by submission | Jul 30, 2016 | Story |
Author : Edward D. Thompson (edacious)
It’s just like hunting, Marcus thought, as he scanned the past at double speed. Know where the good spots are, know how to watch and wait, and mostly, it was just dumb luck. He let himself go, drifting up the current of the past, waiting, watching.
Silva’s hungry whimpering only distracted him for a moment. Poor Sil, it was hardest on the youngest. “I know, Sil, I know,” he whispered to himself. “I haven’t found a good catch for a few days. One’s coming soon, I promise. I won’t let any of you starve.”
He avoided the more crowded focus spots, the landfills, the strip malls, the fairgrounds. Those would be picked over, and the temporal dampers wouldn’t let you harvest too much from one place. Too much chance of changing the present, they said. He didn’t see what would be so bad about that.
If anyone glanced out the begrimed windows, they’d see the present in all its over-harvested, dustbowl, sun-bleached-skeletons-of-the-starved glory. It could use a little changing. But he was in no position to argue; he was lucky to have the transporter at all. You did what you could to survive.
A small town, not too small. A few modest but busy eateries. He slowed around a promising site. And there! He scrolled back to watch the moment again, then forward to make sure no one else grabbed the stuff. Nope, it wouldn’t be missed. Just a little less waste in their already overfull landfills.
He scrolled by again, half speed. There was the moment when they decided to toss them. Then the moment when an employee dumped the trash. Marcus locked in on the boxes, but didn’t retrieve them. Not just yet. He skimmed forward slightly. There was the moment the restaurant closed. He tried not to think about the hefty people making their way out of the building. So much. They had so much and they just threw most of it out! Now, no one was around. He initiated the transfer, pacing impatiently as the unit teleported the target from the past to the pad. In the past, the boxes winked out of existence instantaneously; on his end it would take a while for them to rematerialize. He watched Silva and the other children, lost in the fitful, restless sleep of the hungry, and smiled sadly when the first whiff of hot meat and bread wafted through the room and he heard stomachs growl even before they woke.
And there they were. Six flat boxes, steaming slightly in the cold air. He waved the kids into the dining area. They knew better than to rush him, no matter how hungry they were. Slowly he slipped the top box out of the unit and looked over the contents. One medium supreme pizza with some moldy lettuce stuck to one side. Could be worse. He smiled, they’d feast tonight! And tomorrow, he’d resume the hunt.
by submission | Jul 28, 2016 | Story |
Author : Rick Tobin
“Get down!” Carol yanked private Pennington to the ground below low walls of disintegrating bricks. Enemy snipers pinned them.
“Sorry Captain. Just wanted a look.”
Pennington stared at his commander. The ship’s cook was learning the game. An alien shootout in a California town was new.
Carol did a team perimeter search. Six still huddled below withering attacks.
“Just stay low. I’ll call air support…” She halted. Pennington disappeared below her. He faded, peacefully, without distress. The game screen froze. Her remaining team stopped playing. There was no cry of sorrow. It was the price of losing a member in cryosleep.
The Company psychiatrists invented cryosleep mind sharing to prevent deep-space ‘cold insanity’ that was devastating a third in long suspensions; however, they misreported the powerful side effects as crews realized chamber failures during sharing.
Carol shook it off, excising her demons, but her remaining team disintegrated, one by one. Horrified, she hurried back to the commander’s control center for hibernation. Her fingers pushed through the panel. She dissipated into dull shadows.
“What…where am I?” She was confused while acclimating to new views. She was slipping gently away from the shredded star ship Clemens, wrenching in meteorite hail. The titanium hull sparked as it turned and twisted. A kilometer away, Carol watched flashes of oxygen reach the fusion drives hydrogen recyclers. Explosive light and pressure waves raced through her with no effect. There remained six rotating orbs nearby, within a larger glow, all drifting like her toward the double star in an unfamiliar system. The spheres rotated and trembled, sometimes approaching each other; other times drifting apart, displaying bright colors, and then regrouping. Carol felt their pull but could not discern how to reach them. She had no sense of her own body or any means to move. She thought about Pennington and his final, peaceful stare. Suddenly, she was next to one of the shimmering bubbles.
“Didn’t have any beliefs beyond life, did you, Carol?” She heard Pennington’s question clearly. It was disturbing. “No, don’t be afraid. We are still us, or at least a core of us, whatever that is. Is this my soul? Maybe we are ghosts, but we exist, even if our bodies didn’t make it home.”
“So this is it? We just drift out here, in a vacuum, forever, with no purpose? I’d rather have pure darkness. Where is all this extra light originating?” Carol felt anger replacing her fear. “This is the hell idiots believe in. This is the ultimate punishment. We’ll never see Earth again.”
“No, Carol.” A deep voice, resonant, sweet and overpowering entered her. “We are here. Our joy is your return to the colony of souls, as we exist to assist all life traveling throughout this solar system. We collect the disembodied spirits of consciousness and then reunite them with the all knowing and all loving.”
