by submission | Jan 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : David Stevenson
“Once there was a ship, travelling through space. There was a terrible accident. The reason for this is not important. What is important is that one man got suited up in time and was able to survive the immediate aftermath of the ship’s destruction.
Of course, he now had bigger problems. The priorities of anyone lost at sea haven’t changed since antiquity; find the largest piece of wreckage, and head for the nearest landmass. The AI inside the suit looked around itself in the first few milliseconds of booting up and immediately burned the smallest amount of fuel necessary to grab onto a large piece of wreckage, and then burned another small amount of fuel to nudge its course in the direction of a convenient stellar system. The reasons for this are twofold. If rescue comes quickly then they can more easily find a survivor attached to a large object and heading for a logical destination. Should rescue come not at all, then at least you have a large lump of metals and plastics to play with, and you’re heading for a source of energy.
It should be stressed that this was not some government issue, special order, experimental suit. This was an ordinary, off-the-peg, standard issue suit which could be bought for a modest sum by anyone who wanted one. This fact will be very important later on.
There was no rescue, or, if there was, it was too late to make any difference. After a short while the suit conferred with its occupant and they went into hibernation mode.
Have you any idea how long you might drift in these circumstances before coming across a handy stellar system? It’s all been worked out. Going at those sort of speeds, pointing in a random direction, and in that part of the galaxy you’re looking at tens of millions of years. If you get lucky and end up travelling towards the nearest star, maybe just ten thousand. It took half a million years before this suit came close enough to a star to wake up and start repairing the damage of the centuries.
It took another few thousand years to loop around the star in huge cometary orbits and eventually end up in the asteroid belt, close enough to collect solar radiation, and with a plentiful supply of raw materials.
Solar panels, microwave emitters, ion drives. It’s amazing what you can do with a determined AI, emergency nano-manufactories, and a lot of time. You can build a simple spaceship, which only really needs some basic propulsion and a big heat shield, and then you can land on the nearest planet, while the hardware you left in orbit beams down power and launches manufactured goods at you.
Again, I should stress that this was a standard survival protocol, in a standard suit.
The occupant of the suit awoke to a new world. Every human need was catered for. The bio-vats had come online just before he was woken up, and the next twenty humans were due to be born, fully adult, and with personalities supplied from the vast storage capabilities of the suit’s AI.
Within a few centuries the entire planet was habitable and occupied and these new humans spread outwards once more.
Every other race who tried to conquer us announced their intentions and turned up with a huge fleet of ships. Not only did your people seize half the planets in this sector, they did it by accident. This story is the one we tell our children when they ask why we kill all humans at first sight.”
by submission | Dec 30, 2013 | Story |
Author : Mark Gorton
My new friends are all dead. But that doesn’t stop them giving me presents.
Presents like words and understanding and sight and hearing. Thanks to them I can think in this language and theirs too and hear their voices all around me all the time like invisible butterflies fluttering and flying. And I can sense their love for me. It is very strong, because my presence is a promise of salvation. They believe that many will follow me in ships much bigger than the one that brought me, and when the passengers in the ships arrive and depart, and leave some people behind, over and over across many years, some of the butterfly voices will stay and others will go until, once again, all the voices have bodies and hands.
And with these new hands they will build cities and ways of life without pain and despair on not one but two worlds.
The day before yesterday they played some tricks. For hours I vanished, as if I was broken, and I can imagine how scared everyone at home was – it makes me laugh to think of it – while they carried me to the top of a rise where I could look back through all their dead eyes at a wide lake fed by winding rivers, and on the lake’s shores were many buildings, and between them were narrow streets through which grown-ups and children moved this way and that, dancing, always dancing, to music made by their butterfly voices of all shades and tones. Once there were tens of thousands of places like this one.
Their life was a constant ballet, a celebration of motion and grace, and a choir too, formed by an entire civilisation, countless souls always singing about their love for their world and for each other. So I tried to sing, too, and now it was their turn to laugh – I am not very good. But there was no cruelty in their laughter, and their love for me touched me everywhere like wings rushing and brushing and I was very happy as they carried me back to where I belonged and made me visible again. Straightaway I crept forward to a rock they had guided me to, a special rock with tiny fossils full of surprises.
As I worked I imagined how one day the Earth will be full of dancing and singing, how cities will fall and new ones rise. People will be afraid but I swear there is no need. Things change and change is good. Dancing and singing is so much better than fighting and screaming.
Today I was given another present, the best one of all. A new name. They gathered and swarmed around me and sang and sang and chanted my new name. Ramesh. That is what my new name sounds like and it is their word for Freedom.
I think it is much nicer than Curiosity.
Because we all know what curiosity did.
by submission | Dec 29, 2013 | Story |
Author : Glen Luke Flanagan
The soul shimmered softly as Vanessa tucked it into her briefcase with gentle hands. Blue, silver, blue again, like moonlight on water.
Empty now, the body of a young man lay cold on the hospital bed. Vanessa closed the youth’s eyes tenderly. Though she had only met him today, she felt as if she knew him better than his friends and family – she alone had seen and touched his naked soul.
Hospital staff glared as she left. They called her monster, thief. But in truth, she was a curator – and someday, the world would marvel at her collection.
by submission | Dec 28, 2013 | Story |
Author : Samuel Hymas
They were in love. That much was obvious to even the most unperceptive.
