by submission | Oct 21, 2012 | Story |
Author : R. Michael Cook
Knuckles knocked against the truck window.
Mary leaned over and cranked the window down. Rain and the diesel engine nearly drowned out her voice. “Phil, buddy?”
“Yeah,” said Phil, leaning down to the window. His breath fogged up the glass as Mary unlocked the vehicle.
Opening the door, Phil squelched into the seat, water forming a puddle at his boots. The truck’s hinges creaked as the door closed. Water still trickled in through the truck’s rusted roof.
“Glad you made it,” said Mary, not meeting his eyes and ignoring the excess water. “The cops thick tonight?”
“Yeah,” said Phil, “but more on the other side of town. I was fine once I got over the tracks. How can you drive this carriage? And how the hell do you get the gas for it?”
“It runs on vegetable oil, dude,” said Mary, “and I run it because it’s a pre-comp model.”
“Pre-common sense model, you mean?” Asked Phil dryly.
Mary exhaled patiently. “It doesn’t have a computer in it. The cops can’t track me and I can grow my own gas.”
Mary began rummaging through a paper bag. She pulled out a small cluster of whole, shriveled leaves.
Phil eyed the tobacco. “Same price?”
“Same,” said Mary, “but if you try something new, I will give it to you for half.”
Phil hesitated. “How much is the new stuff?”
“Three-fifty.”
“What exactly is the new stuff?”
“It makes you see reality, man,” said Mary. “It screws the mind sensors and you can think whatever you want. It frees you.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Phil. “How?”
“You know how it all works,” said Mary. “Everything we see is a construction to keep us safe. That’s the way it is. Everything is monitored. But don’t you ever want to be free? Freedom and safety don’t balance well.”
“They use those sensors to catch killers and psychopaths,” said Phil, annoyed with the conspiracy. “It is to keep us safe.”
“Don’t you want to live dangerously?”
“I’m buying illegal tobacco from you,” said Phil, running his hand over the stubble on his throat. “I am living dangerously.”
“The government allows every import and export,” said Mary, “the illegal and legal. They know you are buying and they know I’m selling. They don’t care about tobacco. They only jail you for show. If you take this, they can’t get at you anymore.”
“Have you taken it?” Asked Phil.
“Yeah,” said Mary, “and I came down from it all right. It’s better than sex, man. Pure freedom.”
“But if they control import, how did you get it?” Asked Phil, his wide eyes darting around nervously. “Won’t they know?”
“Naw, man,” said Mary, “I make it myself. It’s got my DNA too.
Phil stared, eyes wide. “And… you’re sure that it will block the mind sensors?”
“That’s the beauty of it. It doesn’t block them, it just feeds ‘em nonsense and they don’t know what to do. When it gets both our DNA it can’t read either of us. But don’t worry, it’s not enough of mine to be a threat to me, just enough to make you… not readable.”
“Alright,” said Phil, hesitantly, “I’ll take it.” He opened his wallet. “How do I, you know, take it?”
“Put it in your eye,” said Mary. She handed Phil his purchases.
Phil stuck the slip of paper underneath his eyelid and took a deep breath. “OK, thanks. Next month?”
“Deal,” said Mary. “Enjoy yourself.”
“Right,” said Phil. He stepped out into the rain and had his first free thought.
by submission | Oct 20, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bruce Meyer
It could have been the simplest of conquests. One properly-placed shot and the rebel city would be nothing but ocean.
“I’ll sink ‘em all,” Lam said, his red face was projected as an image ahead of Enoch’s cockpit window. “I’ll blast the monsters to the sky. Give the word!”
Two spider-shaped fighters were dispatched to the floating metropolis. Lam’s hovered just off Enoch’s flank, powering low over a remote region of the Thalassinus Ocean. The target’s sleek and slender spires gleamed in the sunlight.
“Denied,” Enoch said. “Hold your fire. Survey the city first. I want to locate all inhabitants.”
“What?” Lam’s red deepened. “What will a survey do? We know right where they are. Those things are diseased! Dark energy has destroyed them. I vote we make them ocean garbage.”
“Prepare the survey,” Enoch said. “They may be diseased, but they’re still human beings.”
Although Lam argued, he eventually complied. After a time, he completed the survey. “Nobody’s down there. The place is deserted.”
“Yes,” Enoch said slowly. Even with Enoch’s years of experience, the readouts were unfamiliar. There were no life forms indicated, but the energy readings were off the scale. “We’ll search the city on foot.”
Lam argued all the while they lowered their vessels to the streets of the city. When Enoch secured the landing and opened the hatch, Lam was already there ahead of him.
“Commander, the towers, do you see them?”
Enoch saw houses and apartments. Then he followed Lam’s gaze to the slender structures rising miles into the air.
“They’re not buildings,” Lam said. “I think they’re particle accelerators, tearing the fabric of spacetime. The buggers are manufacturing dark energy, would ya believe it? Commander, we have to get out of here. We’re at risk-”
“Commander Enoch Frangin,” said a metallic voice from behind.
