by submission | Oct 15, 2015 | Story |
Author : Morrow Brady
Like fireflies born from air, the HoloTV image morphed into view. Through its ethereal glow, lay scattered beer cans and ecig batteries. Everyone’s favourite reality show Joe’s Stake was about to start.
“Hurry up Honey, they’re plugging in the Joe!” said a grey bristled middle aged man nestling into a old brown sofa. He was quickly joined by a brandy haired lady in a chrysanthemum sun dress.
In 90 high resolution inches, the corpse of this week’s Joe appeared laid out on a rusty hospital bed. Through a shaking handheld camera, a red haired starlet welcomed her viewers. Carefully she reached behind the Joe’s ear and eased in the neon blue transmitter into the implant port.
Blue static snapped into view and slowly formed words in large white helvetica font.
REWINDLIFE
Moments passed until further words appeared.
PLAYLIFE
CURRENT HEALTH 100%
The words faded to grey and from nothing appeared a first person view from within an office toilet cubicle. News, stock reports and emails glowed on the walls of the toilet partitions under shameless LED.
The toilet seat automatically lowers and Joe turns around, undoes his belt and begins to sit.
The screen freezes and the following words appear.
BET?
“$1000 on 10%, I think its gunna be a stroke!” spat the Beard.
“No. I don’t think so babe. Its too early. Lets put $500 on 0%. It’s a fake hurt!”
PLAYLIFE
Joe’s view flashes red indicating extreme pain.
CURRENT HEALTH 95%
Together the couple winces a mixed emotion of shared empathy and financial loss.
Joe struggles to repeatedly rise, only to keel over, clutching his groin.
“Poor fella must have got caught under the auto lid” Beard yelled as they both fell about themselves roaring with laughter.
FASTFORWARDLIFE
Through a red tint, Joe descends to a large corporate entrance lobby with a revolving door.
The screen freezes.
BET?
“$200 says 10% on a door malfunction”
PLAYLIFE
A low resolution CCTV shows Joe entering the revolving door, only for its central spindle to shudder and send the dividing glass panels at speed on a rotating trajectory.
The camera zooms in as Joe is catapulted into the forecourt like shrink wrapped cheese.
CURRENT HEALTH 85%
“$2000! Hell yeah!” The drunken pair spill beer as they slap palms clumsily.
As bystanders gaze open-mouthed, Joe rises dazed, brushes away glass fragments and meanders off.
FASTFORWARDLIFE
A modest suburban home appears, tended by an aging ButlerDroid. Joe collapses on the couch and falls asleep.
Screen freezes.
BET?
“That Droid’s as old as the hills. $500 on 20% for a malfunction” yells Chrysanthemum Lady.
PLAYLIFE
CURRENT HEALTH 75%
“Bad luck baby, that was close” Beardy says, comforting her with a hand on the knee.
From darkness, red colour flicker as on-screen meters show Joe’s adrenalin is spiking.
Joe struggles to extract himself from the deepest folds of his sofa mechanics.
“Ooh no! The sofa auto-folded on him!”
Joe raises his crooked bruised body.
“He’s up! Oh yeah!” Beardy & Chrysanthemum leap to their feet in anticipation.
ButlerDroid carries Joe up a rusted staircase and near the top, the image freezes.
BET?
“$200 on a terminal overnight heart attack”
PLAYLIFE
From a darkened corner, across a dishevelled sofa, a staircase beyond carries an misshapen form. In the corner of the screen pops up a Droid Operating routine that flashes in red text.
MAXIMUM LOAD BREACH
The droid’s forward momentum slows to a backward teeter. As gravity takes hold, Joe and the droid crash desperately down the stairs. The HoloTV image fades to grey.
CURRENT HEALTH 0%
“Oh no!” They both spat in dismay as the closing credits show a mourning widow presented with the house winnings.
by submission | Oct 14, 2015 | Story |
Author : Kate Runnels
Saree had been sentenced to five hours on the alien planet where her crime had been committed. Where on any human controlled planet or sector, what she had done would not even be considered a crime.
And five hours. Five hours didn’t seem like that bad of a verdict, as she didn’t consider her actions a crime. It was a punishment that fit the crime – to her mind.
