by submission | Feb 22, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jedd Cole
There are a million people in this city, and none of them speak the same language. They are passing through to distant parts, nodding their heads to the immigration officers and their berets. They are carrying their passports in the numb fingers of their right hands. They are dragging their bags across the sterile floor with their left hands. They are sagging under the weight of bags on their shoulders and broken backs.
It is cold on the platform. Outer space tends to make everything cold. It’s the perfect condition for the fever.
There are a million venders in this city, one for every man, woman, child. They use their machines, machines with lips and beautiful faces and smooth skin to speak honeyed things to these little polyglots. It is not coercion–everyone accedes to vendors’ programs. Come earn a living working for [mining conglomerate] on Mars. Realize the [“career goal” entry from mandatory survey] you’ve always dreamed of at [mining conglomerate] in the Tau Asteroid Station. Visit your [“closest deceased relative” entry from mandatory survey] in the holographic gardens on Titan. The machines love these people and kiss them in careful ways.
There is only one answer. It’s the social pathogen, the Yes Fever. And it’s catching. There are a million slaves in this station-city, headed for parts unknown that they think they know because the machines have told them all about it–the successes awaiting their eager labor in the side of unassuming red rocks–the opportunities for visiting masked holograms of dead relatives during lunch break before returning to the off-planet call center–the chance to make it big working for a new man every night, their faces bidding on you in a dark room downstairs.
It’s got to be a fever–it’s cold on this platform, but they’re all sweating.
There are a million seats on the ships at the edge of this city. They are empty and full and boarding but never unloading. There are a million one-way tickets being given to the nodding infirmed, headed to distant parts and new lives just like this one. They’ll never lose the fever, though. They say it’s terminal.
by submission | Feb 21, 2014 | Story |
Author : Deirdre Coles
The key is, you never take anything from really rich people. They’re paranoid, and they often have their own kinds of security. It’s much better, usually, to aim lower.
Jackson had gotten four decent cameras from the wedding of anxious, pregnant young bride and a sullen groom on Friday evening. With all the booze and bonhomie in the hotel ballroom, nobody was keeping a close eye on their stuff.
As he walked past another reception room, a flash of peacock blue caught his eye, a woman twirling around in a long glittering dress, and he stepped inside.
The room made him nervous right away. He didn’t look toward the woman in blue. In a long-practiced maneuver, he scooped up a serving tray, brought it over to the nearest table, and picked up a few empty glasses, a couple of plates, and a camera, with a napkin draped over it.
Back at his apartment, he decided not to sell this one right away. The camera was really beautiful. It was a very pale iridescent yellow, with intricate sculpted buttons with no words.
He experimented with it a bit, and figured out how to take a picture of the two sugar maples across the street outside his window.
But when he looked at his photo, the trees were scorched and ringed with litter. The pavement was cracked and buckled, the buildings in ruins., with broken glass everywhere.
Jackson was starting to get a bad feeling. He took a deep breath and took another picture, this one at an angle of the street corner. On the camera’s screen, the building on the corner was gone, with only one partial wall remaining.
Nobody like Jackson survived for long by being stubborn, or ignoring their instincts, so he didn’t waste much time arguing with himself. He walked down the street to a playground and took a picture of a toddler in the sandbox. Never a good idea to take a picture of a kid, but Jackson was in no mood to be careful. He heard an exclamation behind him and walked swiftly away.
As soon as he got around the corner he took a closer look. The chubby toddler with her Viking-blond hair had become a gaunt, sunburned preteen. So, not much time, then.
Jackson sighed as he turned the camera around and took a picture of his own face. He thought he’d expected the bare, grinning skull looking back at him, but it came as a shock all the same.
He walked slowly back to his apartment. The first thing to do, he thought, was to get far away from all the big cities. And the camera might help him figure out where.
Back in the hotel, a creature who now looked not at all like a woman in peacock blue frowned at her companion.
“I thought you said the human would get rid of it, if it foretold his death?”
The other creature shifted uneasily. “It seems they may have changed since my last visit. Or maybe this one is different than most.”