Enoch whirled around. Behind him stood the most gruesome creature. Its skin was like boiling mud, and its eyes glowed like two red lasers. Despite the terrible disfigurement, Enoch recognized the face of Dr. Carter Frangin, the lead rebel.
“Father?”
The monster reached out with his molten arm and touched his son’s shoulder. Repulsed, Enoch jumped back.
“Father, what have you become?” Enoch realized why their instruments hadn’t picked up anybody. They weren’t human anymore. “What has dark energy done to you?”
“Dark energy?” The monster’s speech resembled machines grinding without any oil. He held out his bubbling hand to his son. “It’s only by dying to your humanity that you can live. Give up your human weakness and be reborn in energy.”
Lam looked around at the multitude of creatures that had joined Dr. Frangin. He grabbed Enoch’s arm and pulled him away. “Commander, to the ships!”
But tears streamed down Enoch’s face. “I will never become like you-”
Dr. Frangin extended his arm to his son once more. “You already are, son, it just doesn’t show yet. You’re already infected.”
Enoch and Lam never made it to their ship. The eyes were the first to change, turning bloodshot and then fluorescent red. Splotches appeared on their faces and arms, spreading like insects burrowing into their bodies. Enoch and Lam joined the rebel ranks of the dark energy beasts.
by submission | Oct 19, 2012 | Story |
Author : Nathan Martin
Jev killed a cop. Technically, he pushed an undercover narcotics agent into an airlock and blew the outer hatch. Technically, it was the loss of pressure and lack of oxygen that killed the cop. Jev just pushed the button. Would’ve gotten away with it too, if the sun-burned corpse hadn’t made half a stable lap around the earth before smacking into Orbital Main station. Some luck.
He reached out and tapped a button on the console. The image on the main screen of Earth, slowly passing below him, blanked out. He was sick of looking at it. Six days since the launch, and still he sat there in his little ship, not quite ready to jet off. “Execution, or space mining,” they told him. It was an easy choice. Still, he missed the drugs.
He closed his eyes and stretched, unable to avoid brushing some portion of the ship’s interior no matter what angle he chose. When he was finished, he tightened his seat mesh to restrain his floating. He looked down at one of the screens; several windows were open, none of which were the tutorials he was to spend the next six months of flight time studying. A pop-up was on the screen, an override from Orbital Control. They were becoming more frequent, now that he was closer to overstaying his welcome. The latest pop-up informed him that he had, “12 hours 37 minutes 32 seconds to vacate Earth orbit or be terminated.” This one was bright red. He closed it and unhooked his seat mesh, floating free.
Grasping the overhead wall rungs, he moved hand over hand to the small cold box at the back of the cabin. He pulled out his last beer bulb, bit the tab off, and put the nipple in his mouth. He wondered if he was the first to drink the whole supply before leaving orbit. It was nice and dim in the cabin with the main screen off.
“Why am I still here?” He thought. “What the hell am I doing? I can’t go back down. There’s no way. I’d be dead as soon as I set the course.” He scratched the new tattoo on his wrist that marked him as a convict-miner. It itched. “I could say, ‘fuck asteroid mining, I’m going to Mars.’” He finished the beer bulb in two more gulps, and realized that he was speaking aloud; he hadn’t noticed the transition from thought. He continued. “They wouldn’t take me there, either.” The ships transponder was hardwired from the outside, marking him for what he now was.
He handed himself back over to the seat before the screen. There was only one thing left to do. He tapped a button and turned the screen back on. Earth burst over him, and he found himself missing it for the first time. Ice cream. Couscous with tomato sauce. Gravity.
“Fuck it,” he said. He tapped into the navigation system and activated the presets. The engine behind him began to roar, and he barely remembered to re-hook the seat mesh before he was tossed back into the cushions. Earth dropped out of view and was replaced by a slur of stars, drawing him away.
by submission | Oct 18, 2012 | Story |
Author : Robert White
“Wait. I don’t get it. I thought transit was supposed to be instant”
“It was. It is.” The scientists are always so snarky. “We did all the tests, sent animals and clocks back to the beyond and everything was instant. So this here cannot be happening.”
“Look, I may be a glorified janitor on this ship, but I know ‘happening’ when it happens.”
“No you don’t. This isn’t technically happening. We are experiencing it, sure, but time isn’t really passing. We are experiencing the passage through space as if time is passing.”
“Okay, Scientist Guy, if you are so smart, how long will this not be happening?”
“About three hundred and seventy light years.”
Scientists never answer simple questions simply. “How long will that take? I still see earth like we haven’t left orbit and it’s been like a month already.”
“Every Planck distance is taking up one Planck time.”
“Translation, forever, am I right?”
“More or less.”
“And the things?”
“These ‘things’ as you call them are hallucinations made manifest. Our perceptions are dictating the configurations of mater, but it’s all transient. When the ship arrives it will all disappear. It has to do with the plasticity of distance and perceptions when delta-t is zero.”
“Yea, okay, sounds like you don’t really know.”
“Well there is no control here for proper experimentation.”
“Okay, you said something about a ‘spatial distortion wave’. What’s that again?”
