by submission | Jan 26, 2013 | Story |
Author : Townsend Wright
“Alright let me see if I can explain this to you,” I wasn’t very good at deciphering the aliens’ emotions, especially with the monotonous voice of the translator machine, but I was fairly certain this was condescension. “What do you know so far?”
“Well,” I said, thinking over what the scientists I employed had said, “we know you come from the planet just closer to the sun than ours, and that your biology is based on entirely different levels than ours.”
I waited for my words to translate, for the alien to speak, and then for the translator again. “Both true, both true. But here’s what you don’t know: we’re your—”
“Uh—sorry, that last word didn’t didn’t translate properly.”
“Oh, what, you don’t have the concept of—? Well, that explains a lot. Anyway, basically we created you.”
I heard gasps from my people. I tried to find meaning in the alien’s words. “You—you mean at some point in our development you visited us and somehow affected our development?”
“No. We created you.” I looked at the alien. It had pale, dull skin, and its body was just—odd.
“You didn’t create us. No body created us! We started out as single celled organisms, which mutated over and over and slowly developed into the ecosystem on our planet today!”
“I’m impressed, you figured out evolution! And again that’s all true. But your missing a few details.” It paused, almost like it was waiting for me to say “like what?” like I was some idiot who had no idea and was extremely eager to know what it had to say. I didn’t comply. “Namely,” he said as if there was no pause, “where those single celled organisms came from. You see,” it continued now thinking I was incapable of interrupting it, “a long, long time ago our planet became very crowded, actually much as it is right now, unfortunately. It became so crowded that we resolved to move some of our people to Mars—that’s what we called your planet at the time—well, now too. But, at the time, there was very little air, and no liquid water, which we need, and it was very cold, so we made a nanite—er, a very very small machine, which we sent to Mars where it would self replicate using Martian dirt and terraform—uh, make the planet like our own. That would be your single celled organism.”
“You actually expect me to believe that?” I said. The problem was I sort of did. It was still all just speculation about where those first cells came from, and this sort of thing was one of the theories.
“Actually, I couldn’t care less. Those nanites were only supposed to be active for twenty of our years, after that we’d deactivate them from Earth and make our way over here. But, right after we sent it off we had a massive war, centuries of rebuilding, another war, blah blah blah,” I had no idea what that last part meant, “anyway you got left alone for a few millennia and a bit out of hand, so much so our signal couldn’t take out your complex forms all the way from Earth. So, here we are.” It turned to the other aliens, “Geoffrey,” one of them took out a small box with a red button.
“Wait, what?!”
“So long, you four armed, sparkly pink freaks!”
“Wait, you can’t—”
by submission | Jan 24, 2013 | Story |
Author : Michael T Schaper
Tanya looked out across the room. The party was in full swing and, because both of her sisters now had children of their own, any chance at conversation was being drowned out by a multitude of little voices. She swooped down, picked up one of her young nephews, and spun him around in her arms.
“How does that feel, honey?”
“Whee!” was the only answer she got. The three year old’s face was lit up with sheer pleasure.
Kids, Tanya thought. So full of life and love.
Tanya glanced across the room at her husband Peter. His attention was clearly elsewhere, in an animated conversation with her brother-in-law, both of them ignoring the good-natured chaos around them.
“Hey,” she shouted over the noise, “want to join us?”, but Pete just shook his head and turned away.
Tanya sighed. We can fly through the depths of space, use nanotechnology to extend our lives, climb Everest and even build perfect robots, she told herself. But we still can’t work out why some males warm to children and others don’t.
“All good, Tan?” Her youngest sister materialized alongside, extra wineglass in hand.
Tanya took a deep gulp and shrugged. “Five years,” she said, taking another long draught. “I’m five years older than you. Yet here you are, with a family of your own. What have I got?”
The cherished hope of a child of her own seemed to be slipping further away every year.
Ever since she’d first met Peter, Tanya had known that a natural conception wasn’t possible. But even all the many other treatments hadn’t bought her any closer to having her own family.
“If you still want to try, then you have to do something about it,” her sister said. “Have you ever thought of adoption? If Peter agrees, that is.”
And that was precisely the problem. “We could apply you know,” she explained to Peter after they’d left the party, “and get a response fairly quickly. But the adoption agency has to know that we’re both keen to do this. I can’t be the only parent in this relationship.”
Peter stopped and looked into her eyes. He was thinking, really thinking it through, Tanya realized. She could almost hear all the gears in his brain ticking over. Then he shook his head. “I’m sorry, really. But it’s not something that interests me. Hasn’t in the past, doesn’t now. It’s just not the way I am.”
