by submission | Apr 6, 2012 | Story |
Author : Suzanne Borchers
Edwin studied the soft-fleshed android beside him on the laboratory bed. Fred had the same plug-in cables as himself, same size arms, legs, head and torso. What made Fred better? Was it his flesh colored appendages, his manipulative facial features, and his warmth?
Edwin tapped his cold metal fingers together. Father had pronounced him superfluous. Father had ordered him destroyed. Father didn’t want to see him ever again. Edwin despaired.
But then Edwin felt the warmth of the newly fused synapses in his brain. Even knowing Father intended to dismantle his parts and that he would be lost forever, Edwin didn’t believe it would happen. Was this warmth called hope? He remembered learning its definition long ago but not understanding the meaning. He still didn’t understand, but he enjoyed its warmth within his cold circuits. Could he survive? “Perhaps,” he murmured, and wished he could smile.
Edwin “slept.”
When Edwin’s circuits powered up in the morning, he found himself alone. Father had come for Fred and ignored him, leaving him to sleep, knowing the bed would be empty when he returned Fred that evening. Father didn’t want him. Edwin despaired.
Edwin welcomed the pulsing tiny warmth in his brain. Hope. He reached behind his head, stripped off the cables, and sat up. He waited. He hoped.
Hours later, footsteps approached. Measured, light steps. They weren’t Father’s steps. The cadence became faster, louder, and then stopped. The door opened slowly. A woman’s face appeared to scan the room until her eyes found Edwin.
Edwin remembered her as Father’s assistant. She would stand quietly as Father plugged in his cables. She was always in shadow. Hers was the feminine voice behind the door when Father ordered him destroyed. She was here. Edwin wished he could shudder.
As she approached him, Edwin realized her face was asymmetrical. Her right, blue eye was larger than the left. Her nose wasn’t centered, but pulled a bit to the right. She smiled at him with lopsided lips. A dimple on the right winked at him.
Could she understand how he felt? Perhaps.
“Hello, Edwin.” Her voice was soft. She reached out her hand to his and gently clasped it to flood his arm with warmth. “It’s time.”
Edwin jumped to the floor and paced his steps with hers. They left the room, moved down the corridor, entered the elevator, and rode down three floors. When the doors opened, Edwin hesitated.
He surveyed a large room filled with android parts in overflowing boxes. Metal heads stared blindly from rows on a top shelf, with huge crates marked “Feet,” “Hands,” “Arms,” and more on the successive lower shelves. Across the room, two technicians were dismantling a metal android on a slab.
His brain pulsed with warmth that became fainter as he stood looking out of the elevator. This was the end. Father had ordered her to destroy him. It was her job.
He felt cold, and he despaired. He wished he could disobey. He wished he could plead.
He hoped it would be over soon. “I’m ready,” he said.
He stepped out of the elevator with the woman. He began to move toward the technicians when she stopped him.
“No, Edwin,” she said.
She led him to a door that opened at her touch. As it opened, he blinked his eyes at the brightness on the other side. He stepped through the doorway into warmth.
“We’re going home.” She gently squeezed his hand.
Edwin wished he could smile.
by submission | Apr 1, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Lieutenant Thev’s cephalon bioluminesced a faint yellow. Clearly, he was nervous. “You do realize, Thev, that this is the most carefully planned celestial engineering project in galactic history?” Thev turned his cephalon to face Project Director Grojjun. The gesture was out of politeness and not necessity. The position and field of vision of Thev’s eyes allowed him to see Grojjun standing behind him, but it was respectful to observe certain protocols.
“Sorry, sir,” said Thev. “It’s just, well, there won’t be any second chances. This is it. This is the ancestral home of all sentient life in the galaxy.” Thev turned his cephalon back to the large viewscreen that comprised most of one wall of the bridge of the ship. “This is Earth.”
Grojjun looked at the aging planet their ship was orbiting. But he was more concerned with the aging star that lay eight light-minutes in the distance. The Sun was nearly eight billion years old. It was larger and redder than it had been when Earth was the sole repository of intelligent life. As the human race had propagated itself throughout the galaxy and biologically re-engineered itself into thousands of exotic forms capable of thriving on millions of worlds, the Sun had continued its long, slow march through the main stellar sequence and was now becoming a red giant. Sol was becoming decrepit. And the human race and its progeny couldn’t stand the idea that their ancient homeworld would be reduced to a cinder if they stood by and did nothing.