“Perhaps we should prepare for a longer visit, then. It seems we have a great deal more to learn.”
by submission | Feb 17, 2014 | Story |
Author : R. Daniel Lester
The call came out of the clear blue. From the suburbs, beyond the gates. A woman, speaking in a whisper, said, I’ve heard you help. Can you help?
He said, No guarantees.
She said, Get my daughter before she really hurts herself. Corner of Peco and Ash.
He knew what that meant: GIFbaby. Another party girl walking on the wild side. He got the details: height, description, etc. He played it professional. He had two terms. One: no crossing. He had border fear. And any day without a body scan and a cavity search was a good day in his books. Two: an envelope of cold, hard currency at the exchange.
The caller agreed. She said, Please hurry.
The main place to score in the city was a 10-block radius of burned out buildings and half-demolished skyscrapers. Zone Zero, where the worst of the bombing and rioting had taken place. Once the glossy hub of glass and concrete, now a maze of rebar and rubble.
GIF was street slang for the latest designer drug to be plunged through the ruined veins of the city. Other names: Loop, Loopy, Stucky, Same Ol’. A common side effect being repeated actions in its user, a brain on replay. The trip you were on depended at what timecode in the movie you were starring in that your brain hit stop, hit rewind, hit play, hit repeat. Good trip: blissed out magic carpet ride. Bad trip: nanobot nightmare.
He went to Peco. He followed it to Ash. Rough territory. The anti-tech gangs roamed the streets. Lately, they named themselves after old movie stars. They were both nostalgic and vicious. He got a pass. He was local. He was a certified no-chipper.
He walked across the open-air plaza of a 50-storey with half the floors it used to have. He saw a GIFhead in a beg-for-change loop. He saw a GIFhead with no teeth and one milky cataract eye. He saw citizens cut a wide path around a girl in a shiny dress and high heels. He saw her roll an ankle. He saw the girl fall down stairs. He saw the girl on autopilot. She stood. She limped back up the stairs. She fell. She was loop-fucked. He got closer. Her palms and knees were raw, scraped. She didn’t feel it yet. She was GIFfing hard.
When she hit the bottom stair, he grabbed her. Her body wanted to move. Needed to. He didn’t let her go. She went, Wha? Her eyes were all pupil. She dribbled spit and blood. There was a tooth on her jacket, stuck to the lapel.
He escorted her to the gates. She limped barefoot. She sobered up as they walked. He snagged an empty pill bottle from an abandoned corner store and dropped her tooth inside. She rattled the tooth around in the bottle. She handed over the rest of her stash.
He said, You’re lucky. If the Dead Astaire’s had found you first.
She nodded. She said, My mom?
He said, Yes.
She said, Shit.
The woman waited on the other side of the gates while a burly member of the family’s personal security/kill team traded her daughter for the envelope. The mercenary was teched out–ocular rig, smart armor, reflex enhancers–and looked at him like he was nothing. Like he was a chimp behind zoo bars scratching his balls.
He traded the GIF for a baggie of pure Columbian. At home, he hand ground the coffee beans. He boiled water. He sipped slow. He savoured. The taste, a rare thing, knocked him out at the knees.
by submission | Feb 16, 2014 | Story |
Author : Daniel R. Endres
The glasses gave her a headache. With clenched teeth and a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking she put the neurolenses down on the coffee table beside the sofa that served as her bed. Her chest burned again and she cursed not for the first time her inability to resist the allure of cheap Mexican fast food.
Donna had been there again. She’d deleted her over and over again, erasing her from every preloaded dream-sim she owned, but she kept popping up. More often than not Donna was nothing more than another face in a crowd that just happened to stand out a bit more than the others. While she might be playing out the role of a police officer on patrol or a bike messenger handing out parcels, Donna would be on the street, watching with the same cool grey eyes that had defined her in Nancy’s mind.
Sometimes however, the encounters were more intense. In the sim she had just closed, she had been a professor of metaphysics at Campton and Donna had appeared as one of her students. By the time she’d pried the lenses from her head in the real world, things had progressed to a situation better suited for cheap freebooks than for her dream-sims. Even at their most exciting, her friends had often teased Nancy for the dullness of her scenarios. While they lived out imaginary adventures full of fantasy and action, Nancy’s sims were simple lives most people would find mundane… unless Donna was there.