Weren’t guys designed to get better at dealing with kids the more time spent around them? It didn’t seem to be working for Peter.
They drove home without saying another word. Tanya would have felt her heart was breaking, if she hadn’t already expected this answer.
*****
She woke the next morning with a still heavy heart. Peter was standing in the doorway, as he did every Sunday morning, her breakfast on a tray. He was good like that, Tanya realized. Good on the predictable. And kids weren’t like that. They were messy, confronting, hard to understand or control.
He placed the tray on the bed beside her and giving her a long kiss. “I’m sorry I can’t give you what you want. I guess I’m just not wired that way, am I?” he said with a wistful smile.
She looked at him closely for a minute, this beautiful husband of hers. Peter was right: he wasn’t built that way.
And her sister was also right. If Tanya wasn’t happy with that, then she had to do something about it.
She leant over, kissed Peter softly, and ran her hands through his hair until she found the spot. It took just a few seconds to switch data chips, then wait for the reset function to work. She smiled at him once more, then decided they could go looking for nursery decorations this afternoon. There. Now he was wired that way.
by submission | Jan 23, 2013 | Story |
Author : Will Strouse
If Casey wasn’t so hard to understand, she would be perfect; we kissed for the first time at work… The next day, we still got along… at work.
Kind of weird that she can never hang out after work…
She says she lives alone downtown but I don’t know where…
At the end of the day she gets anxious; acts like I don’t exist.
Next day everything’s cool again, except she won’t acknowledge that us just being intimate at work is weird.
One day I followed her home…
Figured she must be married(unhappily)…
Found out she wasn’t…
She acted like everything was normal…We had dinner… I stayed over… Things felt okay… for a bit.
Then something happened, I couldn’t explain..
She fell asleep… I got up and went into her kitchen & when I came back to bed she was gone… I searched her entire house, but there was no sign of her…. yet her front door was locked…
The next morning she reappeared… When I asked her where she had been, she acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about…
I realized we had to break up…
We stopped talking for a week…
She started flirting with Nat Gander… I hate that guy.
I missed her.
One day after work we got coffee and talked honestly for the first time… She said she was afraid of the dark as a kid… and that’s why she’d gotten all weird at the end of the day… Wasn’t sure that explained anything…. but it was progress…
I stayed over at her place again… This time I watched her for awhile… then I left the room… By the time I got back she had vanished… I looked everywhere for her… Called out her name…
Then I saw something in her hallway that took my breath away…
The next morning I told her about the man that showed up after she disappeared… Said he was her father…
She laughed in disbelief.
I told her she’s either a shape shifter – her power nourished by her compulsive denial… or her dreams come to life.
I got a video camera and stuck around…
I watched her all night, made sure she didn’t disappear… Then I’d test it out… let her go… & dream… most of the time there was nothing around but empty space… I got lucky a few times though and wrote down what I saw… & pretty soon I got to know some of the characters from her dreams…
my favorite was Andre, a unicorn missing it’s horn…. there was a crocodile that lived in her tub that scared me… scared her parents too… her best friend from college told me to leave… but someone had to write her dream book…
I stopped going to work so I could sleep during the day…
And then one night, I met something that had taken on my exact resemblance, claiming to be me… It left and let me see through its eyes… the outside world… less and less frequently…
Pretty soon I lost my reflection…
When I woke up I saw her reflection… she was sitting on the ground writing in my dream book…
I never saw myself again.
Instead, I closed my eyes and dreamt of blackness and falling purple stars.
by submission | Jan 22, 2013 | Story |
Author : John Arthur Beaman
Waking-up felt strange. “Waking-up” is probably not the correct term, but its close. Her eyes didn’t work at first. That should have been expected, but it still surprised her. She was confused. Why couldn’t she move?
Lying down with her head resting flat on a gurney, a sheet was drawn over her body and pulled up to her chin. A small wire tucked into her long, brown hair was connected to the back of her head. All these things she knew, but where she was and what she was doing there were painfully absent from her mind. “Calculating,” she said aloud.
Hearing her voice was startling. It was her voice, but it sounded distant, almost as if it had come from outside her body. “Analyzing,” she told herself, this time very conscious of leaving the words squarely in her head.
”My name is Nancy,” she thought. “Nancy? Calculating. I am eight years old. Error. Calculating. Was … eight years old. I am a woman, thirty-four years old and … and what? Designation: Nancy Ellen Tobey. Doctor. Neurologist. Dying? Memory accessed.”
Her torso lurched upward as her eyes opened. The sheet fell to her waist revealing her naked body as the wire fell away from her head. “Calculating. Alive. Why?”