I’ve seen salesmen work a room before. They leave everyone feeling like they made a new friend and need to take a shower. But these two were different. Maybe because they had nothing to sell. But I know it was more than that. Especially now.
I’ve always been able to see. For years I thought everyone could see like I could. It wasn’t until after my second walkabout that I realized I was different. That I could see what others could not. That, even though we were looking at the same things, I was able to perceive so much more. I thought it was partly intuition and partly reading what others are feeling through their facial expressions and body language. And that’s some of it. But mostly it is being able to hear other’s souls with my own. It’s more complicated than that, but you wouldn’t understand.
And even then I could do that. And they knew I could do that before they even said hello.
I’ve met a few other people like me in my life. Usually I didn’t recognize that they were like me for at least a little while. But I’ve gotten better at it. They burned. Both of them.
The man caught my eye from across the room and SAW me. Saw me seeing him and his love. The faintest smile crossed his lips as he looked in my eyes and I knew that he saw more than I ever have. He turned to her and whispered in her ear without breaking eye contact with me. I learned later what he said: “I found one.”
She followed his gaze and found me at the end of it. The people they were with didn’t want them to leave but they deftly extricated themselves and made their way over to me.
The man just gazed into my eyes. But she introduced herself as Annabel and asked me my name. “Grace,” I said, looking back and forth between them.
“She’s not uncomfortable,” Annabel said to Edgar, for that was his name. “You’re losing your touch.”
“It’s not me, it’s her,” he responded without ever looking away from me.
“I know,” she said as she poked him in the ribs.
Then he looked away from me. And at her. It was a combination of pure love and “prepare to be judo chopped.” Which he did. Judo chop.
I’m not sure if that’s the real term for it. But he attacked her. Not like a banzai hack or flailing arms. It was fluid, graceful and quick. I didn’t even understand what was happening. She did. She countered it by twisting away and swinging her arm out like in the vids.
“You’re so predictable,” she said to him in a tone that would make any man I’d ever known up to that point angry.
He put his right fist against his open left hand and bowed to her while smiling. It wasn’t even an “I’ve been beaten but I’m going to get revenge” type of smile. It was genuine amusement and love.
Their quick movements didn’t create a ruckus, but the people close to us noticed and had backed off a little. It’s like it was their plan all along. We were surrounded, but no one was within earshot.
“We’ve been looking for you Grace,” said Annabel.
by submission | Dec 27, 2013 | Story |
Author : Ian Hill
The thin machination stood at the asteroid station’s balcony, leaning over the guardrail to peer off into the depths of space with her multi-faceted eyes. The two red points of light were a mere formality, vestigial figments from her creators intended to set those human elements at ease. At her prime she was a staggering feat of engineering, a true coppery milestone in the history of industry. Now though, she was reduced to a malfunctioning tower of metal plates covered in grimy hexagonal scales and ashen infections of rust that spread like a plague over her ropey pseudo-tendons.
She slowly twitched a finger, a fully articulated finger full of nanotubes that contained coursing rivers of torrential gel. This gel system surged over the whole machine’s frame, transmitting information and signals via a clear liquid base. It was efficient, but only when maintained by a highly trained specialist on a regular basis. The repercussions of letting one of these thinking machines run without being recalibrated and fixed was a frightening prospect. It was as if the gleaming machinations were constantly trying to break away, to crawl out of the unholy mire of human restriction.
The android turned away from the glorious void and walked through a series of heavy vault-like doors, her movements calculated and deliberate. She strode through the cramped facility, brushing past down hanging wires that showered glistening sparks onto the grated metal decking below. The station was pitch black, but she didn’t mind. Light was a concept for the weak, those reliant on a single pivotal sense that could be canceled on a mere whim.
As she moved deeper into the asteroid the noises became clearer. There was ragged breathing intermingled with the occasional plea for help, a nonsensical and fleeting gesture that didn’t even register with the android. She had a duty, no amount of begging could end it. What’s a lost machine to do without its makers?
She paused in front of a door and stood patiently as the pressurized hatch slid into the partially melted wall. The room beyond the threshold was a featureless circular area that gently sloped down to form a sort of inverted conical ground. By this point the pleas were intensifying, reaching through terror as they became more and more animalistic.
The machine stopped in front of the chained down being. She crouched, her metal joints creaking slightly, trying to tear through the built up corrosion. The man could hear a soft buzzing coming from within her head as she inspected the prisoner closely. He wanted to lash out and fight, but he was powerless. The operations had sapped his strength.
“Please, I don’t want to be here.” he moaned, his voice thin and shaky.
Something clicked from within the android’s head.
“Just, just help.” the prisoner continued deliriously. “I need- I need to leave. I don’t want this.”
She ignored the words and continued to stare blankly at the man as he rattled off complaint after complaint, groaning on and on about the wide tear in his stomach that was temporarily sustained by an impromptu surgery. The needle flew in, the needle flew out. The stress levels in his voice reached a pitiful peak then slowly receded back into nothingness as the prisoner lapsed into a pleasant comatose state.
The android clicked once again and stood back up to her full height. She pulled the bloody apron from her waist and draped it over the man’s bare legs in a sort of motherly way. She turned and strode out of the cell, her internal computer working furiously as it compressed the recorded pleas and sent them off in every direction. This was a signal asking for help, a wish for escape and a band of rescuers, probably Keitl, that would surely arrive within the next few days. The machine needed more components to get her family back.