She was a virus. Nancy knew that. There had been a real Donna once, sure. Hell, somewhere there still was, but she hadn’t been a part of Nancy’s quiet life for years. This Donna, the Donna that ironically enough wouldn’t leave Nancy alone even when she wanted her to, wasn’t real. After this encounter Nancy knew that she was more than just an unfortunate glitch that’d latched onto one of her memories. This anomaly had purpose. She would keep coming back no matter how many times Nancy deleted her profile from memory. It wanted something.
This last time, when Donna had pressed her too comfortably tight against the desk of her imagined office, she’d whispered something into Nancy’s ear. In the moment, Nancy hadn’t given the words much thought. Her mind was too torn between wanting the lenses removed as quickly as she could tear them from her face and wanting to see just how far things with this phantom Donna would go. Now though, with time to reflect back on the experience, she could recall exactly what she’d said.
“Meet me at Baker’s.”
Nancy didn’t know anyone named Baker, and even if she did was she seriously considering taking directions from a virus? It was absurd. No, this had gone on long enough. As soon as she could motivate herself to throw on her blue sweats she was going to Tommy’s. He’d sold the neurolenses to her in the first place. He’d gotten her a discount through his job and had insisted she buy a pair. If he couldn’t fix the piece of junk, then maybe he could replace them. Her warranty was still good for another two months and despite her initial protests against buying into something she saw as a fad, she’d grown fond of the simple little fantasies she could come home to. As boring as they may have seemed to her friends, they were an absolute vacation from the soul crushing data entry work she did from home.
by submission | Feb 15, 2014 | Story |
Author : Mark Gorton
London’s High Court has been hearing how a dream timeshare holiday turned into a nightmare for two senior citizens.
In return for £15,000, Bob Plain, 83, and his wife Betty, 82, were promised a luxury fortnight break in the computer-generated splendour of aristocratic Victorian England. Instead, the elderly couple had to endure two working-class weeks at the height of World War II’s Nazi Blitz.
Mr Plain told the court that virtual tour operator Past Times had offered a low price and also tempted him with the promise of lavish gifts that never arrived. “They told me we’d have a holiday we’d never forget,” he said, “and they were right.”
According to their contract the Plains’ trip of a lifetime to 1840 should have seen them mingling at a Buck House garden party thrown by a young Queen Vic, and also given them the opportunity to meet dizzy daffodil loving poet, William Wordsworth. Other highlights included a hot-air balloon flight over the capital, a ride on a train powered by steam, and helping Rowland Hill invent the postage stamp.
All of this was to have been a gift from Mr Plain to his wife. “I wanted to surprise Betty,” he said, “and surprise her I did. But not in the way I had planned.”
The Plains’ journey downtime left them a century short. Instead of Victoria’s England the Past Times server sent them to Brick Lane, London, in October 1940. Here there were no palaces, poets, aristocrats, inventors, champagne or caviar – just sub-standard accommodation, ordinary people, dried milk and powdered eggs. And one of the most ruthless bombing campaigns in military history.
Mrs Plain, who is still being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, described how their holiday began. “Two of the houses next to our timeshare were blown to pieces during a midnight raid. There were dead bodies stinking underneath the rubble. And despite being almost 84 years old my Bob was arrested for being a Nazi spy and put in solitary confinement and given a beating. I’ll never go back there! Never!”
Server problems also meant that the Plains’ minds could not be withdrawn from this environment until their two weeks were up. In that time Mr Plain suffered severe bruising and lost 10 kilos in weight, while a shell-shocked Mrs Plain was committed to a local asylum. “My holiday was complete Bedlam,” she told reporters later.
Expert witness and top Oxford historian Professor Richard Fothergill stated that, in his opinion, there had been a material change to the couple’s holiday plans. “I have researched this period of 20th century history for many years,” he said, “and I have no doubt that the London Blitz is not the sort of thing any normal couple would deliberately choose to experience.”
Lawyers representing Past Times told the court that the server error that blitzed the Plains was a one in ten million accident. The Plains’ lawyers agree – they are seeking £10 million in damages. The hearing continues.
