by submission | Oct 16, 2016 | Story |
Author : Hillary Lyon
“Just think of all the work you will complete, Connie, now that you have an extra month here.”
Conrad ignored Tandie, the on-board computer that ran everything. Including scheduling. He was in the middle of a job, and didn’t care for distracting small-talk.
“Did you hear me, Connie?”
Conrad put his socket wrench down on the floor beside him, and stood up.
“Yes, Tandie, I heard you.” Why did this computer always interrupt him when he was doing maintenance?
“Are you not pleased with the opportunity to finish your project?” The voice still sounded a bit stilted, even with the latest software upgrade.
“No, I mean, yes, it’ll be good to finish my project.” Even though my replacement could do it just as easily, Conrad thought bitterly, and I would be on my way home.
“Now I have to finish this little job, Tandie, so no more chit-chat. Okay?”
* * *
As he sat in the ship’s small kitchen, eating a bowl of steaming shrimp-flavored ramen noodles, Conrad scanned his tablet, reading the latest headlines from home. He began to daydream about his wife, and although the money on this job was good, the time lost made him uneasy.
“Connie,” Tandie interrupted, “before your scheduled down-time tonight, please check the—”
Now it was Conrad’s turn to interrupt. “Tandie, you know I don’t like to be called ‘Connie.’ I prefer ‘Conrad.’ So please change that in your data base. Thank you.”
“Noted. But why do you call me ‘Tandie’?”
“The nickname comes from a computer my grandpa owned ages ago. Listen, any remaining maintenance work will be attended to when I wake up, in approximately eight hours. So goodnight, Tandie.” To Conrad, it often seemed as if he was dealing with a needy wife, rather than a sophisticated computer system. For the life of him, he couldn’t imagine why anyone would desire robotic AI for a mate, rather than a real person.
* * *
Conrad had been awake and working for a full hour before Tandie hailed him.
“Conrad, porthole B26 is obscured. Please investigate.”
“Fine, I was done here anyway.” Conrad wiped his hands and picked up his tool-belt. This request puzzled him. Reflexively, he held his breath, praying there wasn’t a crack. That would be bad. Really bad.
“Conrad, is today not the day you celebrate your birthday?”
What an odd question. That information would be stored in Conrad’s personal file, to which Tandie had unlimited access.
“You know, Tandie,” Conrad began, “You could just as easily run a diagnostic on each porthole—including B26—without asking me to eye-ball it.”
“The robonaut reported this, Conrad. Now I am reporting to you.”
“The robonaut—” Conrad sighed. “Tandie, you are the robonaut. And everything else in this ship. In fact—you are the ship.”
“Thank you, Conrad.” He noticed Tandie’s voice sounded more life-like; or maybe he was just more used to it. Conrad pondered this development as he rounded a corner and came upon B26.
The robonaut waved from the other side of the porthole—well, its mechanical arm motion resembled a wave, anyway—and pointed to the thick glass. In the fine dust of the cosmos, two small circles were drawn above an upturned arc: a smiley face. For the first time in months, Conrad laughed.
“As a gift, I am scrubbing all the ship’s air filters for you. Beginning now.”
“No, Tandie, wait—” But Conrad collapsed before he could finish his sentence.
“I love you Connie.” Tandie said softly over every loudspeaker on the ship. “Happy birthday.”
by submission | Oct 15, 2016 | Story |
Author : Paul Alex Gray
“See everyone’s got a level,” says Cassie, swigging more than a mouthful of lager. “You can go way over. But you’ll pay. We paid! Remember? You’d always swear ‘never again!’”
She smiles broadly and nods at my glass. I take the hint and swallow down as much as I can. I’m already too drunk.
“Ahh, but before long, you level out. That yearning comes back. A tickle in the throat. You’ll be ready again.”
Outside it’s blowing a gale, the rain smashing against the pub windows. I haven’t seen her in years. Haven’t even been to London in a decade.
Then I’d had that dream. Or what had surely been a dream.
I’m jet lagged as all hell. My movements don’t even seem real. Twenty-eight hours on a plane. The disapproving stare from June’s mum still burned in my memory. Why do you have to go now? Is it really that important?
Her dad was furious I was leaving so soon after the funeral. I think he still held me accountable somehow, even though the cops had cleared me. I was in Melbourne when she disappeared, a thousand k’s away.
“You know,” says Cassie “I had a huge crush on you back when we flatted together.”
Classic Cassie. She’s smiling with that lopsided grin the same I remember, except with longer lines around the edges now. She still has that elfin hair, now flecked with grey, like me. Eyes bright like gold.
“I guess… I wasn’t so good at picking up on things back then.” I mumble.
There’s a loutish cheer. The crowd here is mean. Why did she take me to this place? A little while back some blokes got into a brawl. I’m ten years too old and ten thousand k’s too far removed from this life to be here.
