Nothing surprised me.
The second half, the Bobcats stepped up their game- just like I knew they would. In the end, the game went into overtime.
Either I was suffering from the world’s weirdest case of deja vu, or something was wrong.
This was a video game. I’d played this rivalry, Cougs vs. Cats on a basketball video game. The first half was too easy, so I bumped up the difficulty and the Cats caught. Then it went into overtime.
“This isn’t real.” I said.
“What’s wrong, Babe?” Asked Macy.
“This isn’t real. I played this game on a video game.”
The display screen that wrapped around the court went blank. Then, the scoreboard blinked out. The players disappeared, along with the audience. Macy and I were alone.
A small, black message crawled across the display screen.
“You were right.”
“Right about what?” I demanded. “That nothing is real?”
“Oh good, he’s coming around.” Said Macy.
But it wasn’t Macy. It was the mad scientist’s wife from the movie.
I wasn’t sitting in the stands of a basketball game, I was sitting in a dark room with my arms restrained, and electrodes taped to my head.
“Lance! He’s coming around! Get over here!” Said the scientist’s wife.
The scientist I worked for, Dr. Lance Hamilton, appeared by her side.
“Welcome back, Mr. Daily.” He said. “How was the game?”
by submission | Jun 3, 2017 | Story |
Author : Matthew Harrison
Susan led Tommy by the hand into the kindergarten forecourt, past the big red climbing frame. “No, not yet,” she said, dragging him back. “Wait until the break.”
“You know,” she said to Marjory, who was likewise preoccupied with her son, “I don’t feel useful any more.”
“Yes, it’s hard to keep up,” Marjorie agreed. “Don’t, Jerry!”
After a struggle, they reached the kindergarten door, and checked their children in. A teacher appeared, smiled just a little too long, and led the two boys away by the hand. They submitted docilely.
“Keep up?” Susan repeated, as the door closed and they were left standing in the forecourt. “I think I’m going to give up.” Her blond hair hung over her eyes, as if she were too defeated even to brush it back.
“Don’t say that,” Marjorie said mildly. She straightened, tall and at ease with herself, and looked around the forecourt. It was deserted, except for a drone watering the trees, and a row of flowerpots. A burst of childish laughter rang from inside the kindergarten.
“And wasn’t that a robot?” Susan continued pitifully. “I asked for a human teacher for Tommy, but they didn’t listen. I feel so helpless.” She rested a limp hand on a nearby urn.
“If the children are happy, that’s the main thing,” Marjorie said soothingly. “Robots have so much more patience. I used to be a teacher myself, God knows.” She shrugged.
“Look, Alassio’s is open,” she continued, seeing her friend still despondent. “We’ve got an hour before the break….”
#
A little less than an hour later the two women were waiting again in the forecourt. The time had been well spent, and Susan was more cheerful.
“I just don’t know where it’s going,” she said brightly. “Oops! Who put that there?” This last was to a flowerpot; the drone hurried over and set it up upright.
“It’s all happening so fast, with the uploads, they get better and better all the time, Jack thinks he can keep up but he can’t, he’s just fooling himself. And what I want to know is, where is it all going?”
Marjorie, cheerful herself, didn’t know quite what Susan meant.
“I mean, how are our children going to cope?” Susan continued. “It’s going faster and faster, robots everywhere, and you know what? It’s going to take off!” She spread her arms dramatically. “There’ll be no future for the children at all.”
Marjorie smiled, too contented to contradict her friend.
A bell rang, the roar of childish voices rose in pitch, and a moment later the kindergarten door opened and several children rushed out.
“Tommy!” Susan shouted. “It’s too big for you.” But it was too late. With a whoop, the little boy hurled himself at the climbing frame, clambered up a couple of rungs, and then slipped. He fell onto the soft padding that covered the ground, and was hauled up by his mother.
“How can they let them play unsupervised?” Susan looked around. But the teacher was not to be seen.
Meanwhile, Tommy approached the climbing frame again, cautiously this time. The frame obligingly shortened itself, and extended a handrail at just the right height. With a delighted cry, the little boy lurched forward.
by submission | Jun 2, 2017 | Story |
Author : Tiasha J. Garcia
“This was not how I imagined this going.”
The words drifted into the pristine silence, disturbing nothing and no one.
“I–I thought there’d be more time.”
The two grotesquely bloated figures slumped over the bolted-down commissary tables declined to answer.
“I only wanted…to have a say.”
In the starboard head, the captain lay in an undignified sprawl with his white jumpsuit pooled around his blue ankles.
“To be heard.”
Not even the engines made a noise, so perfected had routine space-faring become.
“I am a member of this crew!”
Even more had been caught unawares while sleeping in their bunks.
“I am!”
Huddled lumps under blankets, one could almost imagine they were still alive.
“I am…”
Outside the stars glittered, starkly beautiful and magnified in a stream of cosmic dust, but there were no human eyes to see it.
“There–”
Oxygenated air whooshed through the corridors as the small freighter repressurized.
“–now can we can be friends again?”
The vessel continued on its scheduled course, faithfully corrected by the ship’s AI computer, whose dialogue looped for the fourth cycle in a row.
“This was not how I imagined this going…”
