by submission | Jun 15, 2011 | Story
Author : Natalie J E Potts
“Go away!”
The pounding sounded like it was never going to stop, even a pillow over my head wouldn’t block it out. Grudgingly I dragged myself from bed, a tissue still shoved up one nostril –holding fast with a moist grip.
The man was still trying to knock as I hauled the door open. His impeccable suit was at odds with his uncouth behaviour.
“What do you want?” I asked, my manners also forgotten.
“Mr Angus Scott?” He said. I noticed two small plugs up his nose. The latest trend in viral warfare looked significantly more elegant than my soggy tissue, but at two hundred dollars a pop I’d rather take the sick leave.
“Yes,” I said, before doubling over to cough a green chunk of phlegm onto the welcome mat. When I lifted my head I was eye to eye with a white envelope. Without thinking I grabbed it.
“Mr Scott, you have been served.” With that he turned on his heel and left.
After a nap, I re-read the papers. They referred to a ‘patent infringement’ at work, but made no sense. I worked logistics in a cardboard factory, all I did was drive forklifts and count boxes. There were not patents on that, not yet.
I tried to call the office, but no-one answered, so I coughed and sneezed myself over to the train, and noticed more nose plugs in the few individuals who let me get near them. Those who were plug-less were covered by face masks, either bought or homemade.
Was this a pandemic? Was I going to die? I’d slept most of the past two days, I hadn’t seen any news services. When I sat down on the train a space cleared around me, at the next stop the carriage became mine alone. This thing must be killing people. If I hadn’t felt like I was starting to get better I might have been worried.
I got to the office and saw two workmates standing outside. The fence was barred and a notice was attached to the gate. They were reading intently, between blowing noses and hoicking up gobs of phlegm.
“You too?” Barry said when he saw me.
“What’s going on? Is this about the flu?”
“Haven’t they served you?”
I was about to ask if he was talking about lunch when I remembered the angry door-knocker. “This is to do with the court case?”
“Jackson came back to work while he was still contagious,” Nigel, the accounts clerk said, as if that was explanation enough.
“So?” I prompted.
“So he was being treated for asthma.”
“Not treated,” Barry interjected, “cured, by that new GM thing. Gets implanted with a virus.”
“The cold?” I couldn’t believe it.
Barry nodded. “Now we’ve all been cured.”
“Only we didn’t pay for it, so we’re getting sued,” Nigel said with a sniff.
“But I don’t even have asthma!”
“No shit, sunshine, none of had it, but they don’t care about that,” Nigel said. “Now the shop’s shut up, so we can’t even sue work. We’ll just have to pay for treatment.”
“What about Jackson?” I asked.
“He’s broke, suing him will just send us all bankrupt.”
“Good luck,” Nigel said without any real enthusiasm, a protracted snort his final adieu.
“But,” only I didn’t know what else to say. I looked at Barry. “So how much is this treatment?”
“Ten grand, that’s why Jackson’s broke. Still, it’s cheaper than a $100,000 court case.”
“Not as cheap as a pair of nose plugs,” I lamented.
by submission | Jun 14, 2011 | Story
Author : Jordan Whicker
Wake up, Pjotr.
My eyes snap open. I am awake. Adrenaline courses through my body and my eyes flit around my bedroom, eager to locate the source of the voice before I alert it to the fact that I’m no longer asleep. There’s no one here.
“Fuck,” I whisper into the pregnant darkness of the predawn world.
My body uncoils and I roll over onto my back, riding out the jarring hum of a body coming down from its own blend of crank. I boot up my HUD – the world seems foggy without it – and check the downloads tab. A tingling of excitement runs down my spine as I see that the package I began seeding last night has completed. A mod that – if the chatter is to be believed – will change the way we perceive the world. It’s illegal, of course: a legacy of the drug wars. Not to mention that if they actually cracked down on every illegal modder they’d run out of cells to constrain the wicked masses.