She tried to take a deep breath and did, but it was a strange sensation. It was a cold, almost metallic feeling. Looking around the room, her eyes made some quick observations. “Calculating.”
She was exactly twenty-six and five-eighths inches off the ground. The distance from floor to ceiling was exactly ten feet. With merely a glance in any direction, she could make precise computation of height, width and distance.
As her head turned mechanically from left to right, Nancy’s attention was drawn to the body lying to her left. Between her and the body, a monitor displayed the blinking script, “” underneath lines of code. Forcing her legs over the side of the gurney, Nancy stood uneasily as the sheet fell to the floor. Unsteadily walking to stand over the body, Nancy puzzled over the lifeless face. “Designation: Dr. Nancy Ellen Tobey, deceased. Calculating.
“Anomaly detected. Accessing memory. Analyzing. Anomaly resolved.” With perfect clarity Nancy could recall the slightest minutia of a life once lived – from the first thoughts that sprang to being in the womb to the last moments of mortality as a mind wondered aimlessly to strangely lit corridors of belief.
“Memory accessed: July 9, 2082. Eight years old. Father’s suicide. Memory deleted. Memory accessed: August 13, 2085. First kiss. Accessing. Calculating. Memory Accessed: March 23, 2092. First sexual encounter. Accessing. Memory deleted. Undelete process initiated. Undelete successful. Accessing memory. Accessing. Accessing. Accessing. Memory encrypted. Save file.
“Memory accessed: July 29, 2108. Biological failure. Accessing. Analyzing …”
Dr. Nancy Ellen Tobey scrutinized over the final preparations. Making sure every last detail was complete, she knew the lifeless android wasn’t her but hoped it soon would be. It wasn’t the weak, emaciated body that cancer had turned her into. Rather, it was an idealized version of a body she used to have. Without being absolutely sure that her android’s brain would be able to process emotions, she was confident that only a Full Neural Engram transfer (even to the very point of death) could make it possible. This was her chance at immortality. This was proof it could be done!
“Analysis incomplete,” Nancy thought as she remembered the cool feel of the saline solution entering “her” veins. Running her hand across her left forearm, she puzzled over the look of her hand. “Who am I?” Nancy thought. “Calculating”
by submission | Jan 20, 2013 | Story |
Author : Tiana Lexia
The screen flashed on, casting shadows off the cadaver’s body. The tube that ran from the base of her head to the computer slowly radiated light with each passing memory.
Her life started off normal, like any other person who passed through the Cognizance Center. Born to a rich family, raised in a part of town that allowed her opportunity, experience, and unending knowledge that could put her through life with more money than any street rat could even begin to imagine. She was the epitome of High Society, and watching her life being recorded in the Cognizance Center bored me to tears. A million times a day I would receive lives similar to this one; they all went through the same motions. They grew up, got money, got married, and died happily. There was no struggle in their lives.
My boredom began to turn me away once her teenage years began to roll through, but, before I could, a memory caught my eye. She was lying on her back, casting out fake moans for the pleasure of a man thirty years her senior. My stomach churned as I recognized him as her uncle, a prominent political figure in our city. For the next few memories, it continued on much like this. She’s sold and used for the pleasure and amusement of men her uncle knows, men that want to feel the touch of a young woman again. They introduce her to new things, horrible things, and the memories of the next few years are too clouded by the drugs poisoning her mind for anything to register on the screen. I watch her life become a mess before her own eyes.
Soon enough, she’s pregnant. There’s no way to tell who the father is, but she refuses to give the child up. Her parents don’t give her a choice, and, in a matter of weeks, the baby is gone. Her parents think that this will save her from the mess she’s making in her life, but they’re wrong. The girl turned back to the drugs, to the men, the alcohol. Memories continue to flow into the computer, but nothing is registering. If she were alive, I doubt the girl would ever be able to remember this part in her life. Every sense she has is poisoned.
Finally, a memory appeared on the screen. She’s leaning against a bathroom counter, naked, chunks of hair missing from her scalp. Her once beautiful face is mauled by scars from years of drug abuse. Every part of her has changed to mirror what she put in her body, but one thing remained as clear as the sky; her eyes. Brown and flat, they seemed to have a sense of innocence that the girl had lost long ago. They were knowing, worldly, but didn’t seem to understand.
Her hand reached over to her side, pulling a knife from the drawer. My hands are shaking, afraid as I become aware of what’s happening. She positions the knife at the base of her neck. I turn away, sickened, but look back as the memory clouds over and the screen flashes to black.