Being an xeno-anthropologist of a culture predating any currently existing culture by several millennia, Saree followed the evidence and the facts –
-but facts and evidence to an alien mindset, could be interpreted as superstition or magic or evil or a thousand other things.
Unwittingly, Saree had tread where she shouldn’t have and was now paying the price for, in her mind, a silly superstitious misunderstanding. Five alien hours to work off her crime under the watchful gaze of those same aliens she had wronged.
Five alien hours.
To be honest – the Rochocheh aliens who judged, sentenced and now watched her, understood human physiology better than she had expected. They knew humans could not stay awake for those entire five hours on their home world. Saree had been provided a place to stay and sleep, given plenty of food and water, but oh, how they worked her with menial labor.
Five hours hadn’t seemed a lot in her mind. For five hours anyone could endure almost anything. Saree wiped the sweat that was dripping down into her eyes and flicked the drops away from her. Squinting, she glared at the thick red sun that never seemed to move against the planets rotation. The planetary rotation was 175 earth days to a single rotation on the home world of the Rachocheh.
Saree stared across at the alien overseer. Once she’d served her five hours, she would leave here and would never be back, no matter what evidence she followed for her job. She’d stay in humancentric sectors, even to the point it limited her research and her career.
Saree didn’t care. She’d learned her lesson and learned it well.
by submission | Oct 13, 2015 | Story |
Author : Brad Crawford
{BLINK}
There it went again. This time he noted the time and severity of the event. For the last two days or so, Dr. Samuel Coughlin, world-renowned physicist had experienced a strange phase in/phase out effect. It started with a gradual feeling as though he was insubstantial, ethereal if you will, and the sensation progressed to where he momentarily lost his vision, but then suddenly he was fine again. Afterwards, it was though nothing had happened, and he was still actively participating in what he had been doing before. An odd “blink”, that was the only way he was able to describe it to friends and associates. To try and make sense of the madness, his wife kept watch over him during one such event. She said that he briefly flickered, then his eyes went completely dark, as though blind for a couple of seconds. But she could discern no other ill effects from the blink. The miracle in all of this was that so far he had not experienced the blink during a time when cognitive processes were critical to his survival, such as during his daily commute.
Nine seconds; this last time was the most noticeable, and the longest incident of something not being quite right since the infernal blinking began. It was impossible to predict when it might happen again, or even if it would at all. Sam just knew that everything had an origin, and a trigger. Something that caused its beginning, and something to initiate all subsequent occurrences. All he remembered was that he had been researching time travel in his laboratory the day before it started. It started as a plain, ordinary day and remained so up until his final machine check. He had thoroughly checked and debugged each line of code, routinely investigated the wiring, verified the stability of his fusion generator, realigned the time refractors, and then there was a tremendous boom followed by a power surge. Wait a minute…..{BLINK}
As they pried open the bunker door melted shut during the intergalactic wars, Affar-JalTin mused, “makes you wonder how long the computer has been rebooting this rudimentary time machine. It would have been constructed shortly before the hostilities started, and it’s a shame that whoever built it never got to see if it actually worked.” Underneath a thin layer of dust, the dim readout still showed the last setting was to travel 56 hours in the past. Menka Jehn shook his head, “So glad they sent us to find items like this. There’s no telling what kind of havoc this thing might play in the wrong hands. You know, It’s sad, and little creepy; almost as if you can still see a faint, shadowy image making final adjustments. Come on, let’s deactivate this thing and go home…”
{BLINK}
by submission | Oct 11, 2015 | Story |
Author : C. James Darrow
There was a time when man set his eyes on the stars beyond our own. Yet as the centuries passed man still found himself stuck on the world upon which he began. Through our own advancements we eventually found ourselves setting foot onto the Moon and Mars. But it was our satellites which reached far beyond those boundaries, to which no living man ever would.
A time dawned when man’s chaotic history culminated to a single point which became our tragic end. Not from our own self-destruction, but rather obliteration from the one thing which had given us life—the Sun. The dying star became a spectacle of light as it engulfed our home and the other inner planets we had come to know so well. However it was this fate which we recognized long before its occurrence. In one last attempt to survive the eons, and to preserve a history we so cherished, we erected one last monument to ourselves.
The vault was constructed from solid gold, a magnificent cube the size of a small home. It was sent to, and placed on Europa with a hope that any future travelers may find the last remnants of our forgotten empires. Inside it we placed thousands of books and millions of photos; a collection of documented life throughout the evolution of man and his home.
