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.
by submission | Oct 16, 2012 | Story |
Author : Alex Grover
He breathes in with speckled time undivided, and he breathes out with golden dust. His body is bulbous, a multicolored neon affair, reds and greens and blacks all in lines like that of a heated circuit board, charred from overuse. His beard is human flaw grown down past his chest, and his eyes are weary. His hands are frozen jelly on the levers, yet his arms still move according to the sun. Every second requires a quartz twitch, as his veins are plugged into the machine’s juices, the golden orb’s halves soldered together around Gamberol a long time ago. The face outside reads 34:25 to the 70-hour day.
When a rapping comes from beyond the golden hull, he doesn’t halt his work. His eyes glance to his right, but his hands, fused with the levers, continue to move. As he continues his work, a fiery light—light Gamberol hasn’t seen in eons—races along the half-line of the orb. It runs to the side, sparking fission fireflies as he twitches the clock along. As soon as the alien grasp sinks in on that fault line, the orb collapses in two directions. Gamberol is alone, exposed to a world he hasn’t seen in years.
The two engineers, scaly lizard men that are more hunched shadows than people, quickly run behind a platoon of other lizards, who are their superiors. They’re much taller, covered in sleek white armor, sporting gun-like weapons the size of their massive forearms. The engineers wait. The lizard at the forefront, possibly a captain, moves towards Gamberol, who watches in a blank stare. The captain edges closer, seeing the smoldering fires of the human city in his periphery.
He speaks in a strange tongue, and he knows this. However, he doesn’t know if Gamberol can hear the sounds of his life anymore. Making a clicking sound with his free hand—nails very, incredibly sharp—the captain confirms Gamberol’s deafness. He clicks once in Gamberol’s face, and the old and weary human blinks. He can see. The captain looks to his platoon, then looks back. Gamberol wears a multicolored jumpsuit with an armband, which bears the symbol on the fallen city’s banners. They’d crumbled easily, those who followed the banners.
The captain gestures Gamberol out of the clock and onto the war-torn pavement, to leave the clock, his fingers outstretched as if saying, “You’re free. You’re no longer your race’s slave. We’ve liberated you. Live life in freedom.”
But Gamberol doesn’t move. He looks around, seeing the city he once knew, maybe realizing that he’d lived there once before, maybe forgetting he’d been imprisoned for an arbitrary fault. Something inside halts his motion, if there were any drive within at all, and he remains in his clock.
It lasts for minutes. The platoon stands at command as the captain mediates with Gamberol boldfaced. Inside he sees Gamberol and he knows pity. But he can’t show pity. He can only show efficiency. He’s the captain. So he shrugs and shoots Gamberol. The old human slumps to the ground, the needles pulling from his arms, his body cradled in the one of the half-orb platings. The captain never looks back. His platoon follows him, and the subservient, whipped engineers look to each other, hunched over, backs sore, wondering much about Earth.
by submission | Oct 14, 2012 | Story |
Author : Skyler Heathwaite
The moonlight bled through thick overhead leaves and massive drosera. Lokshin blinked away sweat, peering up into the seething body of the forest. Sarant was up a tree nearby, much too long in coming down.
The fighting of the flying things had stopped three mornings past. Lokshins ears still rang.
He peered out through the trees and pools of light as far as he could see. A clear night, with large gaps in the canopy. Kasprey would come. He’d heard them every night, beating their great wings in the dark. They knew the hunters were below, somewhere.
Off in the distance a skittering, a scream and a snap told him a brush beetle had found prey, more softer scrambles that it was of breeding age.
Suddenly Sarant fell to the forest floor in front of him, a meter from a damning pool of moonlight. He crawled close, a mixture of excitement and concern on his face.
“Did you keep under the top branches?” Lokshin asked.
“Yeah. I saw smoke, other side of the valley, two plumes.”
Lokshin clenched his jaw, relaxed. “Can you get us there?”
Sarant nodded emphatically.
Lokshin gestured “Okay, lead on. But keep out of the moonlight!”
Dawn broke a few hours later, photosythetic fungi shifting with their mother star and exploding into color. The two hunters lay flat on the edge of a small plateu, looking down into a further depression of the valley. In the center were two flying things, their mirrored bulks shining.
Lokshin scanned the skyline. He looked at Sarant, who’s eyes remained fixed on the flying things.
“Any pieces?”
“Some, small enough to carry.”
“let’s go.”
They made their way to the bottom of the plateau without incident. A few fallen trees, broad as a man, made the passage across the occasional raging river easy enough. Overhead flying shapes circled, too quiet to be flying things, too slow to be Kasprey.
By midday they arrived at the grave of the flying things. Smoke no longer curled skyward, but only because the parts that would burn, had. The hulks still threw off tremendous heat. There would be no relics today, only steel.
Steel. Lokshin dared not even to breath so holy a word.
Lokshin scanned the clearing, and the skyline once more. Nothing. He looked to Sarant, who looked back ernestly. Lokshin nodded, and they jogged out into the clearing.
Rolling, flipping, sifting and piling. Piece by piece the scraps they could carry made their way into their deerhide scrap bags. In less than an hour they were finished, Lokshin’s bag full to burst and Sarant’s nearly so.