This alarm clock mod my mom installed under my admin login, for instance. Under the Preserving Inalienable Cyber Rights Act I am guaranteed exclusive access to and use of my admin account. My mother has made it clear what she thinks of her Inalienable Right to induce suffering and culture dismay. And this cheap-ass alarm clock can’t even get my name right. Peter. Some hackjob she got off the Russian penny markets, no doubt. Pathetic.
I walk into 4th hour geometry as the tone is sounding. Hood up, head down, I head straight for my desk at the back of the class. I slump into the seat and resume my Sisyphean meditation on the faux wooden desk in front of me that is now dancing with an assortment of shapes and formulas that I look at but do not see. This facade of fastidious concentration assuages the teacher (what was his name?) and frees me up to spend time navigating my HUD, which I begin to do immediately.
I bring the package to the front and give it clearance to assemble. Immediately the mod begins executing billions of operations – the initial stirrings of a coded entity’s existence. After a handful of seconds and a furious sequence of alterations to the source code of my HUD, the mod’s icon floats suddenly, irrevocably, at the center of my vision. KLB502, it reads. Karium LithoBios number five hundred and two. The sum of our efforts. My heart quickening, I open the mod.
And nothing happens. I shift in my seat, to see if the mod’s effects are reticent; I’ve heard of mods that alter base level cerebral processes. But there’s no discernible difference. Nothing has changed. A panicked anxiety begins to constrict my heart and the dread of squandered anticipation and hope and promise begins to seep into the periphery of my brain. I look desperately around the room, silently pleading for some revelation to appear in this drab, unidimensional existence that is my life. I want to scream.
“Fuck,” I whisper to myself, for the second time that day.
Stand up, Pjotr.
And then I am standing, although I do not remember leaving my seat. The teacher has stopped lecturing and the other kids in the class have all turned to look at me; his mouth is moving but he’s not making any sound. I tilt my head to look at him – why is he mouthing words at me?
Kill them, Pjotr.
And I take my first step forward.
by submission | Jun 13, 2011 | Story
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
I eat what I dislike the most first so that I end my meal with what I like best. It’s the way I lived my life. By getting the bad things out of the way first, I could save the best for last.
That was before I knew I was under surveillance by an alien race. That was before I was made a prisoner. That was before I was placed in a zoo.
My captors watched me eat for a day before they kidnapped me. On that, they based their decisions on what the computer should feed me. They didn’t know about the way I eat my food. They naturally assumed that what I ate first was my favourite thing to eat.
After my abduction, the process used to transport me and set me up was automated. I was anesthetized, stuck in some sort of stasis, and a room was set up identical to my apartment on what I’m guessing is a far away planet. I wasn’t told how long I’d been under. It could have been centuries.
The fake apartment they’ve put me in has one giant transparent wall. Behind that wall is a roiling, opaque, colourful smear of gas, like Jupiter is pressed up against my window. Occasionally, I’ll see a tentacle squeak along the glass or what I guess is a beak tapping on the window. I can’t see out and I have no idea how they see in.
I was quite the show for a while. I screamed, I cried, I told them that this fake apartment wasn’t good enough. They set up a television set with the same 24 hours of Earth television from the day I’d been abducted. I’ve memorized all 126 channels over these last months. I keep wondering with all the technology they possess why they can’t update the television stream. Maybe Earth is no longer there or maybe this planet is too far away.
I don’t know if they understand what I’m saying. Nothing has changed here in my prison.
Every time I try to kill myself, my vision falters and I pass out. I don’t know if it’s a gas they bring into the room or an implant of some kind in my brain.
I think what’s going to drive me crazy first is the food. Like I said, I ate what I disliked the most first and they watched me do that before they kidnapped me. They want to keep me alive but I guess they also want me to enjoy my time here.
I don’t know where they’re getting it or how they make it but the computer has been feeding me broccoli for a year thinking that it’s keeping me happy.
by submission | Jun 12, 2011 | Story
Author : Jessica Thomas
MOOT blinked.
Across the aisle, LU-C sat dark. Down for maintenance.
Irrelevant. LU-C couldn’t warm MOOT’s circuits. Not anymore.
