by submission | Jun 18, 2014 | Story |
Author : Ethan Noone
She looked at him in horror.
He wondered what was coursing through her mind as she stared at him. Her repulsion, evident. Her disgust un-disguised.
“Why did you show me this?!” she screamed.
“Because I love you. You needed to know. Me. For good or bad.”
She tried to avoid looking him in the eyes as she began to talk. “According to the public records, it has been three generations … eradicated … How?”
He responded quietly to protect himself and avoid an unnecessary escalation. The risk to him was dire. He knew that. “My father protected me. After he murdered my mother for what in his mind had to be infidelity, he ran. I don’t know why, but he took me with him.”
She was shaking. “But how did he do that?”
“He kept me hidden. Bottle fed me. Kept me off the grid completely. No school. No doctors. Travel after dark. Always keeping your head down. Perhaps there was guilt that maybe he was to blame.”
She looked at him, making eye contact this time. “But the lenses – where did they come from?”
“From the underground market. My kind are not gone completely, despite the official records. Bolivia, New Zealand mostly. Two recessive genes can hide for generations. When they do, solutions are necessary.”
“But now I know. We can’t go on” she said.
“I feared that. But I need you to know that I love you. I couldn’t live a lie if I was going to expect you to live your life with me. Not in good conscience.”
He paused, hoping she may back down from her firm position.
She was still shaking, and now she avoided eye contact when she spoke further.
“Only because I love you, the person I thought I knew. I will not call the authorities. But please don’t risk this curse on anyone else.”
“I never planned on having children” he said, knowing the discourse had taken its final turn. “I know it wouldn’t be fair, in case this continued.”
She was still looking at him, but still without eye contact. “Please… put the lenses back.”
He did as she asked.
She looked at him again. Solemnly, she said “You have to go now. I will never be able to see you the same again. Not after you have shown me this.”
He stood, knowing she had reacted as generously as anyone could. He walked to the door and looked back to say good bye for the final time.
Her eyes were tearing as she whispered “you were so wonderful….how could your eyes have been blue?”
by submission | Jun 17, 2014 | Story |
Author : George R. Shirer
Noir York. V9.7.
The rain fell, neon droplets painting the city’s stark black and white streets in a kaleidoscope of liquid color. Sitting in Smiley’s, propping up the counter, Dashwood stared through the window at the technicolor weather.
“Shit. Would you look at that? What the hell’s the world coming to?”
“Geez, Dash. Don’t drez on us or nothing.”
Dashwood glanced at the NPC standing behind the counter, rubbing a grubby rag over the grubby surface.
“But its color,” said Dashwood. “Color! In Noir York, Smiley!”
“Probably just a glitch,” said Smiley. He shrugged. “Don’t get your jockeys in a bunch. You want some more coffee?”
Dashwood scowled and pushed his cup away. “Tastes like chalk.”
“I’m gettin’ better at makin’ the crap, then,” noted Smiley.
“Aren’t you even a little bothered?”
“Nope. I been around since the first version, Dash. I seen it all.” Smiley threw the rag across his shoulder, jerked a meaty thumb in the general direction of the weather. “This? This ain’t nothin’. I survived the Big Hack of 6.3! Now, let me tell you, pal, that was somethin’!”
“It’s not a glitch.”
Smiley quit talking, mid-remembrance, and Dashwood turned to stare at the woman seated at the end of the counter. She was a looker. Tall, slender, with silver-white hair and onyx eyes. Her lips glistened.
“What do you know, doll?” asked Dashwood. He reached up and automatically straightened his tie.
“Marilyn,” said the woman. “Not doll, gumshoe.”
“All right. So what do you think you know, Marilyn?”
“I know that’s not a glitch.” She turned to stare at the colorful streets. “It’s a paradigm shift.”
“What?” Smiley wasn’t smiling. “Ya mean they’re gonna put us in color?”
“You stand here all night and don’t hear the news?” asked Marilyn.
Dashwood moved over a seat. His eyes flitted to Marilyn’s endless legs. “What news?”
“They’re shutting us down.”
“What?” shouted Smiley.
“They can’t!” said Dashwood, furiously. “They wouldn’t dare!”
“They can and they will,” said Marilyn. “You ever check the stats? Less than a thousand users a night log into Noir York. We’re below the minimum threshold.”