Sarant laughed. “We’re going to be rich!”
Lokshin allowed himself a small smile “Yes, I think we are.”
“What do you think you’ll buy first?”
“a better bag, probably.”
“Yeah, that does-”
A single beat of damp air against his back, then silence. Lokshin turned slowly, seeing the sixty pounds of of Kasprey digging into Sarant’s back. His head was twisted, neck broken.
Sarant scanned the sky again. Only one. Only one. A male, gathering meat for chicks. A day hunter, no plumage. Lucky.
The Kasprey pulled a beakful of meat free, one claw digging into Sarant’s back. It eyed Lokshin, shifting one side of it’s head forward, a peach pit sized eye as blue as clear water. Lokshin kept still, and after a moment it lost interest, returning to it’s meal.
He looked down at Sarant, pulled his eyes away, and turned into the forest. Three days home, and he’d be a rich man.
by submission | Oct 13, 2012 | Story |
Author : Rachel Verkade
The killer told me he’d had a turtle in his head.
He seemed perfectly calm and reasonable about it. A turtle, living nestled in his brain. I asked him if the turtle was what had made him kill. He didn’t know. If it did, he didn’t hold any ill will towards it. He seemed to feel a good deal of affection for it, in fact, or at least as much affection as a man like him could feel.
I asked what had happened to it. Shrugging, he told me that when they’d caught him, they’d cut into his head. To see what had made him the way he is. He told them not to, he said, but they didn’t listen. He was mentally incompetent, after all, committed to a state hospital for treatment, and that gave them all the power over him that they needed. So the surgeons came, and they strapped him down, drugged him, cut him. They’d found the turtle, and they’d removed it.
I asked if that upset him. Not really, he replied. He’d been sorry when it died, of course, but he’d thought that might happen. How could an animal so used to the warmth and wetness of a man’s brain survive in the cold and the dryness of the air, after all? Anyway, they’d let him keep the body.
It was hanging outside his cell, just close enough for him to touch through the bars. A red-eared slider, male, a good size. The killer brushed it with his fingers, making the limp little head sway. I asked him how it could possibly have fit in his head and left room for his brain. He didn’t know. Not how it had gotten in there, nor how it had survived, nor how it kept getting out.
Getting out?
Oh, yes, he said with a smile. At least once a week it would go out, never for more than a couple of hours at a time. It always came back, so he didn’t mind. And anyway, he confided with a wink, it was because of the turtle’s little sojourns that he now had his secret. He gestured me closer, and I approached despite my better judgement.
Crawling around his feet, paddling through a little bowl of water on the stone floor…a clutch of tiny hatchlings. He didn’t know how big they’d have to get before they could enter his head, but he was willing to wait.
by submission | Oct 11, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
Thomas began remembering in the middle of the first week of May. There wasn’t a particular reason for it, no epiphany, no aching longing. It was just that Thomas had spent so long trying to forget that the only thing left to do was remember.
Before he purchasing the memory machine he had never done anything notable with his life. He worked long, well-paid hours, and he never spent more money than he needed to. Friday nights consisted of lying in bed listening to music. He had no friends, and to be frank he didn’t want any.
He had loved a girl so much once that her absence still ached in his chest. Yet despite the tremendous longing he had for her he couldn’t remember her face. He spent long hours awake in bed trying to visualize her. He never could.
The night that Thomas finally began remembering was a sleepless night much like the many before he had dreamt of dreaming through. His mind desperately wanted to sleep, but his body refused. He spent hours fighting a battle in his head he knew he would lose. After three hours he stood up, walked back into his kitchen, and sat down in front of the helmet. He looked at it for a while. He listened to the sink drip – it had been broken for a while. The kitchen’s electronics hummed. The city buzzed with the motions of life just outside his window. He listened to these things. They were real things, things that he could hear in the darkness of night. He wondered what they would sound like if they weren’t real.
He put the helmet on.
Thomas didn’t show up to work the next day. Instead he went walking through snow up to his hips on surface of a lake, laboriously wading out letters fifteen feet tall. It took the better part of an hour to spell, “Happy Valentine’s Day.” Then he waited for her on top of a hill overlooking the lake, sitting in the snow and thinking. When she arrived he took her by her dinosaur-mittened hand and took her for a walk. He loved holding her hand. They went out for coffee after that, looking like snow-drenched rats in the clean store interior.
Thomas missed work again the next day. He was too busy for work and instead spent the day out on the trails behind her house. He rode a horse for the first time even though he was afraid of horses. She had wanted him to ride her Hoss, though. So he had, despite his fears. He had never seen her smile so much. He didn’t know it, but he fell in love again. He spent the evening warming up in front of a fire, happier than he had ever been.
The authorities showed up on the third day. They found Thomas on the kitchen floor, covered in his own waste and not moving, face vacant behind the helmet visor. They removed the helmet, but could solicit no response from him. There was swearing, an ambulance, a frenzy of activity.
Thomas died just before eleven in the morning from a severe brain aneurism. The last thing he ever remembered was the sight, sound, and smell of eggs, whipped cream, and waffles while she asked what she had done to deserve breakfast in bed.