“Earth has faced destruction countless times in her history,” Grojjun reminded the lieutenant. “Asteroids, volcanoes, ice ages. As recently as 10 million years ago a minor adjustment to the Moon’s orbit had to be made.” Thev’s cephalon maintained its yellow hue. “But, Director,” said Thev, “what we’re about to do. No one has ever attempted anything on this scale. The complexity of the calculations. The sheer amount of power and the utter precision with which that power must be controlled. I can’t help but worry.”
Grojjun was about to make another attempt to reassure Thev when a message flashed across the lieutenant’s control panel. “Sir,” said Thev, “all orbital and ground stations report ready. It’s time.” Grojjun looked not at the Earth or the Moon, but at the Sun. “Goodbye, old friend,” Grojunn said as he pressed the flashing green holographic button on the control panel.
There was no flash of light, no tremor, no feeling of movement. There was nothing at all to suggest that the fabric of spacetime had just been torn asunder on a scale without precedent in four billion years of recorded galactic history. To an outside observer, the Earth and Moon would appear to have simply vanished without a trace.
On the viewscreen, Grojjun and Thev saw what appeared to be the Sun suddenly shift a few degrees to the left and simultaneously change from reddish-orange to yellow-white in color. “Director!” Thev exclaimed. “It worked! We’re 43.3 light-years from our previous position. The Earth and Moon came through the wormhole perfectly intact. We’re in a stable orbit around 58 Eridani!”
Grojjun looked at Earth’s new parent star. It was almost the identical twin of old Sol except that it was billions of years younger. Thev breathed a sigh of relief as his cephalon faded from yellow back to a sedate and happy dark green.
by submission | Mar 31, 2012 | Story |
Author : William Mason
“They used to have something called friends.”
“What?” asked the boy,
The machine beeped a few times, and resumed with its synthesized voice, “Friends are people whose company you enjoyed; people who are an extension of you.”
“Friends.” repeated the boy, his voice bouncing off the glass walls of the Institute.
“Friends were one step below family. Are you familiar with the word family?”
“Yes” the boy replied with eyes that lit up “I remember that word from last were! I took some recall pills, I remember I had a …”
The screen on the front of the machine changed colour, an interrogative gesture. The boy strained to remember the word.
“A father, yes I remember!”
The machine returned to its colourless screen.
“I had a father, and a mo…mo…a Mother!”
“Very good,” said the machine,
“I remember them” continued the boy “I saw their faces, they had masks on, and the green smoke all around, and then… I was on a moving channel”
“Yes you were born when you came out of the other end” said the machine.
The boy raised his eyebrows, trying to remember something “Tell me more about friends.”
“A friend is someone whom you spend time with for the sake of enjoyment, a friend is someone with whom you have shared interests or shared activities”
“Are you my friend?” asked the boy,
“No,” said the machine, “I am your teacher”
“Can a teacher be a friend?”
“No” repeated the machine,
A man in a lab suit entered the glass enclosure, and the boy looked back.
“Class is over” the man said softly,
The boy jumped up and ran out with haste.
“I’ve been observing the lessons,” said the man, “He is progressing quickly.”
“Of course he is” said the machine, “soon he will be able to make friends with the other subjects.”
by submission | Mar 30, 2012 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
Four minutes. That’s how much longer I have to be human. Or, if things don’t go as planned, to be alive. I could have elected to be anesthetized for the procedure. If I had and anything went wrong, I’d never know it. I’d simply never wake up. But I chose to remain conscious for the transformation. Death will be almost instantaneous if this doesn’t work. And if it does work, I want to be wide awake and remember the moment when I became…something else.
How long has it been since anyone underwent a totally novel transformation? It must be nearly 300 Earth years. Yes, that sounds about right: around the year 2700. The first settlers on Venus. That was a particularly difficult one. Surface temperatures over 460°C and an atmospheric pressure almost 100 times that of Earth. It took the bioengineers even longer to transform people to live on Venus than it took them to adapt a human subspecies for life in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Not every world is a Mars or a Titan that will let you get by with only a moderate amount of biological transfiguration. Even the people who live on Luna still look vaguely like humans from Earth. The extremophile worlds just don’t tolerate much evolutionary baggage.
Just over two minutes. They told me the neural scanners will continue operating right up to the end. Theoretically, I shouldn’t notice any “interruption” of my consciousness. From my perspective, one moment I’ll be here in the ship and the next I’ll be out there, neither the spacecraft nor my original body surviving the transformation.