“But they can’t shut us down!” said Dashwood. “We’re AIs! That’d be murder!”
“Yeah!” said Smiley, hotly. “We got rights!”
Marilyn nodded. “You’re right. They won’t shut us down. They’re just taking us off the grid, dumping Noir York into a self-sustaining junk server. The same one that houses San Futuro and the Magik Kingdoms and a dozen other obsolete game-worlds.”
Dashwood and Smiley stared at her, reeling from her words. Marilyn fished in her clutch for a cigarette and a lighter. She fired up the cancer stick and began to nurse it.
“We’re scrapped, boys,” said the dame. “But look on the bright side. No more users. No more stupid, pointless deaths or dumbo quests. Hell, we’re already getting some color in this dump. Maybe, soon, we’ll even get to see a real sunrise.”
The diner fell silent. The three of them sat at the counter, considering the unknown future, while outside, the neon rain continued.
by submission | Jun 15, 2014 | Story |
Author : W. Jason Petruzzi
I sit at base camp, on a rock ledge above a dry lake bed on the planet Mars, looking out at the red sky and the inhospitable landscape. We searched for water, digging thousands of feet under ground in hopes of finding it, just as the eggheads told us to do. But there was nothing. And other than the plants we brought along in our greenhouse, we found no signs of life anywhere. There are no fossils in the rocks, no protoplasm or plankton, or even a single microscopic bacterium. The planet’s underground caverns are as barren as its surface. Mars is just as it always appeared on those transmission images or satellite snapshots, or those long ago, long distance telescopic photographs. There is nothing here; there was never anything here.
But there is us. We are here. The two of us in the Ares, and the two of them in the Arcadia. And we will stay here. We will make something of this settlement, this first human settlement on Mars, the first on another world. We will live here, on plants and bottled water, for as long as we can. One of them is female, but it would be reckless to try to have children when there is nothing outside the ship, and barely enough room inside for us, but we still dream about it, because maybe they will live long enough to see the arrival of more humans, and, hopefully, rescue. We will not.
Yes, we knew that going in. That was always the price. To be the first to reach the new planet, to become the ultimate adventurer, to receive the glory of the first explorer, to go down in history as the first to set a boot print in the soil of another world. To get here was always easy, but getting back always impossible. It was always a one-way trip, a suicide mission, but we accepted, for the immortality of the accomplishment, to become the hero of civilization.
We spent much of the trip arguing about it. About who would make that first heroic step onto this world, that glorious first step. For that was the key. To be the first. There is no glory in coming in second, no immorality. To be the first. We came to blows over it, my co-pilot and I. It seems absurd now, now that we are marooned here for life, forced to rely only on each other for solace, but I really tried to kill him. I really did that; I knocked him out and tied him down, all so that I could be first.
And having done that, I bounded out in the Martian gravity, ready to utter historical words, and saw the Arcadia just below the horizon, already landed, her two pilots already walking about.
by submission | Jun 14, 2014 | Story |
Author : Gary Will Kreie
I love my new self-driving car.
My name is Leo. This is my brand new 2029 crashless car with vehicle-to-vehicle communication and GSDS, the Google Self-Driving System. I love my commute now. My car is pre-programmed to know the best way to get me downtown where I work. I turn on internet talk radio, but it’s airing another rant from an anti-tech kook, who sees networked cars as government intrusion and would blow it all up, if he had a chance. That’s not me. I love this stuff. I push the GO button on the dash. My car backs out of the garage and makes its way into the street. Here we go.
Traffic signal? No problem. My car, I call it Mr. Jeez, exchanges digital messages with the traffic light and slows a little to reach the signal just as it turns green, so we won’t have to stop. Then Mr. Jeez accelerates onto the interstate highway.
Another car with a nice looking woman enters the highway and sends Mr. Jeez a digital message asking if her car can merge into our lane. My car automatically replies with a “Yes” digital message and slows to let her merge in front of us. I have Mr. Jeez’s aggressiveness level set to “not very”.
A car behind me is closing fast. That guy must have his level set to “espresso”. His car wants to get around mine. He must be late for work. I sit back and watch what happens.