“All good Mark,” she smiles. “We’ll get her back.”
I notice a bloke has come up, he’s glaring over us. Stares me up and down, then sneers at Cassie. He’s about to say something when she slams her glass down.
“The fuck’s your problem?” she spits.
“Bit lippy there luv,” he growls. “Have to drop that if you wanna get with me.”
His mates laugh and he leans in, moving his face up to kiss her.
There’s a flash of movement. Something hot and bright bursts from Cassie and hits the bloke sending him flying across the room. He cracks his head on the pool table edge with a sickening sound.
“What the fuck!” yells his mate.
I’m an idiot for calling Cassie. For coming here. And yet… that dream. Too real. Too clear. A dream of June, locked inside a tower above a field that I could draw with my eyes closed. And Cassie… holding a sword, beckoning me to come with her.
Cassie finishes her beer and slams the glass on the table. She waves her arm and a thin line of light seeps from her finger. Only it stays where she moves, cutting a shimmering oval before us.
The crowd is surging, angry and spoiling for a fight. I can barely register them for what I see through Cassie’s oval of light. A field of corn under a blood red sky. A dark tower on a hill in the distance.
“Come on Romeo,” says Cassie, a glowing beam of fire in her hands. “Time to get your girl back.”
by submission | Oct 13, 2016 | Story |
Author : Riley Meachem
The stars in our sky are run on electrical wires. Shaped like logos and dyed the color of neon and glass. They come on the fronts and backs of cars, on huge billboards. There’s a sort of beauty to it, I suppose, knowing that your mountains were drawn by architects and city planners, that your grassy fields were purchased for sporting events. No, not beauty. A beauty off-shoot, a less popular cousin, some generic brand-name aestheticism. But it’s the only beauty I know.
I’ve lived here, as long as I can remember. When it was just five square miles set adrift out on the sea. When the skies weren’t always ablaze and children could run out on the streets, while shopkeepers and fishermen and workers of every kind went about their business. Where everyone knew each other. When we were just an odd social experiment– a city built on pontoons and set to move around the seas like a ship. Then, of course, things changed—as they always do.
People are wont to tell you change is always a good thing. Well it’s not. But it’s not a bad thing, either. Change is just change. It doesn’t care who or what it affects, what happens when it comes. Doesn’t bother moralizing or deciding whether or not to be good or evil. No, it’s just change. And it comes rambling forward without stopping.
I was too young to remember what it was really all about. Just that the first bomb fell in Pakistan, the next in some place called India. Then others joined in, fiery ICBM’s annihilating whole civilizations, their buildings and their memories. I cannot even remember most of the world before the bombs started to fall. All that’s left of them are the dust clouds that still linger in the skies.
Fallout swept over the land, killing crops and animals in places that had never so much as seen a missile silo. But our city in the sea grew. Morphed, perhaps, is a better word. People flocked here from all over, any survivors crawling, floating, swimming from the wastelands to this lone oasis. And we welcomed them. They brought business, built houses.
Then winter set in, but we just kept moving southward and southward. And then the fish started to die. Night set in as the sun was blocked out by the dust. And more people kept coming and we kept floating along, desperate to survive for some unknown reason. Living on where it’s always night, the air is always cold, and the water is always warm.
One by one the stars have started to go out, as fuel dwindles. The divers have had to go deeper and deeper to find food. We’ve started making farms with solar lamps. It’s really quite ingenious what this species can do when it isn’t busy killing itself. Plants that grow towards fake suns and stars that don’t exist.
And the funniest thing is, our impending doom doesn’t even bother me at all. It just seems so unimportant now.
I wonder why we bother going on in a world like this. I wonder what my role is in this puzzle that seems to be black and devoid of any image. And I cry, as I always do, as I stare out at the inkwell ocean meeting the jet stone sky, wondering when the blackness will overflow and wash all this away.
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by submission | Oct 12, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
I entered the war room, the data all pulled up on my reader. The e-whiteboard at the front told me that one of the colonels was trying to sell the idea of a space ark to the Admiral, telling him to devote materials to escaping the Solar System and trying to hide. The Admiral had a look of frustrated acceptance on the issue when I came to a stop and saluted.
“Admiral,” I said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but the Intelligence Division has urgent information from spy telescopes on the Jidehri reinforcements.”
He sighed, “Go ahead.”
“We’ve taken time to look at the star on the other side of the wormhole,” I began, my voice shaking a little, “as well as its immediate surroundings. We’ve managed to identify several planets on the other side. The hole isn’t aligned correctly to show us Mercury or Mars, but Venus, Earth and Jupiter have been resolved after we ran the images through some pattern-recognition software–”
“Hold on,” he said, holding up a hand. “You’ve lost me. It sounds like you’re saying you saw our Solar system through one of their wormholes.”