In my new form (again, theoretically) I should be virtually ageless. If that’s true, maybe I’ll live long enough to see the human race, in all its various forms, finally achieve the age-old dream of traveling to the stars. It’s hard to believe that after a thousand years of spaceflight, we’ve still never succeeded in reaching even the nearest star system. Multigeneration ships, suspended animation craft, near-light-speed vessels, countless schemes to create wormholes and space-warp corridors. And yet no one who has ever tried to cross the gulf between the stars has ever signaled back that they made it. But surely humanity won’t be confined to one solar system forever. One day mankind will leave the cradle and take its place among–
Transformation! It worked! My personality and memory are intact, preserved in a network of magnetically-woven plasma. I am vast. How could that infinitesimal creature I was a moment ago have ever been me? I can…”see” isn’t the right word. I can perceive the last remnants of the spaceship that brought me here vaporizing. And here’s a 500 kilometer wide spicule jetting alongside me at 20 kilometers per second, but to me it feels like a pleasant breeze. Now, I have to modulate the local EM field to emit a radio signal to let them know we’ve succeeded. After three centuries of stagnation, humanity has slipped the bonds of planets and moons and comets. Mankind has finally colonized the Sun!
by submission | Mar 29, 2012 | Story |
Author : Thomas Desrochers
Tara giggled and leaned over the railing of the walkway, peering down the cyclopean shaft. “You know,” she told Camus, “I bet that if you were to fall down this you would fall forever and ever and never even stop.” She trilled out a laugh again and kicked a can off the edge.
“Hey, silly,” Camus rasped in his failing synthetic voice, “Stop that. For all you know there might be somebody down there. How happy would you be if you had a can traveling some ludicrous speed hit you on the head?”
The young woman paused and considered this. She frowned and bit her lip. “I suppose I wouldn’t like that a whole lot.”
It was sad, Camus thought to himself, how Tara had the mind of a child and would always have the mind of a child. She couldn’t help it, of course. Nobody can help how they’re born.
It was sad.
“Right,” he affirmed. “You’d be pretty mad, I’d imagine.” He shoved his pry bar in the access hatch’s lock and pushed all his weight against it. It gave out with the shrieking typical of unhappy metal. “OK. I’ll go first, and then you follow me. Stay close, alright?”
“Yes, Cammy,” Tara chirped. “And be very very quiet so that the monsters don’t find us.”
“Right. Good girl.” Camus’s bad shoulder creaked and groaned as he crawled into the lightless access shaft. It was fairly roomy, he decided. For a coffin, at least. He kept crawling, listening intently to make sure that Tara was behind him and nobody else was ahead of him. If the map he’d found was right the shaft would go by some old store rooms. Hopefully they had food. He just had to find the right one, M778. He counted the rooms that went by under his hands and knees, feeling out the numerals: M772, M774, M776.
There it was. 778. And it was unlocked. Small miracles were better than no miracles, Camus thought to himself.
He undid the two bolts and eased the door down, revealing more black space.
“Cover your eyes, love,” Camus whispered back to Tara.
“Alright,” came the reply.
Camus switched on his headlamp. He played the dim beam across the walls, the floor, the mostly empty crates strewn about. It didn’t look promising, but it was worth a look. Camus eased himself down into the room and then helped Tara down. The two began to look through the refuse, searching for something edible.
“Cammy.”
Camus picked up a box. It was too light to hold anything, and he tossed it aside. “Yes?”
“Where are mommy and daddy?”
Camus paused a moment. “Mommy and daddy went into the sky, dear.”
“What’s the sky?”
“Above ground. They went above ground.”
“Oh,” Tara said. “Why?”
“Because they had to escape the monsters.”
“Oh,” Tara said. “OK.”
Camus picked up another box. He saw the wire attached to it too late. There was a snap and a foot long steel bolt smacked into Camus’s chest.
“Oh,” he said, grabbing his chest. Oil leaked between his fingers. Camus swore. Hydraulic fluid was rarer than food in this place.
“Come on, Tara,” he rasped. “Let’s leave. Before the monsters come.”
“OK Cammy,” she chirped. She held his rusting hand. “Are we going home?”
“Yes, love. We’re going to go home.”
“Can we braid my hair when we get back?”
“Of course.”