“Pennington, did you hear that?” Carol saw the other globes about her glide behind her toward a fuzzy, lustrous patch of light. It was a comet hurtling past them to the twin stars.
“I hear it, Carol, and see the beautiful gathering on its surface?”
“Every system works the same,” continued the gentle voice. “Every star is connected in the web of creation. Listen to others sing of their returning.” Carol heard soothing choruses of a million life forms she now gathered with for her soul’s continuing evolution.
“You will enter the star incubator, returning to your system of origin through the multiverse threadways. We, the shining ones, are collectors— guides. We retrieve consciousness back to source creators of every system. Welcome home.”
by submission | Jul 27, 2016 | Story |
Author : Arthur Carey
Sacagawea stepped off the damaged recharging grid. Battery life registered in the “failure imminent” range. Within hours, the robot would become an immobile piece of junk in a deserted space station pummeled by raging solar winds and debris.
The scientific team studying the impending death of Copernic 362, a dwarf star of 7.7 magnitude, had left hastily in an escape pod. It was their second forced evacuation after a violent flare-up on the dying star’s surface.
Sacagawea discovered Commander Mary Callis was no longer on the communications link. Nor were her four male subordinates, Slim, Roofie, Jones, and Rako.
Initially wary of serving under a woman, the men had come to like and trust Callis. She joined in the raucous camaraderie of poker games, winning without boasting and losing without complaint. On birthdays, she “discovered” hidden flasks of joy juice and whipped up cakes from limited meal resources.
When her own birthday came, the men surprised their commander with a pseudo female companion—the ship’s made-over general utility robot. They attached black plastic eyelashes above the robot’s view slits and painted the toes of its magnetic boots red, giving it a crude female appearance if not personality.
The robot was an AI model enhanced to perform tedious data analysis. Before the transformation, the crew had referred to it simply as “the bot.” But Callis renamed it Sacagawea after a famous Indian guide in the time long ago. She downloaded data files of women’s history, lifestyles, and preferences into the robot’s memory banks and addressed it as if it were a real person.
The robot reviewed its final instructions from Callis: “Saci, we’re leaving, at least for now. We’ll try to record some of what happens from a safe distance. Try to patch any oxygen leaks. Oh…and sprinkle the garden with whatever liquid nutrient is left in the distiller. If the explosion is another false alarm, we’ll be back within days.”
But the explosion hadn’t been a false alarm, only the prelude to a series of internal blasts that tore Copernic 362 apart.
The station’s lights flickered and died, leaving the interior lit only by sparks from fried electronics equipment and lights flashing beyond the viewports.
Sacagawea switched on a headlamp and waded through strewn laboratory records, broken furniture, and discarded clothing to the attached bubble that housed the bio-regenerative hydroponic system.
Four plastic troughs bristled with greenery. The plastic drip system lay in tatters, LEDs shattered. The robot drained the last of the nutrient from a recycling tank and sprinkled it over the three troughs containing carrots, potatoes, and red lettuce.
Sacagawea pulled two scraggly plants from the fourth trough. Wilted blossoms drooped from sharp-spiked branches. The robot scanned the objects. Classification: Genus, Rosa; Family, Rosaceae; Pigmentation: Crimson; Essence: Tea; Viability: Moribund.
The robot dropped the plants and prepared to grind them underfoot. Unlike vegetables that sustained human life, flowers weren’t eaten. Therefore, they had no function. Without function, there was no justification for their consumption of oxygen, water, and light.
As Sacagawea raised a metal boot, a microcontroller running at 80 MHz and performing 100 million operations per second activated. A visual and aromatic simulation of red, white, and yellow blossoms bobbing gently in the breeze beneath an azure sky flooded the memory nodes of the robot. Sacagawea paused to consider an unfamiliar concept.
What was regret?
by submission | Jul 24, 2016 | Story |
Author : Hasen Hull
“Rise and shine, sleepyhead.”
He groans, as if forced to life.
“It’s eleven and we’ve got things to do. Come on. Get up.”
“Ten more minutes, baby, alright?”
I smile. “Five, and that’s my final offer.”
There were protests at first. Human rights activists calling for bans, sanctions, restrictions. Jason once told me about a group of people called ‘tree huggers.’ People who claimed they cared for the environment so much they clung to trees to stop them being cut down. Jason and I agreed that these activists went the way of the tree huggers.
“You ever get sick of this place?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You know. Tired. Trapped.”
“No. Not really. I like it here.”
“So you’d never think about leaving?”
I consider this. “Maybe. But where would we go?”
“Anywhere.” He stretches his arms out wide. “The sky’s the limit.”
Beyond that, there was little opposition. With safeguards in place, governments were unconcerned. The market was ready for it, and when the first celebrities came out in support, so was the public. It was a natural progression, and the counterargument quickly fell out of fashion.