His car sends a request to Mr. Jeez to kindly move out of our lane. My car replies with a proposed price, and tells his car that we take BitPal. His car and mine negotiate quickly per my pre-programmed instructions, and now my car is moving to the next lane to let him by. And I am 96 cents richer. As he zooms by, I see that there isn’t even a driver in the car at all. Just a big metal box in back with a glowing counter. And it has a bumper sticker that reads, “That’s all, Folks.” I heard a beep, which I think means my car and this one exchanged one late message. Hmmm.
The rest of the drive on the interstate is becoming routine, so I take a nap and let Mr. Jeez finish my drive downtown. I love Mr. Jeez.
#
About an hour later.
Where are we? I wake up and my car is stopped. I should be at my building downtown where my car drops me off and then finds itself a parking space. I appear to be parked in the desert beneath a cliff.
The GSDS map shows that we are about 50 miles from the city, which is on the other side of this hill. Why would Mr. Jeez bring me here? I wonder if Mr. Jeez knows something. I wonder if Mr. Jeez monitors me. I wonder if he heard me say I love him. I wonder what other cars tell Mr. Jeez about their owners.
I turn on the radio and hear, “…and they think the robo-car could be headed directly for the center of downtown with a thermo-nucle…”
White everywhere blinds me. I open my eyes and the white starts to dim a little. I realize my car is in the shadow of the cliff, which is shielding us from the flash coming from the direction of downtown.
My car knew something. It drove me here. It protects me from crashes. It protects me from everything.
I watch the shock wave blow past us.
by submission | Jun 13, 2014 | Story |
Author : Aaron Koelker
The old man looked over his shoulder at me. His clothes, hands, and face were just as greasy as any of the parts within the dinosaur engine compartment beneath him. His arms were black with it up to the rolled sleeves clinging at his elbows.
“What is it, kid?”
My iHUD told me the man had slightly elevated arterial tension, heart rate, testosterone levels and activity in the left brain hemisphere; along with a minimal decrease in cortisol levels. He was mildly irritated. He also took note of the pause as I read the data streaming down my peripherals.
“Cut out that damn Trekkie stuff,” he said. “You know what I told you.”
The testosterone feed fluttered a bit.
“With all respect, sir,” I answered, “why are you so against it?”
“I don’t need a machine stitched into my face to know whether or not you’re bored.” He ducked his head back under the hood of the old beater. “Finish checking the rest of those spark plugs I gave you yesterday.”
“They’re too old. Just buy some new ones.”
The old man turned round again. “I’m sorry, did they force you into this internship? Because I sure as hell don’t need you here back talking me. In fact, I don’t really need you for much of anything. You’re supposed to be here to learn.”
I was tired of the old man constantly belittling me from his high horse of nostalgia and old age. “You’re just afraid of change,” I said. “And things you don’t understand.”
The old man took a rag from his back pocket and unsuccessfully tried to clean his hands. “Don’t pretend you know how any of that stuff works, kid.”
“Of course I know.”
“Then please share,” he said, unconvinced. He dropped the rag over the grill of the car and leaned against the fender, arms crossed.
“Scanners in the eye take a reading of the various chemicals in the body. Heart rate, brain activity; basic bodily functions…”
“You’re telling me what it does, not how it does it. I can tell you my eyes see the sky and tell my head it’s blue, too.”
“That’s different.”
The feed said my heart rate had increased by twelve percent.
He barked a laugh. “How? The problem with the world today is that we have all this fancy technology yet no one knows how it actually works. They know what it does and how to use it, but they have to rely on others to actually innovate. To fix it, to build it. And those people have to rely on yet more people to handle all the other things, because even they have only mastered one trade. Everyone just consumes these days. No one learns. No one can take care of themselves.”
My cortisol plummeted.
“And I suppose you’re the exception.”
“No, but I’m sure as hell more self-reliant than your sorry generation. I actually know how a combustive engine works. I can hunt my own food and properly dress it. I know the difference between a blackbird’s song and a blue jay’s and I can make a dovetail joint. I can temper a piece of iron and knit myself a shirt if it ever need be. And I can tell when a kid is embarrassed without some chip built in Taiwan.”
The feed alerted me of an adrenaline increase, as well as an isolated dilation of the blood vessels across my face. My metabolic processes slowed by twenty-two percent and my pupil diameter had increased by thirty-seven.
I quit that lousy “History of Mechanics” internship the next day.