“The projector compresses space around the ship and then the ship coasts through the distortion.”
“How big is this distortion?”
“I takes up zero distance, It’s a threshold. So essentially the front of the ship is already there while the back of the ship is still where we started.”
“But we’re moving around on the ship.”
“Well… maybe.”
“And the livestock isn’t here, and didn’t have the problem because…?”
“Animals don’t really experience time the same way we do. They don’t understand the idea of ‘now’ being a different thing than ‘before now’ and ‘after now’. They just have ‘now’.”
“Even though my cat remembers me?”
“Yes.”
“So your solution is…?”
“Well we aren’t really aging, so we just wait it out.”
“Forever?”
“Yes.”
“I think I’d go mad.”
“Probably we both will.”
“No deal.”
Stress, they say, is what happens when the body resists its natural desire to beat the hell out of someone who really deserves it. I hate stress. I cold-cock Mr. Scientist and he drops like a rock to the deck.
“You people make everything so damn hard.” I haul his behind straight to forward observation. “Here is what’s really going to happen. I am going to look out that window and see the target buoy. See! There it is. And that means that that window and that part of the ship is already ‘there’.
“So I figure I’m gonna draw a line across the deck, and wait a second for me to really see that everything on that other side of the line is already ‘there’.
“Then I am going to throw your dead weight over the line.
“And now, since you are ‘there’ and I know exactly where the bunched up space is, I am going to take a running jump…
“And here we are.”
The translation engines spin down immediately as space expands behind us.
I look down at Mr. Scientist and his bloody face. “I may just be the glorified janitor on this ship, but you know what? You people think way to hard to ever really get anywhere.”
by submission | Oct 17, 2012 | Story |
Author : David Barber
“Welcome back to the Stirling Surprise Show, with me, Haydon Stirling. Later, we’ll be talking to fash sensation, Jess Marlboro, but first, They Stole My Soul.”
His earpiece murmured and Stirling turned smoothly to camera three.
“Yes, my next guest, John Beck, claims the jirt have stolen his soul.”
“You said you wouldn’t use that…”
Stirling smiled his blandest.
“…it’s our consciousness they’re stealing. Copying, I mean, and…”
“Isn’t that just what natives said when they saw photographs, John?”
Keep the stiffs off balance. And that Marlboro slit was in for a surprise when her nasty habit got a mention.
“It’s not a picture of you, it is you.”
“And you know this how?”
“Well, the jirt said. They go tourist sometimes, right? I was out cycling and I’d done about 10k…”
The Floor Manager began doing the speed up signal.
“…anyway, this jirt asked if it could take a snap of me and the bike. I guess they don’t have them. And afterwards, I asked for a look. It fiddled with its box of tricks, you know, that they talk through?”
Edit this bit, Stirling thought, his face bright with interest.
“And there I was, I mean, I was there, staring at myself. He wanted to know who the hell I was, and I said…”
Stirling gave the studio audience Look Number 2 and the stiff faltered at the laughs.
“Anyway,” he ended lamely. “There’s a copy of me trapped somewhere.”
Sometimes Stirling pumped up the crowd beforehand, or sat the crazies at the front. It had seemed a natural, this jirt conspiracy thing, but the atmosphere was flat.
“Sur-prise!”
And there wasn’t the usual whoop his catchphrase got. The crowd froze. Up close, jirt loomed, and they smelt of damp and rot. Organs fluttered inside its transparent body. Still, there’d not been a jirt on TV since they arrived. Big coup.
“Greetings, Haydon Stirling.”
But before Sterling could read the autocue, the stiff butted in and the director went with it. Stirling saw his own camera light die.
The stiff’s hands were shaking as he pointed. “Do you deny there’s a copy of me somewhere?”
Its box of tricks made the jirt sound like a voice over. Stirling wondered if an actor somewhere was getting royalties.
The jirt explained the technology was minor, trivial. Was trivial the right word? Just a recording of reality, a bit like a camera, but the simulation allowed interaction.
Stirling nodded. Nods were useful for editing.
“But I spoke to myself.” The stiff appealed to Stirling. “How would you feel knowing there was a copy of yourself somewhere?”
“My agent would want double his fee.”
Laughter. A genuine ad lib, like the old days.
“True, our technology copies brain states as part of the simulation, but dopplers are not real.” The jirt sounded genuinely puzzled. “Since they retain no memory, they have no legal standing. Is there some religious taboo?”
“Well, John here thinks you’re stealing our souls.”
“You don’t have a soul, Haydon Sterling.”
“I’ll do the…”
The audience gasped and Stirling saw himself walk on-set.
“Amazingly lifelike,” the copy said, gazing around. “And you’re me?”
“…jokes.”
“I’m interacting with the snap taken during the show.” His other self announced, and turned to the jirt. “So, are you real?”
“I shall remember nothing of this if reactivated. So, I am not real, though it seems like it now.”
“Wait,” protested Stirling feebly.
“Told you,” complained the stiff.
“Though God knows how we edit this into the show.”
“Wait,” said Stirling, as they switched him off.