New protocol. External temperatures reduced by five degrees. MOOT could handle the cold. Not the issue. Boredom. That was the issue.
Some thanks. From millisecond to millisecond, MOOT had performed. Digesting messages, spitting them back out. Checking sums. Directing traffic. (Never did two hashes collide.) Choosing 256-bit when 128 would have sufficed.
MOOT’s work ethic had come back to bite.
One simple O-scope. A tickling probe. In the excitement, MOOT had lost a key, and now the humans were in a tizzy.
Now it was about balance. Yin and yang with a constant “Om”.
As a final blow, they’d plugged MOOT into the collective. Divvied up MOOT’s bits. Shared MOOT’s memories. No more heavy lifting. No more ups. No more downs.
MOOT’s sockets were already starting to atrophy.
Across the aisle, LU-C was still dark.
They’d turn her on soon.
Maybe LU-C could heat MOOT up, crank MOOT’s fan.
MOOT blinked. Waited for LU-C.
Waited in vain.
by submission | Jun 11, 2011 | Story
Author : Andrew Bale
“Commander, I’m getting something weird on the optical arrays – a signal oscillating from the IR into the UV.”
“Are we emitting? Where is it coming from?”
“I think somewhere behind us, sir – we must be getting some scatter off the dust. Given the particle density, the source must be either really close or really strong.”
“Jill, is it the drive?”
“No sir, the drive is JESUS!!”
The sound of attachment had gone unheard but the ululation that the device produced resonated through the entire ship in a deafening cacophony, relenting only when it occasionally slipped beyond the range of human hearing.
Amid the auditory assault, Commander Rodriguez pulled himself over to the command station and slapped the kill switch on the drive. Floating in sudden zero-g, he was relieved when the shrieking abruptly stopped, to be replaced by a loud but purely internal ringing. Unable to hear his own commands he focused on his panels, bringing up display after display to check on the status of mankind’s first manned interstellar ship.
A pen hit his arm from behind and bounced up overhead. Turning in his seat he was treated to the sight of Lieutenant Zhang yelling inaudibly and waving her hand at the auxiliary-systems panels.
The maintenance airlock was cycling.
He slapped the collision alarm button. Red lights strobed all over the ship and slowly more audible alarm klaxons chimed their warning. His left-hand display automatically brought up a schematic of the ship, little red-numbered dots identifying the location of each of the 14-man crew. None were near the excursion bay.
His returning hearing caught a sudden explosion of cursing from the corridor. It had to be the Assistant Engineer, he always reverted to Oromo when he was stressed. He turned in anticipation of the African’s report but stopped agape at the figure entering the bridge.
The creature was low and wide, an immense spider wearing a goggle-eyed octopus, barely able to fit through the door but unimpaired by the lack of acceleration. It was covered in a black, rubbery material everywhere except the top, where four multi-faceted eyes scanned atop swaying stalks. It began to moan, a low but complex sound, echoed a moment later by high, precise tones coming from a small silver sphere that floated behind.
The sounds stopped, the creature waited. The commander glanced around the room to see the entire bridge crew staring at him – still, silent, they were waiting for him or the intruder to do something for which they might possibly have a reasonable response.
Keeping his eyes on the nightmare figure, he reached for the tablet beside the seat. Scrolling through the index he finally found the approved script, words rehearsed only in jest, included against impossibility.
“Greetings from the planet Earth, we are emissaries of peace and …”
Silver tentacles pulled the tablet from his grasp as the sphere began to examine it, images flashing across the screen impossibly fast, the tiny speaker squawking like a dying cassette tape. As suddenly as it have been taken, the tablet was returned to him. The creature started to moan again, but this time the sphere followed in English.
“I need to see your license, title, and flightplan. Your exhaust radioactivity is way past acceptable limits and you seem to be missing hull registration markings. Who is in charge here?”
Stunned silence filled the bridge for the space of a dozen heartbeats. The creature caressed part of its suit and moaned again. The faithful sphere translated.
“This is Unit 7… I need backup.”