It was there it sat, for millennia to come, resting atop the frozen moon; shimmering in the light of the colossal red Sun. Though it was that light, however weak, that allowed the world to slowly warm. The melt itself took thousands of years alone and the layers of ice began pooling together, creating vast oceans. Soon the vault’s weight became too much and it broke through the thinning ice, sinking far below the surface, and so vanished every last trace of us.
Though it was something else that soon found its way to the surface. Black eel-like fish, for the first time ever had been granted a view beyond their once encapsulated icy realm. It was when they first reached the surface that they stared into the heavens with uncomprehending eyes. Soon they began to lunge from the icy waters, propelling themselves into the thin atmosphere that had slowly been forming above. The red Sun, though providing only a fraction of the heat it once had, was more than enough for the emerging species. It was here they continued to jump into the air, over and over for countless years to come, striving to reach the stars for themselves.
by submission | Oct 10, 2015 | Story |
Author : John K. Webb
This was not South Carolinian white sand beach. He’d instructed Jacobson—the spherical little Dispensation Drone with its twitching antennae and the prying, bulging crystalline eye—to direct them to a nearby exoplanet with a white sand beach. Corporal Weyer had nicknamed Jacobson “Jacobson” one day prior because he’d found it amusing; apparently, this minor betrayal was the drone’s version of a comeback.
“You are not satisfied with Exoplanet-Arlington-XC57C? My scanners indicate that your blood pressure has risen to one-twenty-seven over eighty-two, which while being within normal parameters—“
“I’m sure you find this funny,” said Corporal Weyer, folding the pre-deployed polycarbonate surfboard under his armpit.
“Exoplanet-Arlington-XC57C is the closest approximation to what you described, sir.”
“The sand is black andesite, you can barely call it sand—“
“Blood pressure has increased to one-thirty-five over eighty-six—“
“—and you think it’s funny, don’t you?”
The drone fluttered in circles around his head, humming a tuneless song in its tinny voice that served as response, and with that they began walking down shore, Weyer’s footsteps disappearing almost instantaneously in the hot, rubbery black “sand.” Then, looking on the horizon, he noticed something.
“I haven’t seen one wave, Jacobson.”
It was true: the planet’s ocean, large enough to swallow all of Earth’s landmass, stretched as an infinite sea of mint colored glass, the light green color owing to sprawling colonies of undisturbed deep-sea algae that’d originally been confused with methane gas emissions, from the orbital imaging.
“The planet’s wave articulation—“
“My only day off and you take me to a planet with no waves?”
“—occurs once every three hours. The next wave is due in fifteen minutes.”
“Care to tell me my blood pressure?” Said Corporal Weyer, stepping into the water. It felt like a river bottom, layered moss-slick stones that if not for his boots would have been quite painful to walk on.
“Blood pressure is—“
“Shut up, I was joking.”
“May I remind you that the re-appropriation of TEDI material for the purposes of constructing a surfboard is a gross misuse of company material?”
“You just did.”
They went about a hundred yards out before Weyer activated his surfboard, the object no larger than a briefcase unfolding into a twelve foot long solid piece of polyurethane. The Corporal lay flat on his belly, the board unmoving atop the featureless expanse of alien ocean. Like antarctic whiteout: a shimmering flat Nothing. Jacobson hovered overhead, providing a measure of shade, scanning with that great, bulging eye.
“No lifeforms detected,” it said helpfully.
Weyer grunted.
Charleston was his home—at least, it had been, before he’d entered the Deep Sleep and drifted several million miles away. For the first time in his career he allowed himself to wonder if the city still even physically existed, or like every other memory simply lived on in collation and correlation: water is water, beach is beach, whatever the chemical components. Cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless.
“You know what paradise is, Jacobson?”
“An existential conceptualization—“
“This is it, this is paradise. Nothing but ocean and beach, oldest thing there is.”
A bump appeared on the horizon, what the orbital images showed as a solid wall of water rising hundreds of feet high, straddling the planet, the result of unstable tectonic activity. The wave was finally coming.
“I take it all back. This is perfect. Jacobson, thank you.”
The drone hummed merrily, “I wouldn’t trick you.”