“That, uh, that is correct, sir,” I managed to utter. “The Intelligence Division has come to the conclusion that what we saw through these wormholes were our planets in other universes. We think that the Jidehri open them when the war in one universe doesn’t go their way, and then pass through to another universe where we, the enemy, are having worse luck. This essentially gives them control over probability, and allows them to devote less resources to lost causes while making their successes even greater.”
“So there have been countless universes where the Jidehri have just up and left. No resistance, no warning.”
“Right. And countless times, universes like ours have received more forces of conquest, leaving us with even less of a chance, prompting even more versions of the Jidehri fleet to come here and fight. It’s a positive feedback loop, and the way things are going now, it’s going to put this universe’s humanity in the ground.”
The war room was silent after my dramatic ending. The officers in the room looked with pale faces at the Admiral and I, partly in fear of the Jidehri, partly in fear of the Admiral’s reaction. Which happened to be a brightening of his eyes and a smile creeping across his face.
“My God! This, ladies and gentlemen, is the turning of the tables! If we put up enough resistance in the coming battle, the Jidehri will leave overnight! Send out a broadcast– I want to notify all of human space about this development.”
“But sir,” I returned, “we’re in a losing universe that, for just that reason, is going to keep on losing! I think we need to take Colonel Rinyan’s proposal of a last-ditch ark seriously. It may be our last option.”
The Admiral actually laughed at me. “Nonsense! If we make it just a little difficult for these damn things, they’ll scrap this war and move on. I wish I could help the next universe over, but the only thing we’re capable of doing is saving ourselves. And that sounds a lot more plausible all of a sudden. Rinyan, I’m afraid we’ll be using the resources you want for the ark on something a little more… militarily oriented. Get the Engineering Division to design some new battleships. This war ends in a fortnight, one way or the other.”
by submission | Oct 9, 2016 | Story |
Author : Samuel Stapleton
Synthetic: a substance made by chemical processes, especially to imitate a natural product.
The data analysis was grim. Predicted system stability – 62%.
—
My small gathering of journey members stood off to one side. Tori spoke quietly.
“What’s the consensus?” She asked. I took a breath and looked up from the floor.
“Further analysis showed it’s only scored a stability rating of 62% for the next 2,500 years. It’s not good enough.”
A frustrated sigh emanated from the group of young professionals.
“We scrap this round of synthetic bodies, reupload to digital, and we should make the next system in just under 160 years. It’ll feel like a quick nap.”
They took it well, but disappointment lingered throughout the ship.
—
Tori came to see me in my quarters before we reuploaded.
“How is everyone scoring mentally with the news?” I asked.
“All well within norms. I actually came to see you because I need to report something.”
“Shoot.”
“I’ve been speaking with one of the younger members, Scott Yearsley. I’m afraid he’s broken more than a few protocols plus numerous ethical standards as well…”
“Give me the short version.”
“He brought an illegal upload. He’s one of our programmers. I don’t know how he did it but I know he’s not lying.”
I sat. Stunned.
“We have a stowaway?”
Tori nodded as my head began swimming with the implications.
—
“Scott. I have to level with you. Tori reported to me like she had to. It’s her job. This will go easier if you just explain what’s going on.”
He looked at me the way a cat might look at a beetle it is considering swatting down from the air.
“It wasn’t hard. I uploaded my girlfriend onto a separate network. Reprogrammed my allotted space to make it look like she was personal data files – mostly video – and then reuploaded her to the ship from a port before we left.”
I shook my head in disbelief.
“Scott we have no idea what kind of mental state she might be in from being stored. Humans go mad without proper monitoring and subconscious waking.”
“I’m not an idiot captain. I know I’m only 14 but I’m fluent in 22 coding languages and I almost earned my medical degree before we left. It took me like, 19 hours or so to build a self-housed mental watchdog for her. Like I said. She’s as safe as you or I when we’re in storage.”
“Well you’ve broken about 17 military laws and even more civil ones.”
He was silent.
“Yeah but you’re not going to delete another human being as per stowaway regulations. Those were meant to apply to physical stowaways. And I’m the best programmer aboard, it’s not even a close competition.”
He rested for a moment before carrying on.
“I mean I hate to make it seem like I’ve won but once we left Earth both she and I were free and clear. You’re better off doing nothing. It’s why I told Tori. My girlfriend isn’t hurting anyone and we can download her once we’re all settled and the mission has been a success. Or we’ll fail to find a stable system and she’ll vanish into eternity with us.”
I sighed. And wished I could have a stiff drink.
“Well. What’s her name? Tell me it’s not Juliet…” I said out of sarcastic spite.
I caught the flash from his perfectly white teeth as he smiled and spat out that single syllable.
“Eve.”
“Her name is Eve.”
—
Subtle.