“And Brad’s coming over?”
“Brad and Naomi, yes.”
“Ooo-la-la.”
I shoot him a look, before breaking into a laugh.
New Horizons was founded in 2048 by a wealthy businesswoman named Samantha Doeer, and it marked the future of humanoid technology. Operating under the slogan The Sky’s the Limit, then Serving Humanity, it reinvested the enormous capital gained from first-generation humanoids – already of adequate complexity to carry out a multitude of interpersonal tasks with lifelike accuracy – in order to establish the foundation of its future operations. Within a decade, ten base models became one hundred and twenty, followed by custom-made options to almost any specification.
“Absolutely not. Impossible.”
“Oh, you keep telling yourself that.”
“I will, because it’s true,” he says, grinning teasingly, goofily, both.
“One of the first things you said to me was you couldn’t even do stick figures. Now you’re telling me you’re the better artist?”
“What can I say? I learned from the best, surpassed my master, all that.” He points to the twin WaterScape frames propped against a wall, not yet installed. “Look. Just look.”
“Yours is good.” A deliberate pause. “But mine’s better.”
There are still activists, and now they protest not ‘the devaluation of human relations,’ but for the right for humanoids to be recognised and treated the same as humans. Great strides have been made towards this, facilitated by how difficult it has become to tell human and humanoid apart, but activists are pushing for legislation that allows humanoids to erase the knowledge that they are created, not born. As part of regulated trial tests, some humanoids already have this characteristic.
“Alright, alright, we’ll go out-”
“Like you said we would.”
“-like I said we would, and then we’ll come back, and then Brad and Naomi. Okay?”
“Ooo-la-la,” I say.
I see it on holoscreen, and feel it on the streets. A sense of community and meaning. A sense of belonging. Sometimes Jason reads out passages he likes on his reader, from stories written over a hundred years ago. Between people, there is always a struggle, cold and bitter, an endless stream of loneliness and wasted life. Not like this. Deep down, I know that this is it: this is what I’ve always wanted.
“But can you tell?”
I tilt my head. “Tell what?”
He smiles. “How beautiful you are.”
by submission | Jul 23, 2016 | Story |
Author : Travis Gregg
The two men sat in silence across from each other in their usual booth at the diner. Thomas was brooding, clearly upset about something and Stan had known him long enough to just let him stew. The two men had been friends since college and still tried to get together semi regularly despite jobs and wives and kids. Although nearly the same age, Thomas looked noticeably older. His hair was mostly gray and his shoulders sagged significantly.
“I always had a fantasy,” Thomas started, breaking the silence, “or at least a day dream I would indulge in, where I had a couple more copies of myself. Imagine the productivity, the things at work I could get done. I used to really enjoy owning a small business, but more times than I can count I have wished for a couple copies of myself. No more calling in sick for bullshit reasons, no more saying the wrong thing at the wrong time in front of the customer. With at least a couple more copies of myself things would really get done.”
Stan knew where Thomas was going with this. He’d heard bits and pieces from mutual friends but hadn’t gotten the full story.
Thomas continued, more talking to himself than anything. “When I saw the advertisement, the one that everyone saw, the one where you could get yourself or a loved one cloned, I knew it was for me. The company that was making the clones had never had a request for a 32 year old clone. Most of the time people wanted kids who couldn’t have them. Maybe an accident happened and they’d want someone a little older. The company had also never had an order for eight. I had to negotiate for weeks but a couple months later they showed up. I was only going to get two at first but why not go big. Got a quantity discount too.”
“The day the clones showed up I fired my entire staff. Every role, the warehouse guys, the accountant, the two sales guys. Everyone. Didn’t need them, I already knew how to do their jobs, and if I knew then my clones would too. For the first couple hours it was kind of awkward but we all got over it pretty quick. They were me after all, and then we got to work.”
“That seems pretty extreme. Some of those guys worked for you from the beginning,” Stan replied.
“The first month was the best we ever had,” Thomas continued, as if he hadn’t heard Stan. “Sales were up, complaints were down, and I didn’t have to worry about someone screwing up. A couple mistakes were made but I literally couldn’t have done any better personally so I couldn’t get too upset.”
“After that first month though, things slowed down a bit. A little less enthusiasm in the office, especially form the warehouse guys, was the start of it. We all agreed to shuffle the roles a bit. Obviously some positions were better than others and we were all capable. Spread it around a little bit.”
“A couple months after that, clones Four and Five started embezzling and clone Two stopped coming in entirely. Could I fire myself? That’s a pretty complicated question it turns out.”
“Six months after my brilliant idea we had a literal coup and for a time I was ousted. I got Six and Seven on my side, convinced Two to come back, and Three after some tense negotiations to form a majority but it’s tenuous at best. The next step is going to be litigation for sure and I’ll be suing myself for the next couple years if I’m lucky.”
“It turns out I make a terrible employee, in fact I’m the worst employee I’ve ever had.”
